Short Stories
vol.7Tomosui（1/5）
One evening in early spring, Yuhira and I went out fishing. We left Haname Harbor in a flat-bottomed boat. It wasn’t as cold as I thought it would be.
The bottom of the boat was a piece of glass, and we could see the dark sea beneath us. He thought it was the perfect boat for night fishing; sure that the boat’s watch fire would reveal what was in the water below.
I supposed he was right, but I ignored him. I felt like we were in one of those Styrofoam trays fish shops use to pack purchases.
“There’s no watch fire on this boat,” I noted.
“There’s a full moon tonight, we won’t need one.” Yuhira was younger than me, but when he spoke, the skin under his nose wrinkled. The more intensely he spoke, the deeper the wrinkles. Must be where his instincts collected, I thought. I could see them even in the light of the moon. They made him look like an old woman.
The thing about Yuhira was that he wasn’t masculine. He was small and he had a haircut that made a fluffy circle around his head. His hands and feet looked hard and bony, but his chest and lower abdomen seemed soft and padded, like a woman.
He occasionally went out into Haname Harbor at night, he had told me, to fish and fill up on something delicious. He’d mentioned it so many times, always promising to take me out with him, that I finally demanded he make good on his offer. He told me he usually went out alone and that I’d be the first woman he’d ever had in his boat-a fact I found oddly depressing as well as flattering. I decided it was the sort of thing that needed to be acted on quickly, and we had met at the port that night and rowed out.
I thought he’d have a hibachi on board to cook his catch, but no, he said it tasted better raw. I felt queasy thinking about eating fish straight out of the sea, but he said it wasn’t fish-it was something like fish.
Yuhira did the rowing. He sped along as if heading for the moon hung in the middle of the sky. Ocean spray splashed over me from time to time, but it was warm. I licked the drops on my hand, and the salty taste was somehow calming. A moonlit night, I noted, was still pretty dark. The moon shown on part of the ocean surface, but the rest was colorless. I couldn’t see Yuhira’s face anymore. So I enjoyed imagining what his expression must look like. But when the moonlight occasionally crossed his face at an angle, I was disappointed to see that he looked the same as always.
Yuhira had informed me I was allowed to bring only a blanket, a change of clothes and make-up onto the boat. The clothes were in case I got wet. He just had one fishing pole, the kind you could fold up until it was very small, and the bait was tucked away in his pocket. I asked him what it was, but he told me it was a surprise for later.
The gray promontory we were headed for grew longer and darker as we approached. It looked like a woman who had thrown her legs out in front of her. The tip of the headland was shaped like a foot, and the hips were covered in fog. It was all rock, but the edges were blurry, giving a soft impression.
“We’re going around the point,” he said.
“Yes, let’s!”
“You’ve never been there before, have you?
“No, it’ll be the first time.”
“It’s a nice place.”
I thought as much. We were on the sea, the moon was out, the land was shaped like a woman’s legs, and I was with Yuhira. One of the reasons I liked him was that he didn’t have an odor. We had kissed once for some reason, and I hadn’t thought much of it because he didn’t smell like a man; not his lips, mouth, face, or body. He was kind of like hot water that had been flavored by boiling broccoli in it. Ever since that kiss, I had suspected that Yuhira might not really be a man. He had a wife and children-he’d shown me a photo-but just because he had a picture of a family didn’t convince me.