The women did not read the newspapers; they did not listen to the high-pitched voices on the radio. They listened to their husbands, but they spoke to each other.
‘My husband says we must conquer others because we have so little space.’
‘The men are mistaken when they said that Japan is poor. We are never poor because we have the sea.’
‘We are not exactly poor. But we are small.’
‘Yes, small is different from poor. We are only poor now because the country is preparing this war. It takes all our wealth to make war.’
‘Whatever happens we will still have the sea. The sea is very rich.’
But even the sea now was not as it had been. The catch had been lower this year than last, and lower the last year than the one before. Some
ama
had found work making
zouri;
others were weaving at village shops. It happened this year again that some
ama
went to work in Kishu, to fish for agar-agar.
‘Probably this war will not touch us, it will leave our simple lives as they are.’
‘But it will take our men and even our boys. Then we can not be as we are,’ said Keiko.
‘Our men and our boys are good subjects and go to the war,’ came a voice out of the steam. ‘At the same time one of our best warriors hides on the summer island.’
‘He spent years in the Emperor’s service,’ said Keiko without looking at the one who spoke. ‘Now he has another task.’
‘What task is that. Is it to be Keiko’s lover?’
Some women laughed.
‘Too late for that! If he had married Keiko she would not have left with the Englishman,’ said another voice.
The women laughed again.
The water was too hot. Vera had to get out – when she stepped onto the stones she saw her skin: boiled red. She rubbed it as the others did and took the wooden half-bucket to throw cold water over her head, again and again.
Winter dragged toward spring. Still the nights were dark and closedin, in the little town. No one came to Keiko’s door, not even the old aunt and uncle. One day Vera saw Hana alone on the street in front of the
udon
shop. She jumped off her seat and ran outside.
‘What are you doing?’ she said to her friend. It was the middle of the day.
‘I left school because a job came up at the pearl farm. My mother needs the money.’
Hana’s father was away in the army.
‘You are lucky,’ said Vera. Even jobs at the pearl farm were few.
‘It is necessary that I have a wage for my family. But I feel sad that I cannot finish school.’
At last it was
risshun
and the countdown until the day they left for the summer island.
Vera sat in the boat anxiously staring at the horizon.
‘What is the matter, are you afraid it won’t be there this time?’ asked Keiko.
But Vera noticed that Keiko was just as anxious. As the boats pulled in they saw Ikkanshi-san on the shore with his arms folded in front, waiting for them.
So, he had survived.
Through the winter the sword polisher had only such feral friends as existed on the island – the cats, the mice, the snakes – the snails, the crabs. He had begun to build his new room. He had put all of his scavenged boards to work in the structure, and all of the nails he had made, but he did not have enough material to finish it. He had spent hours coming to understand the
meito,
the excellent old blade that his father had given him. He had to be very careful, not to damage it. Slowly he felt its
kami
and with great care he took the coarser grit stones to it. As spring
returned he waited for Keiko and Vera. He had hoped to begin the sword lessons again. There was so much that he could teach her. When she came back Vera was shy of him. Perhaps she was more interested in becoming a woman.
These changes in Vera had the inevitability of the larva spinning its cocoon. That white, formless creature she had been the year before was no longer. She was secretive, weaving her threads, making herself a fine cocoon. He could no longer tell what she was thinking. He was fond of her, strangely fond of her, pale shapeless worm that she had been before she disappeared inside herself. But he remained alone.
In late afternoons he went out to the shore to swim. The boys hunted for octopus with their clumsy spear guns. Sometimes they found small lazy ones in the shallow warm water near the harbour. They shot them, and brought them ashore. The old women put them on drying lines to hang. The trailing, mop-like creatures were transparent for a few hours while they shrivelled, and then they became thick and opaque. The women soaked them in soy sauce and grilled them over the fire.
But sometimes the boys found big lazy ones near shore. They had games they played with the creatures, letting them wrap their tentacles over their backs. The boys sank down under the water. The octopus would stick to them. Then the boys rose bringing the creatures up to the surface. Everyone, even Ikkanshi, came and stood on the wooden boat ramp and watched and laughed. The octopuses were like long flopping balloons, or Swiss rolls. The strong boys could easily unwrap the arms and hold the creatures above their heads.
