My first lunch at Yajima Sushi, in Tokyo, felt more like a kidnapping.

There were open spots at the counter. But the chef, Susumu Yajima, instructed me to take a seat nearby and wait. Eventually I was summoned to a place directly in front of him, and the attack began: Piece after piece in rapid succession, as Yajima barked orders at me.

“Eat now!” he said, milliseconds after passing me a glistening slice of buri (amberjack) atop shari (the finger of rice that forms the base of nigiri sushi). “Use your hand!” he upbraided me, as I reached for my chopsticks. He even instructed me to half-chew one piece before washing it down with sake.

Was it the taste of the fish, or some culinary variant on Stockholm Syndrome, that compelled me to return, and to keep returning? Either way, I fell in love with the low-ceilinged room, hidden in the basement of a nondescript building off a main road in Shibuya. And I came to realize that Yajima’s bossiness was an integral part of the appeal.

During another meal, as I followed his orders to the letter, I began to suspect there was something profound behind these edicts. Some were rudimentary and fairly common; others were unique to him; still others recalled sushi’s origins as Edo-era street food.

When I summoned up the courage to ask about this, his wife, Yoshiko, yelled from the kitchen: “He’s just strange!” Yajima nodded. “I’m just forcing my way onto my customers,” he agreed. But slowly, over the course of several meals, he opened up and told me more: How he’d become a chef; how he and his wife had run their sushi-ya together for almost 34 years; and how the story of his life, and this place, was encapsulated in his Ten Commandments of Sushi.

After downing a piece of supremely fresh aji (horse mackerel) with scallions and ginger paste at the mandated maximum speed, I asked Yajima-san to slow down — and explain why he wanted me to eat so fast.

“Sushi is fast food,” he said. “You shouldn’t even really sit down to eat it. Only in the 1950's, before the Tokyo Olympics, did they start to have sit-down sushi joints. Before that it was served at yatai (street stalls). Now there are no yatai. Health regulations.”

“I understand the history,” I said. “But what’s the point of serving so fast?”

He placed a slice of ika (squid) on the black marble surface in front of me. “One, two, three,” he counted. “Every second that passes, it declines. That’s why I want you to eat it immediately.”

One morning I traveled to Tsukiji, Tokyo’s massive fish market, with Yajima-san. He rode a small motorcycle piled with styrofoam containers in which he carried the day’s supplies back to his restaurant, and he paid for everything in cash, as is the custom. He told me that the lunch he was about to serve was the proper, perhaps the only, time that sushi should be eaten.

“There’s a lot of rice in sushi,” he said. “It fills you up. That’s why you should eat it for lunch. Of course I have to serve dinner to survive; but when I make sushi for dinner, I put 50 percent less rice in each piece.”

While Yajima-san shops at Tsukiji, his wife cuts and cleans the shrimp, shucks the clams for soup, and cooks and seasons the rice. When he returns, the smells of her cooking are already strong, just the way he likes it. “It’s the whole experience,” he says, “not just the taste. There’s also touch and smell — the feeling you get from a place.”