Abalone

Abalone connects the livelihood of the divers on Kuro Island with James Bond’s temporary life there: it is food gathered from the sea, a marketable catch, and the measure of Bond’s progress as he learns to dive. The harvest is painstaking rather than spectacular. Divers search by touch among seaweed-covered rocks, while the day’s growing catch records the effort of both the experienced Kissy Suzuki and her new companion.

The Harvest and Its Setting

Kissy describes a shoal known to the divers, far enough from the other boats that they can work there by themselves. Seaweed grows thick on the rocks, providing food for the abalone, but the shells are rarely visible. At a depth of about forty feet, a diver has to feel among the seaweed with her hands and dislodge what she finds with an angular pick. Finding the abalone is a matter of luck as well as skill: the diver searches by touch rather than simply spotting her catch.

The work depends on breath and repeated descents. Kissy says she can remain underwater for nearly a minute, enough time to collect two or three abalone if she finds them. She explains that James Bond will not necessarily stay down for long at first, but expects him to learn quickly. For his use she has brought her father’s goggles, whose side bulbs must be squeezed to equalize pressure between the glasses and the eyes. The details make the harvest a practiced routine, but one that requires equipment, judgment, and physical control.

Kissy’s Work and the Catch

Kissy’s diving provides the clearest view of that routine. James Bond tends the line and watches his watch; after fifty seconds, a tug tells him to pull. Kissy rises beside the boat with two large abalone in her hands, drops them into the tub, catches her breath, and prepares to dive again. The catch is built through repeated trips between the boat and the underwater search, not gathered in a single sweep.

The work belongs to a fleet of boats spread across roughly a mile of sea. From the water, the divers’ recurring whistles carry between them, while the boats rock in the slow swell. James Bond watches another young man tend a line and catches glimpses of divers surfacing. The abalone harvest thus appears as shared labor across the water, even when individual boats claim separate sites.

The catch also has a direct economic value. Kissy tells James Bond that on a lucky day she earned about thirty dollars, though she cannot count on that amount every day. She later returns from selling her shells at the market. Her work is therefore not merely an excursion or a display of diving skill: what she gathers becomes something she can sell, and the uncertainty of the day’s yield matters to her livelihood.

James Bond Learns to Dive

James Bond begins as Kissy’s line-tender and observer, anxious that he may disgrace himself when it is his turn to dive. His concern is sharpened by the demands of the work: he has been drinking sake and smoking cigarettes, neither of which he considers good preparation. His first successful descents make the catch a practical test of his ability to enter the sea and work within Kissy’s routine.

At the end of one day, the boat carries sixty-five abalone. James Bond is responsible for ten, a first catch Kissy regards as honourable. The number gives his participation a concrete measure: he has not matched the experienced diver’s work, but he has moved beyond watching and handling the line to collecting the shells himself. His hands are sore, his back aches, and his shoulders sting from sunburn. He understands the exertion as training for the swim and climb still ahead, so the day’s catch is both a livelihood and preparation for another task.

The following day the total rises to sixty-eight, largely because James Bond’s diving has improved. That increase gives the abalone a recurring role in his brief stay: each day’s harvest records a change in his competence, rather than leaving his training as an unmeasured intention. The progression remains modest and specific—ten abalone on his first day, then a better overall haul the next—but it shows him adapting to the physical work.

Food, Labor, and Material Presence

The abalone also enters the domestic life that follows the dives. After James Bond develops cramps from the exertion, Kissy tends to him at home. She walks softly along his spine to ease the ache, then takes him to the tiny bathhouse and pours hot and tepid water over him from an abalone tub. The harvested animal is present here not as a catch being counted or sold, but through the vessel used in the household’s care of him.

Across these scenes, abalone links sea, market, boat, and home. The shells take time and luck to find; the divers’ skill turns them into a substantial haul, and Kissy can sell them. For James Bond, gathering them makes an unfamiliar daily occupation into bodily training. The book’s attention to the fifty-second descent, the pick, the tub, and the changing totals gives the catch its significance through concrete work: abalone is not simply named as local food, but woven into the labor and routines that shape his days on Kuro Island.