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He was born and raised on the seashore. The place was so beautiful when Fujimoto was a little boy. A village wedged between rolling hills, pale sandstone cliffs overlooking sandy beaches where the waves caress the shore. In summer, the sea and the sand shimmered in the sun, and when Fujimoto first set foot on the beach, he believed treasures lay at the bottom. Later he realized that it was the whole sea that was a treasure. His great pleasure was to run as fast as possible from the old Shinto temple built on the highest cliff to end up lying on the beach, his knees all scratched, and then to jump into the water after he trapped his clothes under a heavy stone.
Fujimoto's childhood greatest tragedy was that his parents' house didn't face the sea directly. You couldn't even smell it. If he wanted to see the sea, he had to climb through his parents' window, hang on to the ivy, and crawl on the roof. When he was caught, a monumental spanking awaited him once downstairs. His other tragedy was that everyone at home was convinced that he loved fish, grilled, fried or raw. He loved the sea so, he should love seafood, or so they say. As they were poor, he ate it anyway, but he wanted to puke. Once he was alone in his room, he always cried. His last problem was that his father was a mason, unlike most of the other children's fathers in the village, and that he did not even have a small boat. Fujimoto despaired of getting away from the coast before he was an old man as wrinkled as his grandmother.
Other than that, it was paradise for a little boy like him. After school, he would collect seashells on the beach and watch the little fish dance in puddles where the tide had trapped them. Sometimes, he took them in his hands to return them to the sea. And when it was vacation, he went down at dawn to observe the thousand and one tones of the ocean. His father had to come and drag him home, or Fujimoto would have slept on the sand to see the sea colours under the full moon. The summer when he was six years old, the only day he didn't go to the beach was the tsunami day, and he spent it glued to his parents' window, hoping the wind would blow away the houses and trees that hid the sea from him. He wanted to see her unleashed.
He couldn't tell when things had started to change. It was the bomb's fault, his father said. His mother never questioned anything and shrugged her shoulders. His grandmother was smiling and nodding her head as if she knew a strange secret. She often did that, his grandmother.
At first, little Fujimoto could no longer pick up small fish in the puddles, not alive at least. On the delicate sand, instead of shells, he discovered pieces of glass and plastic. Then, there were black marks on the rocks and fish and jellyfish dying on the shore. So many of them. After school, Fujimoto spent more and more time picking up the tiny corpses on the beach to take them where the current would carry them out to sea, to return them to their mother. He was crying as he released them. He was cleaning the rocks while the other children laughed at him. First, they threw stones at him, then trash when they realized it made him scream more, even though they were just old plastic bags. He was rushing to pick them up before they polluted the sea. Of course, they find it fun to harass him and to force him to start over. One kid even put dead fish in his school locker. Others decided to outmatched him and filled his house's mailbox with dead fish and seaweed every night for a week.
Little Fujimoto wept over every dead fish and oil stain. If adults had agreed, he would have stopped going to school altogether to deal with the damage himself. Knowing the list of Japan's emperors or his multiplications could not help him save the bay. Only music found favour in his eyes. During class time, he quickly stopped listening to look out the window, and he tried to guess what kind of monster could possibly want to harm the sea. If it wasn't the bomb, it must have been a gigantic monster, one higher than the cliff and who decided to destroy the sea to replace it with something else. He didn't know what, but he hated the monster. Everyone laughed when he talked about it, except his grandmother.
One morning, his mother had to go to the next town for a doctor's appointment with the grandmother. She suggested bringing Fujimoto. He would protest and say that if he couldn't stay home alone, he could always go to the beach, as usual. Then his grandmother said that he could wait for them at the port near the doctor's place. Everyone knew that it was the largest port on the island. Fujimoto immediately stopped objecting.
On the excursion's day, he was ready at dawn. Excited, he pulled his grandmother by the hand to the bus stop despite his mother's reproaches. He spent the entire trip glued to the window, watching the sea between the trees. When they got off the bus, they walked to the port, and when he saw him on the corner of the street from the station, Fujimoto froze. The port was ten times, twenty times bigger than he imagined. His grandmother laughed and gently pushed him to move forward again.
