Flotsam

Six years after the tsunami, the wreckage still washes up along the Kushiro coast.

There’s detritus from the sea with no connection to the Tohoku devastation, but Jun knows what he’s looking at when he finds a scratched and beaten-up kokeshi doll, reduced to driftwood, or a shredded book bag with sodden and indecipherable scraps of notepaper inside, or a plastic tiara, or a broken hair clip, or a sealed tumbler half- filled with acrid black coffee; there’s no mistaking the basic history behind sun- bleached sales banners and T-shirts, or balding plush animal baubles – pandas, penguins, frogs – that once hung from the phones of those who drowned or were made refugees in their own country.

Jun lives with his mother in a house on the outskirts of Konbumori. It’s a three-minute walk to the beach. When the wind is right he can hear the waves lap up to the shore; to him the sound of waves is like the sound of silence, except in storms, when the breakers thunder and pound and pull, like hands that slap upon a table cloth before tugging it at the edges. Storms remind Jun how easily the sea can change, how easily it could claim them, how grotesquely human it is in temperament.

Following the tsunami, the town performed a formal clean-up of the beach. Volunteers came in from other parts of Hokkaido, some from as far away as Sapporo: well-meaning urbanites whose bubbled lives had been untouched by the quake, who felt guilty and slightly restless, left out of the apocalyptic drama that had unfolded elsewhere – and they made pilgrimages to Kushiro’s shoreline over the course of a few months, collecting every non-natural item they could alongside the locals. Neat piles were made, separated by size and type of material, while items of perceived sentimental value, for which there was a chance a surviving owner or rightful inheritor might be located, were bagged and taken away to the community centre.

The washed-up items that Jun keeps for himself are without any marks that would identify the owner (such items are exceptionally rare), yet for each one that he stows away in his collection, whether or not the town officials would approve his keeping them, he knows the former owner is dead. He can’t say how. He knows it in the way he knows, when he enters an empty room, that no one else has been there for quite some time.

Today Jun arrives at the beach hidden under the hood of his dark green windbreaker, and scans the shoreline to see if anyone else is there. An old man or woman strolls across the sand and broken shell in the far distance, but that’s all. Jun is effectively alone.

He goes down to the tideline and walks parallel to the water, combing for treasure. Within an hour he’s found the cap of a Pocari Sweat bottle with two neat holes in the top, like owl eyes, a Yu-Gi-Oh! card sealed in a plastic sleeve, a plastic tag with a purple bunch of grapes imprinted on it, probably once attached to actual fruit in a grocery store, and a small Hello Kitty keychain with five links of the chain itself intact but the metal ring missing. Everything else that may or may not be tsunami debris is of little concern to Jun: shingles, warped boards, splinters of prefab wall; he’s interested in the things that were used, things that were held or fondled by warm hands, things that were noticed – not pieces of construction material, not the drab broken bits of furniture that could never be identified.

He examines his finds. The Pocari cap was barely worth picking up. It could have come from anywhere, anytime, and while the holes are too perfect not to be man- made, they suggest nothing more to him than a bored boy with a nail and hammer. He pockets it so he can throw it in the bin at home, if only so that it won’t catch his eye on some other day.

The Yu-Gi-Oh! card is not perfectly sealed in its sleeve. Water has leaked in and made it sodden, but the deterioration is minimal, and the sharpness of its colours suggest it’s been adrift for months at most, not years: this simply blew out of someone’s hands, maybe a few towns down the coast. The grape tag is also not old, its condition too pristine, and even if it had been at sea for six years, what of it? No one had ever valued a tag on their fruit. He pockets it along with the Pocari cap and Yu-Gi-Oh! card, destined for the bin.

But the Hello Kitty keychain is different.

A quiet surge of excitement wells in Jun’s breast. Kitty is depicted in samurai garb, albeit with a heart-shaped eye patch, and even with most of its paint gone the figurine is immediately familiar. After a moment’s thought he has it: Masamune Samurai, from Sendai. He owns the same one, or one that is nearly identical, tucked away in a bottom drawer where he’s stashed the relics of that hateful year of his life. This keychain, then, was almost certain to have come from Sendai, carried to Hokkaido by the waves. This is treasure.

He doesn’t announce that he’s home, but his mother hears him come in. Today is her day off.

‘You’re bringing in more rubbish?’ she says, drifting wraith-like into the kitchen behind him.

Jun doesn’t say anything.

