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.

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. 

Sumiko’s Daughters

As a child, she asked, Doesn’t it hurt them, ripping  them open? Shoving rocks down their throats?  This made her grandmother feel like a sapling  in an earthquake. At the factory, they said they  were helping oysters; culturing pearls helped  the oyster population to recover from previous  generations’ over-harvesting. Maybe they were  right, but so was Sumiko. Torturing oysters was  no better than killing them. 

Sumiko didn’t know it, but this was her first exposure to the feeling that drove every ama to frustration. The sense that their efforts to conserve were all for nothing.  

Sumiko’s Daughters

Sumiko’s grandmother resisted the diving  mask. It would make them see too well, she said,  they would find and kill too many hidden snails.  And the mask magnified everything. It made her  fearful of kidnapping babies. 

10.6 centimeters. Use a ruler. A smidgen smaller and  you have to release them. Find somewhere dark and narrow  with kelp nearby. Give awabi babies every chance. Her grandmother balked at the wetsuit, too.  Disrespectful, she said, to go to the ocean like that.  You don’t see whales going around like that. Like umib ōzu. Plus you’re more likely to snag something and get stuck.  Then you’d drown. Wouldn’t happen if you dressed the way  your mother made you. 

The umibōzu were demons. They were glossy,  black, humanoid giants who thrashed the sea and stirred up deadly typhoons. Sumiko imagined her grandmother in a glossy, black, skin-tight outfit,  sneaking up on a boat and leaping out of the water to give all the men on the vessel the fright of their lives. The idea made Sumiko giggle. It made her grandmother scowl. Yet it was Sumiko’s grandmother (while her daughter-in-law, Sumiko’s mother, roared with laughter) who was the first  Nagata ama to wear clothes into the water. Skirt and blouse, pearl-white, they’d go down in history as the “traditional” costume of Japanese ama.  These outfits, amagi, offered little warmth, flailed in the water, and were designed in the twentieth century by the Mikimoto Pearl Company in Toba.

Sumiko’s Daughters

She searched for snails: sazae with silver shells  like inverted whirlpools and their mother-of-pearl  abalone sisters, awabi, with such expressive eyes.  She also hunted their cousins: octopi, urchins,  spiny lobsters, sea stars, seaweeds, and sea cucumbers, the chubby and slimy namako. But  awabi were above all. Noshi awabi was the sacred sustenance of the divine kami Amaterasu,  ancestress of all Japan, and luxury markets paid  ¥8,000 per pound for awabi sashimi. 

Even men followed awabi into the water when prawns were scarce or finned fishes weren’t biting. But men preferred fishing from boats atop the sunlit surface. Grubbing in the sand between light and dark, air and water, life and death; turning over rocks and plunging hands into black crevices, the secret lairs of biting eels and stinging puffer fish; battling the cold, the currents, struggling mollusks, and the fighting urge to breathe:  that was women’s work. Sumiko learned from her grandmother, who’d learned from her own grandmother, that throughout the Edo period no community incurred greater disdain than the ama. They were hinnin, strangers who dirtied themselves with death’s dirty work. But from her mother and grandmother, Sumiko inherited the belief that all ama shared. It wasn’t that women  and snail-seeking were ignoble:  

Women and the ocean, we are a natural match. Only women can bear it when the ocean’s touch goes deep. Only women have enough of the right kind of body fat to withstand the biting cold. Women needn’t fear the ocean’s chilling love. And ama mustn’t be afraid. That’s why ama are women.