18mm Blues Read Online Free Page B

to three other of the Yoshida houses situated closely together there on the point near Hegurajima light.
    Although great-grandmother Amira died many years before Setsu was born, from this manner of hearing history and elaborating with imagination, Setsu felt she knew Amira well. In fact, one of those rooms that Amira had added on eventually became Setsu’s bedroom, so Setsu thought of Amira as a benefactor as well as an ama that she should live up to.
    There was never any doubt that Setsu would be an ama. She believed, as did others, that she’d had the secrets of the profession passed on to her while still in the womb. Hadn’t her mother continued to dive for months after Setsu had begun kicking and rolling within her? Hadn’t Setsu been born early, in a hiba , one of those meager stone houses along the Japanese coast meant to be where an ama might take temporary refuge?
    Even before Setsu was old enough for deep water she would go out in the boat and help while Harimi, her mother, dove. The boat was a wide, high, fat-bellied rowboat, and Setsu enjoyed the dry thumping sounds it made whenever she or her father moved about in it or something struck its sides. Father would often have her tend the line that was attached to mother’s waist, and she’d feel the tugs and tensions of it as mother, like a large fish, moved along the bottom ten or so fathoms below. (It occurred to Setsu years later how umbilicallike it was, but with the dependency reversed.)
    At age twelve she officially became an apprentice ama. Required to practice diving by retrieving speckled pebbles in the shallows. Forbidden to go out to the sea. It was boring for her. She was already too advanced an underwater swimmer, knew how to hyperventilate before going under and how to preserve the oxygen she took down with her by relaxing and never expending unnecessary effort.
    She was tall for her age, taller by a head and thinner than any of the other apprentice amas. Such a long, slender neck that her contemporaries called her jotu , crane. She was self-conscious of her slimness until Harimi told her it was something that had been held back two generations for her, that great-grandmother Amira had been similarly constructed.
    It indeed did seem that her slenderness made her a better swimmer, allowed her to slice through the water with more speed and surely more grace.
    She became a full-fledged ama at age fourteen. Began accompanying mother down the steeps of deep water, sharing those special regions with her. They swam along the bottom nearly within reach of each other, pointing things out, signaling. Mother would indicate an abalone and swim on, leaving it for Setsu to pry at its cling and take up to the boat to father. Pleasing father, allowing him to brag at night in the tavern about how many Setsu had brought up.
    Pearls.
    When Setsu was seventeen she found an oyster that had done its best to hide from her in an inconspicuous underwater crevice. The pearl in it was like its soul, she thought, a lustrous twelve millimeters round. She was reluctant to sell it, kept it for a while wrapped in a square of silk in a tiny white lacquered box. She thought possibly it was the part of her spirit that was great-grandmother Amira that convinced her to let it go to a dealer in Kanazawa. She put the money away.
    By then, as expected, sister Michiko had also become an ama. And sister Yukie, the youngest, had begun apprenticing. Michiko was never a consistently good diver. One day she’d dive acceptably, the next she’d use any excuse to get out of having to go down. She confided to Setsu that when she was only thirty feet under she felt as though she were being crushed, and at sixty feet she often was overcome with panic. Yukie apparently would be even less of an ama because she really didn’t want to be one, was merely tolerating the path of tradition.
    Father died.
    And Hegurajima was not the same. The presence of his. absence was