Perhaps Keiko understood this. She did nothing but take in a quick, barely audible breath. Her eyes strained at the lids, just a little, with her effort to hide the hurt. Vera felt a thrill of pleasure, then a wash of regret which, again, made her angry.
But Keiko immediately inclined her head with an accepting smile. ‘Oh, it was nothing, so?’ she said, with that lilt at the end of the phrase. Then, in halting English, she talked about her own day, at sea, about the catch, which had been good, but not as good as it might have been. The old couple spoke together and soon, because it was dark, everyone prepared for sleep, bringing out their mosquito nets and draping them over the futons. Vera too, felt sleepy and lay down quite satisfied with her day although she would never admit it to Keiko.
The next morning as usual, Vera set out on her circuit of the island. She visited the old shrine. She saw the priest there, writing on paper, but she slunk away. She went past the ice house: the hole was covered with dried grass, but she could feel the chill of it. She went to the Lost Lake and threw stones, and then came back to the Low Place. She watched the babies on the shore, lolling and splashing, almost black now with suntan. They played in the wheeled wooden carts that their parents used to carry heavy items from the boats to the houses, lying down in them, rolling them over the stones, shouting. There was no one her age. She walked up the street toward the houses. She went
past the sword polisher’s door and saw that he was seated on his tiny bench, immersed in his work.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In the village, people don’t know what to do with you.’
She inched her way into his workshop. She bowed, and then she hesitated. He made a movement of his hand that told her she could sit. She dropped onto her knees, as she had learned to do from Hanako. He sat back from his work, lifting his eyes.
‘Would you like some tea?’
She watched him take the iron teapot from the fire.
‘Keiko says I can be a diver. Earn my way and learn a trade. But the Headman says no.’
‘You are not
ama.’
‘Keiko says I am now that she has charge of me’
‘Ama
means born of the sea.’
‘I am born of the sea,’ she said. ‘My mother said so. The womb is full of salt water.’
He laughed. ‘You are clever, that’s one thing.’
‘Keiko says that what I become is for her to decide and that she has decided this much: I must be of use, and in this village that means I must dive.’
‘But, you are English.’
‘Not English. My mother was born in Yokohama, Japan. I am Canadian. And a little bit Japanese.’
‘You look English,’ said Ikkanshi-san. ‘Your family would never allow a loved one, a granddaughter, to dive. It is dangerous, cold work, work for fishing people, for sea people, who understand sea gods. The Headman puts his views like stones on the ground. He cannot be moved.’
‘Keiko will not move either,’ Vera said.
‘So. They are like warriors. They both wait. There is plenty of time. Neither one will fight the other; neither one wants a showdown.’
‘But I have nothing to do,’ she said.
‘Keiko is wise,’ said the
katanatogi.
‘In whatever way is possible she will see that you can learn what you need to meet your life.’
Vera drained her cup of tea, and looked again to see if there was any left in the bottom of the cup. She said nothing.
‘Talk more,’ he said. ‘I like to hear your words. They bring back my English.’
‘Where did you learn it again?’ she asked casually, as if she had taken no real interest in his answer the first time. Since she could not talk to Keiko, he was the only person she could communicate with in English. She had to know how he came by this grace and how he had been given to her in her current predicament.
‘At school here in Japan,’ he said, ‘but it improved when I went to England.’
Then she asked him what he did in England, and who he met.
‘I played some tennis,’ he said. ‘At a club where the grass was under a roof and inside a house. The English built it this way, because it rained so much we could not play outside.’
‘Were you a good tennis player?’
‘Tennis was rather easy for me,’ he confessed. ‘Golf also. It is the swing. If you have been dividing in two with your sword pieces of fruit that have been tossed at you, for a dozen years, it gives you an advantage.’
This was meant to make her laugh, but the diversionary tactic did not work with Vera. She persisted in her line of questioning. Her mother had been in boarding school in England. Vera was curious about it. And here was a Japanese man who had gone there.
