IT HAS been ages since I left the sea.

Now I live in Tokyo, on the fringes of Setagaya. Two rundown video rental stores sit side by side in front of the station, and beside them an old tofu store and a pastry shop selling cakes and, as of five years ago, fresh-baked bread. Across the tracks, a supermarket. Its doors stay open until 10 pm. A local market used to be there, but it was torn down some years ago and the supermarket built in its place.

My husband is a transport company executive. His office is in downtown Tokyo. The company’s headquarters are in Hiroshima. He always comes home late.

How long has it been since I was handed over to my current husband? Thirty years? I can’t remember exactly.

We have four children.

The oldest boy has a job in Aichi, doing computer-related work. The next two are twins: one lives in a university dormitory in northeastern Japan while the other works at part-time jobs, crashing at his friends’ homes or, sometimes, here. The fourth child, our only daughter, dropped out of high school and now works nights in one of those video stores (the one closer to the tracks).

The fourth child can’t wake up in the morning. I took her to the hospital for a checkup, but all I got from the doctor was that she was suffering from orthostatic something or other. Is that the name of a disease, I asked? No, he said. My daughter and I trudged home carrying a mountain of vitamins and blood-strengthening medicines. Neither of us said a word.

This husband comes home late. The one before worked at home. He was a painter. I modeled for him any number of times. He saw something wild and untamed in my body, so he always made me pose naked. “Clothes don’t suit you,” he would say. “You put them to shame.” As I recall, one of his portraits of me won some sort of prize. No one talks about him anymore, though. He is totally forgotten. He had been feeding me for about twenty years when he announced he had tired of me and handed me over to my current husband.

Apparently, the artist passed away not long after that. I can’t read very well, and TV exhausts me, so I never learned exactly when or how. It was more than ten years later when, quite out of the blue, my current husband let it drop that the artist had died a long time ago. “Is that so?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered. And that was that.

The husband before the artist was a university professor, and the one prior to that was a rich merchant who owned a lot of land. I have only a vague recollection of my husbands before the war. I think a tycoon of some sort and a viscount from some place or other are mixed in there somewhere, but I can’t be certain.

So many husbands, yet until I was handed over to this one, only one child. It was born when I was with the merchant landowner, but it lived less than three years. I suppose half-human children don’t have the staying power that others do. In fact, I regarded its survival to that point as a kind of miracle.

That baby’s grave is there even now, in the cemetery at Zoshigaya. I go there occasionally to offer incense. After my daughter dropped out of school, she and I began visiting the grave from time to time during our outings. On the way back, we would stop by a dessert cafe in Ikebukuro, where she would order shiruko sweet red bean soup and I the mitsumame gelatin cubes in syrup. Then we would catch the Yamanote Line to Shinjuku and transfer to the private railroad that took us home.

TEMPTATION LURED me from the sea.

It was night. The air was warm and carried the fullness of spring. I had raised myself half out the water to breathe it all in when another, more powerful aroma wafted from the shore.

I have but a dim image of my other husbands, but my memory of the first is as clear as day.

The man had a strong odor. He was brimming with an inner fierceness. I could search the oceans, I thought, and never find another man like this one. That inner force circulated throughout his body, heating his blood. His physical presence was overpowering.

I swam to shore, leapt up on land and made a beeline for him. I couldn’t hold back, not even for a second.

I rushed up to him. He looked a little surprised, but his hesitation quickly vanished.

We spent the next few months together. His home was a rough shack on the water. The winds sometimes blew the roof away, and when the waves were high the floor was swamped.

He was a fisherman, but he was better suited to trolling for women than trolling for fish. Even after my arrival he continued playing around. Sometimes he would bring a woman back to the shack. I would sit there in the dark and watch intently as they copulated.

When they had finished, the man would always chase the woman away. Not that any of them needed much encouragement. The man’s reputation in the village was far from savory. As soon as the woman left, the man and I would waste no time setting to it ourselves. Warm breezes blew through the walls as the lapping tides slowly soaked the shack.

After six months of this, I was passed on to the boss of the village, the man the fishermen relied on. My own man was flat broke.

This new man gave off the fragrance of incense. His skin was very fair. I immediately tried to return to the sea, but to no avail. He placed a metal ring around my neck and linked it to a long chain bolted to a stake. I could move only as far as the chain allowed, which meant I couldn’t leave the room.

