"If you eat too much shark fin, you'll turn into a mummy."
On July 13, 2015, Hayakawa Koji and I sat in a little Sichuan restaurant called Facing-the-Sky Chili gnawing on pickled chicken feet. He was treating me because his father had beaten me. He'd smacked me over the head with a plastic broom, the kind people use for sweeping, hard enough to make stars burst in my eyes. If Hayakawa Koji hadn't shown up so quickly, I probably wouldn't still be in one piece. While I spat chicken bones noisily onto the table in front of him, I shot him murderous looks. He said, "Hey, Matsuoka Mio, your eyes go triangular when you're angry." Then, after a silence, he lowered his head and tapped a finger against the glass tabletop. In a muffled voice, almost as if someone had just died, he said, "Matsuoka Mio, I know. You only make jokes about loving and not loving someone when you don't love them at all." "Oh, cut it out, Hayakawa Koji," I said. "Why are you acting all tragic? We grew up together. We saw each other naked when we were three. If I ever really fell in love with you, that would be the true horror story." After a while I finished the last chicken foot, pressed my lips together, and told him, "Hayakawa Koji, my little table and all my flyers are still outside your family's shop. Take them back for me when you have time. I'm moving the campaign somewhere else." Hayakawa Koji's father, Zhao Dalu, ran a seafood store on Shima Island, a tourist spot where he specialized in selling rare marine products to visitors: abalone, sea cucumber, shark fin. It was summer vacation, and a bunch of us island kids had answered the national call to protect the ocean, protect the environment, and protect sharks by giving people science talks everywhere we could. Our first stop had been the Zhao Seafood Shop. We put a little table right outside their door, printed leaflets at our own expense, and lectured every passerby: Sharks are creatures with five hundred million years of history, and in just the last fifty years most species have been pushed to the brink of extinction. Please stop eating their meat and drinking their blood. To tell you the truth, authorities have already confirmed that the mercury content in shark fin is forty-two times higher than the level the human body can safely absorb, and it has almost no nutritional value at all. Eat enough of it and you'll turn into a mummy. I said that over and over until my mouth was dry. Then I tried to go inside for a drink of water, and Zhao Dalu came charging out with a broom, chasing us in every direction. He cornered me against a wall and beat me with it. "Matsuoka Mio," he shouted, "how did your father raise you? Do you know you're cutting off our ancestral livelihood?" I thought, I didn't know that before. I know it now.
Who was the one who strung the shark net across his heart?
Hayakawa Koji was right about one thing. I didn't love him. Not because his father sold seafood without the least concern for protecting the ocean. I didn't love him because I loved another boy on Shima Island. Two years earlier, a boy named Takahashi Kou moved to the island from somewhere else and bought a seaside villa in the newly developed district. He looked rich. I still remember the day, back when I was a first-year in high school, that the homeroom teacher seated him beside me after he transferred in. He was tall and thin in exactly the right way. When he walked over and sat down without really looking at me, I caught a faint, pleasant scent on him. At that age I thought every boy who couldn't be bothered to look directly at me was impossibly cool. Takahashi Kou was no exception. Hayakawa Koji used to say that made me cheap, and cheap in the most self-righteous way. Back then I went to school half an hour early every day, wiped down Takahashi Kou's desk and chair with a rag until they shone like mirrors, and then rested my chin on my hands and waited in a lovestruck daze for him to stride in. He liked using sharpened pencils to draw simple sketches on grid paper. In those drawings there was always a girl with softly curled hair and huge eyes. I stared into mirrors many times and never found a single curl on my own head. I thought maybe he liked girls with wavy hair. So enchanting, so lovely. I stole two hundred yuan from home and got a mushroom-shaped perm at a salon. I thought Takahashi Kou would be stunned, that he'd look at me differently. The first person who was stunned turned out to be Hayakawa Koji. He met me on the path in front of the classroom building, opened his mouth wide enough to fit in two whole eggs, and then bent over laughing. He touched my hair from every angle and finally said, "Matsuoka Mio, now the whole world knows China has nuclear weapons. Aren't you afraid that walking around with an atomic bomb on your head will start World War Three?" I stepped on his foot, pulled his ears, kicked his legs. Later Hayakawa Koji bought me a hat with pearls sewn all around the brim. Don't get the wrong idea and think he was generous or that his family was swimming in money. On Shima Island, pearls aren't worth much, especially the bumpy, irregular ones. I never wore that hat. I wanted to stand in front of Takahashi Kou with my freshly curled hair and let the sea wind blow it around until he noticed me, no matter how stupid anyone else thought I looked. And in the end he did notice me. During study hall he whispered, "Bai Bei's hair is curly too, about like yours. But hers is natural. She's