I clasped the ferry boat ticket in my pocket and climbed up the hill overlooking the bay. Although the dock was only a block away from home, I made sure my trip to Tokyo would start from where Ohzora used to live. Without a car, the Suzukis would have carried what remained of their belongings. Maybe a duffel bag too big for a skinny boy of twelve then. The boy might have dragged it, then rolled it down the hill, running after it like he chased a soccer ball with me. Even for the island where the Tsushima and the Liman Currents converged, it would have been a warm day in March, like today, if my recollection was correct. Which I was not sure about these days. Time no longer moved linearly but regressed and progressed, always landing at that particular moment. I kept hearing a buzz. Like a fly that hovers around my pillow, invisible in the dark, yet there. A low drone approaching a crescendo, then a diminuendo, turning into fortissimo just when I started to fall asleep beside Mika, my wife, who did not snore but breathed heavily, like the ebbing and tiding of waves in slow motion.
The cabin located on the hilltop no longer had any windowpanes. A tattered rope was tied around the doorknob to prevent trespassing, not by the islanders but by tourists who flooded in during the summers in bright beach sandals taking selfies, trying to capture themselves as they leaned toward the ocean on a fenceless cliff. Barnyard and goose grasses stretched endlessly on both sides of the paved road. Soon, a developer from Tokyo would clear the land and build a resort hotel, a project that should bring in work other than a fishery and, more importantly, young residents to my caldera, where I was born, raised, and would die.
“Don’t be so sentimental. You’ll be back in a week. Whether you like it or not, you’ll have the ocean under your nose every day. So why not go straight to the jetty and hop on the boat?” Mika urged me as she rearranged the orange and yellow gerberas and baby’s breath in a beer mug—a retirement bouquet villagers had given me a week ago.
We would be apart for the first time in our forty years of marriage. Mika, I knew, expected to be invited to this trip. How could I? She didn’t hear the buzz.
◆
The Suzukis used to live in the cabin fifteen years ago: Chikara, Nami, and their children, Ohzora and Megumi. I lost my bet when they registered themselves at the village office. I was one of the two civil servants (i.e., glorified jack of all trades) who delivered mail, maintained the only school on the island, stored emergency food, and such. We were skeptical about them moving in, even though we received a fax requesting a municipal cabin. “Who, from a big city like Kawasaki, would want to come live on this island? The kids are just three and four,” I said. Taro, who was more than twenty years my junior and more hopeful, bet for the Suzukis’ arrival.
Maybe because I lost the bet, I watched the family grow on the island like a transplant. Nami hung sky blue curtains with a pattern of clouds and decorated their door with a handmade wreath, which always had fresh green purslane and beach vitex. Chikara bought an old skiff from a retiring fisherman and ventured around, sometimes getting lucky with flying squid and rock oysters. He explained to me that Kawasaki faces Tokyo Bay, and he grew up fishing with his grandfather. A hobby. A concept I grappled with because the only fishing I knew was for a living. To feed your family. To pay the bills.
For me, a hobby was what Chikara seemed to be doing most of the time when I delivered him mail. He had a large canvas on an easel just outside his cabin. What he painted always looked the same: different hues of blue splashed randomly, and blotches of white and fuchsia pink scattered here and there as if Ohzora and Megumi had been playing around with their father’s brushes. “Have a glass of barley tea,” Nami said whenever I handed her a heavy package from Tokyo, which was always addressed to Chikara and never to Nami.
Taro sometimes shook the package before loading it on our village van and guessed the contents. “Whiskey, canned stew, music tape,” he’d say, as if naming those items he craved would make them come true. Sometimes, Taro even asked me what the package was when I returned to the office. “Who knows? She always leaves it on the porch for her husband to open.”
That was true. But I could tell what was inside—paint, thinner, brushes. I was sure because, since the day of his disappearance, no package had arrived for the Suzukis.
◆
What remained of Chikara’s skiff was washed ashore weeks after the storm. The slabs of the hull were found scattered on a narrow pebble beach below a rugged cliff. If it were not for a quarter horse that trotted to the rim of the ridge, almost throwing off a daredevil ranch boy, the wreck would have been left unnoticed, perhaps until summer when tourists poured in. That’s what the villagers said when a few fishermen sailed out in a boat and maneuvered around the caldera to collect the debris. No body was found. But when the broken white boards were fit together like a puzzle with some missing parts, a portion of the skiff’s name Chikara had painted on the port side became decipherable. 空. 大, a character preceding 空, was lost in the ocean, but there was no doubt that the debris was Chikara’s skiff. No native fisherman of the island would have named their boat Vast Sky.
