(Heeeey~ it's the first comic since I started using a more advanced drawing program, yaaay... Sorry for the inconsistency between this and the past ones)
明けましておめでとうございます！ Happy new year! \(^.^)/
Sorry for not posting a comic in… forever (O.O;) I got very busy. I did most of this one over winter
break. One of my resolutions is to draw
more often, so hopefully I’ll be able to work on more comics too!
With the end of the year comes 忘年会
(“bounenkai”) season, which means lots of fun talking and drinking with your
coworkers. Some bounenkai are more
formal, and some are more casual. In my
workplace, we have one fancy, all-staff bounenkai held at a hotel downtown,
with speeches, games where you can win prizes, and several courses to the meal
(so much food… most of it fish, I think because people eat osechi for new
years and much of that is fish). We also
have a smaller, more casual party for just my department, that is more along
the lines of a regular enkai. This year,
we had it at a fancy-schmanzy sushi place, so I mentally prepared myself for
lots and lots of sushi. But I had no
idea what was coming. (O_O;)
I don’t eat fish very often and I eat raw fish even less, so
my stomach wasn’t feeling too great with course after course of various sea
creatures in various states of rawness.
I thought it couldn’t get weirder than the raw sea cucumber (which was
saltier than a sailor plucked straight from the sea, and also very slimy and… hard? Slimy but crunchy. It was a weird texture). When I saw them bring in something
tempura-fried, I thought to myself “hallelujah, something cooked!” I saw a good ol’ mushroom on the plate, and
even something green! Yay, vegetables!! And next to it, a few tempura-fried squiggly
blobs, that I did not recognize.
The above conversation took place with the guy sitting next
to me, and after a stealthy under-the-table google search on my phone, I
realized that the thing I had just put into my mouth was none other than fried
fish sperm. Yep. Suddenly his seemingly-random choice of words
made so much sense. The word “shirako” (白子) literally means “white children”, and I would say yeah,
that is a fairly accurate description of what sperm is. Go ahead and google it, if you want to see
what it looks like. Do it, I dare you. Apparently, I’m lucky I got it tempura fried;
it looks like it’s most commonly eaten raw.
Now, I’m all for utilizing all parts of the animal (even if
I don’t like actually eating them myself, I understand the appeal of not
wanting to waste). But it seems like it
takes considerable effort to extract “the seminal fluid of fish” (thanks,
Wikipedia), and that it would really be easier to leave certain things within
the organs of the animals that produce them.
I really do not want to think about the process of obtaining that. Guess I gotta kinkshame the fishing
industry, now.
On the plus side, the evening could only go up from
there! After that, the sazae (a type of
sea snail) cooked in it’s own shell wasn’t so bad (again, very salty, not to
mention sitting on its own little personal pile of salt. I could feel my sodium levels rise just from
that dinner alone).
(the guy next to me probably thought I was instagraming my food)
(not today, sazae-oni! This time I eat you!)
What an adventurous evening.
I did considerable more chatting at this enkai, reassured a coworker
that do, in fact, have friends, teased my boss about liking the Green Bay
Packers, informed my supervisor that the Spanish wine he brought was called 牛の血 (“sangre de toros”, Blood of the cows), ate something I
once saw in a manga (the sazae, featured in Shigeru Mizuki’s “GeGeGe no Kitaro”), and learned what fried fish sperm tastes like. I’m really not sure how to feel about that
last one. (≡ω≡;)
Happy year of the dog, and here’s to a great 2018! Hopefully with no more fish sperm.
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