Sekolah menengah atas khusus perempuanku kadang-kadang didatangi oleh kepiting. Pertama kali aku melihatnya muncul adalah pada tahun pertamaku, pada hari yang hujan di awal musim panas. Kepiting itu merayap di sepanjang salah satu trotoar luar, di mana udara tebal dan lembap menggantung dekat tanah. Mata abu-hijau muncul dari cangkang bulat kecilnya yang berwarna pasir, dan kakinya mengeluarkan bunyi goyah yang lembut. Aku berhenti di tempatku, hampir menabrak seorang teman sekelas yang mengikuti di belakangku. Dia menatapku dengan tatapan mencurigakan. Aku membuka mulut untuk menjelaskan, tetapi lidaku terasa kering dan kata-kata tersangkut di tenggorokanku. Sebelum aku bisa berkata apa-apa, kepiting itu merayap pergi. Alis tipis teman sekelasku berkerut karena kesal.
From what I could tell, the crabs came from a nearby river. Tall reeds grew along the embankments on both sides, and even though the shoreline was supposedly far away, I was certain I could sense the presence of the sea. The water level rose and fell daily, the cycles gradually shifting over the course of the month. Sometimes only the tips of the reeds and the seed heads were visible, poking above the murky water, and other times the reeds stood fully exposed, with a clear view of crabs clambering around their bases. Every morning, after leaving the station, I crossed the river on a bridge. I never saw a single crab on the way to the bridge, but from that point on, as I made my way closer to the school, countless crabs lay crushed on the road. The sun roasted their shells, emitting a terrible stench. Crows pecked at both the living and the dead crabs, and cars shattered the shells into tiny fragments. Any crabs that managed to survive and reach the school would wander through the corridors, the schoolyard, the flower beds, and even the classrooms. To me, they seemed lost, traveling from place to place as though in search of something. Whenever I spotted one, my eyes would lock on to it. The other students would warily watch me. Perhaps they were more aware of the crabs than I was, avoiding them or pretending that they didn’t exist. Even if a crab was right in front of them, they would refuse to acknowledge it, continuing on their way and lowering their voices. And when it would’ve been easy to simply step over the crab, they would instead walk around it in exaggerated fashion, or burst into wild laughter and screams. If a crab found its way into their indoor slippers, instead of shaking it out or removing it, they would enter the school in just their socks. Crab shells, whole and in pieces, turned up all over the school, to be swept away with the dust and fallen leaves and other litter, placed in a trash bag, and carried off behind the buildings to the incinerator. In those days, the incineration was handled by the school janitor, a thickset, middle-aged woman. The students called her “the old girl,” and even some of the teachers called her that too—“Someone go get the old girl to clean up this broken glass.” “Hey, you know what she does sometimes, that old girl?” One day, I overheard two students chatting quietly during a weekly cleanup shift. “She throws live crabs straight into the incinerator. Just grabs them with her tongs and tosses them in. You can smell them—it’s very strong, and briny.” “Really? That’s creepy.” “I wonder why she does it.” “That old girl has had a really hard life.” “How old do you think she is?” “Maybe sixty? Seventy? But to do that to crabs . . .” I strained to hear their conversation, but the next minute they began to discuss the PE teacher, who many of the girls had a crush on. “Did you know Hara-sensei came second in track-and-field in his college championships? He was this close to competing nationally!” “How cool is that?!” “If he hadn’t gotten that leg injury . . . he’d still be training.” “He still looks sooo ripped.” I’d once seen the PE teacher step on a crab in the corridor. It was hard to tell if it was an accident or if he did it on purpose, but the way he kicked the shattered shell off the back of his heel seemed strangely well practiced. His sweatpants clung tightly to his muscular calves. Hara-sensei always had a green-apple fragrance wafting about him. “That shampoo of his—how can anything smell that good!” “And that curly hair!” “Where can I buy that shampoo?” “What, you want to smell like him?” “What if he notices? Well? What does that matter!”