Perhaps it was the lack of his body that did not convince the Suzukis of his death. Nami declined to hold a funeral. Megumi and Ohzora continued attending the only school on the island where seven children between the ages of six and fifteen took lessons in one classroom. Six other rooms, including the one that used to be a music hall when I was a student, were empty of desks and chairs. My first job in the morning was to air out all the classrooms and turn on a copier.
Likely, the children overheard their parents talk about the debris. They plucked a few seaside morning glories on their way to school and placed them in two empty milk bottles. Megumi and Ohzora, the youngest of all, arrived at school last. For a six- and seven-year-old, a daily walk down the hill, passing by the dock, then through the center of the village, would have been an excursion.
“What is this for?” Megumi asked her classmates when she saw the morning glories, half wilting, on her desk.
“For your father.” Shota, my son, who was fifteen then, placed his hand on her shoulder. He might’ve been thinking about Uncle Ken, who had been lost at sea the year before.
“Why?” Megumi asked.
“His funeral.”
“You liar!” Ohzora shouted and jumped on Shota, overturning the milk bottle on the desk. As Ohzora kept punching Shota’s flat stomach, the bottle rolled off, scattering shards of glass on the wooden floor. My son did not try to hold down Ohzora but stood still like a sandbag.
◆
Since that incident at school, nobody talked about holding a funeral. Instead, a rumor went around that Chikara and Nami were seen fighting on the beach a few days before the storm. Some witnesses explained they were tugging at a canvas like kids fighting for a toy. “You wouldn’t believe how tough Nami was. No matter what, she kept grabbing the canvas. So petite, she was dragged along the sand like a stubborn puppy, determined not to move an inch.” Others said, “No, they weren’t fighting. They were horsing around. I saw Nami fall on her buttocks when Chikara let go of the canvas, and they were laughing. You never know what the city people are up to.” Since nobody overheard their conversations, the rumor circulated the village like a scene from a silent film, allowing people to add any lines to their likings. Some even suggested an elopement with a photographer who lived temporarily on the island on a national grant. Camera-san was how the villagers referred to her. Of course, she had a name, but nobody ever came to know her. Maybe the situation might have been different if she had taken some shots of the villagers, which she never did. She showed no interest in people. Only sceneries without a single life. Sunset, moonlit ocean, precipitous cliffs. Chikara, who was asked to take her to scenic spots on his boat, was the only person who called her by name. What I remembered was her pixie hair, which was never brushed, her bulky Nikon hanging from her stork-like neck, and the smell of the chemicals that stung my nostrils when I dropped by her shack to deliver her mail.
She disappeared from the island around the same time Chikara was found missing. Some insisted that they’d seen the two board the ferry. Others denied witnessing such a scene. Elopement was such a far-fetched notion for me, but once rumor started rolling in a small village like mine, there was no way to stop it. You let the villagers exhaust their imaginations and wait for the words to die, like the last flame of a campfire.
◆
Three months after Chikara was reported missing, Nami suddenly appeared at my office. She wore a dark navy suit and had her hair tied on her back in a bun. So different from the Nami I used to watch, scuttling in and out of her cabin in her ketchup-stained apron, picking up Lego blocks and crayons, careful not to step on her husband’s paint tubes on the porch.
“Where can I find a job?” she asked.
“Well.” I fumbled for the right words. “Why don’t I go through my file and get back to you later?”
“Any job would do. Here’s my resume.”
As soon as the click of her high heels faded, Taro cracked up. “Where does she think she lives? A job interview? So boss, where’s the file you’re talking about?”
I pointed at my head and picked up the phone to make a few calls. Even without looking at her resume, it was evident that Nami had no experience making sun-dried flying squids or knifing rock oysters. Her hand that carried a cup of tea for me looked like porcelain—the kind of hand that belonged to none of the women from my village. While making a few inquiries to my childhood friends, who were running family businesses, half of me hoped that there would be no job opening, that they’d pretend to entertain the possibility for my sake, but soon apologize for not being able to help me. But on my second call, I found a job for Nami.
