There was little traffic on the night streets of Tokyo until the taxi neared Tsukiji, the world's largest fish market, which sells 5 million pounds of seafood a day. We turned up and down little alleys a dozen times in the final half-mile, passing ever growing battalions of small trucks and divisions of motorized carts. Then the driver grunted one last time and deposited me in front of a maze of large buildings that looked like airport hangars. Fires in metal trash cans lined the road and warmed hands.

I joined a processional of shadowy figures and marched into one of the hangars. All around me were men dressed in shades of gray, dark blue and black -- jackets, pants, sweatshirts, sweaters, everything. The knee-high boots in which they sloshed were all black. Some wore baseball caps, but even they were drab. Needless to say, I was the only one wearing a pumpkin-colored flannel shirt with a camera around the neck.

Narrow wet aisles separated thousands of small stalls, each selling one or two items. In the center of the stalls were salespeople with straight black hair and smiles that seemed permanently affixed to their faces. Each was surrounded by wooden boxes and stainless steel trays full of glistening, slippery harvest from the oceans of the world. The containers were edge to edge on tables illuminated by large unfrosted light bulbs that were strung every few feet from small pipes suspended from the ceiling. The yellow glow made it all even more surreal.

Some of the fish were smaller than a thumbnail, some had razor-sharp predator's teeth and some wore faces befitting a "Star Wars" bar scene. There were at least three different kinds of eel, all squirming in glistening tangles, and more colors and sizes of shrimp than I had ever imagined. There were sea cucumbers, cockles, jellyfish, yellow and green groupers, red snappers, yellowtail and barracuda, small squid and huge squid, flanked cuttlefish and octopus, raw and cooked. Those that were cooked were white-fleshed inside and dark red outside if they had been pickled or golden if they had been cooked in soy. The variety of fish roe, too, was incredible: silver gray, pale yellow, iridescent orange, golden and crimson; these delicacies were displayed sitting unadorned, clinging like barnacles to strips of seaweed, or encased like sausages in semi-transparent tubes. Seaweed came in all shades of green, from lime to dark forest, and in black, brown and dark purple. The clams, oysters, scallops and crabs went from teaspoon-tiny to platter-large. There were miniature periwinkles and giant conch.

The vendors were friendly and much more communicative than the cabby. They seemed amused by my exuberance and curiosity, and answered my questions as slowly and as simply as they could, as if they were parents responding to an inquisitive toddler. Closer to dockside I saw dozens of large tables with electric band saws; workers in surgical gloves and rubber aprons operated on 200-pound headless and tailless frozen tuna bodies. They would cut the tuna lengthwise along their backbones, then load them onto carts for delivery to the buyers' mini-trucks waiting outside. The place sounded like a sawmill.

Beyond these were tables where skilled filatures were wielding extra-sharp knives with blades longer than their arms. Adjacent to these tables lay row upon row of tuna and marlin bodies, neatly arranged side by side; buyers with small pocketknives scrutinized them one by one, now and then cutting half-inch slices into the tail end of the fish. The frost-caked fish skins were marked in thick red kanji characters, which I presumed to be the name of the buyer or seller.

A bevy of buyers stood nearby, bidding on these cadavers to the animated hoarse staccato of the auctioneer, who stood elevated above them. The clipped baritone mile-a-minute syllables sounded like the typing pool in an old-fashioned newspaper office. Most amazing to me were the elements that were absent: No fish smells, no slime and no blood-stained aprons. Japanese fastidiousness ruled even at the fish market.

Beyond the auctioneer, large doors opened to the docks. The bright sun was about 60 degrees above the horizon. I was surprised, but my watch confirmed that nearly five hours had passed. Now it was time to reconnoiter with the hung-over tourists back at the hotel. But which way? I had no idea.

Next page | Taking over the fish-seller's stall