‘This house isn’t your rubbish bin. Do you understand that?’

The lines around her mouth are deep, her eyes beady and desperate, and at the same time nervous, like that of a wild animal encountering loud machinery – which Jun finds ironic, considering he’s the antithesis of anything loud. She doesn’t know what to do about him; she doesn’t know who or what he is, and Jun doesn’t have any answers to give.

‘Did you hear what I said? Jun!’

Jun sighs and forms a look of disgust without facing her, making sure she sees it from the side. He pulls the rubbish bin out from under the sink, drops the cap, card and tag into it, and stalks out of the kitchen.

‘You selfish boy, you . . . you man-child, how dare you ignore your mother like this?’

She sounds almost like she might cry, though she hasn’t wept in Jun’s presence for years.

‘I’m speaking to you. Don’t walk away like that when I’m speaking! I want to talk about this rubbish-collecting.’

She follows him through the living room, thin, short and shrill.

‘Don’t just walk away from your mother!’

Then she’s on the other side of his bedroom door. His head is pounding from the interaction, brief though it was. If he could, he would speak to his mother only in text messages. Emails. Sign language.

There’s a very faint scent of salt in here, which he only detects when he’s been away for a while, and even then not always; the salt scent comes from the stack of cardboard boxes in the corner where he’s amassed years of little articles from the beach. He doesn’t wash anything before storing it there, only rinses it in the sea to get rid of the sand, then lets it dry in the sun on the back step. They all interest him in one way or another, but they aren’t treasure. Not like the keychain.

---

Jun was a normal child at primary school. At least it seems that way in his memories. In middle school, around the time his groin and underarms sprouted hair, his body groaned and lengthened, his voice changed and sore red pimples pocked his face, he ceased to be like everyone else. All the others hit puberty too, of course, but for Jun it was different. That was when he began to float away. His registering of nuance deteriorated. He gradually stopped noticing the minutiae of surrounding social interactions, how each filamentary encounter entangled itself in the larger web of things, supporting the mysterious whole of which he was supposed to be a part. And at some point it came to be that Jun couldn’t see that web at all.

At first he experienced moments of introspective clarity in which he perceived what was happening to him. Those moments became less frequent over time; and then he was too far gone, drifting into an open expanse in which the alliances and enmities, juvenile hierarchies and impassioned romances of a teenager’s world passed by his senses like infrared light.

In the first year of secondary school a senior named Ryu Ogawa had kicked Jun’s legs out from under him during an outdoor football match. It was after the final lesson of the day, on a secluded pitch down the hill and out of sight from the school, and there were a lot of students watching. Jun went down hard and felt the skin tear off his elbows in the dirt. Ryu and his teammate came to his side, but instead of helping him up, they each went down on one knee and punched Jun in the belly, the ribs, and tried to hit his face, though he’d rolled onto his front and blocked it with his arms. A third joined, a heavyset boy, and planted his cleated foot between Jun’s shoulder blades to hold him down, while the other two kicked his shins and thighs until he screamed in fear and outrage. He was left with angry black bruises that lasted for a month. His left knee, in the spot where one of their feet had connected with the side of the cap, still sends out twinges of pain on some winter mornings, and when the pressure changes before big storms.

When they’d finished and walked off without a word, Jun had to get up on his own; no one among his own team, or even those students watching, had spoken up or come to his aid. Enraged, he shouted at everyone gathered there, demanding to know why they weren’t reacting – he’d just been attacked! – but the only response he received, at last, was from one of his teammates lingering nearby, who told him to be quiet and that he’d talk to him after the game.

Later, that boy informed him, simply, that Ryu and his goons had given Jun the beating because he had been flirting with Shoko Imanishi. Everyone knew Ryu had his eye on Shoko, despite her being years younger than him. Jun should have known that too – how, he was asked in all seriousness, could he not have been aware? The beating had been coming to him, said his teammate; it could’ve been worse, and Jun’s acting like a whiny baby about it, yelling at the crowd and playing dumb, was going to make everyone he knew look bad as well.

After that day, Jun stopped playing football altogether. Gradually, he gave up doing any kind of school activity besides attending lessons, and even that was wretched. Being surrounded by his peers filled him with a seething angst, enough to break pencils and pens in his bedroom at night, staining his hands blue or black or red; he needed to hear something snap in those days; he needed to destroy something that was whole. The floorboards in his room still bear flecks and splotches of ink which have permanently stained the wood.

