Sea Changes
Jennie Stevenson
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2024 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Fiction
My grandfather slipped quietly beneath the waves one day shy of his 70th birthday.
His modest fishing craft, the pea-green Minato-Maru, was found bobbing peacefully on the ocean a little way from shore. As per local tradition, the boat had its anchor down but was otherwise unmoored, allowing for an easy escape should he encounter a daki: malevolent yōkai who were known to disguise themselves as women begging for fish, but who would attack if allowed to get close enough. Onboard, all was orderly and shipshape, not a rope out of place, as though he had just stepped out of life for a moment, intending to return.
The official ruling was that it was an accident, the old man tumbling overboard to find his rest among the darting fish and creeping crustacea who had filled his years, caught among the weeds in the sun-dappled deeps. In Kieta, though, where he had lived his entire life, superstitions whirled. A tiny village clinging to a craggy coast, ruled by the sea and prone to sudden fogs, whose inhabitants knew well that there were many dangers that could befall a man at sea.
My father, who was more or less raised on the Minato-Maru, had increasingly taken over the fishing as the older man's back grew bent, his hands twisting and knotting with age. Now he slipped fully into his father's role as smoothly as the tide rolling up a beach, and if he mourned his father then it was alone and out at sea. Without me to come home to, perhaps he would have drifted away altogether. I often wondered if that was what he would have preferred.
When I think of my childhood, I picture a boy alone on a beach, searching for pretty pebbles amongst the pale gritty sand or poking disconsolately in the rockpools that edged the ragged black rocks which surrounded Kieta. A child staring out at the horizon, thinking about what lies ahead.
By this time, I had no mother, no grandmother: it seems that women were deaf to the siren song that the harsh, jagged coastline and unforgiving waves sang to my father and his father before him. They had already melted away out of our lives like sea mist.
My grandmother died long before I was born. My mother left one night when I was a baby, taking nothing but a small bag, unenamoured with life amongst Kieta's bleak and windswept sand, sea and sky. I like to think that she paused for a moment by my cradle, that maybe her hand hovered briefly over my head. That maybe she planned to come back for me; or that perhaps she thought my life would be better in the wild freedom of the coast than the claustrophobic constraints of the big city.
Either way, she disappeared as completely, as utterly, as a stone dropped into a deep pool, the surface of the water returning to stillness. We never spoke of her: it was as though she had never existed. My father and I shared the pretense that we had both sprung fully formed from the watery landscape; and if our hearts ever ached as we lay alone in our beds at night, if we ever sobbed ourselves to sleep, if we ever spent lonely hours on the shore looking out to sea, waiting for her to come back—then that was something we kept to ourselves.
Could I really blame her? The sirens didn't sing to me either. My father, my grandfather, their fathers before them, may have clung to the rocks where they were born, lived and died, stubborn and unmoving as abalone; but their stoic endurance seemed like a pitiful, unimaginative thing to me. The way my father had eased so readily into his own father's life horrified me. I fled to the tall buildings and bright lights of Tokyo as soon as I was able. Now I work in an office and wear clean shirts, and hold expensive coffee in paper cups in my soft hands. The bullet train that takes me back to Kieta travels through five hours and 150 years, and every time I come back, I'm a little more shocked by the signs of its decline: the boarded shops, the empty buildings. My father fades with it, still holding fast to his home, but each time a touch older, a touch slower.
And then another shock: I detect the presence of a woman in my father's life. Nothing too obvious: a girlish giggle in the background of my weekly calls home (calls, like my visits, fuelled more by duty than by love). An unfamiliar lightness in my father's tone and being. The next time I visit, a pretty shell in the centre of his ramshackle table. Feathery fronds of seagrass in a jar of water on his windowsill. And on the next visit: when I wake early in the grey predawn light, a set of damp footprints that lead from where he snores on his futon.
I don't mention it. We have never talked about love, relationships—anything like that. Where the fish are biting, whether there's a storm rolling in, whether spring has arrived late this year—these are the safe topics of conversation for us. No man is an island, sure: but maybe we are made of stone.
He doesn't know, for example, that Miku and I have split up: that it seems that the men of our family are no more appealing to the women of Tokyo than they are to the women of Kieta. Sitting naked on the edge of our bed in that same grey light, her back to me and her hair spilling down her spine like a dark river, Miku tells me that sometimes, when I open my eyes in the morning, I don't seem to recognise her. That she feels I'm not ready to hold on to anything. I can't disagree. I let her go.
