The Last Crane of Edo
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 9: Six Weeks of Water
The first three days belonged to Miyu’s stomach.
There was no diplomatic way to say it. She was seasick with the wholehearted commitment she brought to everything, and the Pacific was unsympathetic. She lay in the cabin with a damp cloth on her forehead and the expression of a woman reconsidering every decision that had led her to this moment.
Midori sat with her, held the basin, brought water, pressed the cloth to her forehead with brisk efficient tenderness.
“I am dying,” Miyu said. For the fourth time that morning.
“You said that yesterday,” Midori said.
“Yesterday I meant it less.”
Midori wrung out the cloth. “Stop fighting the ship. Let it move you.”
“It is moving me,” Miyu said. “Violently and without my consent.”
Reggie appeared in the cabin doorway with a tin cup of weak ginger tea that the cook had prepared — an old sailor’s remedy that he’d vouched for with moderate confidence. Miyu looked at it. Looked at him. Looked at the cup again.
“Tell her it helps,” Reggie said to Midori.
“Does it?”
“Probably.”
Midori took the cup. Held it to Miyu’s lips with the patience of a woman who had been doing this since they were girls. Miyu drank with the resignation of someone who had stopped having opinions.
By the fourth day she was on deck.
By the fifth she was watching the horizon with the careful expression of a woman who had reached a truce with the ocean and intended to maintain it through sheer force of will.
By the seventh she was herself again, which meant she was watching everything and saying things behind her hand that made Midori cover her face with her sleeve.
The English lessons began in the second week.
It was Midori who organized them. She appeared one morning with her brush and paper — the same system she’d developed at the villa, Japanese characters beside Roman letters beside meaning — and sat down across from Reggie at the small table in the captain’s dining room which Captain Ward had made available to them each morning with the quiet generosity of a man who understood more than he said.
She pushed the paper across to Reggie.
“Today,” she said in English, “you will teach me ten words. Then I will teach you ten words.”
“That’s twenty words,” Reggie said.
“Yes.” She picked up her brush. “We have six weeks. That is forty-two days. At twenty words per day that is—” she calculated without hesitation, “eight hundred and forty words. Enough for conversation.”
Reggie looked at her. “You did that in your head.”
She looked back at him with the expression that said she didn’t understand why this required comment.
Miyu had installed herself at the end of the table with her own paper and brush. She was officially there to observe and learn alongside them. In practice she was there to provide commentary.
Reggie gave his ten words. Midori absorbed them with the focused precision of a woman who did not misplace information. She repeated each one until it was correct, noting the ones that required more work, moving on. Her accent was not perfect. It was better than his Japanese had been at the same stage, which he was honest enough to admit.
Then she gave her ten words. His Japanese. He worked through them with considerably less grace, the sounds requiring arrangements his mouth had not been designed for. Midori corrected him without expression. Miyu corrected him with expression.
“Again,” Midori said, for the third time on a particular word.
He said it again.
She tilted her head. Not quite right but closer. She said it herself — the correct version — watching his mouth as she said it so he could follow the shape of it.
He tried again.
Something moved at the corner of her mouth.
“Better,” she said.
Miyu said something in Japanese.
“What did she say?” Reggie asked.
“She said you make the face of a man in pain when you speak Japanese.”
“I am a man in pain when I speak Japanese.”
“Yes,” Midori said, picking up her brush. “We know.”
The storm came in the fourth week without particular warning.
Captain Ward had seen it building on the horizon for two days and said nothing to the passengers because there was nothing useful to say. When it arrived it arrived completely — the sky going green-black, the wind coming up hard and fast, the Meridian beginning to move in ways that bore no resemblance to its usual rhythm.
Reggie found Midori and Miyu in the cabin and told them to stay there. Midori looked at him with the expression she used when she was deciding whether to comply or negotiate. He used the voice he almost never used with her — firm, no room in it.
“Stay,” he said. In Japanese. One of his reliable words.
She read his face. Nodded once.
He went back on deck into weather that was trying to remove him from the ship.
The storm ran twelve hours. The Meridian took it the way she took everything — with the steady competence of a vessel that had crossed this ocean before and intended to cross it again. Three men were injured, none seriously. Two crates of cargo broke loose and were lost overboard. And below in the women’s cabin, water found its way through a gap in the hatch seal and soaked everything that hadn’t been stored in the oilskin wrapped cases.
Miyu’s market kimono. Three of them. The practical persimmon orange, the everyday teal, the amber with the maple leaves. Soaked through, the dye running, ruined beyond recovery.
When Reggie came below after the storm had passed, wrung out and salt-crusted and exhausted, he found Miyu sitting on the wet floor holding the persimmon orange kimono with the expression of a woman absorbing a small grief.
Midori stood beside her with her hand on her shoulder.
She looked at Reggie. He looked at the kimono.
“San Francisco has fabric merchants,” he said.
Kenji wasn’t there to translate. But Midori understood and told Miyu and Miyu looked up at Reggie with wet eyes and said something.
“She says,” Midori translated carefully, her English finding the words, “that it is only cloth.”
“Tell her she’s right,” Reggie said. “And tell her we’ll get more.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.