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

Sumiko’s Daughters

You have to tell Namako to go into the city. She has to believe it’s what you want. Otherwise she won’t do it, she’ll stay here and waste away.

And Sumiko’s own mother saying this, the ama who once dove naked and taught Sumiko to move her legs like fins . . . Sumiko couldn’t have been more dismayed if her mother had told her to take the net bag she’d inherited and tear it with her hands.

Besides, it would be a lie: a lie to pretend that even one hour shape-shifting in the blue-on-blue wasn’t worth the strain; that predator and prey face-to-face and intermingled wasn’t what living was; and that Sumiko hadn’t lived, dived, and survived so that she could pass on that existential truth and the sheer joy of oceanic living to her daughters.

She felt hemmed in and divided: torn between her ocean-daughter who needed ama-mothers to fight for her life and her Namako-daughter who just wanted to be a woman. The indecision seemed to dry Sumiko up. She went into menopause. She pretended nothing was the matter. She avoided serious conversation for a year, never quite acknowledging that what had wrapped her in itself like a cannibal starfish was double-headed fear.

Fear that she couldn’t lie to Namako. Fear that if she didn’t lie, Namako would corrode like awa bi in an ailing sea.

She did it, finally, or there would have been no Hana (b. 2007). Namako became the housewife of an Osaka salaryman. And then Sumiko no longer knew who she, Sumiko, was. She felt like a broken tile in a vast and ancient roof.

There was no outward change in her laugh ing personality. But she was guarded with Hana, the cybernetic granddaughter who learned to use a smartphone before she learned to read. Sumiko couldn’t understand why Namako didn’t at the very least take the baby to a public pool so that the water could teach her to swim. Sumiko reminded her that as an infant she, Namako, had learned to swim from the ocean just as Sumiko herself had done; and Namako dithered, she seemed almost squeamish or perhaps lazy. But besides the fact that Namako and her husband selected such a dry and bewildering name — Hana (花), meaning “flower” or “nose” — Sumiko found herself baffled every time she looked around. There was the Fukushima disas

ter. The ama had declined 80% in number since her childhood. Awabi had diminished by 90%. Kaiyōno, with dwindling snails and proliferating storms, slid into disrepair. The divers, whose average age was 60, felt the ocean warm as their joints stiffened. And before Sumiko died, she would see tropical fishes, refugees from an equator grown too hot, come to pluck the last awabi from their rocks with beakish mouths.

In her grandmother years, Sumiko still dived daily as her mothers dived. She breathed as whales breathed, carrying the nomi she’d carried all her life. Some of what she caught went to the shrine, for kami craved awabi even after all this time, but hotels bought the lion’s share: the words “dying way of life” won publicity for Kaiyōno. The Ama Preservation Association also did its best to piggyback on the trending idea that to “return to ancient ways” was to “embrace sustainable living.” And so Sumiko found herself in a white amagi dancing “traditional” dances in the widow’s restaurant, babbling of better days to anybody who would listen, cackling at her own jokes while some man found reasons to pinch her, and announcing that ama-diving was an “intan gible cultural heritage” as though she belonged behind glass in a museum.