He had flirted with Shoko Imanishi, a little, though it was hard to recall the specific details of it now. There had been words, glances, smiles – nothing more – yet he’d been completely oblivious to any transgression on his part. He hadn’t had the slightest inkling that seventeen-year-old Ryu Ogawa had feelings for her, or any notion of what Ryu was like to those who crossed him.

And yet everyone else had known. Everyone. They were all aware, tuned in, bemusedly watching Jun court disaster. No one had been the least surprised by what happened. Jun was the only one who’d been hollowed out, somewhere around puberty, when childhood moulted away like a cicada’s skin: he was that discarded exoskeleton, the transparent remains of the boy he’d once been.

It was his mother’s idea that he should go to school in Sendai, to live in Honshu for a time – get out of Kushiro and see another part of the country. So he went, and his year of hell began – far from the little house in a town from which he’d once wanted nothing more than to escape.

There were too many people in the city. Too much noise, too many faces and voices. Too many garrulous individuals, hungry for someone to acknowledge the existence of their thoughts. Most people, Jun learned, needed hosts to lay the eggs of their musings in, unable or afraid to let them mature within the brain that bore them. They didn’t see Jun: they only saw a silent, receiving mind, a vague receptacle in which to incubate their opinions.

Little by little, Jun gave up speech altogether. He gave up trying to be heard. He had a voice, but it had been swallowed down into his lungs from the day on the dirt of the football pitch, when he’d cried out to his peers for justice and received none. Once Jun had faded he never quite came back into view. His transparency increased until he became invisible, and the full spectrum of life passed through him like light through a dusty window.

The only bright spot in Sendai, his only reprieve, had been a simple sensation that would come over him from time to time, always when he was in a public area and outdoors: a street, the little park near the internet café he frequented, and especially the coast road, where he would ride his second-hand bicycle at weekends. It was the sensation of being watched. Rather than being disconcerting or seeming eerie, it brought about a feeling like a warm hand suddenly entwining its fingers with his own, or a body lovingly embracing him from behind.

When that pleasurable warmth settled on him like the rays of a spring sun, Jun would turn and cast his eyes about to study his surroundings, but there was never anyone present who might be focused on him. Mostly, he found himself alone, especially on the long breezy stretches of the coast road, with only the company of soaring gulls and the indifference of passing vehicles.

But someone was following him all through that year, watching yet never making contact. He just couldn’t see where they were hiding.

---

Jun leaves his room in the late afternoon. He’s been listening for a while, ear to the door, and the house has been dead silent all that time. His mother must have left for town, though he didn’t hear the car start up.

His bedroom is at the back of the house. He passes through the living room and goes by the kitchen. He stops in the modest entryway, a few steps from the front door, because he now hears voices. One is his mother’s, the other a man’s. The two are in front of the house, talking in subdued tones. The walls are thin, however, and their words are almost audible. Jun sneaks into his mother’s bedroom, keeping low, and sidles up against the front wall below the window. She and the man are just outside, and by the husky voice he identifies the visitor as elderly Mr. Sasaki.

‘. . . since that’s all he does,’ his mother is saying. ‘Besides using the computer.’

‘Pathetic,’ sneers Sasaki. ‘What’s happened to this generation, is what I want to know. How old is he anyway?’

‘Twenty-seven.’

‘Twenty-seven already! Should be preparing for marriage by now. No girlfriend, I’ll take it?’

‘Of course not. What woman would want to be with . . . with a shut-in? He’s barely even spoken for years. No friends. Doesn’t meet anyone. He hasn’t held a job since his months at the cannery after Sendai.’

‘He’s more than just a shut-in.’

‘I know what he is. I do. It’s just that . . . Oh, the years are going by and I just wonder what we’re going to do. Sometimes . . . sometimes I . . .’

Her voice dissolves into a sound that Jun knows well. A beat of silence on either side of a brief hitching sob, always heard through a wall or a door.

‘Now, now, stop that. That won’t help a thing, will it? Here. It’s fine, I don’t need it back. There now, you’re both going to be . . .’

Jun pulls away from the wall and drifts out of the room just as he had drifted in. He leaves the house through the back door, opening and closing it very slowly, careful of the upper hinge that squeaks. He crosses the patch of weedy earth that hosts his mother’s tiny garden at one end, and disappears at the other into the forest.