◆
“She’s learning quickly,” Mika said. “Better than when I was a beginner.” She did not bother to get changed after returning from a makeshift shucking shack and was still in her rubber boots and apron when she stood at the doorstep.
“Glad it’s working. At least she can keep feeding her children,” I said.
“What are you talking about? She doesn’t have to work for a living.”
“What do you mean?”
“According to Masa, you know that internet addict, Chikara is a well-known artist. Nami-san could easily make ends meet if she were to sell those paintings. But who knows what she’s thinking? Maybe she still believes he might appear one day out of the blue. She might be afraid of upsetting him if he were to find out that his paintings were gone. Or, she might want to keep everything untouched as his keepsake. Either way, it doesn’t make sense to me. Chikara is dead. Clear as a day. Someone should put sense in her head.”
When Taro was not around at work, I went on the internet. What Mika told me was correct. Chikara was featured as an up-and-coming young painter in a video that might have been taken more than a decade ago. He might’ve been in his early twenties. A beard made him look quite different, but those sharp, intent eyes were the same. The eyes that seemed to read my mind. He was looking straight into the camera, and there she was, Nami, in the background, fixing the angles of the wooden easels displaying his work.
◆
The ferry left the island on schedule; as expected, I was the only passenger. Along the coastal line, the shucking shack Nami used to work at was still there, and the oyster shells were piled up against the galvanized iron plate wall. Mika and the rest of the shuckers believed Nami wouldn’t last long. Not because she was not good at shucking but because she was strange. Not arrogant, Mika said, but the women working with Nami felt she was always floating, like a life buoy, thrown out into the ocean, letting the waves take her wherever.
“We tried to include her in our small talks. Nothing serious. Like cooking tips or the best way to get rid of the fishy smell from your hair. Anybody could’ve joined our conversation. But not Nami-san. She was so engrossed in shucking that small talk never reached her ears, even after getting used to the job. Nami-san kept staring at her knife as if it might open up something.”
“I once asked her why she was so intense,” Mika said. “You wouldn’t believe her answer. Nami-san said oyster shells are so intriguing. Rough on the outside, milky smooth on the inside. I guess that’s how you see the world when you have too big a brain.”
◆
Although Nami never rooted herself in the lives of the villagers, she became a part of our landscape. On Sundays, I saw her picnicking with her children on the beach, Ohzora chasing after swallowtail butterflies, Megumi decorating Nami’s hair with beach vitex. Especially during the first few years after losing Chikara, the children would stay behind at school and leave around five o’clock to meet Nami at the shack.
I was at school one late afternoon, taping windows before the hurricane hit our island. The wind was getting gusty, and I was rushing through my job when I saw Ohzora and Megumi in the classroom. They were lying on their stomachs, doing breaststrokes. “Now roll,” Ohzora said, and the two changed to backstroke and slid toward the blackboard, which was covered in blue chalk with strokes of white and pink. “Hurry, we have to rescue Father.” Ohzora grabbed Megumi’s hand and pulled her until their heads bumped against the wall. “Did we make it? Is Father saved?” Megumi asked.
They must have been nine or ten. It was around when Shota went to Tokyo, saying the island had no future. There was so much truth in Shota’s words, but I had difficulty digesting it, like when you have too big a meal. Maybe because I was not yet used to going home where there was no Shota, I offered the children a ride to the shack and back to their cabin.
When we arrived at the cabin, lightning struck here and there, and Megumi begged to sit beside me and covered her ears. Under the flash, her dust ball-covered hair and tainted blue fingertips shone. In the rearview mirror, Ohzora was clasping Nami’s hand.
“Why don’t you come in and wait until the thunder’s gone?” Nami asked.
Although three years had passed since Chikara’s death, their cabin was full of him: blue series paintings I found on Wikipedia crowded the walls, making me feel as if I were at the bottom of an ocean and in the midst of a sky at the same time. His work-in-progress was on an easel by the picture window where raindrops beat brutally.
“Surprised, aren’t you?” Nami said when her children had gone to hide under their futon cover. “He hasn’t finished it yet. He went out on his skiff that day for this painting.”
“What do you mean?”
“Chikara said he wants to see the blue in action.”
I was perplexed at how naïve people could be, not growing up with nature. Blue in action was a matter of life or death, and you avoided it at all costs, not jump into it like Chikara unless you wanted to die. Or did Chikara commit suicide? Such a possibility never crossed my mind, and I tried to shake it off. But the sporadic lightning, incessant rain, and the serenity of the blue room made me envision Chikara rowing his skiff toward the roaring waves, his eyes, those fearless eyes in his video, looking straight ahead.
