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taking the moisture of the water with it as it penetrated. Special, longer attention was paid her legs and feet, for they had done most of the diving work. Michiko tended to the left and, simultaneously, the boy to the right. The boy had become good at this and enjoyed doing it and there was just as much care and love in his hands as there were in those of Michiko, who let him continue on Setsu’s ankles and insteps and toes while she prepared the raw supper. She washed the awabi more thoroughly before slicing them because Bertin’s fingers had been into them.
    By the time supper was over the long twilight was waning. Setsu sat with her back against the cabin trunk, Michiko, beside her, had eyeglasses on and was writing postcards that she’d picked up in an everything store in Ban Pakbara. The boy was restless, getting up and down, wandering the foredeck but minding Setsu by keeping to it. He had her patience, she thought, and that caused her to catch upon an instance when she’d been about his age and showing her patience, as for perhaps the hundredth time she listened to her grandmother Hideko Yoshida recite family history and pridefully tell of her great-grandmother Amira’s exploits as an ama.
    For twenty generations or more, as far back as could be remembered of anyone being told by anyone, the women of the Yoshida family had been amas. An honorable profession, romantic in the way it demanded female courage. How mystical and practical the gathering up of the offerings of the great mother sea!
    Originally the family had lived on the island of Tsushima out in the Korean Straits. In the early 1800s all the Yoshidas, including even most distant cousins, migrated to the village of Wajima in Noto prefecture. There were many amas living in Wajima, an entire society of amas, so the Yoshidas felt comfortably in place and before long had earned a respected standing.
    It was customary for most of the amas of Wajima to spend the diving season (from late spring to early fall) working the more generous waters out around the island of Hegurajima, thirty miles from the mainland. In the eyes of the Yoshida amas of that time no place could have been more beautiful, and eventually they’d grown so attached to it that throughout each off-season their spirits longed for Hegurajima. They heeded the longing, gave in to it, moved one and all out to that island and settled on its northernmost tip close by the lighthouse. From then on Hegurajima was where they thought of as truly home.
    And it was where, shortly before the turn of the century, the West discovered these Japanese women who dove. It was thought and expressed then how contrary they were to Victorian convention. So actively brave and, scantily clad in revealing wet white (if at all), they plunged into the sea time and time again in search of pearls. Incredible how deep they went and how long they remained under. They were able to better stand the coldness of the water because of something special about their female bodies, it was said. By all means worthy of curiosity, an attraction one would never regret going that far out of one’s way to see: the amas of Hegurajima.
    That was during the time of great-grandmother Amira, whom Setsu had always been told about so much. Very early on it got so Setsu would enjoy reciting aloud to herself practically word for word those stories about the great ama, the great-grandmother, Amira Yoshida.
    For example, the account of how Amira had taken part in the 1905 pearl fishing season of Ceylon. Never had there been another to equal it. Forty thousand persons from almost every direction assembled on what had only a week before been a desolate stretch of beach on the Gulf of Manaar. All sorts. Picture them. Delicate-featured Singhalese, muscular Moormen, thick-limbed Kandyans, Weddahs, Chinese, Jews, Dutchmen, half-castes and outcasts. There were boat repairers, mechanics, provision dealers, cooks, clerks, coolies, servants,