The River Fisher's DaughterBy Kirk Marshall
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The crow that mimics a cormorant is drowned. – Japanese proverb.
The prows of our boats glide over the river’s glass-striated violet surface, cleaving a path through the entanglement of the bulrushes, and carving up the marshes.
My father hunches, staunch and reverent, over the supple breadth of the oar shafts, his eyes baleful and white like the heat of the season, squinting to locate the contours and schema of fish, flat and disinvested of angles beneath the refraction of the water. Lanterns – real ones devised from paper and balsa or camphor limb – hiss like enormous dragonflies out over the surface of the river’s meander.
We drip tails of flame onto the water, arabesques of dwindling fire as we sidle with disarming stealth into the rage of irresolute dark. The river is aglow now with the distant advance of our lazy, candle-wheeling convoy, tiny figures of canoe-like design consuming the bowl of the silent estuary with a softly phosphorous glint.
There could be dragons or water spirits coiling beneath our keel, but my father seems content in his grim way, his gaunt and vivid face hot with the kerosene vapour of our light, grinning with his gaze downcast into the blade of the river’s edge.
I sit and shiver, hugging my knees; the vast cool depths of the landscape, upon which we swarm with our fantails and cloth sails, transmitting its chill through the water and into my bones. My leg-iron – clasped around my meatless shanks – only worsening the viral freeze creeping beneath my sinew like the calcium in my bones, too deeply steeled within, so that my mouth chatters when there are no words to express.
My father had once been the king of this wetland. All through the political ferment of the sixties, his toil-ravened head had been an emblem of the bounty that comes of a lifetime of devoted industry, a message that was proselytised by the state and forged in kanji and hiragana on the backs of coins, stamped into metal: be like Katsu Nakamura, the ukai fisherman to whom the state is indebted for the merchant catch or fish-produce he’s been supplying to the people for in excess of two decades, and you too would be recognised as a patriotic contributor and rewarded for your efforts!
But my father never secured his likeness in copper, or alloy, or the sterling of the state. On the 25th of May, 1972, a week preceding the throes of that year’s fishing season, the governmental wind shifted; cormorant-fishing was determined to be ‘a technologically inefficient and economically unsustainable trade’ in the wake of ‘a legislative push for globalised, international commerce in speculative industries’ that would strengthen diplomatic relations with the first-world merchant powers: so community business collapsed ‘to compete with centralised trade futures’, and people forgot about my father.
He was left, depleted and incapable of maintaining mass clientele in any viable way; a wraith deprived of company on a river that simply refused to feed the world. He began assuming a tortured configuration, plundering the gloss from the water with violent oars, until he realised that there was a demand for his penniless skill that would return the sounds of mirth and coins twinkling to the banks of the Nagara.
Being both a bastard and lacking imagination, my father would never promote himself as an adaptable animal – and nor could he compel himself to embrace modern, twentieth-century vocational homogeny over the traditional disciplines of his forefathers without first begrudging it – but he understood the vitality of endorsement, the need for cultivating a social brand, and he made certain to act on the conviction.
He swapped trade for tourism, and with a slow inevitability entirely proportionate to my father’s surly transition, the business started trickling back! All that had been necessary or germane to alter was the rationale behind catching the fish, but with initiative comes expectations to excel.
My father was the first successful – and correspondingly socially enviable – pioneer of the ukai tourist venture in the Gifu region, and as with the trajectories of all high-flying maverick innovators, my father’s journey was one distorted by the consequences of accomplishment.
Soon, thousands of tourist traps and dinky, idealistic, one-vessel operations surfaced from the riverbed of financial ruin, and cormorant-fishermen waded out of their positions of disgrace, embracing their new status as entrepreneurially viable as a blessing of the tide.
But it was my father who was responsible, and he was forgotten all over once more.
*
It has been seven months since I last saw my father happy; seven months, two weeks and four days since the immensity of his personal grief but public desecration had been lifted from the intersection of his brow, fleetingly enough for there to form a smile – a token of weary-hopeful reckoning – to exonerate our losses.
One smile, like a clap of orange thunder. For we have not worked to profit throughout the entirety of this stint in subsistence living: my father’s self-imposed sentence is the consummate performance of a dramatist who has taken on the embodification of our river’s losses, has seized ownership of the region’s fish famine as his own private trauma, so that one can identify the sickness of the riverbed in the suffering eye of the man.
