Behind the Kitchen Door.
The Japanese have a term, kitsui shigoto.
Hard work. Dirty work. The kind that doesn't wash off easy.
I thought I knew what it meant.
I'd spent weekends scrubbing pots and pans in my father's restaurant since I was nine, standing inside cookware so large I could fit my whole body in them.
I'd delivered newspapers at crack of dawn in the middle of the winter in middle school, and done all kinds of other odd work...
Apparently, I had a talent for attracting the crappiest jobs.
But standing in the courtyard behind a fish market on a Saturday morning, sixteen years old in a new city, I realized I'd only understood the concept.
My new boss walked me through the kitchen. Past simmering pots of fish stew, past fresh baguettes cooling on racks, past the walk-in freezer with its heavy door. The warmth. The good smells.
Then he opened the back door.
The smell hit first. Before the cold. Before I saw anything. Foul. Strong. Instantly gag-inducing… like a shovel to the face.
That stench claimed territory in my sinuses it would never fully surrender. Like inhaling the liquefied death of a thousand fish. Like breathing through roadkill.
Then the cold. Frost covered the ground. The kind of morning that promises snow.
That’s when I saw it.
A mountain of Styrofoam and cardboard boxes stacked twenty feet high in the courtyard. And beside it, bags. Dozens of large black trash bags, piled up like body bags, some of them moving. Actually moving. Undulating slowly, like they were breathing.
My heart sank.
"The boxes", the boss said. "Break them down, get them in the bins. And the bags... those go in the bins too."
There appeared to be more trash than bins.
I started with the boxes. Manageable. Break them down, flatten them, if possible, stack, repeat.
But the bags. Heavy. Shifting weight inside.
I grabbed one, started dragging it toward a bin.
It ripped.
Fish guts oozed out through the tear. Grayish-beige. The texture of something that had been dead for days...
It splashed out over my jeans, and drenched my shoes.
The smell doubled, tripled. I gagged.
"Fuck!!!"
It echoed through the courtyard.
Playing Tetris with garbage that could explode at any minute wasn't my idea of fun. But here I was. And there were so many bags to go.
I learned quickly.
Don't drag them. The friction tears them open. You have to lift them and move them carefully.
What you should NOT do is the following...
The next bag I tried to carry properly. Wrapped my arms around it, pulled it tight against my chest and tried to cradle the moving bottom, trying to distribute the weight.
The plastic stretched.
Something sharp, fish bones, pressed through against my forearm.
Then punctured. Small tears appeared. Not rips. Deliberate little failures, like the bag was giving up in sections.
Cold liquid seeped out.
Not onto my jacket.
Into it.
Through the fabric, against skin, the kind of cold that feels like it's coming from inside your body.
And more on my jeans... feeling the slop drench it, forming itself around my leg like some kind of sheath… then begin to freeze, a little by little.
I kept going.
Some bags made it to the bins intact. Others didn't. Each time one split, fish guts and brine spilled out. Onto the frozen ground, onto me.
The courtyard began to look like a crime scene.
The smell. It coated everything. My clothes. My hands. The inside of my nose. No amount of breathing through my mouth helped. It was just there.
Hours passed. I don't know how many. But somehow the pile shrank. Slowly.
My hands went numb… from the cold, from the work, from gripping bag after bag. My back ached. My jeans were stiff with fish juice and frozen solid below the knee.
By the time I finished, it was lunchtime.
The boss nodded at the empty courtyard, said something about lunch being ready inside. I was ravenous. My stomach had been growling for the last hour.
But when I sat down with a plate of food, I don't even remember what it was, I couldn't eat much.
The smell. It was in my throat, wafting up from my clothes every time I moved. I could taste it. The guts and juices that had soaked into my jeans and shoes kept reminding me they were there.
I managed a few bites. That was it.
After the lackluster lunch break, the boss walked me back through the kitchen.
Pots and pans, he said. Then reorganize the walk-in. And then the floors.
All the other menial tasks a grunt on the first day does.
I scrubbed industrial-sized stockpots, my hands raw and wrinkled from the hot water. Moved crates of fish in the walk-in cooler, the cold actually feeling good after hours in that courtyard.
Mopped floors stained from the daily activity inside the fish market.
Then some more trash from the day's work...
The smell never left. Not in the steam from the dish sink. Not in the strong smell of the floor cleaner. It was just part of me now.
When I finally left that afternoon, the winter sun was already setting.
I remember changing into my regular clothes. Carefully wrapping my fish stained clothes in plastic bags. Walked to the bus stop, then to the subway that would soon take me home.
And that entire ride, all I obsessed about was…
"I must reek."
I sat on the cold floor in the back corner of the subway car, trying to create a buffer zone between me and the other passengers.
Every shift I made while I squirmed on the floor released a fresh wave of fish stench from me. Even with the work clothes wrapped in multiple plastic bags, the stench that had bored itself into my skin was surfacing…
I could see it in people's faces. That moment of confusion when the smell registered, followed by the subtle scan to locate the source.
I was the source.
The guy who smells like he crawled out of a dumpster behind a sushi restaurant. The guy you move away from.
At home, I dropped my clothes immediately in the wash... 4 times. The smell was still there.
Even after a shower, where I ran hot water until it ran cold, I could still smell it. On my hands. In my hair. Somewhere deep in my sinuses and lungs where soap couldn't reach.
At school, I swore I could still smell it. Sitting in class. Eating lunch. The phantom stench of rotting fish, clinging to me like a shadow. It lasted the entire week...
The following Saturday.
Same mountain.
Same smell.
Same sinking feeling in my gut that this was my life now. Not because I'd learned anything. Not because I was becoming a better person. Because I'd committed. And commitment, I was learning, mostly means doing shit you hate until it's over.
But I knew what to do now. Lift, don't drag. Watch for the bones. Move carefully. Some bags would still rip. That was just how it went.
Week after week, it stayed horrible. I never got used to the smell. But I got more efficient. Learned which bags were safe to carry, which ones needed some ingenuity to move.
The other guys got better at tying them off, at disposing of the worst offenders immediately, instead of letting it sit for the week waiting for me to arrive.
Eventually I moved up. More kitchen work. Prep. Then to the fish counter in front. Becoming a fishmonger.
Kitsui shigoto.
Hard work. Dirty work.
There's no nobility in it. No character arc. You show up because you said you would.
I stayed three years.
Years later, in the dojo, I heard the phrase ningen keisei.
Character formation through training.
Maybe.
But you show up. That's the work.