If a beast like that came at you, it’d be all over. To begin with, you’d be under water and all loaded down with diving gear, so you couldn’t maneuver very well. The beast would probably chomp into your air hose and rip it apart with its teeth. It’d probably knock you around pretty hard.
If I went scuba diving and met up with a beast like that glinting its two blue eyes at me from among a tangle of seaweed, I’d definitely be quaking in my flippers, Ōura thought.
“We had some regular tigertail in our yard at the old house,” Mrs. Ōura was now telling Shōjirō.
“We did?”
“Uh-huh. With pink flowers about this big. Keiko’s mother gave us the original plants.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Sure you do. They were growing all along the fence. We started with only a couple of plants, and they gradually spread out. But never mind that. We need to hurry up on this or we’ll never finish. Let’s see. . . . I guess this would fall into the brown algae category.”
“Bro-wn al-gae,” Shōjirō sounded out again.
Brown algae, is it? Ōura thought. So that’s how they divide up the seaweeds. They classify them by color.
This was the first time he had heard the term “brown algae.” In fact, it was the first time he’d known anything at all about seaweed classifications, since he had never studied about them in school. To Ōura, seaweeds were simply a food he enjoyed at the dinner table: shredded kelp, which he liked to put on top of his rice (he and the children had been trying to steal from each other’s shares recently); salted kelp; wakame (just last night they had had a vinegared salad of thin-sliced cucumber and wakame); and hijiki simmered in a savory sauce with fried tofu. He relished all these varieties of seaweed as dinnertime treats, but he had never heard the term “brown algae.”
Right now, though, Shōjirō was having his mother help him with his summer-vacation science assignment. Their seaweed project had nothing to do with food.
“Next, number ten. What would this be?”
Mrs. Ōura sounded intent on finishing up as quickly as possible. School would be resuming in just two days, so this was no time to be fooling around.
“Maybe it’s this,” she suggested.
“Yeah, that looks right.”
“Must be. So it’s called tamaitadaki.”
“Okay, ta-ma-i-ta-da-ki.”
Tamaitadaki. It was another name Ōura had never heard before.
“This one belongs to the red algae category.”
“Re-d al-gae,” Shōjirō sounded out as he wrote.
Of course, Ōura nodded to himself. This specimen obviously has a red pigmentation, in contrast to the sea tigertail’s brown. There’s no telling what you can learn by keeping your ears open.
Shōjirō had sketched a rocky seabed scene on the top half of a large sheet of drawing paper, and he had taped the seaweed specimens to this so as to make them look like they were all growing on the ocean floor.
His mother had been the one who got out the watercolors and painted in the water and rocks. Adding a little color like that made it seem much more realistic, especially since the colors naturally came out lighter in some places and darker in others—just the way you’d expect rocks at the bottom of the sea to look. The haste with which she had dashed the colors on had had an unexpectedly felicitous effect.
The specimens had come from a beach on the Pacific side of the Bōsō Peninsula, where the family had gone on vacation at the beginning of August. Mrs. Ōura had been the one who gathered the specimens, and she was the one, too, who had brought them home in a plastic bag, carefully rinsed them off, spread them between layers of newspaper, and weighted them down with the big stack of comic books piled in the corner of Yasuo and Shōjirō’s room.
Then she was also the one who left the specimens that way and forgot to change the newspaper periodically, with the result that many of them had disintegrated and fused with the newsprint by the time she went back to get them. Partly by natural selection through this process, and partly by throwing out all the remaining ones with complicated shapes that looked hard to identify—though many of them were really quite pretty—Shōjirō ended up with thirteen different kinds of seaweed attached to his drawing of the seabed.
Even now, it was Mrs. Ōura who actually searched through the seaweed volume of Shōjirō’s illustrated encyclopedia to identify the varieties, and Shōjirō’s role was little more than that of a scribe, writing down whatever his mother said. He never questioned any of her conclusions.
The Ōuras had a tradition of going to the same Pacific-coast village every summer for a stay of two or three nights. Because of the distance from Tokyo, and because even those who made the long trip tended to go to the bigger and better-known beach in the neighboring town, the village where the Ōuras stayed always remained relatively quiet. Their first visit to the small inn there with daughter Haruko and son Yasuo had taken place ten years ago already—before Shōjirō was even born.
Thankfully, the small fishing village remained much the same now as ten years before. Even with the deeply tanned local kids and the visiting families from the city all swimming at the same beach, the crowds remained quite light. In the evenings, the beach emptied out completely.
The Ōuras had first visited this village at the urging of a friend who lived in the neighboring town—the one with the better-known beach.
“It’s a wonderful place. I guarantee the kids’ll love it,” he said. “There’s a fabulous beach right beneath the local shrine. A rocky reef protects just that part of the shoreline so you don’t have big waves crashing in, and that makes it perfect for swimming. You can walk out as far as you like along the reef, too, and it’s completely safe. There are lots of little pools among the rocks where you can catch goby, and you can be sitting there all wrapped up in fishing and suddenly look up and see the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean spreading out right before your eyes. Even the color of the water seems different.”
His enthusiasm persuaded the Ōuras to make the trip—father and mother, daughter and son. Haruko had started first grade that spring, and Yasuo was just three years old. Both of them fell in love with the place, exactly as their friend had predicted, and so did Ōura and his wife. They immediately decided to come again the following year.
In time, the family gained another member. Shōjirō, now working on his third-grade seaweed project, first made the trip when he was three. As evening fell on the day they arrived, he suddenly burst out:
“Time to go home!”
“We’re staying here tonight,” the others explained, but Shōjirō didn’t understand.
“I wanna go home. I wanna go home,” he insisted, his voice turning to tears. In all his life, he had never slept anywhere but in his own bed, under his own roof. He couldn’t comprehend the notion of spending the night somewhere else.
Suppertime was near, and in the adjoining rooms separated by nothing more than sliding doors, other families with hungry children were eagerly waiting for their meals to arrive just like the Ōuras.
That was when Shōjirō fell to pieces. The entire family joined in trying to comfort him,