Keiko looked down at her bland breakfast of white toast and milk tea. The other ladies at the table had all ordered lightly, so she followed suit as she always did. But what she really wanted was the greasy breakfast of eggs and fried Spam that the American couple next to them were eating with great pleasure. She glanced over at them several times, wondering how it felt to be so unselfconscious about food.

The conversation with the other Japanese ladies at the table consisted of the usual pleasantries. “Is this your first trip to Hawaii?” “Have you tried the taro ice cream—it is wonderful!” “The sun here is very strong, we had better take our umbrellas to the beach today.”

Like Keiko, the other ladies were middle-aged housewives with husbands who were in Kona for a business conference. While the men sat in meetings, the women would be entertained by Mr. Hamada, local travel guide, whose Japanese grandparents had journeyed to Hawaii to work as sugar cane farmers. The ladies often giggled quietly at Mr. Hamada’s Japanese, which included quaint phrases better suited to 19th-century peasants than modern-day Tokyo residents.

The morning sky was heavy that day, with the promise of a drenching rain that would freshen the concrete and bring the sand crabs out on the beach. Mr. Hamada informed the group that the planned activity would be a boating trip with a native Hawaiian grandfather and grandson spearfishing duo, and that they would show the ladies how they hunted for ulua. “Good for sushi!” Mr Hamada said enthusiastically.

The ladies politely opted out, preferring to partake in the Lomi Lomi hot stone massages, as they had already spent the last three days driving around in Mr. Hamada’s van. While they had enjoyed the excursion to the volcano and the black sand beach, they worried that they were getting too dark already with all the hiking and walks on the beach. Keiko was bored of the polite talk and felt slightly uneasy with the other women, who were kind in the superficial way of privileged Japanese ladies, and yet distant towards her because Keiko’s husband ranked higher than theirs in the company.

So Keiko rode with Mr. Hamada alone to the pier, where she joined the Hawaiian grandfather-grandson team on their fishing boat. As she climbed in, she suddenly felt foolish in her linen pants and blazer, and her stockinged feet slipped a little in her sandals. The Hawaiian men were bare chested, wearing only swimming trunks. Their feet were bare and, Keiko noticed, even the grandfather’s were smooth and youthful, unlike her own feet, calloused from years of wearing pumps.

As they paddled away from the pier and into the calm ocean, they spoke little, as the men knew no Japanese and she only knew textbook English. Mr. Hamada had stayed behind, rubbing his belly and saying several times that “boats don’t agree with my stomach.”

The clouds hung heavily in the sky and Keiko felt the perspiration collect behind her knees and in the crook of her arms. Now and then the grandfather said something to the grandson. Keiko could not understand but she found the “ka” and “na” and “kikiwawa” syllables of the language to be soothing, like the sounds of a mother cooing nonsense to a child and the child responding back in the most elemental of words.

They anchored, and in one movement, without hesitation or thought, the grandson dove into the water, with nothing but his spear gun, a pair of long fins, and a brilliantly white-toothed grin. Keiko peered over the edge of the boat, seeing shadows of coral reefs and flickers of what may have been animals or plants, or the light playing on her imagination. The visibility was easily 30 feet or more, and yet she couldn’t see the boy. She wondered if she should be concerned, but the grandfather only stared off into the distance, chewing on a toothpick with a rhythm that matched the sounds of the waves gently hitting the side of the boat. After what seemed like several minutes, the boy’s dark-haired head broke through the water and he inhaled deeply through his mouth. His eyes met hers and he smiled.

Keiko could see that while his head bobbed above water, below the surface he was straddling a large fish still wriggling on the spear. The fish was bigger than the wrap of his hands, and he used his thighs to keep it still. He reached down for the knife that was strapped to his leg and stabbed the fish, cleanly and quickly, in the triangular space above its eye. The wriggling stopped and the boy’s grip and thighs relaxed. He pulled the fish off of the spear and, with both arms, held it up for his grandfather to pull into the boat.

