“They’re bootlegs,” said Shun. “Obviously they’re bootlegs. Nobody owns her. That’s the point.”
He was holding up a keychain. It was a small plastic girl in red and white, with a yellow plastic halo around her, a black plastic stick in one hand and a loop through her head, and she was smiling a wide cartoon smile. There was a whole rack of them in the window of a souvenir shop on Komachi-dori, between the rack of keychains shaped like the Great Buddha and the rack shaped like rice crackers. A handwritten sign said MIKO-CHAN 500 YEN PROTECT YOUR BAG, with an exclamation point after every word.
“She doesn’t look like that,” I said.
“That’s the other point. If it looked like her it’d be weird. She’s a real girl.”
He went in and bought two. When he came out he gave me one.
“I don’t want it.”
“It’s lucky. Everybody’s got one.” He hung his on his bag strap, beside the little Ofuna Kannon he’d drawn on it in marker in our first year. “She saved nine people at Ofuna. Well. She saved one. She tried to save nine.”
I put the keychain in my pocket. Kohaku, invisible on my shoulder, leaned down and looked at it as it went in.
“That’s you,” she said in my ear. “With a hat on.”
“It’s a halo.”
“It looks like a hat.”
* * *
It was the twenty-second of May, a Saturday, the first properly warm day of the year.
Shun’s mother had agreed to let him come to Kamakura on the train as long as I was with him, as if I were a responsible adult. Komachi-dori was so full of people we couldn’t walk at our own speed. Everybody in Kanagawa had decided to come to Kamakura at once and eat crepes.
We came out at the bottom of Wakamiya-oji, the long straight avenue that runs from the shrine down to the sea, and walked down it to the beach.
“My aunt’s down here,” said Shun. “She works at the surf shop. She said she’d buy us lunch if we came by.”
Yuigahama is a long, wide beach, curving around from the river mouth at one end to the cliffs at the other. In summer it’s covered in beach huts and loud music. In May it was just sand, sun and people, hundreds of them: families with blankets, dogs and children, students playing volleyball, couples, a few surfers out on the water waiting for waves that weren’t coming. The public restrooms stood at the top of the beach beside the parking lot, a low concrete block with a blue roof. Down at the eastern end, a little river came out across the sand into the sea, the Namerikawa, shallow and brown. Behind us, Wakamiya-oji ran straight back up through the town toward the shrine, two kilometers, dead straight.
I didn’t look at the sea. I was looking at the beach, at all the people on it, and thinking about how loud it was, and how ordinary.
That was why I didn’t see it go.
* * *
“Huh,” said Shun.
He’d stopped on the steps down to the sand. He was looking out past the volleyball nets.
The sea had gone out.
It was going out while we watched. It was too fast and too far for a tide. The water was sliding back from the beach, uncovering wet sand that hadn’t seen air for years, dark, ribbed and shining, with weed lying on it and little stranded fish flipping in the pools. The surfers were sitting on their boards on mud. A fishing boat that had been moored off the river mouth was lying on its side on the bottom.
It went out a hundred meters, then two hundred, then three.
There had been no earthquake. Nothing had shaken.
The sea had simply left.
All along the beach people were standing up. Some were pointing. Some were filming. And some of them, more and more of them, were walking out onto the wet sand to look.
“Don’t,” I said. I didn’t say it loudly. “Don’t do that.”
Children were running out across the flats, shrieking, chasing crabs. Parents were following them with phones. A whole school volleyball team went out together in their bibs. A man walked a long way out with his dog on a lead to where the stranded fish were, and crouched down to look at one.
“That’s weird,” said Shun. “That’s really weird. My aunt’s out there. Look, that’s my aunt, in the blue.” He pointed. A woman in a blue rash guard was walking out across the sand with a group of people from the surf shop, laughing, holding up her phone. “I’m going to text her.”
The cuff on my wrist went hot.