One day, after PE class, Hara-sensei chose me to put all the equipment away. I wasn’t particularly good at sports, so most likely it was a random choice. But it seemed to cause a commotion among my classmates. He was grinning slyly too—his narrow, angular chin, perfectly shaved, glinted in the sunlight reflecting off the sports field. After putting away the equipment, I walked back, skirting the edge of the campus. Something caught my eye beyond a cluster of bushes and trees: a rectangular block, roughly knee-high, about six inches wide on each side, jutting out of the ground. It appeared to be made of granite, with white speckles on a gray background, and the corners seemed worn down or eroded. One side was engraved with letters, but the inscription was hard to read, the markings were faded, almost as if they’d been scraped off. For some reason, I’d never noticed it before. The shadows of the trees swaying in the breeze flickered across it. It looked like a gravestone, but much smaller. “What are you doing?” The voice startled me so much that I stopped breathing. The school janitor emerged from a gap in the trees, smiling cheerfully. She wore overalls and a straw hat, and had a towel draped around her neck and pruning shears in her hands. Sweat glistened on the white foundation smeared across her face. “What are you doing?” she repeated. I hesitated. “I saw this.” My voice was hoarse: It’d been a while since I’d spoken to anyone. I pointed to the grave marker at our feet. “Did you fall over it?” she asked. “Sorry?” “You didn’t trip on it?” I knew that I was the clumsiest student in my class, but even I wouldn’t have fallen over something that small. I shook my head and the janitor’s cheerful expression returned. “Good. You wouldn’t want to trip over that and hurt yourself.” “What is it?” I asked. My heart was pounding. “It’s a marker. For where the old shoreline used to be,” she said simply, and snipped the tip off a branch of pale-pink berries with her shears. “The shoreline?” “These areas have been filled in so many times that the sea’s been pushed way out, but it used to come all the way up to this point.” She gestured with her shears to the school grounds, where moments ago girls had been running and jumping. “The sea there. A wide beach there.” A wind swept across the dry, brown grass, kicking up tiny grains of sand like powdered sugar. It was midday break, and the grounds were deserted. On the other side of the field, the entrance to the gymnasium shed was a dark hole. “It’s strange, when you think about it,” the janitor continued. “Dumping earth and sand into the sea, tamping it down, building a school and houses and roads everywhere, divvying the land up, and living there, without any concern at all.” So, I thought, there used to be sea here. I glanced down at my sneakers. White shoes were a school requirement, but mine were scuffed and gray. The janitor resumed snapping at the bushes with her shears—tiny, clear quartz beads scattered. “When I was a child, this whole area had already been filled in. See those low-rise huts for the construction workers? I was about your age when they were working in that area. Back then, they built it by lugging whatever they had into the sea—junk, trash, and that sort of thing—and covering it with sand. When the trash reached the level of the water, they brought in horses and made them walk in circles all over it. The ground level would sink, the water would seep up, and the horses’ hooves would trudge through mud. Then they brought in more sand by truck . . . Can you imagine such methods nowadays? Horses toiling away through mud . . .” “Wow,” I breathed. “It is strange, isn’t it.” “Very. And for you, it may seem like the distant past, but to me it happened almost yesterday. When I was young, they told us that it was polluted up here, and the soil was rotten. But when my parents were kids, they used to collect shellfish on the beach here and cook them right over there.” And crabs, too? I wondered. There must’ve been hundreds of them, running all over these sand dunes. The janitor squinted into the distance, shielding her eyes from the sun with a hand. I shielded my eyes and looked in the same direction. Roof after roof of ramshackle buildings. The sea had once been there? It seemed unbelievable. “And they’re still at it. They’re still trying to fill in the sea and make more land. When are they going to stop? And what’s the point, when the population is shrinking? When I had my daughter, I thought, Surely by the time she’s grown, they’ll have stopped with the landfill. But no. If anything, it’s happening even more.” “Wait, so you have a child?” I asked. It seemed so unexpected. She chuckled. “A child, yes.” And then: “Shouldn’t you be heading back? You’re going to miss lunch.” “All right!” “You should eat more. You’re way too skinny. Put on a bit of weight. You’re delicate. Life’s about being strong. You’re going to understand that, any day now.” “I am?” “Yes. Any day now, and in all the years ahead. You girls have no idea what’s coming.” The janitor resumed steadily snipping the bushes with her shears. “I feel sorry for you.” “What do you mean?” “Oh . . . nothing. Nothing. You’ve