He passes the familiar beech trees that mark his usual route and after a few minutes comes to the babbling stream that wends its way down from the hills. Here the ground is flat, the water crystalline. Jun follows the stream until his marker comes into view: an axe handle he found washed up on the shore years ago, which he sharpened and drove into the soft soil at the top of the bank. He crosses the water with the help of a stepping stone, climbs the bank and passes the handle, touching it lightly out of habit to check that it remains firmly lodged.

Just past the handle is an ancient oak tree with a hollow in its base, and within this hollow is tucked an opaque Rubbermaid storage container. Jun pulls the container out and removes the lid. He draws from his pocket the Masamune Hello Kitty keychain and places it inside with the other treasures stored there, nestling it between a frayed burgundy ankle boot and the plastic cover of a ringed notepad, the rings still attached but all the paper pages gone. The cover has the cartoon outline of two young birds on it, beak to beak, and the line, in English: For when we found each other it was the loveliest day.

Re-sealing the lid, he returns the container to the hollow, pushing it to the back. He goes home and sneaks in through the back door, but finds the house empty. In the kitchen, he boils water for noodles and carries the steaming cup back to his room, where he jiggles the computer mouse on the floor to wake the computer from sleep. He slurps the noodles up, sets them aside and lays on his belly on the futon with his arms and shoulders over the edge, fingers poised above the keyboard resting on the floor.

Earlier, he’d seen something perplexing online, before he’d left to stow his treasure away in the forest. He brings up a map of the Tohoku tsunami debris field, divided year by year. In 2011, and even more in 2012, the debris field ranged further north up the Japanese coast. This makes sense, as those were the years when the shoreline here had been most extensively inundated and the concerted clean-up efforts took place. Debris had continued to appear long after, however, as Jun knew perhaps better than anyone, so the strange thing was that, according to the maps, the field hadn’t stretched to anywhere on the Hokkaido coast since 2013.

There had then to be some errant current, Jun concludes, some narrow course of ocean within ocean peeling off from larger ones, carrying with it a fraction of the wreckage from the main body. Was such a thing even possible? And if it were possible, how could it be that this current had carried these specific items, these treasures, all the way to his beach?

How, when they’d all belonged to the same person, could they have been delivered to this one spot over the course of years?

---

Jun doesn’t return to the beach for two weeks, roughly the time it takes these days for new debris to accumulate at the tideline. If there are items that don’t make it to the shore, but rather are brought close and carried away again with the outgoing tide, he doesn’t worry: what isn’t left behind on the sand isn’t meant for him.

He’s seen his mother less and less during these weeks. He’s growing transparent to her, too. Eventually she won’t notice his presence at all.

She meets Mr. Sasaki more frequently. He visits their home often, occasionally coming into the living room to chat quietly, but more often speaking to Jun’s mother in front of the house, as he had done the day Jun eavesdropped on their conversation. His mother returns from work later than ever, and leaves the house for long periods, without a word, even on her days off. Jun suspects she’s meeting Mr. Sasaki elsewhere as well.

He doesn’t think they’re having an affair – Mr. Sasaki should be far too old and decrepit for her. It’s more likely that Jun’s muteness, his gradual fading, has made her desperate for conversation, for the sound of a sympathetic human voice.

This is what he finds on the beach: a square plastic plant pot, with a large crack down one side; a salt-hardened rubber bouncy ball (no longer bouncy); a nylon stocking twined tight with shining strands of black seaweed; and part of a varnished board with the character for yama carved into it – probably the last part of a surname, for a family which neither he nor anyone else will ever identify. He leaves the board where it sits, next to a shrivelling semi-translucent jellyfish.

He finds the spout of a watering can, as though it had been housed in some distant greenhouse along with the plant pot. He finds a cartoonishly large red button, such as a clown might wear, and wonders mirthlessly whether he’ll come across a red nose to match. He finds a yellow clothespin, the empty case of a pornographic DVD, and a shredded carp windsock from a koinobori. Like the bare-chested woman on the DVD cover, down to her cascade of dark hair, her dark nipples, the dark line of her panties – like so many things Jun has come across on this beach, the carp’s colours have been harshly bleached by years of direct sunlight; observing it on its patch of sand gives the impression of looking at a washed-out photograph, as though the world itself has become a poorly composed snapshot.

