“Hiratsuka,” said Mio. “Nobody knows us in Hiratsuka.”
It was the Saturday of Obon, and she was standing in my doorway in a yukata. It was dark blue with white morning glories on it, and she’d tied the sash herself, badly, and was holding the ends of it in one hand.
“There’s a festival on the beach,” she said. “Stalls. Fireworks off barges at seven-thirty. You haven’t been out of this apartment since the shopping center except to fight things. Come on.”
“I’m tired.”
“You’re always tired. You can be tired on a beach.” She held out the sash ends. “Also I can’t do this. Tie it for me.”
I got up and tied it for her. I’d watched Mom do it every summer when we were small, the flat bow at the back. My fingers remembered it better than I did.
“Mom’s working till nine,” said Mio, looking over her shoulder at the bow. “Obon. Everyone wants fish. She said go.” She turned around. “She said, and I quote, ‘Make him eat something that isn’t rice.’”
* * *
I didn’t decide to wear the yellow top.
I opened the wardrobe to get the navy T-shirt and the yellow top was hanging next to it, and I took it off the hanger instead.
Mio was waiting by the front door with her phone and her little drawstring bag. She looked at me in the yellow top with the white flowers and the ruffle at the collar, in my new jeans, with my hair grown out to my shoulders and tied back in Saki’s hair tie.
She didn’t say a word. She opened the door and held it for me.
On the way out I put the sweatband on over the cuff, and the black phone in my back pocket. It was switched on. It was always switched on. Mukai had said they’d call if anything happened, and in nine days they hadn’t called once.
Kohaku came too. She didn’t ask. She rode on the luggage rack of the train all the way down the Tokaido line, invisible to everyone but me, with her tail hanging over the edge, and complained about the smell of the man under her eating dried squid.
“I want some of that,” she said.
“There’ll be squid at the festival.”
“There’d better be,” said Kohaku.
* * *
Hiratsuka is the next town along the coast past Chigasaki, flat and wide, where the Sagami River comes out into the bay. The beach there is long and gray and open, with a road behind it lined with pine trees, and a big seaside park with a parking lot as big as a field.
By the time we got there at six, the beach road was full.
There were stalls all the way along it under the pines, hundreds of them, strung with paper lanterns and lit with bare bulbs: yakisoba and grilled squid and shaved ice in syrup colors, goldfish scooping in plastic tubs, chocolate bananas on sticks, a man selling masks off a pegboard. The smell of soy sauce and charcoal and sea came down the road on the evening wind. Families were walking up and down in yukata with fans tucked into their sashes. A drum was going somewhere, slow and heavy, for the Obon dancing.
And there were Miko-chans everywhere.
I hadn’t been ready for it.
I’d seen the costumes in shop windows and on the news, but I hadn’t seen them like this, walking about, holding their parents’ hands. Little girls, mostly, five or six or seven years old, in white tops and red pleated skirts from the hundred-yen shop that were meant to be hakama, with see-through capes printed with stars, and pink nylon wigs, and plastic staffs with rings at the top that lit up when you shook them. Some had long black plastic sticks with jingle bells tied on instead. One boy with a pink wig on over his baseball cap. A girl of about ten in a version her mother had obviously sewn by hand, with real pleated hakama, a gold cord crossed at the back, and little silver stars glued all over a white net cape.
The mask stall had Miko-chan masks hanging on the pegboard between the TV heroes. Pink hair, gold eyes.
A smile I’d never made.
“Oh,” said Mio, very quietly, beside me.
By the shaved-ice stall a girl of about six was having an argument with her father. She was in a Miko-chan cape and wig, and he was trying to put her plastic staff in her left hand.
“Not that one,” she was saying. “Not that hand. She holds it in the right. The right.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes,” said the girl, with enormous contempt, and held out her right hand.
He put it in her right hand. She shook it, and the rings lit up pink.
Then she saw me watching, and she looked me up and down, the yellow top and the hair tie, the way small children look at older girls.
“I’m going to be Miko-chan when I grow up,” she told me, very seriously.
“Are you?”
“You can be her too, if you want.” She considered it. “There’s enough.”
Then she held her glowing staff up in the air and ran off into the crowd with it, and I stood there with my mouth open.
I nearly said I’d like that. I had the words ready.
I didn’t say them.
I looked down at my own right wrist, at the black sweatband with the cuff underneath it.
Mio took my other hand and pulled me toward the grilled squid.
* * *
We bought squid on a stick and ate it walking.
When nobody was looking, Mio held a piece of hers down by her ankle. For about a second there was a gray cat there, and then there wasn’t, and neither was the squid.