‘Did you wear that in London?’ she asked, nodding to his bare chest and wrapped skirt.
‘No.’ He told her what he remembered: he wore linen suits with creased and pleated pants, and the shaped felt hats that made him feel like a film star. ‘I used to take the Tube,’ he said, pronouncing it ‘teeyoube’, ‘to Covent Garden. The Royal Opera
House.’ He remembered how he used to stand at the top in the back of the theatre, and lean over the rail and count the hundreds of tiny red lampshades that were positioned on the curved wall. There were women in satin dresses that clung to their hips.
‘Did you go alone?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said, and his face creased up as if he did not want to remember.
‘Who did you go with?’
‘There were others of us at the Japanese Consulate,’ he said. ‘My fellow students from officer school. Sometimes one of them would go with me.’
‘What were their names?’ she persisted.
‘They had various names. You would only forget them,’ said the
katanatogi
quietly.
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘One was called Oshima, Hiroshi.’ Now there was a formidable look on his face, so that even Vera did not dare ask more.
But Ikkanshi-san pushed himself forward.
‘A friend would join me there, and he loved
Swan Lake
almost as much as I did. The theatre,’ he said. ‘We went to the theatre in Drury Lane. And saw
The Mikado.’
He laughed. She did not find this funny until he explained that it was about how ridiculous the English found the Japanese. This his friends did not find amusing.
His hands strayed back to the blade that he had been working on. ‘But that was a long time ago.’
‘How long ago?’ she challenged.
‘Not so very long,’ he corrected. ‘Not more than five years. It only feels like long ago.’
‘Why did you come back to this place?’
‘Because I am
katanatogi.
And my father was and his father before him and many many fathers disappearing into the centuries past.’
‘But why to the summer island?’
‘You ask a great many questions,’ he said.
‘And you answer them.’
‘Sometimes to practise an art you must go away from nearly all the world, to a quiet place, and remain apart from what is happening. This is what
katanatogi
must do. Then, perhaps the world will come to him.’
She did not accept this answer. ‘And you did not know this before?’ Vera sniffed.
‘I knew it, but I did not believe it,’ he said, and returned to squat over the polishing stone until the girl bowed (learning, every day) and went silently away.
On some days a storm or wind prevented the fishing; other days the women stopped early to meet the ferry. One day, when the boat pulled up to the small dock, looking as always, as if it might simply plough the simple board structure under the sand, the basket maker came.
He stepped onto the land with his strong foot, his weaker one dragging a little. He carried on his back a large woven pack full of bamboo strips and tools and some small belongings. It was just the right time; the baskets he had made or repaired the year before had begun to need attention. The people saw him coming and waved, and went inside their houses to find the baskets that needed repair. He stopped by the well and took the pack off his back. He took the scoop and poured himself a cup of water, drank it noisily, and then poured himself another, which he overturned on top of his head. Then he shook his shaggy locks and looked around, pleased with himself.
Vera had seen him in the village on the mainland. He bowed and smiled to her as if he knew her, but she was frightened of him. She did not expect to see him here. She went back to her special haunts. When she returned later in the day, he was seated by the well, surrounded by baskets. The little children danced around him asking for toys. They did not seem afraid. He waved them off; he would make them something when he had finished for the day. He had too much work, it seemed, to return with the ferry. He would stay an entire week,
then. That was the only way. For some reason this made Vera uneasy.
One afternoon, when Vera and Hanako went to the spring to rinse the sand and salt from their bodies, Hanako held up eight fingers.
‘Hatch,’
she said.
Vera repeated the word.
‘Ju-ich,’
said Hanako. Nine.
‘Ju-i.’ Ten.
At
‘ju-i’
on the clock they would meet at the end of the street that ran through the centre of the village. Vera was neither allowed nor prevented from going out. When the others went to sleep, she simply rose from her futon, put on her
yakata,
and went out of the door.
