Sachi's annual visits to Hanalei

Sachi’s annual visits to Hanalei are a long, deliberately repeated response to her son’s death in a shark attack there. Returning at the season of his death, she watches surfers from the shore year after year; the routine gives her time to live with the loss, even as her search for consolation remains unresolved.

The First Stay in Hanalei

After her son’s cremation, Sachi drove to Hanalei Bay with his ashes in a small aluminum urn. The landscape bore the marks of a powerful storm, and the surfers’ repeated journeys out to sea and back to shore held her attention even though she could not understand how they returned to a place where her son had been killed. For an hour she watched almost mechanically, feeling disconnected from both the weight of the past and the distant future. What she recognized she needed most was time.

Sachi stayed in Hanalei for a week before returning to Japan. She rented a cottage, cooked simple meals, and bought a vinyl chair, sunglasses, a hat, and sunscreen. Each day she watched the surfers; when heavy rain drove her from the beach, she sat in her car until it passed and then went back to the shore. These ordinary actions offered no quick resolution, but they established the pattern of returning and staying with the place rather than avoiding it.

A Recurring Pilgrimage

Sachi began coming back to Hanalei every year, arriving shortly before the anniversary of her son’s death and staying for three weeks. She spent her days in the same vinyl chair watching surfers. She stayed in the same cottage, ate at the same restaurant, and read. The repetitions made her visit an established rhythm, not a single attempt to overcome bereavement.

Over the years, Sachi found a few people in the town with whom she could discuss personal matters. Many residents came to recognize her as the Japanese mother whose son had been killed by a shark nearby. Her place in Hanalei was therefore both private and public: she returned to a loss that remained hers, while the town remembered her through the same loss.

Grief, Time, and Acceptance

The recurring sight of surfers did not make Sachi’s grief disappear. On the night before one return to Japan, she cried and wondered why a one-legged Japanese surfer had appeared to two young Japanese men, but not to her. The absence of that encounter felt unfair, and she remained unable to answer whether she was somehow unqualified to see him. Her grief also returned her to the knowledge of her son’s death and to the questions she could no longer ask him.

What she could accept was the advice to take the island as it was, whether its events seemed fair or unfair. The next morning she left Hanalei and resumed her life in Japan, but the annual return continued. The visits do not amount to a claim that mourning is complete: they give grief a place, a season, and a repeated form, while leaving intact the uncertainty and absence at their center.