"In Okinawa all Myagi know two things, fish and karate,"
2014
Living somewhere in the middle of the country, far from the calming influence of the Pacific Ocean, Daniel looked toward the horizon and saw land. Just land. Land filled with country farm houses and rows of corn and dirt roads, dry and dusty and unmoving. He longed for the sea.
He fought again with the woman he thought he loved, but her sharp tongue and narrowed eyes made him doubt it sometimes. He drummed his fingernails on the wooden table top and they were still bitten down and ragged around the edges.
Things were falling apart again. He went from mediocre job to mediocre job, never doing anything he wanted to do, never getting anywhere. But he understood that he had no idea of where to go. It's hard to reach your destination when you don't have one. He'd been fighting with this woman for a long time, for years. They no longer even pretended to be pleasant. He narrowed his dark eyes at her, his head down. He was failing her in some way he could barely comprehend.
He needed something. He was out of balance. He thought of going to New Jersey, to relatives he hadn't seen in decades and had barely known even when he was there. He thought of his mother, who had gone back to the East Coast and met a man and moved in with him. Daniel had met him once or twice and never minded him, but he was his mother's romantic love affair, and he was nothing to him. He didn't want to intrude on his mother's exciting new life. He listened to the shrill tones of his significant other berating him again, and he couldn't say he didn't deserve it. It was what happened when you fell out of balance. He closed his eyes, felt the dull throbbing of a headache as it beat behind his temples.
And in a flash of calm where he swore he could smell the salt brine of the sea, he thought of Mr. Myagi. He thought of how he had been falling apart when he first moved to Receda, how he would have fallen off the edge if Mr. Myagi hadn't been there to pull him back. He opened his eyes and saw the clouds of dust outside the window, saw the chipping paint along the windowsill, and he longed for the long grasses that lined the seashore. He longed for one wise word from Mr. Myagi, that way he had had of confusing him but then making things clear. He longed for some of that clarity now.
"Daniel! I just can't stand this, I can't take this anymore," she said, and he noticed the lines around her eyes and mouth, the sharp crease between her eyes. He'd noticed the gray that was shot through his own dark hair, the drawn look to his face. He felt so old sometimes, so used up and worn out.
"I'm just, I'm gonna leave," she said, and she grabbed her heavy leather purse and keys and went out the door, slamming it behind her. The slam of the door seemed to echo in his head, and it seemed to mean the end of so many things. He stared at the closed door and wondered what she meant by saying she was leaving. Would she be back? Was she going to cool off? Or was she gone for good?
He stood up slowly, feeling a creaking in the bones of his back. Without meaning to he assumed one of the karate stances he had learned so many years ago and hadn't used since, and it felt almost right. It nearly succeeded in calming his mind. That mind that had been riled up for years. That mind that had reeled in the almost daily fights he'd been having with that infuriating woman. That mind that had lost its way, lost its balance. He closed his eyes and breathed, breathed deep, breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. He could feel himself relaxing. He decided he would go to Mr. Myagi. He didn't know if he was even still alive, but he would go and stare at the grave by the seashore if that was all that was left. He needed the negative ions of the ocean and he needed the California coastline and he needed to try and find himself again.
He thought his rotted little car would make the trip, and he set out in it like men before him had set out in creaky little crafts upon the open sea. As the miles burned away beneath the bald tires and the radio played little tunes he might have remembered, he thought he might be feeling better. He still got headaches, still felt the little steel hammers pounding on his temples, and he still bit his nails right to the quick, not even conscious of doing it. But as the roads changed and the scenery changed he found the headaches becoming less frequent. He even found himself singing along with the radio once or twice.
He headed steadily toward Receda and Mr. Myagi's house, fully aware that he might not be there or he might be dead. It didn't scare him. He'd deal with whatever he found. Days later and late at night he was pulling into the lot where Mr. Myagi's house was located, and he saw the same house sitting on the same tract of land, saw the intricate wooden porches and the Japanese screens and the glow of the lights from within and he knew in his heart that Mr. Myagi was still here, he wasn't dead and he wasn't in a nursing home. He was here. He parked the car and headed toward the house.