The moment she left the protection of the doorway and entered the night she wondered why it had taken so long to do this. Here was night itself, dark, inky, soft. Night in the open, night above the whisper of the sea and under the flaring cape of the sky. The huts were reduced to grey shambles; only the angles of their roofs and the sharp edges of the shale that held the roof tiles in place showed. Studded into this cushion of delicious black were a few orangey pricks of the oil lamplight just visible through a window.
A sliver of new moon gave the weathered wooden walls a cool blue cast, and even made shadows at corners, which to Vera were entirely new. She had never seen a moon shadow in Vancouver, in fact it was rare to see stars. Nights at home were usually cloudy, the sky enclosed by square buildings and made darker by their lights. The streetlights, and the cars that striped the streets stole perspective. The air over the city had a close, artificial glow. But here was a serene blackness stretching outwards, stabbed through by stars like the ones she’d first seen in the
ukiyo-e
on Homer Street.
Here,
Vera thought. And where is that? An island somewhere off Japan. An island that barely has a name. But she knew more
about it already than she knew about anywhere else. That was it; she had never before been so aware of where she was on earth.
The air was cool, but underfoot the rocks were warm. It was high summer by now. She thought of the promised swim: the water would slip easily over her skin. Vera crept along the main path of the village, passing one door after the next. A glance through a half-open screen gave her a vision of people squatting around the stone hearth. The firelight flickered in the cracks between the wooden siding. It was all so thin, so temporary. Yet it was somehow safe, too, safe because everyone was there.
She went along to the far end of the village, the poor end. Even here, with the Fisherman’s Union and so little in the way of material things, some people were poorer than others. Perhaps it had to do with drinking. The fishermen went to houses here to drink and take their baths. Women went there too, certain women that Keiko did not like. Vera heard the laughter, and she retreated.
At the Low Place, Vera sat on the warm rock and waited. In a minute the mosquitoes found her. She wrapped her blanket over her back and head. The mosquitoes swarmed but they could not find their way in to her skin. She wondered if Hana would come. She wondered how it was that Hanako ever did come out to be with her. No one else was allowed to speak to her. It did not occur to her that Hanako’s mother and grandmother had told the girl to befriend her. She could not know that the
ama
women had discussed her predicament, and that they saw that this was the best way for her to become part of the summer island. They could not all disobey, but one girl could, and that girl was Hanako. Even if the Headman had not approved it, even though it had never happened before.
That first night, Hanako did not come. After listening a long time to the sea and the wind, and the insects, Vera went home. She did not really mind. Simply waiting for Hana had itself been an important mission. She would be happy to do it again and again. As she walked silently up the path she could see that
even this late, some people were awake. Always there was an adult world at night, but here it was tantalizingly close at hand, thinly screened. She turned into Keiko’s doorway and made her way unnoticed across the floor to bed, and slept.
On the second night, Hanako did come, appearing in front of her, dancing, to avoid the mosquitoes. She laughed at Vera’s blanket-hood. Gesturing for her friend to throw off the wraps, she told her to get up, they were going to the High Place.
There, under the moonlight, they could see far out over the water. Waves crested in broken lines perhaps a hundred feet from shore; a rail of moonlit foam raced, like a shooting star, from one end to the other, fading, then rising again at another spot and racing outward. They stood staring. Instantly it became a game, to guess where a white foam-bud would rise, and how long it would last, shooting slowly along the top of the breaking wave. They pointed and danced, slapping their legs to kill not the mosquitoes, but the sting they left, pointed and danced, four skinny legs, four skinny arms, mimicked by their moon shadows attached to their heels on the hard sand.
When they tired of this they climbed down the boulder slope to the shore and lifted rocks. Crabs – the old warriors in their awkward armour – cranked themselves up and fled, effortlessly, on lightning toes from one hiding place to another. When the girls lifted that rock, the crabs levered themselves up on their legs and challenged them.