The road from our house came after the edge of the sea hills before turning inland toward the town.
Walking it on a day like this was hard, but I recall feeling thankful that the intense wind brought out my mind from the things bothering me.
The sea was vicious, with surges like stones shaved into blades, powerful enough to cut. It appeared to me the globe itself was feeling just as I felt. Was life nothing more than a flood that always washed away what had been there only a minute before, and abandoned behind something barren and unrecognizable?
I had never had such an impression before. To avoid it, I ran down the road until the town came into view below me. Yoroido was a small town, just at the entrance of a bay.
Usually, the water was sighted by fishermen, but today I could notice just a few boats coming back— staring at me, as they often did, like water bugs pushing along the surface.
The surge was coming in fervent now; I could hear its howl. The fishermen on the bay began to loosen up as they vanished within the curtain of rain, and then they were gone entirely.
I could see the storm gliding the slope toward me. The first drops whack me like quail eggs, and in a matter of jiffies, I was as wet as if I had fallen into the sea.
Yoroido had only one path, directing right to the front door of the Japan Coastal Seafood Company; it was covered with several cabins whose front rooms were used for shops.
I ran across the street toward the Okada house, where barren goods were sold; but then something occurred to me—one of those insignificant things with huge outcomes, like missing your step and tumbling in front of a train.
The tight mud road was slippery in the rain, and my feet went off from under me. I fell onward onto one side of my face. I think I must have blown myself into a trance because I recall only a manner of numbness and a perception of something in my mouth I needed to spit out.
I heard voices and felt twisted onto my back; I was raised aloft and held. I could say they were carrying me into the Japan Coastal Seafood Company because I inhaled the smell of fish draping itself around me.
I heard a slapping noise as they slipped a catch of fish from one of the rigid tables onto the floor and laid me on its moist surface. I knew I was damp from the rain, and bloody too, and that I was barefoot and dirty, and scraping peasant clothes.
What I did not know was that this was the period that would rewrite everything. For it was in this situation I found myself perking up into the face of Mr Hiroki Ichiro.
I had seen Mr Hiroki in our village several times before. He lived in a much vaster town close but came every day, for his family owned the Japan Coastal Seafood Company.
He did not wear peasant clothes like the fishermen, but rather a man's kimono, with kimono pants that made him look to me like the examples you may have discerned of samurai.
His skin was creamy and tight as a drum; his cheekbones were polished hillocks, like the crisp skin of a grilled fish. I had always found him fascinating.
When I was in the street tossing a beanbag with the other kids and Mr Hiroki appeared to stroll out of the seafood company, I often halted what I was doing to see him.
I lay there on that sticky table while Mr Hiroki analyzed my lip, jerking it down with his fingers and tilting my head this way and that.
All at once, he captured sight of my grey eyes, which were stabilized on his face with such infatuation, I could not fake it that I had not been looking at him.
He did not give me a sneer, as if to say that I was an insolent girl, and he did not look away as if it made no fuss where I gazed or what I guessed.
We gaped at each other for a long time nt—so long it gave me a coolness even there in the muggy air of the seafood company.
"I know you," he said at last.
"You are old Masumi's little girl."
Even as a kid I could tell that Mr Hiroki saw the world around him as it was; he never wore the bewildered look of my father.
To me, he appeared to see the fluid bleeding from the branches of the pine trees, and the circle of radiance in the sky where the sun was extinguished by clouds.
He lived in the evident world, even if it did not always excite him to be there. I realized he saw the trees, the dirt, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe he would ever notice me.
Probably this is why when he spoke to me, tears came tickling my eyes.
Mr Hiroki lifted me into a sitting stance. I assumed he was going to tell me to take off, but rather he said, "Don't swallow that blood, small girl. Unless you want to make a rock in your stomach. I would spit it onto the ground if I were you."
"A girl's blood, Mr Hiroki?" mumbled one of the men.
"Here, where we carry the fish?"
Fishermen are superstitious, you see.
They particularly don't prefer women to have anything to do with fishing. One man in our townlet, Mr Yamamura, found his daughter playing in his boat one sunrise.
He whip her with a cane and then rinsed the boat with sake and lye so strong it discoloured stripes of colouring from the wood. Even this was not adequate; Mr Yamamura had the Shinto priest come and dedicate it.
All this because his daughter had done nothing more than joke where the fish are hooked. And here Mr Hiroki was implying I spit blood onto the ground of the cabin where the fish were rinsed.
"If you are scared her spit might wash away some of the fish guts," said Mr Hiroko.
"take them home with you. I have got
sufficient more."
"It is not the fish guts, sir."
"I would say her blood will be the neatest thing to hit this ground since you or I were bred. Go ahead," Mr Hiroki said, this time speaking to me.
"Spit it out."
There I sat on that slimy table, sceptical about what to do. I thought it would be awful to disobey Mr Hiroki, but I am not sure I would have found the motivation to spit if one of the men had not crouched to the side and squeezed a finger against one nostril to blow his nose onto the floor.
After watching this, I could not tolerate wielding anything in my mouth a moment longer and spat out the blood just as Mr Hiroki had instructed me to do.
All the men stepped away in disgust except Mr Hiroki's associate, named Yoshiro. Mr Hiroki told him to go and fetch Dr Miura.
"I don't know where to find him," said Yoshiro, though what he implied, I think, was that he was not eager in helping.
I told Mr Hiroki the doctor had been at our cabin a few minutes earlier.
"Where is your home?" Mr Hiroki asked me.
"It is the little tipsy house up on the hills."
"What do you mean . . . 'tipsy house'?"
"It is the one that crouches to the side like it's had too much to drink."
Mr Hiroki did not seem to understand what to make of this. "Well, Yoshiro, shuffle up toward Masumi's tipsy house and look for Dr Miura.
You won't have difficulty finding him. Just listen for the sound of his sufferers crying out when he thrusts them."
I visualized Mr Hiroki would go back to his work after Yoshiro had left; but rather he stood near the table a long while staring at me. I felt my face starting to burn.
Eventually, he said something I thought was very smart.
"You have got an eggplant on your face, little daughter of Masumi."
He went to a drawer and took out a small mirror to show it to me. My lip was puffy and blue, just as he had said.
"But what I wish to know," he went on,
"is how you came to have such incredible eyes, and why you don't look more like your father?"
"The eyes are my mom's," I said.
"But as for my father, he is so crumpled I have never known what he looks like."
"You will be crumpled yourself one day."
"But some of his wrinkles are the way he is made," I said.
"The back of his skull is as old as the face, but it is as shiny as an egg."
"That is not a civil thing to say about your father," Mr Hiroki told me.
"But I think it is true."
Then he whispered something that made my face flush so red, I am sure my lips looked pale.
"So how did a crumpled old man with an egg for a head father a gorgeous girl like you?"
In the years since I have been called gorgeous more frequent than I can recall. Though, of course, Geigi is always called gorgeous, even those who are not.
But when Mr Hiroki said it to me, before I had ever believed of such a thing as a Geigi, I could almost believe it was valid.