The furnishings of the room were luxurious, the bedding always sheathed in fine silk. In the corner was a painted screen decorated with images of beautiful kimono, and tucked behind it a fancy ceramic chamber pot for me to use.

I was angry, though, and refused to squat over that thing. But every time I made a mess, my husband thrashed me. I howled bloody murder each time that happened. He may have smelled strangely sweet, and his skin may have been fair, but he was still awfully strong.

For years, I lived chained up like that. When I shed tears of longing for the sea, the waves rose in response. Violent storms increased, and young people moved away, so the village fell on hard times.

The fishermen’s boss passed me on to my next husband. He lived in the mountains, far from the sea.

MY CURRENT husband says our fourth child is my spitting image.

She’s a strapping young woman, that’s for sure. Once, back when she was still in high school, she brought her classmates over to visit. They were all compactly built with skin darkened by the sun. They talked and laughed incessantly.

My daughter sat among them, quiet as a mouse. She seemed at a loss what to do with her body, so big and soft and white among all her tanned friends.

My first three children are all boys. Two resemble my husband, the other doesn’t. Not one of them looks like me. Only my daughter does.

The days when I would rail against my husbands, weeping and mourning my loss of the sea, ended decades ago. I came to feel almost completely human, especially after my children were born. It reached the point that, most of the time, I myself forgot that I was different.

Although my first child was sickly and died before the age of three, my four children with my current husband haven’t been sick a day in their life. They may be half-human, but they developed very much like human children. In body and in character too, they leave a distinctly human impression.

There were signs, though, that the fourth child would turn out differently. She somehow stood out from the human crowd. It wasn’t that noticeable when she was young, but as she got older it became more evident. By the time she started high school I could see how much her spirit diverged from that of the other students. It wasn’t just that she was bigger; there was also something vast and boundless about her. While years and years of training had tamed my spirit, hers was like mine once had been. Looking at her, I felt as though my original self had been reborn.

It seems that my daughter was picking up boys at her job in the video rental shop. Or maybe she was the one being picked up. She would go to their rooms, but according to her they never had sex or even fooled around. Really? I asked. Then what do you do?

We just hang out, she replied. Playing games, watching videos, sending emails.

You play games?

Yeah, one of us plays while the other talks on the cellphone.

My fourth child told me all this in snatches, with stretches of silence sandwiched in between. She doesn’t volunteer much, but she’ll answer when I ask. Her father finds it hard to deal with her, so he’s stopped trying. He comes home later and later now that the three boys aren’t around so much.

Why don’t you have sex? I asked her.

Because I don’t feel like it.

Have you ever done it?

No.

You could give it a try.

I will eventually.

My fourth child almost never misses work at the video shop. Even on her off days, she’s always willing to fill in for her colleagues if asked. The shop at night relaxes her, she says. It feels like the night sea.

I sometimes think back on the sea at night. It has been an eternity since I left.

MOST OF my husbands treated me well.

They kept me well fed and clean in fine rooms, and decked me out in nice clothes. I was always at their beck and call, like a well-maintained car in their garage.

I wanted to return to the sea as soon as possible. That awful ring around my neck was eventually removed, yet the sea grew more and more distant as I was passed from husband to husband. To reach the coast, I would have had to change trains, and I didn’t know how. I tried to escape a number of times but always failed. They quickly caught me and brought me back. Then they thrashed me. Once I had been cleaned up and beautifully clothed again, they abused me however they pleased.

As long as I didn’t try to escape, each of them was kind to me. Yet behind that kindness was an absence of any real concern, as if they were dealing with a small animal. A chilliness.

Was it something in me—that part of me that humans lacked, perhaps—that made my husbands behave in such a way? After climbing up on land, I tried so hard for so many years to fit in with my husbands, with people in general. Yet, in the end, I failed.

I came to accept my lot. As long as they treated me well, I was satisfied. My memories of the sea grew ever fainter. It was so remote. I hadn’t laid my eyes on it in such a long time. It felt like forever.

There seems to be a verbal agreement that passes between my husbands each time I am handed from one to the next. This is the injunction: “Never let her near the ocean.”

Yes, this has been their motto. She who comes from the sea must be kept from the sea. Otherwise, she will return.

