“It’s Heaven,” Kana’s uncle said, hands proudly on his hips while I watched the movement in the water, “for people who love sharks.”
Kana had insisted her uncle raised “sharks” in this pond tucked in the middle of a Japanese mountain range. But at only around thirty centimeters long in what had to be fresh water, these couldn’t be the sharks I knew. “Sharks” had to have been some slippage of meaning between Japanese and English. Weren’t they just fish after all? But, on second inspection, maybe they were sharks. Glistening scales like ancient sea-dwellers out of some kid’s book on prehistoric beasts, vivid illustrations of dubious scientific accuracy. Their bony fins cut through the water, scales crossed the ages, teeth devoured my doubt. It was as if, like skillfully growing and pruning a forest of bonsai trees, Kana’s family had, over hundreds or thousands or millions of years, cultivated a compact descendent of an ancient shark (or something) and kept it exclusively in this mountain pond. “What are they,” I asked, “exactly?” He and Kana conferred in a local dialect I’d never heard. Rapid, argumentative tones. Then the uncle turned back to me, chin in hand as his eyes searched his brow for linguistic clarity: “Hmm, I think they are… sharks.”
Since I’d been in Japan, eating whatever was put in front of me had been a point of pride. First of all, I didn’t want to offend people who’d so generously welcomed me into their world and shared their food. Second, I wanted to shed the meat-and-potatoes limitation many Midwesterners suffered, tourists stampeding to the nearest McDonalds in Spain or the Hard Rock Café Paris. But most importantly, I didn’t want to be put to shame. Some locals had an impulse (one I could understand) to try to shock-initiate me to the culture through dishes that challenged the average foreigner. There may also have been a dash of cultural machismo when those overworked salary-boomers were able to drop a cocky young westerner down a peg with a mere plate of raw fish. But I was not that guy.
So, I ate the horse sushi my boss ordered me just minutes after arriving in the country. Later, when meeting my evening English article class, I gulped down bottles of mettle-testing nihonshu my boss had sent to my table. And over the next months, I forced my way through stewed tripe and salted offal, sank my teeth into grilled chicken uterus, and even came to like seared ray fin and fried chicken cartilage. When a man of my father’s generation ordered for both of us a plate of raw chicken parts—unregulated, surely, and a questionable roll of the dice even to the adventurous diner—I snapped my chopsticks into the salty pile of hearts. Later, my boss, satisfied with my commitment, warned me never to eat that again. If I survived the day.
Soon, I went out of my way to tackle these culinary dares, so part of me leapt at Kana’s invitation, dreaming of “sharks” swimming in my belly. Not that I was particularly interested in sharks. I’d heard the vaunted Chinese shark fin soup was not worth its steep price. But the way Kana’s eyes gleamed when she described the location—an offbeat little shark preserve in the mountains—got me interested. I was sure that genuine, mountain-raised sharks, maybe the only of their kind in the world, would be worthwhile. After I’d seen the spiny little relics, I couldn’t stop fantasizing about their prehistoric flavor. But as it turned out, Kana’s uncle would not be serving shark.
The afternoon we arrived, Kana’s uncle went to town for a couple hours and returned, truck bed weighted down with the bristly corpse of a wild boar. While Kana and I lounged with her relatives in the steamy August breeze, her uncle butchered the boar, and the sharks patrolled the pond, maybe excited at the faint tinge of blood in the air. Kana whipped a hand fan and, tiring of that, billowed her t-shirt in front of an electric fan, her words diced into thin morsels by the whirling current: iiiiiittt suuuuuu rrree iiiiii sssssss hooo oooo ooo ooooot. Our skin glistened as we emptied glasses of tea and then cans of beer. When it got too hot to bear, Kana’s cousins— male and female twins of the same name, Kaoru—squirted us with translucent lime green water pistols. We stood assassinated, dripping in the yard, a constellation of gem-colored dragonflies whirring about us.
By dinnertime, the summer had nearly wrenched me dry, and I wanted light, refreshing fare. Grilled shark with greens. Chilled shark soup with noodles. Shark sashimi with glasses of rice wine. Anything but what arrived: wild boar hot pot, known otherwise as botan nabe for the sliced boar’s peony-like arrangement. A cauldron meal fit for a snowy winter’s night—not for a day when you might sweat your last idea into the pot. The stew was perfectly delicious, though I started—perhaps from the boiling heat, or Kana’s infectious laughter with her happy-go-lucky relatives, or the never-ending waves of beer splashing into my glass— to imagine scaly delicacies under the broth.