“Ever so good,” said Kohaku, from somewhere around Mio’s ankles.
Down by the river mouth, where the beach road ended, there was a tent for one of the neighborhood associations, with a folding table and a cool box and a stack of paper fans. An old man was standing in front of it handing the fans out to anyone who went past. He was small and brown and very old, with a white towel tied around his head and a festival coat on, dark blue, printed in big white letters across the back with the name of his neighborhood.
SUKA.
He gave a fan to Mio and one to me.
“Fireworks at half seven,” he said. “You want to be here. Best place on the whole beach.” He pointed out to sea with his own fan. “See the barges?”
Out on the water, a few hundred meters offshore, there were two flat gray barges anchored in the dusk, low in the water, with men moving about on them under work lights.
“Loaded since this morning,” said the old man. “Three thousand shells. My grandson’s on the left one.” He looked at us properly, the way old men do, and smiled. “Sisters?”
“Yes,” said Mio.
“Good,” he said, and gave us another fan each, for no reason.
* * *
At five past seven the black phone rang.
It was in my back pocket. I’d forgotten it was there. It rang with an ordinary ringtone, the kind that comes on a new phone, and a woman next to us looked around to see whose it was.
I took it out. One number. I answered it.
“It’s Nishikawa,” said Nishikawa. “Where are you?”
“Hiratsuka. The beach.”
There was a silence.
“Then you can see it,” he said.
And at the same moment the cuff went hot under the sweatband and pulled, hard, out to sea, and I looked up.
* * *
It came in from the bay with the last of the light.
At first it was just a paleness over the water, far out, a patch of sea mist where there shouldn’t have been any. Then it lifted. It came up off the sea, flattened, and kept spreading, wider and wider, until it covered the sky over the water from one barge to the other and beyond. It was pale and thin and glittering, made of spray, the way a cloud is made of rain, with the dusk shining through it.
It had a shape. It was flat and diamond-shaped, with long rippling edges like wings, and a tail.
A ray. A manta ray, the size of a stadium, flying.
It came in low over the barges, over the beach, with its edges rippling, without a sound.
Under it, people began to rise.
The beach was full of people, sitting on mats on the sand waiting for the fireworks. Where the edge of the ray passed over them, they came up off their mats. Slowly at first, like the air was heavier than they were. Their hair and their yukata sleeves lifted first, then their arms. Then they came off the ground, all of them, mats, drinks, children, and went up into the dusk with their legs kicking, ten meters, twenty, thirty.
Then the ray moved on, and they dropped.
* * *
“Get inside,” I said to Mio. “Take people with you. Anywhere with a roof.”
“Haru…”
“Go.”
Mio looked at me for one second. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Then she turned and grabbed the nearest family by the arm, a father with a stroller and a little girl in a pink wig. She started shouting. She pulled them toward the concrete restroom block at the edge of the park, and other people saw her going and went after her.
Behind me the phone was still on. Nishikawa’s voice was saying something very fast to someone else. Then he came back.
“Helicopters are on the way,” he said. “We’re telling everyone to get into buildings. What can we do?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
I went behind the neighborhood tent with the phone and the sweatband together in my fist.
I said the word into my fist.
The seam lit. When the light settled, I pushed the phone and the sweatband into my sash, and the staff was in my hand.
* * *
I came up over the beach in a column of light, and the first group was already falling.
There were forty of them, maybe, a whole stretch of the beach the ray had lifted and let go of, coming down out of the dusk from thirty meters up, arms out, mats spinning away. I couldn’t catch forty people.
I put my hand out under them instead and pushed, and a floor of light went out flat across the air beneath them, white and gold, as wide as a classroom.
They hit it.
The weight hit me in my body, in my back, my shoulders, my thighs, like catching a wardrobe someone’s dropped off a balcony. My starred over-robe streamed out toward them. I held. They lay on the light a meter above the sand, all forty, screaming, and I let it down slowly onto the beach, and they ran.
The next group was falling further along. I went after them and slid a floor under them. I caught most of the group after that.
I didn’t catch all of them.
I couldn’t. The ray was so wide, and it was moving all the time, gliding along the beach with its edges rippling. Wherever it passed, people came up off the sand, hung there, and dropped. There was one of me. I caught a family. Behind me, a man in a striped yukata hit the sand from thirty meters. I caught a group of teenagers. Behind me, an old woman went down who had been sitting on a folding chair. I kept catching.
Every time I turned to the next one there was somebody I hadn’t gotten to.
I hit it.