He finds an open pencil case, filled with sand; it is immediately familiar in a way that raises a dull clamour at the fringes of recent memory. He squints at it in the bright light, turns it over, and there at the bottom in once-black text faded to ashen grey, are words in English: For when we found each other it was the loveliest day. Above the words, just as faded but still recognizable, is the outline of two birds, facing beak to beak.

For the first time in many years, Jun experiences a profound bloom of warmth – one caused by no sunbeam or fire – settling on his shoulders, tracing its way down his back, until it seems to play across his entire being. It’s the beautiful sensation he had experienced in Sendai, on those occasions when he felt that, somehow, he was being watched.

The owner of the notebook, for which Jun had long ago found the cover, was the same person to whom this case once belonged. It had been toted along in the same bag. It had been held by the same hands.

Her hands.

A vague urge in his loins, glowing like a single orange coal, disappears, and Jun casts the DVD case to the ground. No use even considering the risk of throwing it in the bin at home: his mother might notice it and kick up a fuss in disgust. He gouges a shallow hole in the sand with his heel, nudges the case into it and fills the hole back in.

With the pencil case in hand, Jun gathers his other finds into a shopping bag, none of them special, all destined for the bin save for the piece of board with yama on it, which he doesn’t mind leaving to get swept away on the next high tide.

He doesn’t enter the house when he reaches it, as the car is there and that means his mother is home again. Instead, he moves quietly and quickly past it and enters the woods, going to the stream and crossing it at the axe handle. He retrieves the container from the hollow and opens it.

His treasures are just as he’d left them, and among them he nestles the pencil case, after shaking as much sand out of it as possible. He stands back, examining the contents of the container, then takes the notebook cover and slips it in next to the case. The two are now propped between a folded creamy-pink furoshiki, patterned with gardenia flowers, and the remains of a light blue book bag with an iron-on patch bearing the Date Masamune helmet logo of Sendai City Museum.

Next to the book bag, almost beneath it, is a black hairclip with three of its teeth missing. The hairclip is otherwise nondescript, and not the kind of thing that Jun usually keeps.

He’s long known that all his treasures belonged to the same person, but only today has he given her a name, in lieu of the one he will never know, as he’s not been able to find it on a single item kept in this container. The name he gives her is Sanami, little wave.

That night Jun has a dream. In the dream Sanami is cresting a small rise on a tree- lined street leading down to Sendai’s coast road. She turns a corner and the road is laid out before her beneath an iron sky, a section of the bike and footpath running parallel to it clearly visible. This is where, if she waited, the boy had once passed on the weekends: the same quiet and lonesome student she caught glimpses of elsewhere in the city, different like her, a bit strange and repulsed by the masses, like her. That’s why she’s always come out here, to catch sight of the boy, to observe; but it’s now two years since she’s seen him, cruising slowly by on his bicycle, staring out to sea. He’s long gone.

She descends to the shore on the far side of a footpath, where only a stretch of sand and stone and shell separates her from the dark green water. She makes her way to a concrete tetrapod, buried a third of the way up in damp sand. She scrambles up it easily, and, slipping her shoulder bag off, seats herself in a dry crook, her back resting against the slope of one its arms. She’ll make a journal entry as she usually does, here in her favourite place of solitude.

She pushes aside her empty bento box, wrapped in the gardenia-patterned furoshiki – her favourite – and takes out her notebook and pencil case, zipping open the latter with cold, bare fingers. An icy wind blows, the breath of winter still strong in it, and a fine spray, cast up from a wave striking the opposite side of the barrier, settles on her face. She shivers and snaps closed the upper buttons of her coat collar. She’s about to draw her hood up as well, but then her attention is caught by the curious wheeling and crying of a gull. Not just one bird, but several, are circling erratically in the air above.

With the force of an explosion, like the result of some great nuclear weapon detonating in the ground beneath, the very earth lurches with sudden upheaval, shuddering wildly. Sanami is nearly thrown from the tetrapod, scrabbling for fresh purchase with hands and feet against its smooth surface.

A dull groan is filling the world, becoming an unfathomable monstrous roar, so deep and powerful that it reverberates not just in her ears but her entire skeleton. Shaking her . . . shaking . . . but that is all she has time to experience, as the earth lurches again, throwing the tetrapod like a toy jack nudged by a child’s finger, and she slides off it backward, falling. The back of her head hits the half-buried arm of another tetrapod at the base of the sea barrier. Her life is saved by the black hairclip she’s wearing. It absorbs some of the impact, three of its teeth snapping off before it flies from her head, but nevertheless she strikes the concrete with enough force to be knocked unconscious.