It was here that he saw Vera watching Tamio.
The boy was running in waist-deep water. He was laughing and then he lunged forward onto his chest, straining to keep his face above the foam. His chin jutted forward, and his arms were braided with fine long muscles,
like the ropes that hung in the shrine. His skin sparkled with salt and foam in the sunlight. He fell, and disappeared under the surface. In a few seconds he rose out of the water, shedding glistening spray in all directions.
He saw that Tamio could have been the leader. The other boys and young men looked at him for reactions, for ideas, but he seldom gave more than an offhand shrug – or pointed to another: That one! Follow him! Yet he was expert in everything he had to do.
He also noticed that Vera could not stop looking. Tamio was unconscious of his beauty, and moved with absolute confidence that the spear he threw would hit the target, that his foot would fall on pure smooth sand and the spring of his step carry him clear out of the water. He went down and rose with an octopus. He managed to get it over his back, so that he had one of its eight legs in each hand, and several trailing down his legs. He shouted to the other boys, and began to run. Then he dived still running, under the water. Frightened, the octopus did what it was supposed to do: it suctioned onto him with its feet, and then shot out its liquid behind to propel itself forward. Tamio got his ride, flying under the octopus along the water.
His friends cheered and clapped.
Vera didn’t know that anyone saw her watching, so she continued. The boy swam and strutted, with the weight of the waist-deep water holding him back. She kept watching him with the other boys until Hanako, giggling, elbowed her in the ribs.
‘Tamio?’ she said, smiling and rolling her eyes. ‘You like him?’
‘I don’t! I don’t even know who he is.’
‘You’re looking at him.’
‘I am not. I never look at him.’
But she did watch Tamio, and so did Ikkanshi. The boy seemed to be intelligent. He was not silly and he didn’t boast or shove like the other boys. He had a gravity to him,
not just his weight, which gave a sureness to his movements, but in his demeanour. As if he were older than eighteen, the age Keiko said he was, and older than his friends too, older than the girls who clustered on the beach watching.
Now Vera had a language of English and Japanese mixed. But Tamio was different. He did not have the gift of languages or, probably, of friendship. He likely did not read well or analyse the grammar of his own language. Ikkanshi noticed that Vera did not smile at Tamio when he passed her on the path, which must have been morning and night: the rest of the day he was out with the diving women.
Keiko too seemed reluctant to see Ikkanshi. He stopped her one day on the path.
‘Are you afraid to be with me?’ he asked her, outright.
‘I am not afraid,’ she said.
‘Then why do you not come to see me?’ he asked.
‘It is dangerous enough with the girl,’ she replied.
‘Dangerous because I am a man marked by my disagreement with the war?’
‘For that, too,’ she said.
‘People know.’
‘People know, what?’
‘The basket maker,’ she said.
‘The basket maker!’ said Ikkanshi, with anger. ‘He is just a man who carries messages. That is what he does. Any message he gets, he will carry, anywhere. If there were anything to tell he would already have done so.’
Ikkanshi asked himself if he was fair to Keiko; if he should give up this friendship, which was more than a friendship, out of fear – no, he did not use the word fear, even to himself – out of concern that the High Command was watching him, that he was under suspicion, or could be imprisoned. He did not believe they could do anything to him, because of the regard in which he was held, and his father, especially, had been held, because of the regard with
which the sword was held. But Keiko was a simple diving woman. His crimes, whatever they might be, were not hers.
But he missed her visits very much.
Vera did not want to stay at Keiko’s house on the summer island. She said she did not like Tamio.
‘He stares at me.’
‘Do you stare at him?’ asked Keiko.
But she went to the well, and spoke to Maiko, and it was arranged that Vera could live at Hana’s house that summer.
She went to the boats with Hana every morning, and watched the
ama
pole away from shore. It was still very early and the water was cold. She went to the beach, to practise.