Without a splash or stray movement, the boy hoisted himself back into the boat. It was then that Keiko allowed herself to stare, noticing finally how young the boy was, perhaps only 15 or 16. The same age as my Hiro, she thought. And then she was momentarily bothered by that thought of her pimply, slovenly son, who locked himself up in his room with his Play Station and instant noodles. She no longer recognized him as the life that once lived inside of her.

She continued to look at the boy as he pulled off his fins and helped his grandfather clean the fish. He was wet and happy, his skin so brown it was nearly purple.

“Ma’am,” the boy spoke, “here is your fish.” It was easily four feet long and as wide as the boy’s thigh. Its mouth was wide open, revealing jagged, triangular-shaped teeth. Its eye was dark and pupil-less. It felt like a giant muscle, now relaxed under her touch. She could not say whether she was touching something alive or dead.

The breeze picked up, and her hand shot up from the fish to catch her sunhat. Grandfather motioned to the boy that it was time to start heading back.

*****

That evening she decided to turn the air conditioner off, the first time during their week-long stay. She opened the sliding door to their balcony overlooking the ocean. The sound of the sea roared into the room, and soon her arms were slightly sticky and damp from the humid sea air. She could hear the hotel band playing downstairs, a ukulele version of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If you could read my mind, love, what a tale my thoughts could tell. Just like a paperback novel, the kind the drugstores sell.”

Kenji was sound asleep. He always slept on the right side of the bed, on his right side, with his right hand hugging his left shoulder. And even though they were thousands of miles away from home, in a new bed, he did the same here. She picked up his crumpled clothes on the chair and instinctively began hanging them up, but then just dropped them back on the chair.

She crawled into bed, staring at Kenji’s back. The moan of the ocean accompanied her into sleep.

And in her dream, she is back in the boat. She peers over the side, hoping for a glimpse of the boy. She leans over too far and falls into the sea. Out of the darkness, a giant manta ray, black and white and ten feet across, swoops under her. Out of its gills come hundreds of little bubbles that merge and form one big bubble. This big bubble floats up from the manta ray and caresses her face. And suddenly she is breathing the breath of the manta and has lost all fear. She is no longer falling, she is lying on top of the manta and her hands grab the sides of its wings.

It takes her deeper into the sea. As they descend, Keiko feels herself moving backwards in time. Until she is no longer Keiko-san, 40-something, sunhat-wearing wife, but Keiko-chan, red lollypop-loving girl, who runs barefoot in the sand and dreams of marrying a wild, long-haired boy who wraps himself in seaweed and eats nothing but mochi cakes for dinner.

The manta takes her deeper still and she finds herself surrounded by schools of fish, orange, purple, and yellow. They swim circles around her head and stare into her eyes with their black, pupil-less ones. They begin nibbling at her, taking little bites of her here and there as they swim around her. The manta is now gone and Keiko realizes she has been brought down here to feed the fish. They nibble at the back of her neck, her hands, her ankles, the bottoms of her shoeless feet. She is relaxed and wonders why she never tried to get herself eaten before. She feels happy and light. She wakes herself up with the sound of her own giggling.

*****

It is their last morning on the island. The other ladies are raiding the hotel gift shop for coconut soaps, plastic leis and dolphin keychains while waiting for Mr. Hamada to come, one last time, to pick them up and take them to the airport. Kenji is with the other executives in the meeting hall, exchanging handshakes and bows, and handing each other perfectly wrapped boxes that will later be opened, forgotten, or carelessly passed off as a gift to some distant relative.

Keiko is at the pier, hoping for a glimpse of the grandfather and grandson spearfishing duo. But there is no one there except an old man, sitting on a rusty metal folding stool, holding a fishing rod.

She looks out to the bobbing boats docked at the pier, all empty vessels waiting for their fishermen to come and fill them with the life and death of their fish. The wind picks up. Her hat blows off, but she does not bother to try and catch it. She lets the breeze take it out over the ocean, where it will drift away and, she hopes, be nibbled on by curious fish.