gentle, and beautiful." Bai Bei was the girl who wrote to him every single week. Every time a letter came from her, he lit up like he had won a prize. Even though he said Bai Bei and I were alike, I could see from his eyes that the value of that comparison was very low. Mostly he was just flattering me. At the time he went on and on about how pretty Bai Bei was, how gentle, until I really believed him. Later events proved that the girl named Bai Bei was not gentle in the least. Hayakawa Koji warned me, "You're an idiot, Matsuoka Mio. That's his way of telling you he already has a girlfriend. You don't stand a chance anymore." He said it with a cigarette stolen from his father stuck in his mouth while he sat on a damp black reef, breathing in and out. Far out on the water, dozens of white buoys stretched in a row, holding up the shark net. "His words are just like that net," Hayakawa Koji said. "He's trying to keep you outside his world." I kicked him in the backside. "Nonsense. I'm not a shark." Hayakawa Koji grinned. "Sometimes you're fiercer than fish." Then, after a pause, he muttered to himself, "But I would never string a shark net up against you." Along the coastal road, neon lights came on one by one, staining the sea with every color. The wind arrived soft and persistent, blowing his white shirt out around him. For one moment I thought, if only the boy sitting in front of me were Takahashi Kou instead. Then we could sit shoulder to shoulder on a rock the tide had exposed, hold hands, and watch the calm sea under all that flowing night-light.
Takahashi Kou, please kiss me.
The first time Hayakawa Koji showed Takahashi Kou what a true local thug looked like was in the summer of our second year. By then my curls had finally settled into exactly the right shape, almost the same as the girl in Takahashi Kou's drawings, and I had really thought he would fall in love with me. Hadn't I already been leaning against that balcony waiting for nearly a year? Surely he ought to have responded by then. I had watched far too many romance dramas, and in all of them people fell in love by the sea on midsummer nights. So I invited Takahashi Kou to go walking by the shore, imagining that maybe he would hook one finger around mine. If he happened to lower his head and kiss my smooth forehead while he was at it, so much the better. I finally managed to lure him to the beach using the excuse that it was the Shima Island Tourism Festival and there would be fireworks over the water. But once we got there he was unbearably stiff, only trailing behind me over the soft sand until my legs nearly gave out. Then I remembered all those television boys who always took girls out drinking before making their move. So I turned around, stopped, and looked at Takahashi Kou as he slowly caught up. What I had meant to say was, Shall I buy you a beer? Instead, because my head was still full of fingers hooking and foreheads being kissed, what came out was, "Takahashi Kou, let me treat you to a kiss." The moment the words left my mouth, we both froze. The sea wind suddenly became a knife, slicing my face again and again. I hurried to add, "Sorry, sorry, I actually meant let me buy you a drink. Look, aren't all those people drinking at the food stalls while they wait for the fireworks?" So that night we sat at a roadside stand by the steep T-junction on the coast road beside a broken yellow traffic light and drank beer. Every time I remembered what I'd blurted out on the beach, my face went hot. Every time my face got hot, I drank more. One clam, one bottle. I wanted to drink until I collapsed straight into Takahashi Kou's arms and let him do whatever he liked with me after that. What I learned instead was that some beer, once it goes into your stomach, comes back out through your eyes. Filtered free of color and temperature, it turns into a cold, clear liquid. I ate four clams, and then I was drunk. I made a scene in front of Takahashi Kou and blew bubbles like a fish. I said, "Takahashi Kou, I don't care who Bai Bei thinks she is. Stop bringing her up in front of me. I don't like hearing it. Takahashi Kou, Hayakawa Koji likes me so much and I don't even look at him. You'd better take care." Whenever I drank, my words turned grand and self-important, like I was some kind of emperor. Takahashi Kou kept quiet, while I went on talking and talking until my stool slipped and I crashed down in front of him. Through the blur I heard him say my name softly before he bent down and gathered me up, half kneeling on the ground, his expression strained. He had only just reached under my arms to lift me back onto the stool when Hayakawa Koji appeared out of nowhere like Cheng Yaojin charging onto the battlefield and kicked Takahashi Kou hard in the shoulder. Takahashi grunted and fell sideways. Hayakawa Koji shouted hoarsely, "Well, well, Takahashi Kou. They say dogs that bite don't bark. Looks like it's true. You act so honest all the time. Who knew you were the sort to lose your principles the second a girl came along?" As he spoke, his great sinful foot rose for another kick. I scrambled over, flung my arms around his leg, and bit down as hard as I could. Hayakawa Koji howled and dropped to the ground clutching his leg. I moved back to Takahashi Kou and asked anxiously, "Takahashi Kou, does it hurt?" He rubbed his shoulder with a pained look, then slowly stood up and looked down at the two of us. In a cold voice he said, "Are you two done being ridiculous?"