One smile, like lavender milk. One smile and the basin would teem with life once more, the perch would russet and skate in shoals through the green-cunning waters of the Nagara spillway, the lotuses would float in sutras above the lilies and the parrot-oleanders, the shapes of human torpedoes in lemon bathing suits would spring unbidden once more – swimmers in their millions! – and hot amazake would sweeten the mooring posts at the banks another time. But that is the music of all successful fables: they compel us to maintain the vital and barbarous delusion that resolution exists to reconcile the storm and cruelty of human sadness.
I will tell you it doesn’t. I will tell you that if it did, my father would still be king of this river. Not a scorned admirer, a vigilant addict, a broken mage slaving over the surface of this corrupted artery of water, attempting to resurrect the thousands of fish that died months ago.
My father is no estuarine luminary: only a romantic fool. I will not see that smile again, while I still breathe and tremble.
If I did, I’m sure the apparatus to accomplish the task would be already damaged beyond repair. If I did, I’m certain it’d be like confronting a shark on a sleepy spring morning. One smile, like a clap of orange thunder.
It starts to rain, and our lamps strobe once, before extinguishing.
*
Smoke emerges from the ripples in white pythons of sulphur mist, and my eyes sting in the restored cavern-dark which now settles over the accelerating lake.
Our boats knock like knuckles with one another – sit there, in a tangle of fishing equipment and departing light, hoarse fire-fondled commands issued and hissed between the sweating monster pageant of rival fisherman the whole span of the Nagara; everyone too humble to betray our cause, which is to hunt the dwindling communities of filament-sensitive perch hollyhocking in their droves beneath our keels, fish with streamlined sinews of fear feeding through the water; everyone too cold to grit their teeth and welcome the bracing cold baptism.
The rain buckets down; there is no more precise metric to quantify the splintering froth breaking upon our shoulders.
I cough snot and spit rain, the mist steaming out of me like a forge as I gasp, but my father remembers monsoonal perils that endured for weeks in his early years navigating this river, when the surrounding marshland and its canopy of mountains would filter the channels of rain into a now-defunct sorghum mill that once claimed domain over the docking points, its hydroelectric blades fuelled by the sudden flood: this is not rain to him. It is drizzle, the piss of an absentminded dog, not even that. He sits, in a half-crouch of monk solitude, and relishes the beating.
I watch him, unbelieving, his skin exhaling fog like a frog, freezing and insane, and I watch without a momentary conflict as I submit to the same downpour, curl at the bottom of the boat and do the same; blood making wrath like families do hearts, in the font of my skull.
We sit and shiver through the storm. This is why fishermen possess an admiration for the bitter symphonies of the wild: they, too, have to endure it. This is why people pretend the food that they eat, or the entertainment they enjoy while travelling are things disinvested of human struggle: for to remember is to admit nature holds one over us.
This is why a river fisher’s daughter stays: her father’s tears are too deep to wade through without a guide.
Some broken sound lurches from my throat, a fragmentary calque thefted from another defunct language, an accusation from the snarling part of me that is mostly animal; one grief-fallowed phrase, the argot of loss.
My father winces: he, alone, understands the defamation contained in a misshapen silence.
Eels coil around the blades of our oars, spoils of pelagic-green deities with gargoyle faces and the svelte sickle-shape swarm dancing in nebulae-clusters beneath our keels; they follow our lights like moths, too blind to navigate by anything but electromagnetic distortion in the water, and by our falchions of tulip-fire above – and my reflection dapples their flesh. I suddenly remember the carnie, though he’s not yet uttered a word to either my father or I since alighting the coracle, and I twist to study his prismatic face in the halo-climb of night.
The carnie’s green eyes flash and strobe: there is both demon and crow submerged within him somewhere.
‘Your father, there, is an admirable fisherman,’ he croaks in his mutant-tongue, smiling between the flickers. It is a venomous Japanese patois: imagine a dog reciting a prayer and you are halfway there. ‘He does not appear to need you. Not like he claims to, not without fighting his own better judgement.’
This seems to represent some robust and sweet-teethed joke, because willow-bands of moonlight make a prison of his grin, and the laughter rattles between the bars. The carnie plunges a fist into the devil-stark red bane of hair sculling his skull. ‘Back in Galway, see, where I fare, if’n a briny old sea-freak of lord-like fisherman stock such as the Nakamuras, all paranoid and fraggled by the evils of the deep, netted or ensnared a pretty, sick critter such as befallen your father in the form of you,’ the carnie warns, berserk with delight, ‘he’d as soon as sell your hide to the most lucrative bid, lest you doom the man’s trade, and his pride, to a watery-slaughtery grave.’