There was a bench facing the larger boats. His mother made him sit there and gave him her watch, ordering him to wait, to stay here and to be good. Fujimoto promised and kept his word for a good ten minutes. Sadly, he couldn't see the whole harbour from where he was. Fujimoto knew he probably wouldn't be back for a long time, so he had to be sure he had seen all of it. Besides, there was an unpleasant smell floating in the air, and Fujimoto wanted to get away from it. So he got up and went to see the sailors unloading boxes.
"I'll be a sailor when I'm a grownup", he told them.
"Go away, kid, you're bothering us."
Fujimoto had a supply of cookies in his small bag, some money borrowed from his mother's wallet, and a big needle to mend the nets he had borrowed from some village's fisherman. He hoped to find a boat that would take a cabin boy and had taken the needle to show he was serious. He decided he should not talk about it to these men. They would mock him like the children. He took a few steps and went to see the next boat. It was filthy.
"It must be good sailing all day," he said to a sailor who was unloading a fishnet.
"Not when you spend the night waiting for those fuckers to show up."
The sailor lost all interest in the child. He removed a crab from his net and violently threw it back into the sea. It was not the right boat either, so Fujimoto walked away. He didn't want a fishing boat anyway. He wanted to go on an exploration ship.
The others boats were all the same, dirty, stinking, and full of nasty sailors. Fujimoto was starting to think he didn't like ports. Finally, he asked a sailor what that awful scent everywhere was.
"Fuel oil. No navigation without fuel oil."
Seized with a sudden inspiration, Fujimoto asked another question.
"Is that what leaves black marks everywhere?"
"What else?" Replied the sailor, unconcerned.
"We must stop doing that! It hurts the sea."
"She can deal with it. Me and the men, we need money to eat. You can't earn money on a sailboat."
Fujimoto looked at him in dread. Then he saw someone on the following boat throwing old wooden and plastic crates into the harbour under the indifferent gaze of passers-by. Fujimoto ran to the bench where he was to wait for his mother and stayed there crying until she came to pick him up, eyes closed to not see the sailors pollute the sea.
That same evening, at dinner, his parents informed him that his grandmother was very ill and could die soon. He nodded indifferently and went back to his soup. He had no more tears to give at the moment.
His father shook him.
"You could give your grandmother a little compassion. We just told you that she's ill."
"The sea is sick too, but you don't cry for her", he replied.
The slap he received hurt him less than what he had seen in the harbour.
His grandmother joined him in the evening, long after he had been sent to bed without a meal. She sat on his bed and stared at the drawings of fish he had fixed all over the walls.
"Who destroys the sea?", she asked him.
"All of you!" He cried.
"Not me", his grandmother said, with a toothless smile. "When I was your age, I spent all my time in the forest behind the village. I was in love with the woods."
"What forest?"
She smiled sadly, and Fujimoto understood. He could see an immense forest, the tops of its trees moving as if pushed by an invisible wave and the men cutting her, burning her and killing her, laughing all along.
"They cut down the last tree ten years ago. I failed to protect her as I swore I would, but you might be able to help the sea. I don't have much time left, and I was never very good at it, but I can still teach you what I know about magic."
Fujimoto had never seen his grandmother moving around without a large, heavy bag. From it, she took out a long, twisted log.
"If you follow the path of magic, you will have to give up many things. There is a price to pay. I would die if I lost that piece of wood. It's all that is left from my dear forest. You must understand. If you go on this path, you'll have to say by the sea or carry her with you."
It suited the child perfectly. He nodded earnestly, accepting everything, the magic, the responsibilities and the price to pay. The sea had to be protected. He had always thought she had to be magical, and he was glad he could do more for her. When his grandmother began to explain to him what she knew, he leaned forward eagerly to make sure he remembered everything.
It was by the sea that he stood while his grandmother was buried. She had fought valiantly against her illness, determined not to leave until he knew as much as she did. The family must have been outraged by his absence, but Fujimoto didn't care. That day, he renounced the world of men and his parents' house for good.