I flee to the coast, hoping to lose myself in the wind and waves. Father receives me as dispassionately as ever: his talk of catches and weather, his hand on the tiller, are calming constants.
And then there is a woman on the shore waiting for us.
At first, I assume she's just walking on the beach, as unlikely as that seems: the sky grey, the sea dark, a light mist blocking out the islands across the bay. Her hand across her chest rubs her upper arm and it becomes more and more clear that she's glancing our way. And that my father is glancing back.
As we get closer, I can see how young she is—what, 20? Almost half my age. Father has the grace to blush as he looks away, refusing to meet my eye. "She's older than she looks," he says.
She's waiting on the jetty when the Minato-Maru docks. Not only young, but also pretty: her skin white as the sky on a winter day, eyes the dark blue of the ocean at midnight. And another shock: she is absolutely soaking wet, her waist-length hair plastered to her, her traditional kimono streaming with rivulets that pool on the weathered wood beneath her feet.
He introduces her as Shinjo. Neither of them mention the dripping water—instead they're shy, nervous, giggly as teenagers at my presence. But when she bows her head in greeting, I see a faint line of scales that run down the back of her neck. The merest hint of webbing between her fingers as she extends her hand to my father to help him off the boat.
#
"How did you meet?" I ask over dinner, a fragrant fish stew prepared by Shinjo. Her teeth are sharp and white as she spoons the soft flesh into her mouth.
"Fishing," my father says, wheezing with laughter as she smacks his hand. Of course—where else?
"Have you lived in Kieta for long?"
"It feels like forever," she says, bowing her head.
#
I hate that I have my doubts about my father's new-found happiness. But nevertheless, back in Tokyo, I take two days off work and lose myself in the dim dusty quiet of the National Museum. I scour picture scrolls of spirits and demons until, with a sick lurch, I find her, tucked away in a lower drawer in the research department. She's unmistakable: umi nyōbō. Sea wife. I slam the drawer shut. My father is in danger.
#
I tell the office I have a family emergency and head back to Kieta. I ask father to take me fishing: it's always been the easiest place to talk. But when I raise the subject of Shinjo, he already knows. And he doesn't care.
"Otousan, she's a yōkai!"
"So?" He shrugs, refusing to look at me. He's facing into the wind, guiding the Minato-Maru deftly between large rocks. His hand is firm as he steers, but I'm shocked as I notice how grey his hair has become.
"Yōkai are dangerous! You must have heard the things they said about grandfather and what happened to him."
"Shinjo, dangerous? Nonsense. She takes care of me, you've seen it for yourself."
This is the closest to having an argument that we've ever had. I have never openly challenged him before, and I find myself falling back on absurdities, like a child. "She'll—steal your life force!" I say, desperately. Even I can hear how ridiculous I sound.
He snorts. I don't think I've seen my father laugh as much in my entire life as I have the last few times I've visited him. "My life force? Kaito, look at me. There's no force left in me stronger than a fart." He's never spoken to me so coarsely, so informally. As though we were friends. He glances at me, smiling, touched by my concern. "I had no idea you believed in yōkai. I thought you were such a modern, forward-looking young man."
"I promise you, it's come as a surprise to me too."
"Well, if you can change, perhaps yōkai can too. Change is the only constant, after all. Look at me—with a wife after all these years. Even if she is a yōkai." He chuckles.
His sanguinity reassures me a little, but I'm still concerned. Perhaps it's my turn to parent him.
"Please, just be careful, otousan. I read that some yōkai give you a baby to hold, but then it turns to stone and weighs you down so you can't escape."
Now his laughter is a bark that echoes off the waves. "A baby! Kaito, I'm almost 70. And anyway, that's nure onna, not umi nyōbō. Did I never tell you scary tales as a child?"
Now it's my turn to look away. No, papa, you didn't. You didn't tell me any stories when I was a child. "I don't remember."
He wrinkles his brow as he ponders. "A woman who traps you with a baby. Pretty heavy-handed misogyny, when you think about it."
I didn't even know that my father knew the word misogyny.
He wheezes with laughter again. "A sea wife! Me." He smiles and turns the boat towards the shore. "I told you she was older than she looks."
