James Bond nearly dies of it at the end of Ian Fleming’s 1957 novel “ From Russia With Love,” when it’s administered by a kick from a boot with a hidden blade and he crumples to the floor in “ Dr.
Just two or three milligrams of TTX may be lethal to a human - “more potent than arsenic, cyanide or even anthrax,” the American science writer Christie Wilcox notes in “ Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry” (2016). In high enough doses, this can shut down a diner’s nerve impulses and cause, within hours, nausea, paralysis and the stalling of the heart, which only knows to beat because our body’s electrical system tells it to. Among those who think of fugu as merely a distant delicacy, knowledge rarely goes beyond the fish’s infamous trait: In the most delicious species, the innards are suffused with the neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin (TTX). A sluggish swimmer, fugu has stunted fins and often flat-lying spikes instead of scales, and when confronted by predators it compensates for its lack of speed by swallowing enough water to swell up until its spikes stand on end, so it looks like an angry armored balloon. Westerners have never quite understood the reverence in Japan for fugu, alternately known in English as puffer fish, globefish or blowfish, of the family Tetraodontidae. To one diner, this is a promise of pleasure to another, a teetering on the abyss.
HERE IS A PLATE of fish cut so thin you can half see through it, the pale panels arrayed in rings that ripple outward, like the small, concentrically packed florets of a chrysanthemum.
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