◆
Maybe because of that ride in the storm, and perhaps because of the number of students dwindling to five, three, and finally to two, Ohzora and Megumi started calling me Uncle Hiroshi instead of Shota Papa. Between delivering mail, filing for prefectural subsidies, and making arrangements for a weekly doctor’s visit to the only clinic on the island, I spent more time at school, scheduling my tasks to be at the playground during recess. We played soccer, jump rope, pitching—everything I’d enjoyed with Shota. Mika joked about it and told her friends I was preparing for grandfatherhood.
Fishing was another thing. On Saturdays, I took them to a dike near the wharf and taught them how to sprinkle ground bait, when to pull a fishing rod, which fish to let go, like a puffer that Ohzora kept playing with, amazed at how it bloated. When I told him it was the puffer’s self-defense, Ohzora returned it to the water, mumbling an apology.
Nami and Mika dropped by every once in a while, in between their house errands. Rarely did the two meet at the dike, but when we caught half a dozen wrasses, I called Mika to help me prepare fresh sashimi for the children. She brought not only a cutting board and a knife but also Nami.
“Watch,” Mika said to the children. Without hesitation, she chopped off the head of a wrasse still flapping on the board and cut open the body from below the pectoral fin through its caudal fin, gutting out the jelly-black intestines, cleaning the hollow inside with seawater, then wiping it with her towel. Then she stripped off the white meat from the skin, exposing the backbone naked. Meanwhile, the children gave sighs of wonder, admiration, and awe as if they were watching a magic show.
“Now, your turn.” Mika pushed the cutting board and the pail toward Nami. “Have your pick.”
We drove to Nami’s cabin, where she fried the remaining wrasse for late lunch. Although we were unexpected guests, her house was neatly kept. A vase made from a tree stump was on their dining table. Freshly picked thistles were spilling out from the vase.
“Quite a cabin,” Mika said on our way home. She opened the passenger seat window and watched the sunset in the ocean as we drove downhill. “Have you been inside before?”
“On mail delivery.”
“No wonder you weren’t surprised at those paintings. I told you, right? She could be rich. Leave the island and start her life again in the city where she belongs. Did you see how she managed the sashimi knife? Pathetic.”
“Fried wrasse was quite good. A new notion.”
“A city notion. Like those thistles. We don’t decorate them. We play with thistles. That’s what thistles are for. Do you remember when we were kids? We used to throw thistles at each other and count who had the most on their sweatshirt by the time we got to school. I was good at dodging thistles. I’ve never lost.”
◆
When Ohzora turned twelve, I accepted that my caldera only had so much to offer. Even from what little we saw of Shota after he started culinary school in Tokyo, I could tell he was becoming a different man. Spoke a different language, wore different sets of clothes, mingled with people I’d never met and would most likely never see. He was self-content. Not that he was dissatisfied with his life on the island growing up, but once you open the door to another world, you can’t close it and pretend it does not exist.
The second summer Shota was back from Tokyo, he cooked us stingray and abalone he caught with his friend, who stayed behind on the island to work on his father’s boat. Stir-fried stingray with fermented black bean and spinach was what he called the main dish, abalone a’ la meuniere over potatoes, the second dish. He explained that they were variations of what he had learned at school. He had to make do, lacking the spices he needed.
Mika and I did not know how to eat what was supposed to be so familiar to us. With her chopsticks, Mika meticulously removed slivers of chopped chili pepper from the fillet and chewed a small piece as if she were a food taster.
“Not bad. But it doesn’t beat my soy sauce boiled stingray.”
“You’re right. Mother’s stingray is the world’s best.”
Later, after Mika went to bed, we took a stroll to the beach to get some cool air and savor more beer. We sat on the dike, with the Harp Star, Deneb, and Altair clear above us.
“You’re getting good at cooking. Do you plan to open your restaurant someday?”
“Maybe. There’s so much competition in Tokyo.”
“I assume so. But you like it there, right?”
Shota looked at the sky. “Where I live, I can’t see the Summer Triangle. It never gets totally dark in cities. We can’t have the best of two worlds, I guess.”
“Right. But you can visit us anytime. Perhaps with your kids years down the road. Summer camping. Like so many young couples ferrying over.”
