I Turned Thirty-Five Years in Britain Into a Novel

The protagonist is Ryo Fukasawa, a twenty-nine-year-old man.

He has just left medical school partway through his fifth year. He has no experience with Japanese cuisine whatsoever, and does not even know how to hold a knife properly. In late October 1989, he boards a plane for London alongside three skilled sushi chefs who speak almost no English. "We'll help each other out," one of them laughs. And so his life abroad begins.

What follows spans thirty-five years. From apprentice to factory manager. From factory manager to a consultant flying across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. And finally, to a small sushi school run with his wife.

I lived through the entire arc, from a time when Japanese food was an exotic curiosity in Britain, to a time when packaged sushi sits unremarkably on every supermarket shelf. This series is that arc, told as one man's story.

I will be honest: I originally planned to write a straightforward memoir.

But I realised almost immediately that there were things I could not write that way. People who helped me. People I caused trouble for. People still working in the industry today. Writing under real names would mean dragging their lives into my recollections without permission.

So every personal name in the series is invented. Every company name has been replaced, including real ones. Conversations and small details have been reshaped where the story needed it.

What I did keep faithful is the shape of events and the atmosphere of the times. Was the air really like that? Was that figure really correct? I questioned my own memory and rewrote, again and again.

This is a book about what was true, rather than a record of the facts.

Writing this series, what surprised me most was how profoundly Britain changed across those thirty-five years.

The end of Thatcherism. The giddy brightness that followed it. The vast observation wheel that appeared beside the river at the turn of the century. An island nation keeping its own currency while the continent embraced a single one. Then the departure from the European Union, and the years the world went still.

All of it is inseparable from the story of how sushi took root here. The spread of Japanese food was, in the end, also the story of a country changing.

Seen from the Japanese side, those same thirty-five years coincided almost exactly with the long draining away of the country's economic momentum. Japan's presence in the world grew fainter, and yet Japanese food kept steadily working its way onto tables everywhere. National strength and the spread of a food culture apparently run on different logic. That strangeness is one of the things I have felt most keenly across these decades.

There is one more thing I want to be honest about.

I only began using generative artificial intelligence in 2026, and this manuscript was written alongside a conversational model.

I would scribble down memories as bullet points, and they would come back to me expanded into narrative. Then I would read what came back and correct it: no, the clouds were heavier that day; the factory did not smell like that. We repeated that exchange dozens, perhaps hundreds of times.

At my age, declining concentration and memory are, frankly, a real concern. On my own, I do not believe I could have finished four volumes.

If someone calls this a book written by a machine, perhaps that is fair. But what it felt like, from the inside, was having a patient companion who helped me dig up memories I had nearly lost. To anyone my age with something they want to leave behind, I would encourage you to try it.

Memory fades. But as long as the act of writing remains, a life can go on being edited. Having finished four volumes, that is the thing I now feel most certain about.

This is not a triumphant success story. The failures, the embarrassing misunderstandings, the moments that still make my face burn, I left them all in. I hope you will read it and laugh.

And if someone hesitating on the edge of their own step forward finds, somewhere in these four volumes, a moment of "ah, so there was someone like this too", that alone would make the writing worthwhile.

In late October 1989, at Narita Airport, I held a passport for the first time in my life. I still remember thinking the blank visa pages looked like an empty résumé.

It never occurred to me that thirty-five years later, those blank pages would become four books.

If this series gives even a small push to someone standing at the edge of their own leap, nothing would make me happier.

Thank you for reading.