Look down. Back up. Where are you? You’re on a boat. Filled with sushi. And your sole responsibility is to feed. As fast as possible. Until night falls.

Sound too good to be true? Well…it is too good to be true. But at the Shabu-Ya restaurant in Harvard Square, you can come pretty close. Rather than you being on a boat, you can order a giant boat filled with sushi, which dominates the table, upon which you can feast to your heart’s content. But what is this? To your left, you suddenly notice that the next table has ordered a similar boat. Your eyes meet. There is a moment of indecision. And then, without a word spoken, the race is on.

Some may wonder if a food as rich and delicate as sushi should be rushed through, and whether instead it should be savored. Friends, there is a time to savor sushi, much as there is a time for joy, a time when the age of men may end, and a time to sleep. But, my friends, I assure you that it is not this time. When you look to your left and see a sushi boat, it is not this time. This is the time when proper decorum is put aside, when chopsticks become secondary to sheer will, and when the only thing that matters is not the art of your form but the size of your appetite.

And so we raced on, long into the 8pm, and in the end, it did not matter who won or lost. All that mattered was that the table was clean, and we were satiated. In a sushi boat race, everyone is truly a winner.