All my husbands have followed this dictum. Now I am living in the Setagaya neighborhood in Tokyo. I could reach the ocean, I suppose, if I changed trains several times. But I have already forgotten what it’s like. And trying to remember that which one has forgotten is terribly painful. It’s like searching for the eye of a tiny needle at the bottom of a deep hole, only worse.

I am not human. Yet now I live completely surrounded by human beings. Having children made it that way. I no longer weep for my beloved ocean. My current husband seems not to be taking the injunction too seriously. Our children have been to the sea on several occasions. My husband is the one who took them. I always stayed at home, the excuse being that I was under the weather. The first three children embraced the sea. Only the fourth refused to go near the water. According to my husband, she wouldn’t budge an inch, stiffening her body and wailing, her face crimson.

That fourth child has a name. I told her what it was on the occasion of her first period. It is not to be rashly spoken aloud. It can be used only when absolutely necessary.

My first child has no name. Neither does the second or the third. They have human names of course, but not real names. Only the fourth child’s name came to me. It threaded its way through the night sea and the chilly air to where I lay. I had just given birth.

My legs were still spread when they took the baby and placed it on my chest to be nursed. It took to the breast with great enthusiasm, though it had just come into the world. At first the milk just oozed, but the baby sucked so hard that before long it was gushing out. Thick, rich milk dribbled from the corners of the baby’s mouth. One by one, the drops landed on my skin.

I have a real name too. None of my husbands has heard it. Not even the first. I have spoken it aloud only rarely, even back when I was living in the ocean, and to do that I had to swim to the northernmost reaches where no one lives and whisper it behind the rocks on the seabed.

Drawn to my voice, the shrimp and starfish left their hiding places and swam to me. Transparent jellyfish leisurely wove their way through my long, trailing hair. Although I was living in the ocean, I had never really taken to it. I didn’t mix much with those like me, but chose to roam the northern waters alone. I told no one my name, and no one told me theirs. On and on I swam through the frigid sea, silently mingling with its creatures.

My fourth child stands behind the counter of the video rental store, so large and pale and out of place. I sometimes walk down to the station at night just to get a glimpse of her. I don’t go inside, but stand a bit away in a spot that affords a view of the bright interior. A woman coming home from work passes through the station wicket and is sucked into the store. A young man on a bicycle emerges from the dark streets and is sucked in as well. My fourth child barely notices them passing before the counter, as if gazing out at an endless landscape.

I quietly call her name as I watch her from the darkness. Bathed in the fluorescent lights, she has no idea I am there. Their brightness makes her form blurry, indistinct. There in the cold light, she seems to be melting away.

After a while I head home. My husband isn’t back yet. He seldom catches even the last train these days. Sometimes I am awakened by the closing of a taxi door, but by three in the morning, the hour of the Ox, I am fast asleep. A few hours later, my fourth child comes home after her shift. Our house is used to these late-night comings and goings. Small night creatures squeeze in through the tiny holes in the wall. The trapped air of day seeps into the great outdoors through the cracks in the windows. In my bed, I sense past husbands riding the night air to reach me. They spin about me in circles, gather on the ceiling. When morning comes, they will go back to where they came from. In my dreams, I try to picture their faces. But they are all so vague. Like the firefly squid of the northern sea, they flash on and off, off and on, always eluding my grasp.

My own name is half-forgotten. It has been so very long since I tried to remember it.

I HAVE been close to the sea only once in all these years.

My husband at the time was a strange man. He was seldom home. Instead, he lived on the road, seeking out the heart of the mountains and the ends of the sea. Whatever he brought back he crammed into his house, his private citadel. Marble busts of women and men. Fabrics of all colors. Roots of trees. Stuffed animals, examples of the taxidermist’s art. Rattan baskets with lids. Old leather-bound books. Atlases.

He was not at home when I was passed on to him. One month elapsed, then two, and still he had not appeared. I staved off starvation by drinking quantities of tap water. When there is no food, I am quite able to subsist on water alone.

Then one day the taps went dry. Apparently, my husband hadn’t paid his water bill. There was a river nearby, so I went out to soak in it. We were in a city, though, so it was encased in concrete and had wire fencing strung along its banks. I had to wait until night, when no one was around. I climbed over the fence, shed my clothes, and hopped in. The river was shallow. Water weeds longer than my hair twined about my arms and legs. Large carp poked my sides as I drank. The water tasted awful.