“Wishful thinking. I’m not even dating anyone. Finishing school next April and interning at a four-star restaurant come first.”
Shota took out his mobile phone and showed me all the recipes he’d noted, visiting different restaurants, guessing underlying spices. Although he hadn’t traveled abroad, he wrote, a hint of Sicily, a trace of Athens. When he was a little boy, Shota would beg me to give him a piggyback ride while we sauntered along the beach. He’d always ask the same question: Papa, what is beyond this ocean? My answer varied then, but after reading his recipe note, the answer became clear.
What Shota shared with me that night lingered on like afterimages. That was why I did not hesitate to talk with Nami when I spotted her on the cliff that late September afternoon. With tourists gone, the field across her cabin was back to normal, and she was sitting alone on the goose grass, watching the horizon. No wonder Nami was always an outsider. None of the village women I know of her age would be spending time like her. Daydreaming. Alone.
When I parked my car, Ohzora jumped out from the cabin with a baseball mitt. “Later,” I said. But that later never came.
“Do you mind if I sit here?”
“Please. Look at those altocumulus clouds. Can you see how they move along with the patches of blue?”
“You mean the mackerel sky. It means we’ll have rain soon.”
She looked at me as if I were talking in a foreign language, which suited me because it made it easier to bring up the subject. “I know it’s none of my business, but if I were you, I’d move back to Kawasaki. The school here can’t function like a real school, with only your children being the students. They need friends their age. See the world. Tap on their potential. Besides, you’ll find a better job there. You don’t want to keep shucking oysters forever.”
“Why not? That’s what people here do. What’s wrong with prying open the shells? You might not know, but it feels like getting to a secret.”
“You said it. People here don’t think that way about oyster shucking. It’s a job. Period.” Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Ohzora watching us from the picture window.
“I know I don’t fit in. But how can I leave before I find out what blue Chikara was looking for?”
Way beyond the horizon, the sky and the ocean blurred into one, and there was no telling where the one started or ended. “Do you believe that there’s an answer to your question?”
◆
Ohzora and Megumi stopped calling me Uncle Hiroshi, and I stopped visiting the school during their recess. “So much with playing grandfather,” Mika said, and we resorted to our previous life of watching TV on weekends. It would be a lie if I said I didn’t miss fishing with the children, but I made myself believe that they would understand someday, that my suggestion to Nami would work out for the better. I might have been too naïve. But who could have imagined such a terrible thing would happen to Ohzora? So, when Nami quit her job in February, nobody tried to convince her otherwise.
“Finally, she got things straight. She’s moving in with her parents,” Mika said. “Told me to thank you for the job.”
The day the family left the island, I did not accompany Mika to the ferry dock to see them off. In the picture taken then, co-workers from the oyster shack and the school teacher stood around Nami, Ohzora, and Megumi. The children seemed to have been crying. Or maybe it was the wind blowing into their eyes. I would never know. What stayed with me was that wayward look on Nami’s face, who seemed to be ignoring the camera and focusing on the vast sky.
When I went to check on the cabin, paling white walls with rusty hooks greeted me. No more sense of being underwater or floating in the sky. Chikara’s work-in-progress was left behind by the picture window, with numerous gashes slashed by the oyster knife, making his last painting unrestorable. Not wanting anybody else to see it, I threw the canvas from the cliff into the ocean below. Far out on the horizon, the ferry boat carrying the family was turning into a tiny dot, scintillating like a diamond star.
◆
The news shook the villagers when Ohzora’s picture was broadcast on TV a year later. A thirteen-year-old had been lynched to death by minors. Found naked, floating along the bank of the Tamagawa River, with forty-three lacerations on his bloated body. For weeks, details of what had happened were revealed through national programs and newspapers, initially based on facts, gradually segued into interviews, and finally, to hearsay.
At the oyster shack, that was all that women talked about, Mika said. She chewed on the boiled stingray as if trying to decide where to begin her story. “Did you know that Nami-san never moved in with her parents? She’s been juggling two jobs—waitressing during the day and canning at night. No wonder Ohzora ended up hanging out with dropouts. Why didn’t she sell the paintings? That would’ve saved them.”
I wanted to tell Mika that I was the one who couldn’t save them, but a lump formed in my throat.
“At least Ohzora had a great childhood here. You made a difference,” Mika said. After a long silence, she added, “You keep her forwarding address at your office, right? Do you want me to send her flowers?”