got all kinds of things to look forward to.” The clipped berries lay around the marker like the petals of a flower. So, this had all been the sea. The shoreline had come all the way up here. That must be why the crabs made their visits. In the past the shoreline had been here, even if it had disappeared decades or perhaps hundreds of years ago: The crabs had been coming since time immemorial. Something deep and instinctive was calling them back. Once they arrived here, they’d find that there was no sea, and they would wander around not knowing what to do. I opened the classroom door. Voices, voices, voices, chirping, screeching, rising high to a crescendo, dipping low for a moment, then soaring straight up again. The smell of food drifted from lunch boxes. I walked up to my desk. Atop my neatly folded school uniform on the desk was a crab. A dead crab, turned toward me. I stared at it. The voices took on a more frenetic tone. Here and there I could hear little sounds of ridicule directed at me. I took the crab in my hand. It was all in one piece, its legs and pincers were intact. It was dry and weighed nothing. Unmistakably dead, it looked like a perfect specimen for the lab. The classroom gradually quieted down. I stared at its two dull, sand-colored eyes. For a second, I was sure I saw my own reflection in their damp surface. I imagined its muscles, muddy and wet with water from the sea, as it ran across the shining dunes. A classmate who had probably gone out to the school store walked in and froze, sensing the strange shift in the atmosphere. Everyone was staring with bated breath at the quietest and plainest girl in the entire class, maybe in the entire school, standing there in her gym shorts, with whatever it was in her palm. “What’s going on?” she mouthed. Quickly, before anyone could respond, I picked up the crab, set it down next to my uniform on my desk, and, with brisk efficiency, changed out of my gym clothes. As I buttoned up my blouse, the classroom erupted back into chatter. Once I was fully dressed, I slipped the crab into a pocket in the pleats of my skirt. Someone hissed loudly through her teeth. The crab fit neatly into my pocket, a thin, light, barely discernible presence. I’d already been walking around with my head bowed—I was never going to lift it now. On my way home, I stopped on the bridge and threw the crab into the river. The shell was so light that the breeze carried it for a moment before it dropped straight down. Just before it sank beneath the water, I thought I saw a flicker of movement in its pincer. Was it the river, or did my palms smell of the sea? It reminded me of blood. After that day, from time to time, I went to look at that stone marker of the shoreline. There was nothing really there. I never ran into anyone. It was a secluded place, surrounded by trees and the school grounds, the buildings out of sight. One day, I spread out a large handkerchief, sat down, and tried to see if I could sense the waves beneath me, the tides, the pull of the current. But I felt nothing. The ground was firm, layers and layers of dry earth. A single crab crossed in front of me. Its underside was smeared with sand. It moved slowly, as if exhausted, as if some mechanism inside it had broken, and yet it was trying to keep going, sidling along. Above me, the sky was fringed with trees. I touched the sand on my fingertips and raised them to my tongue—they didn’t taste salty or dry. At the bottom edge of the marker, a few centimeters from the base, I noticed something red. I lay on my stomach and crawled closer, peering at it. Five round nodules, each about a centimeter wide, clustered together like grapes, were stuck to the stone. Their surfaces were slightly bumpy, and they had a firm texture, like rubber. Inside, I saw liquid, part of it dark red, the other pink. In color and shape, they were strikingly like salmon roe. Slightly hard salmon roe . . . So, some kind of creature’s eggs? I thought of the crab that had just crossed my path. Could these belong to that crab? It must’ve come up to lay them on the shoreline and bury them in the dunes or in some crevice in the rock. That’s what it was, I thought—the mystery was solved. Tiny creatures like crabs and ants traveled huge distances, encountering all sorts of dangers—driven by the instinct to lay eggs and reproduce at any cost. This was the sole purpose of their brief existence. It simply wasn’t in their nature to be aware of how pointless this effort was, how it was full of pain and struggle. I looked around. The crab was gone: It was nowhere to be seen, even though it had seemed exhausted and about to die when I’d seen it moments before. I couldn’t see any trace of it: There was no shell lying anywhere. Using my fingernail, I pried the eggs from the stone. They popped off with a little click. They didn’t break in my fingers. The liquid inside glinted in the sunlight as I tipped them sideways, the red segments remaining distinct from the pink segments. Each bead seemed like a tiny world, a tiny universe. I slipped the eggs into my pocket and picked up the handkerchief I had been sitting on in the sand. It was damp with moisture.
