‘Do you see, Vera?’
He stood with his right shoulder toward her and asked her to stand the same way toward him. They had sticks in their right hands.
‘Westerners fight this way,’ he said. He lunged forward on his right foot and poked the stick straight at her chest. ‘They poke. They have a shield in their left hand, which they use to protect themselves if the other man’s sword comes close to piercing them.’
He poked at her. She danced away. He moved in on her and parried her stick until she slashed at him and broke it. Then he thrust at her chest and pinned her.
‘Because of the way it is used, the western sword is thin with a sharp point and a short handle with a large guard around it. The side of the blade is only a little sharp.
‘But we Japanese fight this way.’
Now he faced her square on, his right foot a little ahead of
his left. He put both hands on the stick that served as his sword, and held it in front of his
tan tien,
his midriff. ‘The
katana
is used to cut. Therefore it is longer and heavier, and it is a little more stiff. Not so brittle that it will break when you use it to block, but much stiffer than the western sword. It is your shield. You hold it with two hands and when your opponent attacks, you block his sword with it.’
They played a little with their make-believe swords. He let her have the sun at her back. It was late in the afternoon when they did this and the sun was moving to the west. Drawing on her shadow as it fell toward him, he showed her the high, the low and the middle cuts, and the
kesa,
which goes from shoulder to hip.
‘The draw must appear out of nowhere. It is like a shark in a deep sea. You float, you look all around, see nothing; there is a tiny gap, a greater silence and stillness. And then the shark is there, as if it flashed into being. So the sword materialises in the hand,’ he said.
When he saw her nearly white hair he thought of her grandfather, the Englishman. And his merry old ways. Her mother, the Canadian, who had left her by dying. Her father, wherever he was. And he wondered what he was fighting with.
The women and girls were out diving and the boys, and often the young men, went with them, managing the boats. The older men fished. The old women scratched at their hopeless little gardens in the dry rocky soil, and the old men repaired the fishing nets. The naked children played in the water. The
katanatogi
was in his workshop, bent over the sharpening stone with a blade in his hand.
Alone, Vera circled the island, and circled it again.
It was not very big, but big enough that she could walk in three directions until the village disappeared. She could walk down to the High Place, up to the shrine, or across, to the outside. The marshy middle connected it all: the two old volcanic cones had stood side by side on the ocean floor for so long that they gradually wore down and joined forces: what remained was an island low in the centre but higher, with the remains of craters, at either end. In one of these was the shrine, the ice house, and beyond it, Dragon Lake. The lake had no source of water but rain, and sometimes it was very low and almost disappeared. On the other was the High Place, and the lighthouse. This was the first bit of the island that was visible when you approached from the sea and the last that remained when you sailed away. Made of wood, the lighthouse had once been red and white, but the paint had worn off. It had a small circular room with a door in its base, and a set of stairs that went up to the light. Recently a generator had been placed there, to run the beam. It was the only electricity on the island.
In the lowland centre was a spring-fed pond. This was called Lost Lake. It was not really a lake but a marsh, frequented by birds in the morning and deserted all day. The water was sweet and cold. Vera looked around for the source of the spring but she could not find it. At the edge of the water were narrow reeds and bamboo grass called
sasa.
In some places the bushes were impenetrable, covered with prickles. She stayed at the edge of the Lost Lake for hours at a time, throwing rocks. When she was tired of throwing them in the water, she threw them at the wild cats. When she was tired of that, she went into the bushes and lay down. She laid her cheek on the ground. She saw, out of the corner of her eye, snails in their shells. She heard a whisper and saw a small white snake slither between the sharp grasses, and it frightened her so much she jumped up, breathing hard. There were swallows and gulls; the
other birds made themselves scarce during the hours of sunlight.
When she walked back toward the harbour she could see the flat sea marked out with fishing nets and stakes, to guide the boats in and out, as if it were a farmer’s field. At the water’s edge, dozens of small children ran under the direction of a naked boy of about six who was their commander. They clambered over the rocks in bare feet and tumbled in and out of the fringes of the sea. Their skin was gilded with sand. Above the shore, gnome-like old women worked the soil, digging it and softening it and digging it again with fish remains to make it fertile.
At the end of the afternoon, Vera watched the boys pole up to the shore, and the girls and women jump over the side of the boat into the foaming small surf, and run it up on the beach. She tried to learn their economical movements as they bent and carried the loaded baskets. They did not look at her, and she imagined they could not see her, sitting amongst the rocks and bushes, picking up smooth stones. She made no effort to disguise her hungry, lonely look.
She singled out one girl of the group of younger diving girls with a special longing, thinking – she was just her age. And she looked kind, and also brave, even a little bold. Her legs were very straight, and her small round buttocks split by the thong that rode up between. Her back was strong and her middle thin. Her neck was longer than the others’ necks, and her face oval.
Vera compared this girl to herself, taking the measure of face, legs and hands, knees, even the nape of her neck. She wondered if her breasts were as big or bigger than this girl’s, and if people could see her vertebrae like that when she kneeled and bent. She wondered if the girl was a good diver. She wondered if she, Vera, would like her. She looked at the strange girl as she would hold a mirror to herself.
Vera judged that their torsos were nearly the same length,
although the
ama
girl’s legs were shorter, making Vera inches taller. But the other girl made up for her lack of height in coordination. Her limbs pulled neatly together, arms and legs knowing exactly what to do and being well connected to her centre, whereas Vera felt she had no centre, only dangling limbs. The girl’s hands were deft and sure and even her feet were knowing. Collecting her tools and her catch, she bent and straightened, and it was like dancing. Vera watched so intently in secret that she felt sure that any time, years later, in another country, were she to see this girl again, she would recognise the backs of her ankles, the touching angularity of her shoulder, the way her wrists swayed. Some things are imprinted, as on one of those smooth stones, and the stone never thrown away.