Hayakawa Koji came over, crouched with his back to me, and said coldly, "Get on. I don't want the whole country watching Shima Island make a fool of itself." Obediently, I climbed onto his back. He hoisted me up and shouted at the crowd to move. "What are you looking at? Keep staring and I'll dig your eyeballs out and grind them under my heel." It was the first time he had ever turned violent like a wounded beast. He carried me all the way home along the rolling coast road, limping heavily, just like when we were children and used to go to the shore collecting shells, and he would carry me back afterward. Back then I used to tie the two little baskets full of shells together and hang them around his neck so they swung from side to side as he walked. Back then I also didn't sink my teeth into him with all my strength and leave him limping. Far off over the sea, the first firework burst, purple sparks splitting open the chest of the night and lighting my face. "Matsuoka Mio," Hayakawa Koji said, "I've actually been following you since after school. I knew Takahashi Kou would try something." I said nothing, only laid my head lightly against his back and tilted it to watch the fireworks blooming by the thousands. Tears slid off the tip of my nose and soaked into his shirt. He froze, then went back to his usual joking tone and said, "Matsuoka Mio, don't go drooling on my back. This shirt's new."
If carrying me away from a crowd of people while I cried until I looked ruined counted as Hayakawa Koji being good to me, then his goodness was still the kind of goodness that gets swallowed up among ten thousand other acts of kindness. So ordinary, in fact, that the next day when I sobered up, I was able to bundle it together with Takahashi Kou's heartlessness and forget it. I went right back to my seat beside him smiling stupidly as if nothing had happened. "Takahashi Kou," I asked, "I didn't say anything crazy last night when I was drunk, did I?" He was writing to Bai Bei, adding a cartoon shark in pencil and labeling it great white shark. He wrote that there was one in Shima Island's aquarium and that he had gone to see it himself. He wrote that great white sharks were being slaughtered by fishermen so quickly that they were close to extinction now, and that it broke his heart. He wrote about dolphins too, and seals and sea lions. He wrote all this with total concentration, fine sweat beading on the bridge of his nose, so absorbed that he never noticed me reading over his shoulder. Around that time he bought many books, most of them about the ocean, and the thing he talked about most when he talked to me was the same. What I remember most clearly is the story he told me about seals. He said seals were animals with extraordinary sympathy. The easiest way for Eskimos in the Arctic to hunt them was to lie flat on the ice and pretend to be dead. When the seals crawled out of their holes and came over to warm them with their bodies, the hunters would take little hammers and smash in the backs of their heads. After he finished telling me that, his eyes had turned red, and something in my own heart tightened. I remember thinking, Takahashi Kou is such a good person. A boy like this would surely love a girl with a great deal of compassion. So during that period I hid at home collecting facts about marine animals online, turned them into educational materials, gathered a whole crowd, and ran to Hayakawa Koji's family shop to tell tourists not to buy shark fin. That, of course, was what led to the opening scene.