Not warm. Hot. It pulled so hard toward the sea that my arm moved.
“Kohaku,” I said.
“I know,” said Kohaku. “Out there. Under the water. At the edge.”
At the edge of the sea, three hundred meters out, where the water had stopped, something came up out of the shallows.
* * *
It was a fish.
It was the shape of a fish, if a fish were as long as a train, a train of six carriages, gray-silver and shining, with a great blunt head and a mouth that hung open. It dragged itself out of the shallow water onto the flats on its fins. Its fins were wrong. They were long and jointed, like legs, and it put them down on the wet sand one after another and walked on them.
It was made of fish.
I could see that even from the steps. Its whole body was fish, thousands of them, sardines, mackerel and things I didn’t know, packed together and moving, a shoal holding itself in the shape of one enormous fish. Its sides rippled and flashed silver in the sun as the fish inside them turned.
It made no sound. It walked up the wet flats toward the land, the way water runs downhill, and the people were in the way.
The man with the dog was the nearest. He stood up. The dog was barking. The fish lowered its great blunt head and opened its mouth, and when it closed it the man and the dog were gone.
The screaming started then.
* * *
I ran.
Not out onto the flats. I ran back up the steps, through the people coming the other way, to the public restrooms, and into a stall, and slammed the door.
“Go,” said Kohaku. “Go, go, go.”
I pulled the sweatband off.
“Transform,” I told the back of the stall door.
The seam lit and the warmth climbed my arm, my hair came down past my shoulders in a public restroom at Yuigahama, and the staff’s rings were knocking against the toilet tank.
The flats below me were full of people running. Hundreds of them, out on the wet sand, three hundred meters from the shore, children and parents and the volleyball team, all running back toward the beach. They were slipping in the mud. They weren’t going to make it. The fish was walking among them. It didn’t go around anyone. Every time it lowered its head to the sand, there were fewer of them.
I couldn’t carry them. I could carry two, maybe, if they held on. There were hundreds.
So I covered them.
I came down low over the biggest group, a dozen people around a fallen child, and put out my hand, and the light went down over them like a bowl turned upside down, a dome of frosted white with a gold rim, sealed to the sand. Then the next group, by the volleyball team. Then the next. I went along the flats as fast as I could fly, throwing domes over anyone who was in a cluster, and the weight of each one came into me and stayed there, in my shoulders and my back, one more bag of shopping every time.
The note in the staff went up so high it hurt.
The fish walked straight into the first dome, and its great blunt face pressed up against it. It pushed. I felt it push, in my own spine.
The dome held.
Then it slid off the dome and walked on, over the people I hadn’t reached.
Under the third dome, sitting on the wet sand with her arms around two children she didn’t know, was a woman in a blue rash guard. Shun’s aunt.
I’d gotten most of them. I hadn’t gotten all of them. The fish had been walking among them while I flew.
* * *
The fish turned toward me.
It had been walking up the flats toward the land, and now it stopped, and its head swung around to my light like a compass needle. It had no eyes, not real ones. There was a dark place on each side of its head where an eye should have been, a whirl of fish turning round and round.
I put the staff against its side and pushed the light into it.
The light slid off.
It ran over the silver skin like water off a window and dripped away onto the sand, and nothing in the fish so much as flinched. It was made of fish, thousands of living fish, and every one of them was alive. The light wouldn’t touch them. It wouldn’t burn anything alive. I could feel it refusing, in my hands, like a dog that won’t go through a door.
I hit it instead.
There was a fishing boat lying on its side on the flats by the river mouth, a small wooden one with a blue hull, left behind when the sea went out. I got my hands under its keel, lifted it over my head and threw it. It hit the fish just behind the head and broke the fish in half.
For a second the fish was in two pieces.
Then the pieces leaned together, and the fish in them swam across the gap, and it was whole again. The boat lay in splinters on the sand.
It started walking toward the shore.