Jun’s eyes snap open and he awakens at the very moment Sanami is consumed by darkness and unknowing. He’s breathing heavily. The sheet beneath him is damp and there are droplets of sweat on his chest, the likes of which he hasn’t experienced in a dream since the vivid night-terrors of his childhood. He kicks the blanket off his legs, needing the cool air against them, and lies still to slow his heart. As he relaxes, the tendrils of interrupted sleep return, winding around his mind and clouding it with drowsiness again. It’s still dark outside, but there’s a faint blue glow in the sky through the window. He guesses it’s about 4:30 am.

He becomes aware of voices, elsewhere in the house, speaking at a volume barely above a whisper. They’re coming from the living room: his mother, and someone else. He listens as she finishes speaking and then identifies, with little surprise, the gruff droning of Sasaki’s voice. It’s impossible to make out a single word, but the tone is grave, without humour or colour.

What is Sasaki doing here at this hour?

Jun isn’t sure he cares. That’s their business, and he doesn’t want to be a part of it. Sleep is coming on strong, with the tenacity of some colossal sea creature, determined to drag him back to the deeps.

Jun focuses on Sanami, tumbling from the tetrapod at the mercy of gravity. He needs to reclaim the dream. He must return to it at that moment, to know how it plays out – and perhaps even to exist within it lucidly, to be able to intervene and meet Sanami at long last, to reach out to her after all these long years, which in themselves feel like a bad dream.

But there is no returning. Jun sleeps in inky depths until he wakes with the mid-morning sun in the sky.

It’s Monday. The car is gone again, his mother already at work in town. Silence reigns in the house, and even the ocean’s murmur seems to be absent. Jun boils water and prepares noodles. He still feels groggy, half-awake, so he uses the rest of the hot water for green tea. Finishing the noodles, he alternates between sipping the salty broth and the tea until he feels some alertness return. The dream, fragmented and dissolving, must have disturbed the quality of his sleep more than he’d thought.

He decides to spend some time with his treasures. There’s not a breath of wind. He glides among the beech trees, lightly touching the ones that act as his usual guideposts, as though acknowledging old friends.

When he reaches his crossing spot over the stream, he pauses, thinking for an instant that he must have made a mistake: there’s no axe handle at the top of the opposite bank.

But this is definitely the crossing-place – the stepping stone in front of him confirms it. Jun crosses the stream, heart picking up its pace in his chest with worry and the cold stirrings of anger. At the top of the bank he spots the handle, out of sight from the opposite side of the stream, yanked out of the ground and cast down among the leaves and branches nearby, like any other piece of wood. Then he sees the hollow of the tree, and a small, distressed cry emerges from his throat: there’s nothing there.

Jun falls to his knees, sticking his head through the opening in the vain hope that the container, or some trace of it, will somehow still be inside.

‘You’re not going to find it.’

Jun starts at the voice, coming from close by. He scrambles back from the hollow and rises to his feet in time to see Sasaki standing next to the tree.

‘I found your box,’ says the old man. ‘I’ve taken it away, Jun. It’s time for this collecting to end.’

Jun breathes hard, nostrils flaring with each inhalation.

‘Your mother . . . it’s just terrible what you’ve done to your mother. And I can see now that all this junk you’ve been keeping here has something to do with it.’

‘Where is it?’ Jun demands.

‘Oh, so you can speak after all! Well then, perhaps you and I can get some matters sorted ou – ’

‘Where’s the container, you old bastard? Where are my things?’

An expression of cold disgust creeps like dirty floodwater over Sasaki’s face. ‘There’s no need for that kind of language,’ he tells Jun. ‘We’re going to talk this out, man to man.’

‘I don’t want to talk with you. I want my things back, thief.’

‘We’ll get to that. But first we’re going to converse like two adults. You haven’t been a boy for a long time now. It’s time for you to show that you’ve grown up.’

Jun holds his tongue, glaring, waiting for Sasaki to continue.

‘Now I’ve spoken a lot with your mother these days, as you’re probably aware. She’s not a healthy woman, Jun. This sick life you’ve taken on, not working, not studying, barely speaking a word to her – it’s harming her, in both heart and mind. She can hardly support the two of you on her salary. And what will you do when she’s gone? You’ve gained no experience, made no name for yourself anywhere, nothing. You just pick up rubbish on the beach and – ’

‘It’s not all rubbish,’ Jun blurts out, his voice trembling. ‘It’s not like that. It comes . . . it comes from the tsunami.’