I tore the roof off a yakisoba stall and threw it at the ray as hard as I’ve ever thrown anything. The roof went into it and out the other side. The spray closed up behind it without a ripple, and the roof came down in the sea. I went at it myself. I flew straight into the edge of it and swung the staff, and the staff went through nothing. It was cold, wet and empty, like flying into fog, and it closed behind me. I threw a chain at it, and the chain went through it the way a rope goes through mist, and came out the other side holding nothing.
There was nowhere to hit.
Somewhere in all that moving spray it was holding on, and I couldn’t find where, and the whole of it had people hanging inside it. I could feel the light refusing to go in, the way it had refused the fish at Yuigahama. It wouldn’t burn a thing with people in it.
The helicopters came in from the north, two of them, then three, their searchlights sweeping the beach, loudhailers shouting at everyone to get inside. People were running for the restroom block, the lifeguard station, the shops across the road. The beach was emptying.
It was emptying too slowly.
The ray turned. It glided away from the beach, out over the water, toward the barges.
* * *
It passed over the left-hand barge, and the barge came up out of the sea.
It came up whole. It rose out of the water streaming, a flat gray slab of steel the size of a tennis court with men clinging to its rails. It went up into the body of the ray and hung there in the middle of it.
The shells went off.
They went off all at once, three thousand of them, inside the ray. It lit up from the inside. Gold, red, green and white went off in it, bursting, crackling, spreading, all inside that pale glittering body, so that for a moment the whole huge shape of it hung over the bay lit up from within like a paper lantern, with the dark shapes of people hanging inside it.
The sound came a second later, a long rolling crash that I felt in my teeth.
I went for the men on the barge. I got four of them out of the smoke, two at a time, one under each arm, and down onto the water by the breakwater.
There had been six on the barge.
* * *
When I came back up, the ray had turned again.
It was coming back toward the beach. It had stopped gliding. It was moving with a purpose, low and fast, straight toward the end of the beach road by the river mouth, where the crowd was thickest, where a lot of people hadn’t gotten inside yet.
Where the children in the Miko-chan costumes were.
There were twenty of them, maybe, from the dancing. Their parents were trying to get them across the road to the shops, and they couldn’t, the road was jammed with people. I could pick them out by their little red skirts and pink wigs, and the plastic staffs flashing in the dark.
The ray swung toward them, the way a draft swings toward an open door.
It didn’t know them. It didn’t know anything. It had come in off the sea toward my light, and my shape pulled at it the way my light did, and here on the beach were twenty little copies of my shape.
It couldn’t tell the difference.
I went down after it as fast as I could fly.
It got to the edge of the crowd before me. Its long rippling edge passed over the road, and the people at the back of the crowd came up into the air, rising, a whole crowd of them. I slid a floor under the first lot. I set them down.
There was an old man hanging in the air beside me.
He was in a dark blue festival coat with SUKA across the back and a white towel around his head. He was rising slowly past me with his arms out, his paper fans falling out of his sash. He looked at me, at a meter’s distance, hanging there in the dark with the helicopters going over.
He didn’t ask me for anything.
He looked past me, down at the children, and he waved me on. He flapped his hand at me, the way you wave someone through a door ahead of you.
Go on.
I went.
I went down over the crowd of children and put a roof over them, a flat sheet of light between their heads and the ray, as wide as the road. I held it there with both arms over my head while the edge of the thing slid across it, pulling at it, and couldn’t get through. The parents pushed the children under it, across the road and through the open door of a convenience store, between the shelves. Somebody was screaming the name of a girl who wasn’t there. Then a mother pushed through the door with the girl in her arms, the one in the hand-sewn costume with the silver stars, and the screaming stopped.
I let the roof go and turned around.
The old man wasn’t in the air anymore.
* * *
“It’s you it’s pulling toward,” said Kohaku.
She was on the roof of the convenience store. I hadn’t seen her come. She was sitting on the edge of it, a small gray cat, in the wind off the sea, with her ears flat.
“It came in toward you. It’s only going to them because they’re your shape.” Her tail was wrapped around her paws. “Give it the real one and it’ll follow.”
I looked at the ray, turning slowly over the beach road, over the pines, the stalls and the paper lanterns, drifting toward more of my shape.
“Then it can follow the real one,” I said.
“Tell someone,” said Kohaku. “Where you’re going. Which way. The first one didn’t, and when she fell, there was nobody in the world who knew where.” Her ears were flat to her skull. She didn’t say anything else about the first one. “Somebody should always know.”
I took the black phone out of my sash. Nishikawa was still on the line.
“I’m going to take it out to sea,” I said. “It follows me. I’m going to make it follow me. I’m going due south from the river mouth at Hiratsuka, straight out, as fast as I can.”