The spit at the corners of his cryptic smirk reminds me of whitebait listing in ocean foam. My teeth chatter less in colder weather. But my father cannot intervene, for he speaks less Japanese than our Irish charter-partner, less Japanese than the cormorant brooding in its cage. The gaijin ghost with his maple-lake hair remains my only speech-gifted interlocutor: an Irish opportunist with a rotten heart in a foreign land, the vestige of my faith in the lusts of life still preserved.
‘Bajesus if the moon ain’t like an exploded aorta tonight.’ This the carnie says in his own tongue, and I cannot know what it means. But our gazes lock, and I fear the repercussions of the moon’s blood mixing with my own tonight, if I don’t succeed in defending my father’s wager with this man.
In every boat the breadth of the river, a choreographed intimacy is witnessed: the cormorants are released from their cage – it is less a cell than it is a shallow chickenwire hutch – and stirred from their pump-throated submission from the mouth of their enclosures with the aid of a crude trident fashioned from metal and fibreglass – a prawning-spear – to the fore of the boat.
Herded to the prow, and soulful with lung-bellows of contempt, the cormorants mew like giant gulls, refining their coats of slick diamond-tweed plumage with the blade-edge of their beaks until they’re whittled of brittle ends: transformed from threadbare to cavalier, they inflate their feathered frames across the five-hundred-square-kilometre bowl of the estuary.
The Nagara rattles with the brays of nocturnal conversation: the cormorants squall and debate, and as with every night during the thrall of monsoon season, the river becomes a rookery from which fish surge in their pixel-eclipsed shoals, millions of newly-spawned bream parsing through the current, upon which my father sits with eyes aflood. This river is in his blood. His blood is in me. This turbulent and spectacular scene, more vivid than your heaviest regret, can do nothing to assuage my fright. I’m expected to work in cooperation with my father’s prize bird tonight whilst the Irish shylock oversees my success with a scorn-misted, disfavourable eye. The reasons are few.
I was obligated to collaborate – for that was the most faithful and representative term – with my father’s captive cormorant to successfully net a fifty-kilogram trawl of thrashing, frenzy-dervished bluefin or freshwater perch: this was my great skill, my prowess to compare with my father’s own, and the incontrovertible rationale as to why I now shunted shackles on my feet.
I was a freak. My father did not possess a monstrous heart nor a stomach shrunken with vitriol or spleen and disfavour to abhor my crippled soul, my impossible and elemental disfigurements; he did not shun my webbed feet, my prolapsed spine, my subhuman but ecstatically rare gills which gird my breasts, nor the stink of my scaled exterior as it shed nests of hair to summon imbricated blue flesh from within my mistaken frame. His face has not lost its coppery lustre, and his sage-smoked gaze still fulminates with tenderness for my broken guise.
I used to love him: we now exist to remind each other of the way time betrays and collapses such achievements. And if I don’t prove my worth tonight, as I’m compelled to do every night, my father will finally sell me to the Irishman with the purple thistle in his voice and the eyeteeth that shine like runes cast in a bluff of waking embers, and he will pocket the shackle-key which grants me my freedom in the prehistoric channel of the Nagara forever.
If I do not catch fish with the bird, I am to become counterfeit currency, a spurious myth on which disgust will earn me my meals. This is a kind of exploitation, the way I live my life to please my father’s dwindled humanity, but it is preferable to a plight as a circus attraction. The Irishman, and his wallet, think otherwise. It should sicken me – of this I am salient, and incapable of disputing, even with all best deceits colonising my mind – but I am only half-human. The rest of me is claimed by the fish. It is not so unusual to be exploited as a fish; it is not so uncondoned.
I slink out of my shackle as my father unclasps me. The cormorant and I form a team, as we do always, in a convergence most analogous with osprey and iguana: the bond is brief, and forged for sweeter flesh. The Irishman’s name is Conway Jag. His red hair reminds me of zooplankton that froths from underwater fissures which he won’t ever see. But his heart reminds me of a storm, the way it envelops your own intimate horizon without a fleeting reception, when he places his gaijin hand on the arch of my neck and whispers, ‘Go get ’em, tiger.’
I feel vacant of all revulsion. It is the first hand to offer its warmth in perhaps five years. Fish cannot cry, for salt is the air in which they plunge and wheel. It is closer to suggest that a fish feels the most pain when it is left to gasp and founder, at the touch of its tormentor, in free air. This only lasts for a few more seconds, and then I am untethered in a churn of river water. There is no sound but flight.
*
The cormorant, a kaiten missile fanging through the green and screen-murky channel, careening out of orbit within a pace of my bottle-white face, its wings reclaimed by the water so that in their place were flippers which propelled the bird with great clarified bursts of power and speed – with negligible drag and superior steerage.
