In the Center of My Heart There Is a Force Commonly Known As Love

You know how sometimes, for one reason or another, maybe due to a confluence of spontaneity/impulse and a difference of timing, you know how that sometimes makes things not go exactly as you had planned? Yeah, I thought as much. Well then, you know how sometimes even though things did not go as planned, it turns out to be kind of a good thing? That’s what this story is about.

I know, last week I said I would be taking my fellow student researchers to Ruchi, purveyor of Indian cuisine and much mango lassi. (Really, that’s about the best drink on the planet. You have to try it.) However, what ended up happening instead, as I convolutedly, vaguely, and abstractly explained above, was that we instead went to Kokoro, purveyor of Japanese cuisine and much sushi. In Japanese, you spell “kokoro” like this: 心
(Me? Show off my recently acquired linguistic knowledge from Zach and my iBook? Never!) My congratulations if that symbol actually displays on your computer; if not, you should get yourself a Japanese character pack. Somehow. Fortunately for you in the latter category, what the kanji for “kokoro” actually looks like is not really important to the rest of this story.

Sushi is always pretty expensive for the amount you get, but if you and a friend are looking to fill yourselves up at Kokoro, the most efficient way is to buy the Kokoro boat. This is, naturally, a wooden boat about 0.6 meters in length filled with many different kinds of sushi. Dining entertainment! I quite appreciated the Rainbow Roll, which manages to combine several different types of fish (and octopus) in one roll. Also, the Kokoro Boat brought much tuna roll and California roll, and several pieces of shrimp nigiri. Of course, everything was delectable. Now if only Kokoro had an elevated canal running by their tables as Isobune (いそぶね) in Oakland did. Then the boats could actually sail by your table. But let’s not get picky.

Tangent: Actually, the first thing of which I thought when I saw the Kokoro Boat was a story I heard a few years back about the death of Jim Carrey’s pet hamster. It seems that Mr. Carrey loved his hamster so much that he gave the little guy a full Viking funeral. This means that the hamster was placed on a small longboat with some of his favorite possessions (i.e. ball and blanket in place of the typical Viking great sword or axe), and then the boat was set afire and pushed into the ocean to sail off to Valhalla. Kind of touching, really. Anyway, the Kokoro Boat looked about the right size to be a hamster longboat.

And finally, to answer that nagging question in the back of your mind, something to the effect of, “What the heck does that title have to do with sushi?!?!” Or maybe it was just “何?!?” Well, it turns out than a translation of “kokoro” is…
heart.