I shook my head and went to bed without finishing my dinner. Ever since, the buzz kept following me.
◆
I never imagined myself visiting the city, let alone the plane ride. If it had not been for Shota, I would have been lost from day one. He handed me a railroad and subway mini-map with intricate, colorful lines that crossed at numerous points. He circled Kamata with a bold red magic marker, the station closest to his apartment, and stapled his handwritten map that showed how to get to his place. Believing I came to tour around the city, he gave me some recommendations.
“You make me feel like a little kid,” I said, leaving his place while Shota was still in his futon bed.
Along the Tamagawa River, cherry blossoms were starting to bloom, only in places where the branches received much sunlight. Most buds were still yellow-green but rounded. Students in bicycles passed by as a man in a grey tracksuit, perhaps my age, jogged along. If Mika were with me, she would have scoffed at the man, saying, if you want to exercise, come work on our island. But this must be the ordinary morning of a city. The scenery Ohzora had absorbed—the sky so low, smoke puffing out from the factory chimneys lined up on the opposite bank. So this is where I sent him off to. When Ohzora stopped calling me Uncle Hiroshi, I should have talked to him. But about what? About city life I didn’t have any clue? About the tingle I felt the more I came to know the Suzukis? Or about the recurring dream I had then of being unable to cross a bridge that was suspended in mid-air, always shuddering at the chasm that stretched under me?
Even fourteen years later, the place where Ohzora was found dead was not difficult to find. Flowers and soda cans were laid on the bank’s edge, framed by pebbles arranged like a rosary. His portrait, taken at his junior high school matriculation ceremony, was enclosed in a glass plaque with an inscription, The Boy We Failed To Save. Never Again. The Teachers Association of Kawasaki. In his black school uniform, he looked much older than I had remembered him.
Whenever I bundled mail to be resent to Nami’s new address in Kawasaki, I’d attempted to insert a letter to Ohzora and Megumi. How are you doing, sounded too superficial. Are you practicing baseball, making friends, were too patronizing. Like when Shota called to tell us that his apprenticeship at a French restaurant didn’t work out, I didn’t know what to say. Shota saying, coq au vin chicken overdone, boeuf bourguignon too bland—just made me very sad, as if Shota were slipping out of my reach between those foreign sounds. Unlike Mika, who said with conviction, “It’s their loss, not yours,” I found myself nodding at the phone.
Even standing at the bank where Ohzora was forced to swim on a cold February night—for failing to show his allegiance to the street gang, for not shoplifting at a neighborhood convenience store, for acting saucy—all the details I’d gathered to understand why he had to die, made no sense to me. The world was so foreign to me, and perhaps it was to Ohzora, too, who’d learned which fish to let go, how to scrape off meat from the bones and let stray cats eat the rest, which clouds to watch out for. Everything I had taught him failed to protect him. My wisdom was meaningless here, as Chikara’s was on my island. What was Ohzora’s last thought? Did he see his father in the water? Did he call out for his mother? Did he blame me? Maybe it was mere arrogance to think I was in his thoughts. My part in his thirteen years of life might have been like these cherry blossoms that covered the blue sky in pink for a fleeting moment but vanished in the wind before you knew it.
◆
A sudden gust almost blew away my memo with Nami’s address, which I knew might be irrelevant after fifteen years. Nonetheless, I followed the street and block numbers, which did not necessarily proceed in sequential orders, unlike on my island. I hit dead ends a few times and had to back up to start again. Identical narrow alleys, where one compact car could barely pass through, stretched between two-story houses with crumbling plaster walls, where fading posters of a city council member I’d never heard of were stuck on the windows like shades, where a tricycle was left overturned in the middle of an alley, where pots of aloes lined up against rusted fences. What felt like an endless maze with obstacles finally opened into a two-lane road with a Seven-Eleven, a dry cleaner, and a greasy spoon. Nami’s apartment was a three-story brick building with an arch-like entrance with a plaque that said Castle View. When I was redirecting her mail to Kawasaki for a year, as required by the postal rule, I envisioned a grand condominium overlooking the water, like the ones you see on a TV program, featuring the lives of celebrities. No disaster seemed possible to fall upon a place called Castle View.
They lived on the first floor. I stood across the street by the electric pole as the dull buzz in my head began to crescendo. Half of me hoped she was gone, that her family had moved out from the apartment, leaving no track for me to trace them. Would that put an end to my buzz?
