The Language No School Teaches

Watanabe Keita begins his auctioneer’s chant at 5:30am and does not stop until the last tuna has been assigned its buyer, roughly forty-five minutes later. The sound he makes is not quite speech and not quite song — it is a third thing, a rhythmic torrent of compressed syllables that carries prices, fish grades, lot numbers, and buyer signals at a speed that makes shorthand look leisurely. He learned it over seven years as an apprentice, standing at the edge of auctions and listening until the patterns embedded themselves in his auditory memory. ‘You don’t learn the words,’ he tells you afterward, drinking black coffee from a vending machine in the grey pre-dawn light. ‘You learn the music first, and the words come inside it later. It’s the same as learning a dialect from a grandparent.’