The exercises in the pool allow me to experience new sensations with my body. For example, when I’m underwater, holding a companion’s hand in keeping with the safety rules, I can feel his or her pulse in my fingertips. First it’s a normal pulse, and little by little I can feel it slow down and enter the stage of extreme relaxation. The heartbeat decelerates, like a tiny flame going out little by little. And now I’m discovering the definitive cure for my fear of death, because when the heart abates and there’s more space between beats, I’m the one who decides whether to breathe and, in spite of it all, choose the surface. By raising my head above water I’m confirming my commitment to life, overcoming death with every immersion. The sea magnifies that feeling; the water pressure in the deep feels like an embrace, a physical manifestation of someone welcoming me down there, someone who would welcome me forever if that’s what I would want. But I don’t anymore, and with each breath when I break the surface, I am giving birth to myself again. So I return to the stories my mother told me as a child, about those women from our land who dove without tanks, looking for mollusks, abalone, algae, sponges, octopuses, and if they got very lucky, pearls.
I wonder if this natural penchant for deep-sea diving doesn’t have its origin in those stories, or maybe it’s because of my grandmothers, who were born in the village of Wagu on the Shima Peninsula in Mie Prefecture, a place known over the centuries for its female divers, who still today use the same techniques as two thousand years ago, the first recorded activity, which have been passed down from mothers to daughters over the generations. When I imagine those women descending, naked, into the cold waters of the Pacific, it makes me feel as though my training is a canard, almost an act of snobbery, and because of my roots I think I have a right to travel to Wagu one day, once I’ve recovered, to put faces, voices, and movement to the legends that my mother used to tell.
Apnea may not have freed me of heartache, but it did help lighten the load of what terrified me so much. The sea and the outdoors had already begun to cure me during my time with Irrational Number, and now those years of dysfunction were coming to an end. Being in nature protected me from the swindling psychologists and precluded the machinations of society, allowing me the chance to turn over a new leaf. My addiction to pseudoscience ended. Now I know for a fact that people survive many deaths, and whenever I hear a homeless person shouting in the street, disturbed, it’s as if that person is using my same voice.
Now that I’m back on my feet, I want to go somewhere for pleasure; it’ll be the first trip since you died, Jim. It’s an odd notion, going somewhere that has nothing do with finding Yoro. Somehow it feels like a betrayal of the promise I made to you to continue looking for her, and the certainty that I carry her inside me doesn’t really alleviate the feeling that I am not keeping my word. After all, in the end I’m not breaking my water or anything of the sort because (yes, from time to time I’m aware of it) I’m not really pregnant. It’s only in fleeting moments of optimism that I tell myself perhaps this interminable gestation is real, that maybe it got its start with the radiation sickness I’ve always been on the lookout for, as a kind of positive sickness that doesn’t end in death but in birth. If as they say, there are still three-headed rabbits, why couldn’t my situation be just another nuclear anomaly? Wouldn’t it be a nice radioactive aftereffect? My desire made the flesh of my flesh, my baby. So I prepared my trip, allowing myself to play around with the notion that at any given moment I could go into labor.
It’s August 1977. I arrive in the village of Wagu during the women’s fishing season, which runs from March to September. My dog is with me. There must be something in her genes because this animal, like her mother, had puppies late in life. She suckled for such a long time that her nipples are sizable. It’s a little strange to see such a clear mark of suckling in a dog obviously up there in age. I thought about that when I saw the amas—that’s what the divers are called—going in and coming out of the sea, always naked, regardless of age, the very youthful amas—apprentices who begin diving at thirteen, called kachido—keeping closer to the shore and the veteran divers, called funado, reaching depths of close to a hundred feet with a single breath.
Perched on a rock in Wagu, I observed a group of amas on the sand, warming themselves in the sun before going back into the sea. It’s the first time I saw for myself that these women actually exist. I strolled along the streets of the fishing village before catching this scene. There wasn’t a single car. The way they speak, the way they walk, it all seems so much more relaxed than Hiroshima, my hometown. It’s as if everything is marked by a natural clock from dawn to dusk, and though they are strict about all things that have to do with their labor in the sea, life is still much more flexible and easygoing and in touch with the natural course of a day and not built on a work schedule that hides people from the sun, in an office, a factory, or at home. One woman in a corner caught my attention. She was sitting on a small bench scarfing down raw clams and seemed to invite me to initiate a conversation, so I asked if she sold the seafood she was eating. She must have been around thirty years old, and said she was just recovering strength from the morning dive to be ready again for the afternoon. She was an ama who had separated herself from the group to eat in peace, missing out this once on the news they share during these times of rest, when the town’s women come out to help them restore their strength like a great big family where the sea—despite the danger, the cold, and all the effort—is almost like a man shared among them. It was that clam-devouring woman who pointed out their diving spot along the coast, and a great rock on which a few minutes later I would watch her cohort lying in the sun.
When I saw a small boat approaching the beach, I imagined the women would board it for the afternoon dive, so I jumped down and ran. I didn’t have time to consider what I wanted to say to them. When I got there, I saw the same woman I had spoken to earlier and asked her if I might be allowed to board the boat with her group. None of them liked the idea when they heard my proposition. Though my clothes were perfectly casual for any normal city, in that village where everything seemed to follow the dictates of the sea, I was clearly overdressed. But work was at hand, there was no time to waste, and eventually they allowed me on board.
My new friend’s name is Tokumi. Except for a kind of fundoshi that covered her pubic area and left her buttocks exposed, Tokumi was completely naked, as were the rest of the women. In the few minutes it took the boat to reach the diving spot, Tokumi explained that she had recently been promoted to funado, which means she’d become part of the group of veterans, the ones who belong to a higher rank thanks to their skillfulness, and now she usually fishes at a medium depth of eighty feet, though at times she goes much deeper. After a year of apnea training, I’d reached the respectable maximum depth of a hundred feet, but I know that to descend and ascend is not the same as to descend, work, and ascend. One needs a great amount of physical and mental talent to work like that in water whose temperature never goes above sixty degrees Fahrenheit.