#
Sleepless, I steal onto the jetty outside my father's house and call Miku in Tokyo. It's late and I expect her to hang up on me, but she doesn't. I tell her about my father, about Shinjo. The darkness and distance make it easier to talk.
"Are you calling to tell me a ghost story or a love story?" she asks. I can hear the smile in her voice.
"Both?" I imagine her looking out of the window in her bedroom, down on the lights of the city. Here, the night is almost unbroken, only an occasional lamp and the gentle splash of the waves. "I think I just wanted to hear your voice. I miss you."
A comfortable silence. She whispers, "I'm glad you called. Stay with me until I go back to sleep."
I toss and turn long after I hang up. Ghost story or love story? And what about me? At school, I learned that if a play ends in marriage, it's a comedy; if it ends in death, it's a tragedy. If I die once and get married once, which is it?
#
When I wake the next morning, there's a slim volume lying at my place on the table, sea-green, cloth-bound, and frayed at the spine. The Goblin Spider & Other Tales.
"Your grandfather used to read it to me," father says. He wrinkles his nose, considering whether that's true. "Maybe once or twice. I thought we could look at it together, if you're not too old for me to tell you scary tales."
I call the office and tell them I need to take a few more days.
#
Father teaches me how to fish with a stake net that runs from the surface down to the seabed and how to mend bamboo traps. He tells me how Shinjo dives for the young fish he needs for bait but can no longer catch.
We read each other stories from The Goblin Spider, and share other stories too—scary tales we heard whispered at school, fables passed from friend to friend.
When I step back onto land, I can still feel the waves swaying under my feet.
#
On the fourth day, he tells me, "I'm sorry that I wasn't around more when you were a boy. I focused on providing food and money for you, the things we needed to live—but I forgot about the other things a child needs. And I suppose—it was easier for me that way."
Nothing in my life has prepared me for this conversation with my father. A sudden squall blows in across the waves, bringing a light spattering of rain, and my eyes tear up in the wind. It's just the wind.
Am I ready to forgive him for all the times he wasn't there? All the time I spent alone. All the time I wasn't sure if he wanted me there at all. I don't know—but it doesn't matter. He apologises anyway, without needing my forgiveness in exchange.
"I'm sorry," he says, wiping his face with his hands. "All this—talking—it's Shinjo's idea. You know, she's pretty modern for a woman who's centuries old."
When it's time for me to go home, I think it's the first time I've ever hugged my father goodbye. And also, as it happens, the last time.
#
Miku travels back to Kieta with me for the funeral: she tells me she wants to see where I'm from. Things between us have never been better. I cling to her as though I'm drowning, but really, I know that I'm only just starting to live.
There's no sign of Shinjo, but the futon is freshly made up for us and a pan of fish stew simmers gently on the stove. Damp footprints on the floor.
When it's time to place the flowers in my father's coffin, we discover he is already surrounded with a forest of seaweed: dark shining ribbons of konbu, vivid jade ferns of wakame, bright pink feathery fronds of tengusa. The smoke from his cremation carries the scent of the sea up into the sky.
#
I go alone to spread his ashes on the waves: Miku has left ahead of me, to start moving her things back into my apartment. Our apartment.
It's no surprise when I find Shinjo beside me. As always, her hair and skin stream with water that pools at her feet.
"Spreading his ashes here?" she asks, as the gritty grey ashes fall from my hands to mingle with the sea, the sky, the sand. "Your father became such a modern man." She smiles fondly at the thought.
"We have no family plot," I tell her. "And even if we did—I think it would be here."
She nods and bows her head in quiet companionship as I complete the task. And then we remain on the beach together in silence until evening falls: a wake of our own. I know this is the last time I'll come to Kieta, and the last time I'll see Shinjo. There's nothing here for me now.
As the light starts to fade, she tells me, "It's time for me to go. But first I have two wedding presents for you—"
"Wedding? I'm not—"
"Not yet." Again, she smiles and bows her head. "From me—" She hands me a curled slip of paper, damp, the ink blotchy, almost black. It smells brackish. "An omikuji, a blessing. Don't read it now. Save it and read it with Miku." As I take it from her, our fingers touch, her skin cold as ice. "And from your father: a message. He wanted you to know: the child never weighed him down. You. You never held him down."
"Thank you."
She bows again and then slips away into the water, and I'm left with nothing but concentric circles and the wind blowing in from the sea. Staring out at the horizon, thinking about what lies ahead.