Sasaki waves his words away. ‘What does it matter? Rubbish is rubbish. Even if it’s from the tsunami, it’s all forgotten waste. This box had – what? – your special pieces in it or something? A rotten old bag, some filthy cloth – what of them? It’s disgusting.’

‘It’s not like that . . .’

There’s a lump in Jun’s throat. Helplessness is opening a sinkhole inside him, a dark, bottomless pit. His eyes grow hot; his vision blurs.

Sasaki is shaking his head. ‘I can’t believe what I’m seeing. A grown man, son of a good woman, crying over rubbish – and rubbish is what it is, every last bit of it.’ His voice grows in conviction, in sternness and strength, belying his age. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. You haven’t earned so much as the roof over your head or the food in your belly. Better men than you have perished in this very town just to keep their families warm and fed.’

‘And so what? The coast of Tohoku was filled with people like that, working themselves like ants – it was filled with those people, their homes, their families, everything they built, and the tsunami wiped it all away just the same. It’s like some of them were never even there.’

Sasaki grunts, his eyes narrowing to obsidian slits, studying Jun as he’d study a rotten fish left on his doorstep. ‘Just pathetic,’ he hisses. ‘I’ve never encountered a creature like you in all my years. You’ve gone half mad, and here I am trying to help you.’

‘Go to hell.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

A tear streaks freely down the side of Jun’s nose, over his lips, coming to hang from his chin. ‘Just give me the box back,’ he pleads at last. ‘We won’t talk about this anymore. Please.’

‘Fine then. Fine. I’ll give you the box back if you need it so much.’

With a sigh, Sasaki bends over to reach a hand behind the wide tree, lifting the Rubbermaid container into view. He tosses it at Jun’s feet, and the lid, which hasn’t been properly sealed, flies off as it tumbles. The container comes to rest on its side at Jun’s feet, its emptiness gaping.

‘Where are my things? It’s the things I want, not the stupid box.’

‘Burned,’ answers Sasaki. ‘I had an old metal bin knocking around. I built a fire in it, nice and hot, and burned them at dawn. Right down there on the beach.’

‘No . . .’

‘The pencil case must have been a new addition – wasn’t completely dry. I had to use a bit of gasoline to finish the job.’

‘You . . . I should – ’

‘You should what? Beat me? Kill me? You haven’t lifted a finger for years outside of your beachcombing, and you won’t start now.’

‘Listen to me!’

‘No, you listen here for just a minute. I’ve been around for seven decades now, so I’ve gleaned a few things about people. Seems clear enough to me, Jun, that you’ve been waiting for something, or think you have, but all you’ve really done is deteriorate. You’re falling apart while you wait for something that will never happen, whatever pointless event that might be. And you imagine you’re the only person who’s ever felt like that, don’t you? Well that’s your grand delusion right there, the big diseased root holding you back from getting anywhere – you thinking you’re so different, thinking your hopes and fears and regrets are so removed from everyone else’s, so irreconcilable with ordinary men. The difference between you and a worthy Japanese is that the worthy ones get busy, stay busy, and contribute something to society, while your snivelling self shrivels up and hides away, taking without ever giving, a parasite, waiting for the universe to deliver some meaning to your life, when the truth is that the universe doesn’t care – the gods act when they have something to act on.

‘Those like you, you damned hikikomori, have no place in society. That’s the reality of it. Your type is human flotsam. I suppose my pity should be for your ancestors, as it is for your poor mother. You don’t deserve a second thought.’

Jun stares distantly at the ground in front of Sasaki’s feet, and at the side of his empty container. He is silent, and when he speaks he is surprised at the calm in his own voice; a voice even he has rarely heard.

‘Why, then, are you still trying to talk to me?’

‘Because your mother asked me to,’ responds Sasaki. ‘Because she deserves far more from her son.’

Each time Sasaki speaks it clangs in Jun’s head like a cracked bell. Sasaki doesn’t know to whom the treasures in the container once belonged; he doesn’t know and doesn’t care, has never cared, will not be persuaded to care now. Those things are part of what Jun is, and he realises now that to Sasaki Jun is not recognisably a whole person: he’s an anomaly that takes up space, something there and not there in the same continuous instant.