When they had finished, never glancing in Vera’s direction, the divers and their boatmen began to walk up the path toward their weathered homes. This was
shiran kao.
The
katanatogi
had explained: to know nothing and see nothing of her was, to them, good manners. It was clear that even if Vera had stood, and smiled, and waved, they would have continued on as if she were not there.
But one day it changed.
The
ama
divers returned in the usual way, and with the usual chatter turned toward home. But halfway along the path, the girl Vera always watched stopped. She turned and looked directly into the bushes where Vera sat, picking up smooth stones, and said a few words, loudly; Vera recognised it as a greeting. She went still as if to hide herself further; she could not answer; she had no words. The girl walked toward her then and pressed the bushes apart with her bare arms. Vera could see her two small, sand-dusted feet.
‘Hello,’ Vera said. She continued to stare at her stones, rattling them in her hand. The sound they made was pleasing; it was as if she had coins, or beads to play with.
‘Hello. I am Hanako.’
Hanako stepped through the row of bushes and came to the sandy place where Vera sat. She stood beside her for a few seconds and then let her knees buckle inward, easily, carelessly, as if someone had let go of a string that held her up, and the hinges that were her joints simply folded beneath her. She stayed upright when her knees hit the ground. With this characteristic, curious limpness that Vera would come to know, the
ama
girl joined her.
Wordlessly she too picked up a stone. Her face as she examined it was assessing, interested. She turned the stone in her hand, found that it did not meet her criteria, and discarded it. Then she picked up another. Vera could not look at her. She blushed and played with the stones in her palm. Hanako picked another rock from the sand, and examined it just as carefully as the first. But she found something amiss with that too, and tossed it aside. She tried ten stones before she found one she liked, to offer Vera for her pile.
Vera took the stone. It was smooth, flat, round, perfect. She accepted it.
It was a child’s game, but they were no longer children. Still, it was all they could do together.
Vera had many questions, but she couldn’t ask the girl. Who had declared that the period of
shiran kao
was magically over? Was it over for everyone? Or was this particular girl, the one Vera had been watching, Hanako, a rebel? Vera thought Hanako must be the boldest of the girls. And she liked that in her. Vera imagined she would have been the same, friendly and curious if a girl from another country dropped into her neighbourhood in Vancouver.
Hanako mimed her questions. What was her name? Where did she come from? What was her country called? Did people there all have long white hair and long legs? Keiko had been to this place called Vancouver, but no one else on the island had. Perhaps Hanako had grasped that although life here was perfect in its way, the summer island
was only a little blob of land barely holding its two heads above the sea. Not everyone who lived there knew the special melancholy of that. But maybe Vera interpreted too much. Maybe it was only that Hanako had been watching too, and liked the look of Vera and thought that they could be friends.
She tipped her face down to the serious task of sorting the stones. She picked up and discarded, picked up and discarded a series. Then she found another perfect one, smooth, dark, oval, flat. She showed it to Hanako, who nodded vigorously. Vera saved it in her pile.
And so their language began as the stones, and everything that appeared on the shore.
4
Tsuka-ate
Strike with the handle
On the summer island, the naked babies were set down in the tidepools to pull out crayfish. As they grew bigger they crawled to plunge their chubby hands in deeper pools for a shell that looked to be in reach. But the water had magnified it, and it wasn’t in reach; perhaps, striving for it, they overbalanced and fell in. When their faces went under they pulled them out quickly, looking startled, and then simply closed their lips, and tried it again. After one mouthful or noseful of sea water, they learned to hold their breath. At two, they floated and bobbed under the surface. At five and six years, they dived for shells at depths over their heads.
Not so Vera. She had been taught to fear the water. It was frigid, overpowering, and probably dirty. At English Bay, where she walked with her mother, the surf was cold and there were big rocks. If she swam, her mother stood anxiously at the exact spot where Vera’s footprints entered the water, willing her return to dry land. Here on the summer island, the water was warmer, but she was nervous, and she had confined her rock games to several yards back from where the waves broke.
Hanako’s first wordless manoeuvre was to move their search for stones out of the Low Place to the tide fringe where the shells and pebbles were dumped by the waves. They sat on the bigger rocks and put their feet up to the ankles in the sea. Immediately the feet appeared to swell, which amused them.
They pulled them in and out, laughing at the way they grew fat and thin. They picked up pebbles with their toes. Little crabs, disturbed, flew up in clouds of sand. Minute fish jerked in straight lines this way and that, neon stripes on their sides. Tiny shellfish slumbered at the very rim of the water, but if you splashed them, they shot forward, pushing a cloud of sand up behind them. Hanako chased them, clutching her hands uselessly as they passed. She stumbled and fell into the water, clowning to get a real laugh out of Vera. There was no fooling her with a pretend laugh.
Then Hanako stood, and beckoned Vera to follow her on the path. She walked inland to the Lost Lake. She walked through the reeds and came to the spot where the spring came out of the ground. This was what Vera had not been able to find. There, Hanako rinsed off the salt water, and dried herself on her
yakata,
and waving goodbye, went home.
Most days after that, Hanako met Vera at the water’s edge after her day of diving. They played their child’s games, but quickly made them more complex. They got down on hands and knees and picked up the shells that were cast there in a fine line by the departing waves. She told Vera the names of the shells: there were the sun and moon shells she called
tsukihigai,
and the shells, named for the birds that darted along the water line, that she called
chidorigai,
and Vera called plovers. The sun and moon shells were called that because they were different on each side. The crabs were called
kani
and there was something mystical about them. Vera understood from Hanako’s slashing movements and fierce posturing that the crabs were warriors who had come back to life.