The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: AWABI by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Sumiko’s Daughters

Sumiko had no opportunity to wriggle into a  wetsuit until she was almost 30. Growing up, she dived in cotton shorts and a bandanna, imitating her mother’s straight-down dive, feet skyward shooting. Her mother taught her, as she’d learned from her mother, to live and dive and die in the current that commingled predators and prey and daughter-mothers, as it swirled and surged and flagged and swirled up again in time. Best day of my life, Sumiko would say, when she walked into the ocean with her mother and grandmother for the first time, a young teen with her own nomi,  mask, and barrel. They walked without mincing though waves towered over them. They laughed when the ocean slapped them in the face with the full force of its grandeur, three generations with their faces to the blue-on-blue. Sumiko’s mother  had a tendency to grumble later in life: 

Back then, I could catch 40 awabi a day. 10 years ago, I was down to 4 a day. Nowadays if you can find one, that’s really something. Even though there are no more feudal lords, it’s as if we’re ruled by numbers. How many,  how long, how short, how much . . . 

With chattering teeth, red eyes, and heavy barrels, the ama emerged from the water and huddled,  10 or 12 to a group, shuddering, kimono-swaddled,  around a small pit fire in the amagoya, their small bamboo hut. Later, goya were built with corrated tin sheets held down by rocks. They had showers and places to hang nets and floats, drying wetsuits, sodden underwear. Some even had doors, which the ama left open to keep an eye on the ocean. Though they sneaked emulous looks at other people’s catches, they would run back to the sea if anyone came into difficulty. 

The best thing about being an ama is the ocean. Second best: the snails. Third: the amagoya. That’s your real  home.  

It was a noisy place. Wood crackling, wetsuits  flapping, water hissing on the fire. Loud gossip,  singing, shouting fisherfolk tales (“The Big One”  or “The One That Got Away”), boasting about the size of the haul and the best and worst divers,  hollering bawdy jokes about husbands and which ama had better breasts.  

Outsiders thought the ama the opposite of beautiful. They were too brown from the sun,  too stocky with essential fat and muscle, coarse of hand and tongue, dirty with sand and slaughtered sea-snail slime, and always slithering into in-betweens. But their almost inhuman strangeness, the sense that their dolphinesque ability was some mutation, and the bareness that shocked  Mikimoto’s clientele, lured anthropologists, physiologists, and photographers to Kaiyōno.