Vera waded, first to her ankles, then to her knees. The water was silky, almost oily around her skin. She felt its touch now, at night, more than in the day; the darkness took away the distraction of sight. She stood with her feet apart, and fell to her knees, abased in the sand, splashing the sea water over her arms and chest. Hanako lay on her stomach, trusting her midriff to anything that might walk on this sloping verandah to the deeper water, and rolled like a log. Vera too fell over sideways and washed in the surf.
The water was soft. It was warm too, warmer than the air,
warmer than the sand. The water came all over and around her and, if she wasn’t careful, into her, its sharp salt making her cough and her eyes blur so she could not see Hanako any more.
At the harbour the fishermen were working in the dark. In little wooden boats, they floated in the shallows, casting nets onto the water where their strands made cross-hatches on the silken surface before falling out of sight. At intervals along the length the men tethered the nets by making a tepee of three bamboo sticks leaning together. They tied the sticks together with a strip of cloth. These fragile markers were evenly spaced, standing in the shallows, extending perhaps three feet above the water. When the nets were all laid down, the fishermen continued to cross over the place where they sank, swinging their oil lanterns. Hanako said that the fish would come to the light. When the nets were lifted near morning, they would be full of big shrimp,
isebi.
The water in the sheltered curve of the harbour was utterly flat and calm, and the lights and the tied poles made it look like a mysterious field, not liquid at all. These poles made lines, fences, depending on where one stood behind them. If Vera stood in a certain place and looked through them, she saw a narrowing, a portal, a gateway to the sea. Here was a funnel, narrow at the middle and wide on either end. The sticks with their knotted cloths were like signs begging to be understood. Like letters painted on rice paper. But Vera could not read them.
On the third night, Hanako brought a small lantern from home. She led Vera away from the lights to the
ura,
the backside of the island, walking on the path that twisted across the inland.
It was dark on the backside. This was the steep, rough edge where there was no beach and no safe harbour, only the bizarre, worn out old rocks standing in tiers above the water, some high, some low enough to sit on with your feet in the sea. At the
ura
too, there were little spits of islands off the summer island, as if it had once extended farther into the sea, but had given up and sunk, leaving only these traces.
The girls found a rock without too many rough places and sat on it, looking out. One of the standing rocks was muffinshaped, worn nearly through at the bottom and coiffed with a few trees. One looked like a shrunken head; and another must have been a shrine; it had a spindly torii arch on top. Because it was night, the colour was gone from everything, and there was only the alternating black and silver of the water, the island, more water, and the sky. Silver, black, silver, black, silver, black, in layers.
Vera shivered.
Hana pulled closer to her. Here they were unprotected from the small, steady salt wind that breathed into their faces. The moon was a little bigger than it had been the night before, with a blurred edge to show that it would be bigger tomorrow. Its glow fringed the wavelets silver.
‘There are fish,’ Hanako said, ‘that come by night. Night fish.’
Vera shivered again.
‘There are fish that blink like lanterns.’ She pointed to her lantern. ‘They are lantern fish.’ She wanted Vera to go down to the edge with her and see. She coaxed her toward the water.
Vera said no. Dark, unknown water: what was down there?
‘It’s not dark,’ Hanako promised, ‘when you dive down.’ She took her hand and pulled her off the rock. She showed her a shallower place. Indeed it was not so dark. The moon reflected back up off the sand at the bottom.
‘No, no, no,’ said Vera. ‘Fish will touch me in the dark.’
‘Nice fish,’ Hana laughed. ‘No bad fish. I promise.’
Vera had taught her these words. The sign language was universal; to make a cross on the heart. The rest she made Vera understand, without using words. There will be no sharks or anything bad. It is too close to the island. Look we are right on the best swimming rock. You can slip in easily and almost touch bottom. Come and lie in the water.
The following day, Vera stopped by to talk to the sword polisher.
‘My friend has taught me to swim at night,’ she told him.