“How far?”
“Until it stops.”
There was a pause.
“There are ships out there,” said Nishikawa. “Container ships. Fishing boats.”
“Then tell the Coast Guard to clear them. Due south. Now.”
“There’s a typhoon down there,” said Nishikawa. “Number nine. It’s passing offshore tonight.”
I thought about the kitchen television with the sound low, three in the morning, the white swirl turning on the map and the dotted line curving away east, out into the empty ocean. Mom in her bathrobe with her tea gone cold.
That one’s going out to sea.
I knew how far that was. I’d learned it every morning for a week, over the water off Shichirigahama, until I knew it the way you know your own front door in the dark.
It was further than I could come back from. A lot further.
“I know,” I said. “Tell the Coast Guard. Tell them exactly which way I’ve gone.”
* * *
I flew at it.
I went straight up into the middle of it, into the cold wet emptiness of it. I turned my light up as far as it would go and let it feel me.
The whole huge pale body of it rippled, from edge to edge. The people still hanging in it dropped, all at once, as if it had forgotten them. I slid floors under as many as I could and set them down on the sand.
Then it swung toward me.
It took me. The air around me went heavy and wet and started to lift me, the way it had lifted everyone else. It was strong, and it pulled at me hard. It pulled at my shape the way the sea pulls at a hole in the sand, to fill it.
I pulled out of it and ran.
* * *
I went south, straight out over the black water, past the breakwater and the second barge, past the end of the land. The lights of Hiratsuka went away behind me. The ray came after me. Kohaku was on my shoulder, her claws through the over-robe, flat against my neck.
I flew faster than I’d ever flown.
I had flown fast before, home along the coast at night, but I’d never flown like this, with everything I had. The wind tore at my hair and my sleeves, and the light streamed off me in a long tail behind. The sea went under me in the dark, kilometer after kilometer of black water. Far off to the right a ship’s lights were turning away, and then another ship’s.
Somebody had told them.
It was gaining.
I could feel it behind me without looking, a great wet cold pressure at my back, closer every minute. It was faster than me. It was made of wind. I was only a girl with a light, and the wind was always going to be faster.
The staff started to ring.
It was faint at first, under everything, the wet glass note that only Kohaku and I can hear. It got louder as the first hour went, and the second. My arms were heavy, and my legs, and my light was going thinner. The note was a whine now, high and thin, like a glass rim with too much water in it.
Behind me the ray was so close I could feel it on the back of my neck, cold, beginning to lift my hair.
Ahead, the sky went black.
Not the black of night. Something blacker, rising up out of the sea in front of me in a wall, from the water to as high as I could see, with lightning moving inside it. The wind changed. It came at me from the side, then the front, then everywhere at once. The rain came with it, hard as gravel.
The edge of the typhoon.
I went into it.
* * *
I don’t know how long I was in the storm.
I don’t know which way was up. The wind took me and threw me. I fought it, and it threw me again. The rain was so hard I couldn’t see my own light. The sea was somewhere below me, huge and white and screaming. Lightning went off so close that I tasted it.
Behind me, the ray came into the storm after me.
The storm took it apart.
I didn’t see it happen. I felt it. The cold pressure at my back broke up. It tore. The wind went into the ray and pulled it in every direction at once, all those long rippling edges, that great flat body. It couldn’t hold itself together against a wind that size. It was made of wind, and this was more wind than it was.
It came apart into spray. The spray went into the storm, and there was nothing behind me anymore but rain.
I turned around and flew north.
I flew out of the edge of the storm into ordinary dark, and on, north, toward a coast three hundred kilometers away that I couldn’t see. My legs went heavy, then my arms. I was sinking without meaning to. The note in the staff was a thin scream behind my teeth. My light got smaller and smaller, until it was only a glow around my hands and the ends of my hair.
And then I was in the sea.
* * *
It was black and warm and enormous, and it went on for ever in every direction.
I lay on my back in it.
I didn’t have enough left to fly, or to swim anywhere that mattered. I had just enough to stay changed, if I held on. If I let go, I’d be myself, a boy in jeans and a wet yellow top three hundred kilometers out in the Pacific at night, and the light would be gone, and when they came, if they came, they’d see my face.
So I held on.
I held the transformation the way you hold the edge of a cliff, by the fingernails, with the note in the staff whining and whining and never quite cracking.
Something landed on my chest.
It was Kohaku. She’d been pulled down after the staff, the way she always was, and she’d made herself visible, so I could see her and feel her and hold on to her. She was soaked. Her fur was flat to her body and she was shaking all over. She was a cat, in the sea, at night, and I remembered her on the roof in April, facing the bay.
