Modern Myths: Unagi

One of the seemingly least appealing dishes in Japanese cuisine to a western palette is Unagi—or, in layman’s terms: eel.

Of all the Things Japanese that show up on menus over here in Canada, I seem to get the best squeamish reactions by proposing Unagi to people. I’m not sure what it is that is so unappetizing about the idea of eating something that is half snake and half fish, but westerners seem to want no part of it. And this has worked out great for me since, fairly early on, I discovered that the stuff is delicious, and the negative western associations with eel seem to assure that I get any Unagi I order entirely to myself.

However, I’m screwed once I get to Japan. They know better, and over there Unagi is a full-on delicacy. The reverence that the Japanese have for the stuff makes it expensive at Japanese restaurants here, and I shudder to think what kind of delicacy markup eel is subject to in Japan.

Foolishly, I never stopped to wonder why Unagi was so expensive. I must have subconsciously decided that the tastiness somehow validated the price point. However, the reality is that, just like in any other supply-demand equation, Unagi is expensive due to its scarcity.

Didi—Sonomi’s mother—was the one who turned me on to the scarcity of eel in Japan, and something about the way she spun the tale struck a chord with me.

She told of how eel has to be caught in the wild, rather than bred in fish farms like some other popular seafood. She claimd that, despite numerous attempts to mate the creatures, the Japanese fishery has been unable to breed eel in captivity and unable to explain their failures. This means that the market must rely on caught eel and must pay for the labour and luck involved in catching it.

This rarity, combined with the inability of humans to essentially domesticate eel by breeding it gets me going. The Shinto in me always seems to resonate when it comes to stories of nature staying wild in spite of man and his conquering tendencies.

The story of the Unagi, in particular, harkens to a remarkably vivid dream I once had that featured these majestic sea creatures that were unlike anything I’d seen before. The best word I have for them is “mythical,” and the best approximation I can come up with was that they were part lionfish, part eel, and part dragon. They were the kind of thing that could only ever exist in dream, complete with smoky, glasslike, trailing fins, and unnaturally vivid reds, golds, and greens in their scales. But, despite being impossible creatures, they had this inexplicable air of reality about them. It was as if we could find them if we delved deep enough—as if they were the rare creatures that were once glimpsed off the prow of a ship and from which the idea of sea monsters descended. In the dream, it felt as if they existed somewhere in our world, but it was a place we could never hope to reach.

When I hear about the rarity of the Unagi; when I hear about how we are wholly unable to breed them—unable to make them adhere to our dictates of supply and demand—I wonder if they might not be the distant descendants of those majestic creatures from the dream. The Unagi: bred in the oppressive heat of undersea vents by the closest thing this planet ever came to dragons; left to swim up into the cold seas above, where man plucks them from the water and scratches his head, wondering where eels come from and how they are made.