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Kana’s uncle set us up with separate futons, Kana’s in a guest room, mine in the living room by the large window overlooking the yard and the pond. Kana and I had been inching back and forth between platonic and romantic, stealing touches and hurried kisses when inebriated enough to act the next time as if we hadn’t. We were lazy and noncommittal about such things, so it was easy for us when her uncle was similarly nonchalant. But after I’d tucked in for the night, Kana dipped through the dark and slid onto my futon. Her touch felt like one of those winter hand-warmers—chemically hot, almost enough to burn. Was this the power of wild boar coursing through her veins? Underneath the scent of nightly skincare products lingered the slightest aroma of hot pot. A strange but not unpleasant blend of clean and wild. Despite the heat, we fooled around a little, as quietly as possible. “You keep looking outside,” she said. I was going to say I wasn’t sure we should do this at her uncle’s, but her habit of wearing proper pajamas—silky with big plastic buttons—made me tell the truth: “I keep thinking about the sharks.” I thought this might annoy her, but she just nodded and slinked off to grab our shoes, which we slipped over bare feet, darting silently out the sliding back window.
The night air was thick with rattling, whistling insects, the sound like ancient background radiation or the cosmic hum of our planet, unchanged for probably millions of years. It felt like nature was reaching out to us as we shuffled to the pond. The night on the mountain was so dense I felt it might swallow us up into history itself. “I get it,” she said as we kneeled, peering into the dark water, alcohol still pulsing inside. “When you crave something, you can’t think about anything else.”
That she didn’t think this impulse of mine utterly crazy probably pushed me on. Or maybe it was the mountain air. Wild boars resting up for tomorrow’s rampage on local farms. The ancient insectoid whisper: doooo iiiiiiit. Bear-style, I slashed my hand through the waters and, both of us amazed, managed to snatch one of the vaunted sharks. Blood roared in my ears, drool welled up in my mouth, and with the bugs and boars and Kana as my witness, I prepared to bite down on the wild, thrashing shark.
“You’re bleeding!” Kana said. Adrenaline had blocked it out, but she was right: these sharks were even sharper than they looked, and the thrashing body had lacerated my palm and fingers. Dripping blood had gathered a mosh pit of hungry shark allies. There was a faint light in Kaoru and Kaoru’s room where perhaps they were watching the crazy foreigner playing bear in the yard with Kana. And with an awareness of that family, my resolve shifted: I didn’t need to rip my mouth to shreds eating this bony shark alive. I would not cross into the utterly animal, and I would not taste the secret prehistoric flavors. I held the shark just a bit longer, realizing this was the summit of my food challenge, and I would walk away without reaching it, not fully. What would it be like to harbor that craving? Desire frozen in history, swimming circles in a pond outside your time. The shark whipped its body about, slashing me once more, and fell to the water. The porous divide between human and animal, between me and history returned, and my hunger, for the moment, subsided.
Kana led me back to the futon, our fingers interlaced, a newborn, bloody, ten-legged carnivore.
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There were real sharks in the Okinawan waters, but we never saw one. Neither did we see the dreaded venomous Habu—except coiled inside bottles of liqueur. We could have hit the aquarium for some bull sharks and whale sharks and what else but, when we could both get the time off work, we preferred the sands. The plots of paperbacks dissolving in sun and Orion beer. Local fare: coconut crab, stir-fried bitter melon, caviar-like sea grapes with glasses of brain-melting awamori liquor, and stewed pork that couldn’t quite replicate the effects of that wild boar. Then bed, together. Windows open, bodies welcoming the gentle breeze. This was our insatiable craving.
More than the food or romance or liquor, though, it’s the beaches I remember. I found myself scanning the horizon, looking for triangular shapes jutting out of the waves. If Kana caught me, she’d hum the Jaws theme or jolt me with the touch of an icy can to my neck. When the heat proved too much, we waded out into the ocean together. Kana would dive under the surface and paddle around me, nipping at whatever parts of me her hands could find. Then she’d splash out of the salty waters, hair clinging about her face, and come in close. We had this game. Shelooked over my hand, tracing those shark scars as if reading some altered destiny in my palm. Then she ran her hands over my skin, and I explored her body as well. We were checking for rough, scaly skin. Shoulders, arms, back, abdomen, chest, thighs. When other swimmers weren’t looking, she play-bit my shoulder, and I’d recall that night with the shark inches from my teeth. She wriggled about in my arms like that shark thrashing for its life. Once, something on Kana caught my hand the wrong way. I felt the sting of saltwater and found my hand bleeding from some razor-thin, almost invisible wound.
“You have to be more careful,” Kana said, taking my hand. “They might really come find us.” She tightened her grip until several drops of blood hit the seawater. Then, she gave the cut a kiss, and then me, and we held each other there, iron on our lips. Air rich with salt. And waited until we were hungry.
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James Sullivan is the author of Harboring (ELJ Editions). His stories and essays have appeared in Cimarron Review, New Ohio Review, Third Coast, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, and Fourteen Hills among other publications. In 2022, he was a finalist for the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. Connect on Twitter @jfsullivan4th.