Looking back now, I know I chose Zhao Seafood as our first stop largely because of Hayakawa Koji. I knew that no matter how huge a mess I made, he would cover for me. And he did. But later there was something I couldn't understand at all. How could such a pretty girl have crossed the sea and come all that way just to slap me across the face? "Didn't Takahashi Kou say she was gentle?" I asked. Looking over the angle formed by Hayakawa Koji's neck and shoulder, I could see the road ten or so meters away lined on both sides with tiny red and white climbing roses, their leaves and branches tangled together exactly like my feelings. Hayakawa Koji had insisted on taking me out for a drink. I still remembered how, after the last drunken disaster, he had warned me never to drink again because I talked nonsense and lost all principles when I was drunk. To make sure I couldn't drown my sorrows in alcohol, he had even sneaked an entire sack of dried jellyfish out of his family's shop, divided it into little plastic bags, handed them out to the roadside stalls one by one, and strictly ordered them never to sell me a drop if they saw me coming. Thinking of that now, my eyes misted over. He said he was treating me to a drink, but he got drunk himself instead. And when Hayakawa Koji got drunk, he wasn't much better than I was. While I ran into the kitchen of the snack stall to beg some vinegar to sober him up, he slipped off and wandered into the middle of the road to sit there singing love songs. The stall owner and I had to work like dogs to drag him out of the traffic and pull him back. Then he sat quietly across from me and cried. I knew he still remembered that slap Bai Bei had given me not long before. Ever since we were children, he'd been like a bodyguard, never allowing anyone to bully me. Perhaps that was exactly why I had slowly come to think his kindness was simply something I was owed. When we were little, there had been a family on the island named Chen, and their son grew up big and strong. Once, during a summer swim, he copied the hooligans he saw on television and pinched my backside. Hayakawa Koji knew full well he was no match for him, so that very night he sneaked down to the shore and punched a hole in the Chen family's fishing boat. Luckily the damage was discovered early the next morning, or it would have caused real disaster. Sitting there drunk and tearful, Hayakawa Koji looked at me for a long time and finally said in frustration, "I'm sorry, Matsuoka Mio. I didn't protect you today. Bai Bei is a girl. I never hit women." I smiled faintly and let out a long breath. "It's all right, Hayakawa Koji. You're much better than Takahashi Kou. He didn't even say a single word to comfort me." If Hayakawa Koji had appeared just a little earlier then, I think I would have happily told him that I was willing to repay him by becoming his girlfriend, and it wouldn't even have mattered if the plan to spray ink all over Bai Bei's skirt had to be abandoned.
Bai Bei stayed on Shima Island for six days in all. On the day she left, Hayakawa Koji and I arranged to go to the harbor and take revenge for me. He filled a fountain pen designed like a syringe with blue ink and planned to squeeze into the crowd seeing her off. The idea was that when nobody was paying attention, he would spray her from head to toe. When he explained the plan, he wore a wicked grin that made him look absurdly like an innocent child. "Matsuoka Mio," he said, "if I avenge you, how are you going to repay me? How about becoming my girlfriend?" I twisted his ear, stepped on his flip-flops, kicked his legs. I didn't say yes, but I didn't say no either. In the end, though, Hayakawa Koji never completed that glorious, difficult, slightly wicked mission. By the time he finally squeezed out of the crowd, his own face and shirt had turned blue instead. He gave me a bitter smile and said that during the busy tourist season there were simply too many people seeing Bai Bei off. Someone had shoved him from behind, his hand jerked, and the ink had gone straight over his own head instead. So we sat on the sand by the shore and watched the white ferry carry Bai Bei away while cursing her like two abandoned wives.
Dear Hayakawa Koji, if you don't appear right now, then in the very next second I am going to start crying.
In October, Shima Island retired a whole fleet of old ferries and replaced them with a batch of brand-new yellow ships, their glaring color a constant warning to the world. On the hundredth day after Hayakawa Koji's death, Bai Bei came all the way from another city by boat to pay her respects. She bought armfuls of flowers and stood hand in hand with Takahashi Kou before the little marble tombstone that bore Hayakawa Koji's name. All that day Bai Bei kept telling me not to cry, not to cry, and in the end she started crying herself. On the day she left, there were still many people at the harbor attending the memorial, but they wore plain colors and stood in a neat line. No longer was it like before, when the crowd had been so packed that a certain boy ended up spraying blue ink all over his own face. By the time snow began to drift over Shima Island, Zhao Dalu had sold the seafood shop he had run for twenty full years. When he handed me the stack of educational flyers, gray with dust, he said, "Matsuoka Mio, these things of yours have to be returned to you in the end." What I had wanted to ask him then was: what about the boy who used to belong to me? But I knew he didn't know either. I sat by myself on the cold shore, wearing a loose wool hat trimmed with pearls that clicked and rustled whenever the wind blew. And there, all at once, I began to miss everything I had ever lived through with Hayakawa Koji. Every time I remembered another fragment, the cold seemed to burrow all the way into my bones. I missed his badness. I missed his goodness. I missed the embrace I had once thought too ordinary to matter. I wanted to get drunk, but the roadside stalls really were as trustworthy as Hayakawa Koji had made them promise to be and would not sell me so much as a drop. Takahashi Kou came to persuade me to go home. It was the first time I ever shouted at him. "Get out, Takahashi Kou! Just get out!" The truth was, I didn't want to get drunk simply for the sake of being drunk. I only wanted to get drunk so that Hayakawa Koji would carry me home on his back. I turned to the broad, empty sea and shouted his name, but the sound snagged in my throat like torn silk. Dear Hayakawa Koji, if you still don't appear, then in the very next second, I really am going to cry.