Day 21 & 22
The owner, a jolly middle-aged man in his early forties, resembling the pervy master from Dragonball. But don’t let his marshmallow exterior fool you. His intimacy with the knife would make your heart skip a beat. Gentle but firm, and with just a few practiced flicks of the wrist, so smooth even a camera would miss it, he could deconstruct an eel in under ten seconds. Twenty-plus years of dedication to his craft, commitment to his family’s legacy. Most businesses don’t make it past their first year. Shirotani Unagi was just short of a hundred years and counting, flourishing under third generation owner Hiroshi Shirotani.
His right hand man was Fujiwara. A sizeable man in his mid-fifties who literally ran on alcohol. If you were to say there was a draft he would likely give you a smirk and ask for one himself. He too was exceptional with his hands, though he was a bit of a live wire. You never really knew when he would flare up.
His teeth looked like the side of a fishing boat.
They called him prisoner, not because he had been to prison, but because the school he went to is known to look like a prison on the inside, unpainted concrete walls, with barred windows, they were just missing the orange jumpsuits.
I still hadn’t mentioned the fact that I had actually been to prison—well juvenile prison.
I started working here three years ago, fresh off the boat from the US
