Clucking sashimi

I was perched at the end of a table in a restaurant yesterday with two fellow English people, Chris and Charlotte. Various dishes were put in front of us, and most were things I recognise after a few months in Japan. Included in the selection was fried chicken - not knee cartilage this time (that's a nice little surprise the first time), salad with crispy fried potato bits and slightly mysterious opaque white dressing which is almost Caesar but not quite, and 'nabe', which is a type of stew cooked on a tabletop hob with tofu, chicken, mushrooms and cabbage in stock.

Accompanying all these was a plate of light pink sashimi, served with pungent green wasabi and shredded white daikon radish. I tucked in and enjoyed it, though I wasn't quite sure what kind of fish it was. The three of us talked about it for a little while and none of us was quite sure. The flavour was delicate but definitely felt like something marine, though it was a little hard to tell through the wasabi and soy sauce that accompanied it. I decided to take the opportunity of ordering another beer (on the 'nomihodai' all you can drink deal) to ask the waitress what it was. In my best Japanese, I politely asked: 'Sumimasen, kono sakana wa nan toiu sashimi desu ka?' (Excuse me, what fish is this sashimi?) She looked a bit puzzled, and I started to stumble through rephrasing it, thinking that my Japanese wasn't up to scratch. But she interrupted me and said, in a loud voice, 'tori!' I paused for a second, wondering whether she had said 'toro', which means fatty tuna. That had been one of the options we had considered before asking the waitress, but the colour is normally a lot darker than the stuff in front of us. Chris pointed out, though, that they take bits of fish from so many different parts of the fish that it could still be a bit of tuna, which was highly plausible - my tuna identification skills can leave a lot to be desired (!).

But back to the waitress' revelation - I could see Chris across the table from me processing what she had said at exactly the same time as me. Just as we both came to understand what she said, the waitress jumped in again and said 'chicken!' in an exclamatory tone. We looked at each other faintly. I've never seen a chicken breast on a plastic tray in Sainsbury's and thought 'you know what would be nice with that? I could marinade it and grill it, or perhaps cook it in a casserole, but it would be nicer just to slice it up and eat it raw with a bit of horseradish and some watery radish, don't you think?' So far nobody has died from salmonella - actually, I say that, I'm just talking about me. I hope the others haven't kicked the bucket just yet.