He was too old to run from the old temple to the beach. Also, the beach was disappearing, eaten away by tides and pollution. Offshore, the boats released their waste which came crashing into it. They laughed at the port, those of the village and those of the city. Fujimoto hated them all, fishermen, sailors and all those humans who shrug their shoulders when he tried to convince them to take care of the sea. It was progress, they said. It had been a long time since he gave up any hope of convincing them. Mankind could not be saved. Humans were amused by their excesses and always rejected more trash.
Fujimoto walked along the coastal path, glaring at the few people lounging on the rocks, noxious garbage spread around them. Children threw stones at him when he lingered near them to pick up the papers and plastics that would otherwise suffocate fish. In the distance, a boat scraped the ocean floor with its net, destroying the living environment of hundreds of other animals and an entire ecosystem ten thousand times older than its killers.
Fujimoto would have stayed longer in the past, refusing to go to the next cove before it was thoroughly cleaned up. But now he had a plan, which he hadn't told anyone about, even his poor grandmother. He knew why she had failed. She was trying to save her forest, but she believed that men could learn from their mistakes and live in harmony with nature. Fujimoto loved her, but the old woman was wrong. Forests, oceans, rivers, mountains, and glaciers could not prosper as long as man exploited them and believed himself more powerful than nature. Fujimoto refused to be part of this race of destroyers. He would teach them the power of the sea, even if they paid that lesson with their lives. For too long, men had prided themselves on dominating the sea. They would learn to be humble. If they survived.
Finally, Fujimoto reached the most secluded cove in the bay. No one went there, beside him. You had to climb down a section of a cliff and then swim to reach it. For years, he had brought there what was needed to build his own boat. It was ugly and didn't sink solely through Fujimoto's magic. And if he had stolen to make it, it was from humans stealing from the sea. One day, he would even have his own submarine so that he wouldn't have to endure human life anymore. If the sea agreed, he would take just enough of the wealth left by the humans at the bottom of the sea to move his plans forward. The greed of humans would help him.
Fujimoto climbed aboard his boat and set off. For the first time in a long time, he felt happy. No bawling humans, no pollution, just good sea air. He leaned down until he could dip his hands in the water.
Silently, he swore never to belong to anything but the sea, to serve it to restore her to her past glory and to separate himself definitively from humanity.
At first, silence alone answered him. But, after a few minutes, a current from the depths seized his boat and propelled him further from the land. He eventually found himself out of sight of the coast, above water so clear he could almost see the seabed, hundreds of meters below him. Fish swam there that he had never seen except as skeletons in books, more beautiful and more powerful than he had ever dreamed of. Some were supposed to have died long before mankind's birth. Fujimoto began to cry with joy. He would have liked to dive and swim to them. His magic allowed him to do it, but he dared not go without permission. He waited.
From the bottom of the ocean rose a huge multicoloured wave. The water took on a golden shade, and a face appeared under Fujimoto's boat, gigantic and serene. The smile the goddess gave him would have knocked him over the edge if he wasn't safe where he was standing, kneeling inside the boat. Two gigantic lips brushed his hand. Fujimoto shivered. The vision was too intense for his poor eyes. He had to close them and silently offer his thanks, his promises and his prayers to the sea. A watery laugh echoed in his ears, then a wave lifted the boat. Fujimoto had to grab hold of the rail to keep from falling.
When he opened his eyes again, the sea had darkened. He could only guess shapes far below him. He laughed, confident he had the approval of the ocean to pursue his plans. Already he felt different. The sea had always drawn him, but now, it was physical. He knew he couldn't get more than a few steps away from the ocean now, and soon he would need the constant contact of saltwater on his skin to survive. He wasn't totally human anymore, and that was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
He even got more than he hoped for since She had offered him the grace of her presence. She was more beautiful than he had ever dreamed of as a child and the mere thought of that marvellous face made him shiver.
It was far offshore that he fell in love with the sea for good. He had never been so happy.