* * *
“It’s not a fish,” said Kohaku. She was on my shoulder again, hanging on. “It’s wearing one. Look at it. Look what it’s wearing.”
I looked at it.
A fish. A fish the size of a train, made of fish, wearing the shape of a fish all the way through, the head and the gills and the dark places where the eyes should be.
Mom, at the kitchen counter at the start of May, holding up a horse mackerel.
There’s a spot there. Behind the eye. You go in there, one time, the right angle, and it’s finished.
It wasn’t a fish. But it was wearing one all the way through, and anything wearing a fish all the way through had to have the spot.
I needed a spike.
I had one. I’d been holding it the whole time.
I swung the staff end over end, so that the rings were behind me and the long iron foot was in front, pointed like the spike in Mom’s knife block, only as long as my arm.
The fish was a hundred meters from the beach. It had its head down.
I flew down at it with the staff.
I came in low over the wet sand with the spike out in front of me, along its side, toward its head, toward the dark whirling place where the eye should be, to the spot behind and above it. On a fish the size of a hand, that spot is smaller than a fingernail. On a fish the size of a train it was the size of a door.
I could see it. I don’t know how. There was a place behind the eye where the fish inside the big fish were turning around a still point, like water around a drain.
I drove the iron foot into it.
The rings rang.
The light went down the staff into the still place, and this time it didn’t slide off anything. It turned, like a key, and went all the way in.
* * *
The fish stopped.
It didn’t thrash. It didn’t spoil itself. It just stopped, all at once, the way Mom’s fish did, before it knew anything had happened.
Then it came apart.
The shape went out of it. The thousands of fish that had been holding themselves together let go of each other, and fell, all at once, in a great silver avalanche onto the wet sand. They spread out across the flats, flapping silver, sardines and mackerel and bream and things I didn’t know, thousands of ordinary fish, gasping, flipping, shining in the sun.
I pulled the staff out of the air where the eye had been.
I landed on the flats in the middle of them. Fish slapped against my boots.
“Haruto,” said Kohaku. “Look.”
I looked up.
The sea was coming back.
* * *
It came back in a rush.
Out at the edge of the flats, three hundred meters away, the water had gathered itself into a ridge, a long green line from one end of the beach to the other, and it was standing up. It rose as I watched, two meters, then four, a wall of green water with the light coming through it. Inside it, high up, a surfboard was turning slowly over and over.
It started to come in.
People were still on the beach. They were at the top of the sand where I’d put them, running now, up the steps, across the road, into the town. There were so many of them. There were children, a man carrying an old woman, a family trying to get a stroller up the steps.
It was coming in fast.
I let the domes go, all of them at once, and put both hands up, and pushed.
The wall came out of me the length of the beach. It went up along the edge of the flats from the river mouth to the cliffs, flat and white and edged with gold, the wall I’d held along the roof at dawn for Kohaku to walk on, only a kilometer long.
The sea hit it.
It was like holding a door shut against everyone in the world at once. It wasn’t heavy. It was everything. The water pressed against the light along the whole length of the beach, and I felt every meter of it in my own body, and I held it, a wall of green water standing at the edge of the flats, leaning, held up by nothing but me. The note in the staff was a scream. My nose was bleeding and I didn’t wipe it. I could feel my knees going.
“They’re nearly off,” said Kohaku. “Hold it. Hold it.”
I held it.
Behind me on the beach the last people were going up the steps and across the road and into Wakamiya-oji, the long straight avenue running inland, running away from the sea. I held it while the man with the old woman got to the top of the steps. I held it while the family with the stroller got it up onto the sidewalk.
The water leaned. It was too much. It was much too much. My arms were shaking so hard I could hardly see.
The last child went across the road. A small girl in a sunhat, holding somebody’s hand.
“Let go,” said Kohaku. “Haruto. Let go. Now. They’re clear. Let go.”