That second summer on the island it had been decided that Vera would apprentice, to dive. The younger children threw the stones for her, and she went down, over and over, wearing the goggles Hana had given her. Every day, she went deeper, pulling up shells from the deeper and deeper places.
It was unclear whether Keiko had won her battle with the Headman. He wasn’t saying that he was beaten, but there it was, Vera with the children getting used to the water. She would be a maiden diver, working from shore with a basket floating beside her.
Then came the day when all the
ama
would dive
kachido,
from the shore on the side of the island. And they said that Vera could go. Over the path they went, past the Lost Lake, in a silent row, baskets resting on their hips, to the
ura,
the backside of the island.
The women spoke and pointed and conferred. They clambered across and down the cliffs, their feet tender, yet uncalloused, over the sharp rocks. They spread over the cliffs, the divers and apprentice divers, women of eighty and girls of fifteen.
They stood on the edge of the rocks, like a row of cormorants. Vera was on the very brink of the black rock, her toes curled over the edge of it. The rock repelled her. It was black and settled in frozen lips, as if once an evil sauce had been poured carefully from above, so that it lapped over and over itself, and set that way. There were scratchy grains within it that sparkled. Seen from underwater it was even more frightening; it absorbed all the daylight and gave it back in sparks and splinters like eyes, and fish scales, frightening things. In places, against the undersea flanks of the island, the rock breathed, Vera knew. She and Hana had gone down to look, and had seen the bubbles.
She put her foot in the water; her skin shrank and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. She removed her foot. The wind was blowing onshore, straight at her, raising goose bumps all over her legs and arms. That would mean good diving. The
ama
were happy. But the oldest ones determined the rules: they would dive for only one hour now, then warm up and then one more hour.
Some jumped off right away and made a splash, laughing. They bobbed around in the green-grey element, getting used to the cold.
Vera dipped her foot. She dipped the other foot. She bent over and splashed her upper arms, and heart. She found her goggles and placed them on her head. Her fingers fumbled tying the knot around her waist to hold the knife. She uncurled her toes from where they clutched the edge of the rock.
She did not jump.
‘One, two, three,’ she said. ‘Now.’
The cold swallowed her and she was under. A transparent lid closed over her head, taking away everything that had been her strength above. Her arms lifted out from her shoulders, her legs scissored, and her feet, suddenly light, touched nothing. Even the hair that normally hid her neck lifted up, chilling her vulnerable nape. There was this help
less moment. That girl who stood hesitating on the cliff was gone.
And then. She felt it happen, the exchange. Land life flew off her, upward in a sweep of bubbles. The water assumed her weight. All parts of her were equal now. She was a fisher, a hunter. She would live by her skill, inside the instant, the sixty seconds underwater. She was, for a moment, at home in the sea.
She opened her eyes: her arm was white-green-yellow, and trails of white bubbles rose from her shoulders, her thighs. The hand in front of her eyes was larger than her own, swollen by the lens of her goggles. She stopped sinking and began to rise. Breaking the surface she gave the slow
ama-bui
like the others, and thrust herself onto her back and kicked to get warm, building a froth on the water. Yelping and ducking and surfacing, the
ama
made their way to the diving place, the strange black pillar with its escort of little underwater peaks that marked their spot.
It was not so deep there, only a few yards. They dived for seaweed,
wakame.
Vera began to go down, each time a little farther, each time trying to stay down a little longer. She watched Maiko, trying to learn the tricks of quick descent, of finding and cutting. They wouldn’t teach her, not really. They wouldn’t give her the secrets of diving until she could find them out herself. Once she had discovered the secrets, then Maiko and Setsu would recognise her as one of them.
She was only halfway down when her air started to break out of her. She came to the surface. Tried again. Breathed, bent, kicked. Farther this time, but not far enough. She needed more breath. She came up and steadied herself against the pillar of black rough stone. The women bobbed to the surface, putting their handfuls of seaweed in the baskets that floated behind, tethered to them. As they broke the surface they expelled the air, let out the whistle: it was low, and sweet, and a little mournful, like the sounds of birds over their nests.