Oharu liked the sea at night.
“Don’t go to sleep,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You are. I can hear it.” She climbed up onto my shoulder and pressed herself against my ear. “Listen. Do you want to know something awful? In 1257 there was a monk at Engakuji who had a pet crow, and the crow learned to say the abbot’s name, and it said it every time the abbot went to the bathroom. Every time. For nine years.”
I laughed, and got a mouthful of the Pacific.
She didn’t stop.
She talked for four hours. She talked about the price of eels in 1703. She talked about a man in Fujisawa who married the same woman three times, since he kept forgetting he already had, and what the shogun’s cook used to put in the soup, and a girl at Fumi’s school who had a bicycle in 1922 and was the scandal of the whole town. She talked about trains, and the monorail, which she still didn’t believe in. She talked about fried chicken. Whenever I went quiet, she bit my ear. Whenever my light went dimmer, she talked louder. Her voice shook the whole time, with the cold or with something else, and she never stopped, not once, not for one second, in four hours, in the dark, in the sea.
At two in the morning a light came across the water.
It was white and bright and it swept slowly from side to side, low over the swell, the way a flashlight moves when someone’s looking for something they dropped. It went past me.
It came back.
“That’s them,” said Kohaku in my ear. “That’s your someone.”
And she was gone, unseen again, just a small wet weight on my shoulder, before the searchlight found us.
* * *
It was a Coast Guard cutter, white, with a blue stripe, and it was on my line exactly, due south of Hiratsuka, where I’d said I’d be.
They put a boat in the water and came and got me. Two men in orange life jackets pulled me over the side by my arms, and they didn’t say anything about the light, or the hair, or the staff I was still holding, which they had to lift in for me together, swearing.
On the deck they put a blanket around me. Someone asked me my name. I didn’t answer. Someone else asked how old I was, carefully, the way you’d ask a lost child, and I didn’t answer that either. Someone else asked if I could let the light go, so their doctor could look at me, and I shook my head, and he said, “All right,” and that was the end of it.
A young crewman brought me a paper cup of hot sweet tea and held it while I drank it. My hands wouldn’t. Nobody pointed a camera at me. I found out later that Nishikawa had told them, over the radio, in so many words, not to.
Before dawn, a helicopter took me off the back of the cutter. It flew me north for an hour, and put me down on the beach at Hiratsuka, where the festival had been. The beach was empty. There was police tape everywhere, and the stalls stood in the gray light under the pines, with their lanterns out, and paper fans all over the sand.
I had enough for fifteen kilometers. Just.
I flew them low, over the roofs, with the staff dragging, and came down on our balcony on my hands and knees, and let go.
* * *
I was myself again, soaking wet, in my own clothes.
My jeans and the yellow top were wet through and full of salt. My hair was back at my shoulders and plastered to my face. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t lift my head. Something was ringing in my ears that wasn’t the cuff anymore. Seawater ran out of my hair onto the concrete.
Kohaku dropped onto the rail a few seconds after me, soaked and silent. Then the balcony door slid open, and Mom came out in her work fleece.
She hadn’t been to bed.
Mom didn’t say anything. She knelt down on the wet concrete and got her arms under me. She lifted me the way she lifts the big boxes of fish at the market, from the knees, and carried me inside.
“Mio,” I said. “Hiratsuka.”
“She’s here. She came home at two. She’s asleep in the chair.” Mom’s voice was very steady. “Nishikawa called. He said they had you. He said you were on a boat.”
She put me on my bed in my wet clothes. She took my shoes off. She put a towel under my head. The black phone was still in my fist. I held on to it, and she tried to take it, and I wouldn’t let go of it, so she left it.
“Sleep,” said Mom.
* * *
I slept for twenty hours.
I didn’t dream. I didn’t wake up. Mio came and stood in my doorway, Mom told me later, still in her yukata, with her feet bleeding from the wooden sandals, and looked at me for an hour. Mom didn’t go to work. She sat on the end of my bed all day, and Kohaku slept on my feet, and didn’t move once.
The news came in while I slept. Mom had the kitchen television on with the sound low, all Sunday, and Mio sat in front of it and wrote the numbers down. In the evening they put up the final one.
One hundred and twelve.
The old man from Suka was on the list. His grandson, on the left-hand barge, was one of the four I got out.
When I woke up, at one in the morning on Monday, I knew none of that yet. My mouth tasted of salt. The black phone was in my hand, warm, with the screen lit.
It had been in the sea for four hours and it still worked, and it had been switched on the whole time.