I watched my shadow get shorter while delivery trucks and buses passed by. They caused the ground to tremble. “It’s like the waves. You learn to live with the honks and roaring of trucks,” Shota told me the first night, when I was startled by the noises that rattled his windows.
The automatic door of Castle View opened, and Nami, as I’d remembered her, walked out on the street. Her sheen black hair was tied at the back in a bun the way she had it when she first visited my office, looking for a job. As I watched Nami in her turquoise sweater run to catch a bus, the memories of the lightning, the rain, the sky, and the ocean returned to me.
“Nami-san,” I whispered.
She hopped on the bus and walked to the rear. As she raked her bangs and grabbed a handrail, our eyes met. I bowed deeply to her, feeling the weight of all those years. Then, just when the traffic light changed and the bus started moving, Nami seemed to have almost recognized me but tilted her head as if she were catching herself daydreaming.
◆
It was Shota’s idea, a surprise gift. Happy retirement was what it said on a white envelope from the Italian restaurant he was working at. Flowery golden alphabets, which I couldn’t read, were embossed at the center of the sealed flap. It contained two tickets for a night cruise departing from the Kawasaki Port.
“I’ve already had more than a lifetime share of boat rides,” I said.
“Trust me. You won’t regret this ride,” Shota said. “It’s your last night.”
Shota was right. A torch-like flame blew eastward from the tower of Asahi Kasei Chemical while another building blinked its crimson eyes, warding off planes departing from the Haneda Airport. The skeletal steel structures of Toa Oil glistened under the floodlights, making the smoke drifting from the chimneys look like fog. The industrial complex, which appeared oppressive during the day, was transformed into a futuristic, crystalline city.
Over the speaker, the tour guide commented that the Kawasaki coastal factory landscape was one of the most romantic night scenes in the world, especially given the reflections on the water that create doubles all along the Keihin Canal. The Tamagawa River flows into the Canal, which is connected to the Bay of Tokyo, facing the Pacific Ocean. With the clicking of wine glasses and the passengers taking selfies becoming more boisterous, I could no longer hear the tour guide, but I didn’t care. I had enough to digest for the day.
“Why don’t we go to the upper deck?” Shota suggested.
The wind was quite chilly, and the deck was almost vacant.
“Do you remember the first fishing boat ride I took you?”
“Of course. It was on Uncle Ken’s boat.”
“You caught a huge red sea bream.”
“It kept flapping in my arms.”
“I taught you everything you need to know to live on the island.”
“You sure did. Uncle Ken, too.”
“He was more like your brother, I guess.”
“I miss making Shara Boat for him.”
“Then you should come back in August. It’s Uncle Ken’s 21st anniversary since he passed away.”
“That long along. Hard to believe. Do you remember that boy from Kawasaki? Ohzora was with me the last time I built the spirit boat.”
It hurt to hear Ohzora’s name spoken out loud. “I didn’t know that.”
“He was shy about it. Maybe shy is not the right word. He had mixed feelings. You know, with no funeral held, he did not know what to make of his father’s absence, and three years might’ve been his limit of staying in such a limbo.”
“He didn’t say a word about that to me.”
“He was only ten. He wouldn’t have known how to describe his feelings. In the beginning, he didn’t say he wanted to join me. He tagged along with me to the gymnasium and watched us assemble bamboo and tie bon flags on the mast. The colorfulness of the flags made him wonder what it was all about. So I told him about the ceremony of sending off the spirits to sea, writing nami ami dabutsu on the flags—basically what you told me about Shara.”
“So, did he make the flag?”
“Yes, and wrote, save me, god, like the rest of us.”
“But I don’t remember seeing him at the harbor.”
“We watched the boat from the cliff. Just the two of us.”
There was so much I did not know.
◆
I shoved my traveling bag under the seat and slumped between the armrests. The mid-day flight was scarcely occupied. Left alone, I watched the Tamagawa River and the Canal through the oval window. They gradually disappeared under the cumulus clouds. Although I couldn’t see them anymore, they would always be there, flowing out into the blue ocean.
I closed my eyes and thought of home. Gerberas in my beer mug would have wilted by now. No longer deep yellow or orange, their brown heads drooping, surrendering to their fate.
I let the buzz ring in my ears and fell asleep.