I could have held it longer. I thought I could. I thought for one second about holding it longer, just to be sure, just one more second, and I thought about Oharu, nine days after an earthquake three hundred years ago, holding a wave over her street.
I let go.
* * *
The sea came in over the flats with a roar, the first sound in all of it that wasn’t a person.
It buried the fish and the splinters of the boat, ran up the beach almost to the steps, and stopped. And ran back.
I was up in the air above it when it came. I don’t remember going up. I was hanging over Yuigahama in the sun with my arms down at my sides and blood on my face, watching the water run back off the sand, and everything went quiet.
Then the police came.
They came down Wakamiya-oji with their sirens going, a dozen cars, and set up a line along the top of the beach, and somebody was shouting orders through a megaphone. I knew the voice. When I came down onto the sand at the top of the beach, because I couldn’t stay up any longer, it was Inspector Nishikawa who came across the sand to me, in shirtsleeves this time, with his tie pulled loose.
He stopped a few meters away, the way he had at Ofuna.
“Thirty-one,” he said.
He said it quietly, as if he thought I should know.
“Before you got here. Thirty-one on the flats.” He looked at the beach, at the people being helped up the steps by paramedics, at the empty sand where the sea had been. “There’d have been hundreds.”
I couldn’t speak.
He took a card out of his shirt pocket and held it out. It was a plain white business card, a little bent, with the police crest in one corner, a phone number and his name.
“If you ever need anything,” he said. “Anything at all.”
I took it. My hand was shaking. He saw that, and let it go.
Then I went up, while I still could, and came down behind the restroom block, and went in, and let go.
The light went, and the staff shrank back around my wrist, and my own body came back over me like putting on wet clothes.
* * *
I couldn’t stand up.
I sat on the floor of the stall in my own clothes, with my back against the door and my legs stretched out, and my legs wouldn’t work. I was tired, and I was so hungry I felt sick. The note in the cuff was a thin buzz, fading.
Somebody banged on the door.
“Haruto! Haruto, are you in there?”
Shun. I opened the door from the floor. He looked down at me sitting there, with his face white and his phone in his hand and the Miko-chan keychain swinging on his bag.
“Where were you?” he said. “Where were you? I looked everywhere. I thought you’d gone out there. I thought it got you.”
“I was in here.”
“The whole time?”
“The whole time.”
He stared at me. Then he sat down in the doorway of the stall, on the wet floor of the public restroom, as if his legs had gone too.
“My aunt’s okay,” he said. “She was out there. She was right out there, and she’s okay. She’s sitting on the beach. She said a little girl put a light over them like a bowl, and the thing put its face right up against it, and it held.” He put his hands over his face. “She put a bowl over my aunt.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Shun. That’s good.”
He sat there with his hands over his face for a while. I sat on the floor. Kohaku sat on the toilet tank above us and washed her face with one paw, over and over.
When I could stand, Shun helped me up. His aunt bought us lunch after all, at a café on Wakamiya-oji, sitting at a table by the window with a blanket around her shoulders. She talked the whole time without stopping. I ate two plates of curry rice, a slice of cake and most of Shun’s fries, and nobody said anything about it.
* * *
At home that night Mom had the news on in the kitchen, with the sound low.
They were showing Yuigahama from a helicopter: the beach, the wet sand, and the fish, thousands of them, silver on the brown, lying where the sea had left them when it went back out, with gulls already landing among them. Then they showed a clip from somebody’s phone, of the great fish walking up the flats. Then the girl in red and white coming down at it with the staff.
Mom stood at the counter with a knife in her hand and a horse mackerel on the board, and watched it.
“They’re saying it was a fish,” she said. “A fish the size of a train. And she killed it with a stick.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Through the head,” said Mom.
She looked at the screen for a long moment, at the small girl in red and white and the silver avalanche of fish coming down onto the sand. Then she looked down at the horse mackerel on her board.
She shook her head, and went back to the fish.