He sells sushi by the seashore

The astonishment in the master sushi chef’s gaze, when his accomplished longtime protege lets slip that he’s 39, is a pivotal turning point in Kimber Lee’s “Tokyo Fish Story” at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.

Age — or the passage of time — is the theme of “Tokyo,” not just as applied to individuals but to generations, families, culture, society, the sushi business and even the planet, or at least its oceans.

Koji is as dumbfounded to learn that the old family print shop across the street has gone out of business as he is aghast at the long lines for the trendy, low quality chain sushi shop down the block.

[...] as shaken by the retirement of his main fish vendor as he is confounded by the growing scarcity of mature bluefin tuna.

Some of the story’s plot twists may be too easy to see coming, and some conflicts too neatly resolved, but Lee and Brandt deliver them in a playful variety of comic and dramatic emphases — from the delicacy of a glance or an unspoken denial to the comic conversation of half-sighed grunts between Jue and Arthur Keng’s aged fishmonger to the righteous feminist anger of Nicole Javier’s grunge-queen Ama, when turned down for a job at Koji’s restaurant.

Brandt and scenic designer Wilson Chin carry us smoothly through Lee’s many locations — with restaurant doorways and counters slipping into place or a fabric river unfolding from the sleeves of one of Alina Bokovikova’s generation-clash costumes.

[...] tradition also endures, in the sushi itself but also in the repeated, resonant image of the sushi master bicycling to work against a clear blue sky.