He went up to the door and knocked, shifting from foot to foot. He didn't feel nervous exactly, but he felt something. He felt a kind of expectation he couldn't describe. He tried to breathe but found himself holding his breath.
The door swung open and Mr. Myagi was standing there. Age had made him smaller, more angular, and the hair he had left had turned pure white. His eyes gazed down at him, the same dark and kind eyes he remembered from his tumultuous teenage life. He felt like that teenager still, one who was beaten and frightened and angry and coming undone.
"Daniel-san?" he questioned softly, and Daniel nodded, feeling unable to speak. He felt the warm California air wrap itself around him and he could smell the ocean and he inhaled it.
"What are you doing here?" Mr. Myagi said, not unkindly, and still Daniel couldn't speak, couldn't articulate it, and he shook his head.
"I don't, I'm not sure, I just, uh, came here…"he stammered out his answer and felt the tears rising up in his eyes.
"Come in, come in," Mr. Myagi said, swinging the door wide, and instead of being enveloped in a hug he bowed down to him slightly, and Daniel could see in his eyes that he was happy to see him, almost near tears himself. He bowed in return, and he felt that he was home.
"Here, spare bed always ready in case of refugee," Mr. Myagi said, and Daniel nodded and headed for the bed, and before he left Mr. Myagi turned around in the doorway, his hand on the light switch.
"Get up early tomorrow, we go fishing, that okay with you, Daniel-san?" he said.
"Yeah, that's good," he said. He fell into a deep sleep, deeper than he had slept in years.
Out on the boat, the sky pink and gold with the dawn, the water transparent blue and undulating softly, fishing poles in the water, Mr. Myagi turned to him.
"You know Daniel-san, karate not always the answer to life problems, especially when older and problems change,"
Daniel watched his fishing line move with the waves.
"When older it not usually other people who beat you up and try to kill you, it usually you who do that to yourself, you think so, Daniel-san?"
Daniel considered his life in the past few decades and nodded that that was true. It would be easier to have an enemy like Johnny Lawrence again, one he could see and define, one whose punches and kicks he could feel. He was still beat up, but he couldn't tell where the blows were coming from.
"Now you must take lesson from fish," Mr. Myagi said, tugging on his fishing line, "you need patience and perseverance to win against the fish, not just fighting skills. The fight with the fish is brief, not half of what fishing is," Daniel felt himself getting confused again, like he had when he was a teenager, but now he embraced this confusion instead of fighting against it.
"And it not only a fight, it understanding that the fish life reflect your own, that you travel currents like the fish, you subsist on the meat of the fish or the roots in the ground or the animals in the pastures or the sky, that everything a part of everything, even you. If you not happy, Daniel-san, you need to look at your life and not ignore it, not go on like the current of your life not matter," He sat back and let the fishing line drift, and Daniel resisted the urge to tug on his own line.
The morning wore on, the pink of the sky gave way to blue, and Daniel pulled a fish into the boat. It stared at him with its unblinking eyes. Mr. Myagi smiled at him and patted his back.
"You see this fish? He give his life for you. You can do the same with your life. You can give it to sustain someone else, or you can travel the currents you choose. You must choose, Daniel-san. You must look deep inside and see the current you need to travel, make your soul quiet like underwater. When answer to things come from inside you, answer right. Go now, be like fish, contemplate the way you need to go,"
There was no answer yet, Daniel thought as he gutted and cleaned the fish under Mr. Myagi's direction. He knew they would eat it tonight in the lantern glow of his backyard. He knew he had a lot of work to do, and he felt his guidance shift from the action of karate to the flow and currents of the fish, and he thought of the fish as they flashed under the water and traveled rivers and oceans and lakes and ponds and fish tanks. He would follow in their wake to discover the meanings of his life, and when he looked up from his current task of readying the fish for consumption, he saw the slightest smile in Mr. Myagi's eyes.