I followed suit, in pursuit, legs extended to simulate the stratagems of a swimming frog, arms akimbo as I slowly tumbled, forged, capered closer to the river’s bottom. A pleiades of lime and dirt engulfed me, the silt like space-junk blinding me of vision and wisdom. The Nagara seemed to toll like a majestic, bygone ocean-bell, drumming up scum in symphonies of dense, earthy colour, but I kicked with an elegant desperation deeper into the snarls of mangrove roots, my nose streaming chains of pearled air, and soon I was lamping along, making like a candle through the black heat of the river’s dark service.
Fish ignited in front of me, waging tiny fires of spry and glossy resistance, each one both a torch and a target, like the ghosts in a game of Pac-Man, each one stamped with the illiterate signature of the jungle, as hues and gradients clashed in epic array.
I have done this a thousand times now, two thousand, ten: the trick is to discard both language and tense, and to vault through the cathedral of this bounty-bleached river. I am a river fisher’s daughter, a shepherd to the artful and darting herds, and the cormorant is my collie, or perhaps my lure, my vibrant constellation of speed and motion, and the fish do know us, but they do not fear us; there is only denial and the base instinct of the pack, which is to outwit and elude our shadows, but we are leaders for speed, forever full-thruster, batting through the undertow with the vanity of all predators. You’ve not witnessed such terrifying confrontation, the soft fuel of a million quick breaths, the uncatchable fire that we represent, the zip-a-dee-doo-dah deliverance of the swiftest moving mass converging with the most unsuspecting fish in the Nagara’s brimming element ever before. But we prevail, and we administer every reserve we possess, and we cut buttery beams through the furthest islands of night until the entirety of the river is snapping with gangster-shoals in their bullet-convoys.
I am proud, for I will win back my father’s will, his conviction in the bright reckoning that we ukai can still exact a change on this world, his belief that a fisherman constitutes the only honest ambassador between the hopes and traumas of the population who glut our riverbanks, and the scale-dappled people who swim and spawn beneath them.
I am proud because today I won’t be claimed by a circus, and my father’s boat sold upriver, to compensate for the premature extinction of the Nagara. And Conway will be compelled to relent when the final trawl is quantified on weighing-scales at the brushfire newness of dawn, when it is apparent that there is more than fifty kilograms of catch in our net, and he will have to return to that Irish violence of green soil he claims is his home, and forego his occupation as a freakshow scout and roustabout, and maybe tomorrow my father’s face will begin appearing, as though an immaculate intervention, on the sides of coins the country over. But this is all just speculation. There is something about dreams acquiring the hallmarks of heightened legitimacy when you’re surfing beneath it, the burning tapers of a small fishing fleet fracturing the undersurface of the Nagara, and the percussive sound of the oars chafing the hulls of our tiny vessels with the same rewarding tremolo of history’s dormant sorghum mill suddenly awakening to the buzz of industry.
I watch the world above metastasise into a beautiful cataract of sunlight in my peripheries, and when I break for the surface the body of an Irish tyrant eddies by, caught up in the wake and churn of my father’s departing boat, the water around the dethroned rogue having retained a thrumming red lustre: to better match his octopoid hair, the blood flooding my nostrils, the forsaken oar skating across the grade of the estuary, and a virgin freedom bestowed to me which sends the locusts in the grove blistering into song.
I am a river fish. The dead man will be picked of all flesh by the muster of a single week.
Kirk Marshall (@AttackRetweet) is a Brisbane-born writer and teacher living in Melbourne, Australia. He has written for more than eighty publications, both in Australia and overseas, including "Vol. 1 Brooklyn" (U.S.A.), "Word Riot" (U.S.A.), "3:AM" Magazine (France), "Le Zaporogue" (France/Denmark), "(Short) Fiction Collective" (U.S.A.), "The Vein" (U.S.A.), "Danse Macabre" (U.S.A.), "WHOLE BEAST RAG" (U.S.A.), "Gone Lawn" (U.S.A.), "The Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review" (U.S.A.), "The Journal of Unlikely Entomology" (U.S.A.) and "Kizuna: Fiction for Japan" (Japan). He edits "Red Leaves", the English-language / Japanese bi-lingual literary journal. He now suffers migraines in two languages.
Other works by Kirk Marshall in AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought:
"Wolf Tickets Through the Feral Winter" (excerpt from Feverglades)
"Brass Tyrant and the American Thirst" (excerpt from Feverglades)