Sasaki is like all the others – all the others in this world except one.

Jun closes his eyes. He isolates the anger coursing through his veins, tugging at his muscle and sinew – and plucks it away, piece by piece.

‘I’m sorry for the way I’ve spoken,’ he says. ‘I will try to change.’

Sasaki regards him with an expression that hovers, briefly, between surprise and mistrust.

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

A moment of stillness. Then Sasaki produces a hesitant smile. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘I’d like to go back to the house now,’ Jun tells him.

‘As you will.’ He nods down to the empty container. ‘I’ll take care of this thing. We’ll speak more later.’

Jun turns his back on the old man and returns to the stream, crossing it at the stepping stone. His body feels dense, heavy, about to sink uncontrollably to its knees. His tears flow unchecked but, not yet out of earshot, he stifles the single sob that accompanies them. He drifts among the beech trees, wandering through them for a long time.

It occurs to Jun that the only things of Sanami’s – the only things that had ever reached him by way of the ocean at all – were those that could float, and that Sasaki is partially right in his dismissive language, because the floating things are mere material: they were only ever pieces of cloth and plastic in a world choking on them. All that Sanami really was, her physical being, down to her bones, had sunk to the bottom of the sea.

After some time, Jun emerges from the woods and makes his way across the road to the beach. He stays there for the rest of the day, sitting on a ridge of smooth pebbles, watching the surf. Hunger claws at him, but he ignores it. He is repulsed by the idea of Sasaki coming down here to have another go at him, but as the afternoon wears into evening he realizes that Sasaki would never notice him; if he took the time to look in this direction he would simply see sand and stone and water, as he’d always done.

His mother is home by the time he returns to the house. She asks him, as he passes down the hall, whether he has seen Mr. Sasaki. Because she can’t see Jun nod from where she’s standing, he shuts his eyes and summons his willpower as he’d done when he dismantled his anger that morning, and answers, ‘Yes.’

‘Really? Did he need anything?’ ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well what did he say?’

‘He found some things he wanted to ask me about.’ ‘What do you mean?

What kind of things?’

‘Beach things.’

‘From the beach?’

‘Yeah. I’m tired.’

Jun goes to close his bedroom door, but pauses when his mother speaks his name from around the corner.

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s just nice to talk to you, is all. To hear you. Thanks.’

‘OK.’

He shuts the door and slides the lock, lays down on his futon, and descends uneasily into sleep.

Sanami blinks her eyes open, seeing only the metallic sky. The back of her head is a ball of white pain. She doesn’t remember where she is until she turns her aching neck and sees the tetrapods.

There’s a siren going off in the city, a ghostly rising wail, overlaid with an announcement from the emergency broadcast system. Sanami doesn’t need to hear the announcement, because she was taught well exactly what that siren means: Get away from the ocean – make for high ground.

But it’s too late. There is already a roar in her ears, different from that of the quake. This one comes from directly beyond the sea barrier, which will succeed in holding off nothing of what is to come.

The tsunami hits with terrible speed, consuming her in the space of a breath, and she is bowled over, twisted and swept along inside its sunless black heart. Her burgundy boots are torn from her feet; a keychain, keyless and clipped to the belt-loop of her jeans as decoration, snags on something in the path of the surge and is torn away.

She is swept miles inland before the tsunami starts to recede, and she rises to the surface now, carried along by the wreckage-strewn waters. She claws her way onto a patch of roof as it floats by, and is then drawn out to sea.

The days pass, endless azure over endless swells of dark winter ocean, and by night starry heavens the likes of which Sanami has never seen. The Milky Way is clearer than she ever thought possible, glowing bright with the promise of other worlds. Polaris is before her, steadfast above the horizon. She is ferried along by hidden currents.

Half in, half out of the water, she no longer feels the cold. The fragment of roof breaks apart, becomes waterlogged, sinks. It seems to Sanami that she should sink with it, and yet she floats on.

Until one day there is land. The ocean bears her towards it for a day and a night – and, as the sun rises red and indifferent behind her, she is cast upon the shore.

And there is the boy, standing on the beach, watching her – yet less a boy now in appearance, but a man. He takes some steps in her direction, then runs, and she stands up, though she cannot feel her legs, or any other part of herself except her swelling heart, for here is the one whom she secretly loved. The one like her, waiting in this faraway place. Here is the man she once watched, as a boy filled with hope and longing, in a time when she was invisible.