‘I saw that.’
‘You watch us?’
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Everyone sees everything that happens on this island.’
She thought about that, and realised that he must be right. It was a good thing, in a way.
‘Keiko says you are the best polisher in all Japan,’ she said.
He bowed. ‘Of course it is not so,’ he said, composing a forbidding look. But Ikkanshi was inordinately pleased to hear that Keiko had spoken well of him.
He had a blade on the stone. Looking around his room with its bare walls which went straight to the stony ground, she asked him where he had got it.
‘It came to me,’ he said.
She could see that he wanted to stop there, but she would not let him.
‘It came? How did it come? Must be on the ferry,’ she said.
‘From the
katanakaji.
The swordsmith.’ He did not name him or say where he was.
‘The
katanakaji
came here? I did not see him. Perhaps he sent a messenger.’
Ikkanshi kept his head down.
‘I know who the messenger is,’ she said. ‘It is the basket maker. And I don’t like him.’
He raised one eyebrow. ‘You make up an opinion very quickly.’
‘Is he a friend of yours?’ she asked.
‘Perhaps.’
But Vera could tell he wasn’t. ‘That’s like your other friends, in London,’ she said. ‘You’re not certain if they were friends either!’
He gave one of the warning looks; she had gone far enough. She changed tactics.
‘So, the
katanakaji
made it?’ she said with a look of disbelief. ‘How did he make it?’
‘He does it in a very hot fire,’ he said. ‘He must heat and fold over and hammer out the same piece of metal thousands of
times to eliminate impurities. He makes the blade by combining a soft inner core of steel with a hard outer skin. That way he will come up with a material that is hard enough to cut well, but soft enough to be flexible, so that it will not snap. It is no good to make a hard sword that will snap the moment it meets an enemy’s armour.’
‘I don’t believe anyone can make a sword like that,’ she said.
‘Where do you think it comes from then?’
‘I don’t know. A factory, I suppose.’
‘You westerners think everything is made by machines.’ It made him laugh. ‘There are blades that are made now very quickly and partly by machine,’ he said. ‘But they are very poor quality. To make a sword properly, there is only one way, and it is a long and a hard way.’
‘Why are they making bad ones now?’ Vera asked. And when he did not answer, she answered herself. ‘It is for the war in China, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. The war is the cause of making all these bad swords.’
‘How do you know about the war? We have no news here.’
He avoided the question. ‘A sword is not just a thing of metal. It is a spirit. Each sword has its own mysterious quality. That makes it different from every other sword.’
‘Will that be used in the war?’ she asked. ‘I thought you would not make a sword that would be used for killing. I thought you only made a sword for a work of art.’
He looked down at his whetstone, and ground the blade a little faster. He did not expect the sword to be used in battle; that was true. But he could not be sure. He did not want to mislead the girl. ‘It is a ceremonial sword. But that does not mean it should be weak. There is no excuse for poor workmanship.’
She went on her way and he continued with his blade.
She reminded him of himself.
When he had first come to the island he was so used to shouting that his voice cracked in his voice-box when he tried to speak normally. He had come home from England and left the army behind, giving only the excuse that his old father was dying. So he was, and so he did. Ikkanshi had sat with him the last few times the master went to his whetstone. He told his father he could no longer be in the Emperor’s service; he had become convinced, over his years in London, that the way of the new Japan would destroy them. It seemed his colleagues were against the whole world.
His father was silent and went on examining a blade.
‘You must take great care to find the spirit of the blade,’ he said. ‘It will not be readily apparent. But if you hold it quietly and for a long time, it will come to you.’
Ikkanshi knew he understood.
After his father’s death, Ikkanshi sent word: he would follow in his master’s footsteps. To do that meant many more years. It was his calling.
The High Command could not complain.
Why he chose the summer island he was not certain. It was more than a place of hiding. He wanted to be by the sea for years at a time and to feel its rhythm. He imagined that the sea had something to tell him about how to be Japanese, and how to be human.