The river grew wider and deeper as I floated downstream. I passed schools of carp, big and small. They stayed in a single place, while I was moving.

How long did I drift before I realized I was nearing the ocean? Several days, perhaps. When I smelled it on the air I began to grow worried. No, a voice inside me was whispering. You shouldn’t return to the ocean yet. It was autumn. Rows of soft clouds ranged high above me, a mackerel sky. As I floated along on my back, I thought no, the time has not yet come. The ocean was tempting me, though. Just as my first husband had. My body was being pulled in its direction. But my heart stood opposed. This clash continued for some time.

Finally, I reversed course and began to swim upstream. Slowly at first, then more rapidly. Schools of small fish made way for me as my streamlined form cut through the water. It had been so long since I swam like that. My whole body rejoiced, from my fingertips to my flanks, my crotch to my toes. Now I was flying through the water, my hair streaming behind.

It was late at night when I arrived at my husband’s home. I was lying there, my wet hair spread out on the floor, when he came back.

“Welcome home,” I said.

“Is it you?” he said. “Can it really be you?” He dropped his big backpack on the floor and began fondling my body, exploring every part with his hands. I had just emerged from the water, so I was stark naked.

“You were trying to go back to the ocean, weren’t you,” he said. His fondling grew rougher. I knew his behavior was outrageous, but I let him do what he wanted. After all, I had been handed over to him.

He kept at me throughout the night, abusing my body as he pleased. I didn’t feel anything. None of the elation I had experienced with my first husband remained, not a speck. When light returned to the sky and the red, overripe sun began to ooze over the horizon, he finally released me.

From then until he departed on his next trip, my husband rarely used me, and then only as if he had suddenly recalled my presence. Instead, I was left to lie unwanted like all the other objects he had collected on his travels.

I slept quietly among his sculptures. Those of women usually portrayed the upper half, those of men the lower.

When I opened my eyes, he was often seated at a desk in the middle of the room, eating or smoking a cigarette, or jotting something down on manuscript paper. All I could see from where I lay was his back. It was thick and struck me as somehow desolate.

The night before he left on his next trip, he handed me over to my next husband. First, he stripped me naked and jammed me into a crate. Then, heedless of its weight, he hoisted the crate on his shoulder and carried me all the way to my new home. My body was twisted every which way, my limbs at all angles—I could barely breathe as I bounced along.

When we arrived at my new husband’s home, my old husband threw the crate down on the floor of the entranceway. My hair popped out one end, my feet out the other. My new husband cried out in surprise. I had smelled the sea while in the crate. The odor came from my own body.

I crawled from the crate. I looked up at my former husband’s face. It showed no emotion whatsoever. My new husband thanked him, and he left. I kept my eye fixed on that thick, somehow desolate back as it disappeared down the road.

“A STORM is coming,” my fourth child says.

“Even though it’s winter?” I ask.

“It’s a really big one,” she says, shaking her head. “We’ve got to escape.”

“Escape to where?”

“To the ocean.”

Startled, I look at her face. Flames are shooting from its center. There should be no flames, yet there they are. Her face is shining. At that moment I realize she is about to leave for good. The other three had left, but they still came back from time to time. This one wouldn’t. I would never see her again.

“What will you do when you reach the ocean?” I ask.

“I don’t know. But I’m half from the ocean anyway. Originally.”

“There’s nothing there,” I say.

“There’s nothing here on land either.”

“There are men, aren’t there?”

“Yeah, such as they are.”

Such as they are. For many long years men have looked after me, passed me around, made me do their bidding. I want to tell all that to my daughter, but I doubt she will understand. Then why didn’t you leave earlier? she’ll ask. The fact you didn’t leave means that you really didn’t want to. What could I possibly say in my defense?

I tried to remember my first man. But I couldn’t. Why have I spent so long so far from the sea? I thought of the husband with the desolate back who had jammed me into a crate and carried me off. Was he still scouring the ends of the earth in his search? Or had he died long ago?

That husband had lavished my body with endless caresses before he packed me in the crate. Each of my husbands seemed to have grown sad as time passed, regarding me with eyes of unquenchable longing. Once he had climaxed inside me, though, this one briskly crammed me in a box, deaf to my groans. I’ll show you what real suffering is, he muttered as he jammed me further in.

Were any of them from the sea? Did any have true names?

A storm is on the way. Every night my fourth child says this.

WHEN THE storm finally hits, it blacks out our whole neighborhood. Both video shops in front of the station close their shutters. The supermarket closes before its usual 10 pm too. I grab my umbrella and walk to pick up my fourth child at her workplace to take her home. The wind is strong—it’s all I can do to hang on to the umbrella. The awning of the video shop is flapping madly. Eyes sparkling, my child is standing beneath the wet and darkened awning. She is drenched too.

I stop and look at her from a slight distance. Water is streaming from her large white body. She is laughing happily. As the rain pelts her, I can hear her peals of laughter.

“Are you leaving?” I ask her.

“You bet,” she answers with a laugh.

“Don’t go.”

“I’m going.”

“But there’s nothing good about the ocean.”

“You needn’t worry about me.”

Still laughing, she runs out into the rain. I stand and watch her, still from a distance. My child is leaving me. My eyes take in nothing but her. Her back is growing smaller. The way she runs is strange—she seems to be dancing, yet there is something uncertain in her stride. When she reaches the river beyond the tracks she leaps in headfirst, not bothering to remove her clothes. The river is a torrent in the storm.

I see her head sink beneath the surface, then rise again. She is drifting away with the current, but I am rooted to the spot. I try calling her back, but my voice is lost in the wind. I can’t even hear it myself.

Soon she is out of sight. I call her by her true name. I can feel a trace of her return. It timidly joins me under my umbrella. For a second, her warmth envelops me. Then she is gone. I weep.

The blackout lasts all night. My husband doesn’t come home. I lie on our bed thinking of the fish that live in the sand at the bottom of the ocean, their almost imperceptible movements.

“I WANT to go to the sea.”

“The sea?” my husband says.

“Take me there,” I ask him.

“What will you do there?”

“Return. I want to return.”

“So, the time has come, then.”

My husband puts me in the car, and we set off for the sea. A gale is blowing. It has been blowing nonstop since the night my fourth child left. We drive from Setagaya to Tamagawa Avenue, then get on the Metropolitan Expressway. The wind pounds the side of the car, making it shake. When we reach the Tomei Highway the traffic suddenly gets heavier.

At Atsugi, we exit the expressway and take a road through the mountains to Oiso.

“You seem to know the way,” I say to my husband. He nods.

“I come here sometimes,” he says.

“Why?”

“To look at the ocean,” he says. Sadness is written on his face. He too is yearning for something.

The wind is getting stronger and stronger. Not a soul can be seen on the beach at Oiso. The fishing boats are moored out on the water. The sky is leaden. A dull light stretches out from the horizon.

“Are you all right with me going back?” I ask my husband.

“That which comes from the ocean must return to the ocean,” he answers. “Keeping you here has been exhausting for all of us,” he continues. “Go ahead—I won’t try to stop you.”

Hearing those words makes me weak in the knees. I have forgotten the sea for so long. Indeed, I am hard put to recall my true name.

The trees on the other side of the road are whipping back and forth in the wind. The sign for a fishermen’s lodge comes crashing to the ground. I put my foot in the water, my body shaking. The image of my fourth child’s form melting under the video shop’s fluorescent lights comes back to me with perfect clarity. I can feel the water soaking my shoes. Where in the ocean would my child be by now?

Quietly, I step out further. A few steps away from shore. Now the water reaches my thighs.

I can hear the shoreline murmuring loudly. All sorts of things are being blown about in the wind. Hundreds of winged insects are plastered to my body.

Now the water is up to my neck. Is my husband still watching me from the beach?

I look back, but the waves block my view. My clothes have melted away at some point, and a jet-black pelt is beginning to cover my body. The smell of the sea envelops me. I can feel my forelegs and my hindlegs sprouting muscles and my torso thickening. My neck is growing longer; a thick mane sprouts from my head.

I am a sea horse once again, swimming the seas. I pass the moored fishing boats and race toward the horizon, gaining momentum as I go. Days and nights pass as I speed along. When I reach the northern reaches of the ocean, I can picture my fourth child swimming ahead. Her laughter rings in my ears. On and on I run. To that point in the ocean where day and night come to an end.