He took the ferry and held his face up to the wind. The salt air made tears in the corners of his eyes. He walked alone up the path from the ferry dock. This was no place to visit. There was no hotel for tourists, no restaurant. No one came here, no summer tourists, no foreigners, and no
students. There were only
ama
here, like a tribe unto themselves. The Japanese feel a little of two things about the
ama.
The fisher people were primitive, and they were poor. They were what all Japanese must have been, at one time, and that made them ashamed. Yet they should honour their past, and therefore be proud.
He presented himself to the Headman. The Headman allowed him to sleep in the temple, and when he learned that he was a sword polisher, offered him a room to work in. But Ikkanshi was not ready to polish swords. He had not completed the apprenticeship he had begun with his father; he had instead gone away to go to officer school. That was the modern way. He could help, however, with the knives and tools the people used for fishing.
Keiko brought him her
tagane,
the knife she used to cut the foot of the awabi away from the rock. He was seated in front of his whetstones looking down, when she appeared, a pair of feet, two narrow ankles with bones that met at one eloquent point, from which small strong legs rose up invitingly. He did not look.
He took the knife from her hands. Her hands were light of touch, not padded or moistened with oil as were the hands of the girls his parents had presented to him. They were lean, wary hands, very strong and wilful, he could see. He took the knife, but he continued to look at her hands, and to his shame all he could imagine was the magic those powerful, pretty hands could work if they should touch him.
Aroused, he glanced quickly down, and commanded his body to cease and desist. This was not a very good sign for the future which he saw for himself, which was as a species of sword monk. He did not look up again when he promised her the knife by the next day. He had other work he should have put before it, but he wanted to finish quickly, so that she would come back soon.
He knew that men saw the
ama
women as erotic. It was
not their nakedness, near nakedness: that was a matter of no account, merely a sign of the type of work they did. It was something else, their muscularity of form and of personality. He watched the shore and saw them going out in the morning, then coming in, in the evening. They were loose and free in their laughter. Although they were of this place and no other, they had about them a curious air, a manner that no other Japanese women bore. It was the air of emancipation. They could survive alone, without men, and they knew it. The males were all on sufferance. Yet the community held the women close. This was a contradiction.
And it was exhilarating to Ikkanshi. He saw that Keiko, the one who had brought him her knife, was the most spirited of all. He imagined her under the sea, slipping like a fish between the rocks with the weeds drifting along her thighs.
He had not come here to satisfy his creature longings. That was possible in Tokyo any night. He had come to quash them. He had come to train himself to live in a place where they would have no expression.
Ikkanshi filed her knife to a dangerous sharpness and did not look into Keiko’s eyes when she returned for it.
The heat, and the dryness that it brought, were exceptional that summer. The winds took the clouds that so often floated above the horizon, gradually enveloping the sun, and blew them away. The sky was left exposed, pure blue, scoured. And the sun poured out of it relentlessly, baffling the people’s faces with blocks of pure light.
In the baking daylight he stayed inside, with his stones and sometimes his fire. He sharpened the hoes of the old women who scraped at their gardens in the tough soil. He made large needles that could be threaded to mend the nets. He fixed the thinning bottoms of cooking pots. In the late evening, when he was not mending or fixing, he went to the water and swam.
It was not common, to see people swim for pleasure there. The people had no need to do so; they were in the water and out of it all day long. But he was different. He was from the city. He was exercising. He was an officer, and he was of samurai class. This much was obvious even in this simple backdrop, although he had no possessions to show his difference. It was in his speech, his manners, his posture, and his silence. Why should it not be in his swimming?
The fishermen would gather on shore and watch him. He would begin, and not stop for an hour or more, as the sun was going down. He swam in a line along the shore, straight as a destroyer would steer. If there came a rock in his path, he veered carefully around it, without lifting his head. He did not go out deeper, or in shallower.