By the time I got to university, I’d become more capable of talking to people. At a party, I found myself in conversation with a biology major. We barely knew each other—we’d only spoken once or twice—but in the privacy afforded by the noise all around us, I ended up telling him about the crabs. It was the first time I’d ever told anyone. I described how they came to my school in search of the sea, how the shoreline had once been there but wasn’t any longer, how I’d found a cluster of red crab eggs. He listened, nodding along, but when I mentioned the eggs, he burst out laughing. He held a shochu sour in one hand. “No way. That’s impossible,” he declared. “Huh?” “Those couldn’t have been the eggs of a crab. Crabs keep their eggs tucked in a cavity under their bodies. They carry tens of thousands of them because so many fail to survive. The tiny eggs are transparent like plankton and they hatch as soon as they’re released into the sea. Crabs would never lay eggs that big, for a start, and they would never deposit them on dry land. I’m no specialist in crustaceans, but I can say with one hundred percent certainty that those weren’t crab eggs.” And yet I was sure of what I saw. They couldn’t have been anything else. “They must’ve been eggs of some other animal. And you don’t know if they were even eggs. You say they were red and round and springy? You probably just found some kind of toy.” They were eggs. No mistake about it. And they were not a toy. They were the eggs of a living creature. I remembered how smooth they’d felt, how firm and unmistakably alive. Which other creature would have laid its eggs in such a place—which other creature would have had that distant memory of a shoreline buried deep inside? “Female crabs.” “Huh?” “So you’re saying that the crabs showing up in your school were exclusively females. And they were all just about to lay their eggs. And all following an innate biological drive. Right?” “Yeah, that’s right.” I gave a small nod. “But logically, if that was the only place they could lay their eggs, they would’ve gone extinct long ago. Think of all the decades since the landfill started.” “. . . Right.” I drained the last few drops of my drink. Ice banged against my upper lip. “And on top of that, you say you used to see tons of crabs at school, but if you’re right, you would’ve noticed the eggs before, and in other places as well.” It was true. I’d looked out for them, but I’d only seen eggs there once, that one time. “I really don’t understand it myself . . .” I could hear my voice getting higher. I was speaking haltingly, the words wanting to come out in a rush. He waved to a waiter for a refill of his shochu sour. I crunched my ice. “And what happened to those eggs in the end? You put them in your pocket, and then what . . . ?” “I threw them into the river, too.” “You threw something else in?” “No, no. I mean I just threw them away. I wanted them to end up close to the water.” “And what happened?” “I don’t know. They dropped down, floated up for a second, and then sank to the bottom.” He looked down, holding back laughter. His big, wet, horselike teeth flashed briefly. “The library is bound to have an encyclopedia of crustaceans. You won’t be able to borrow it, but why don’t you see if you can find your crabs there?” He squeezed his lemon wedge into his drink, spraying a sour moisture into the air. I wiped my fingers with my handkerchief. “I mean it,” he added. “Do it. High school girl discovers hitherto unknown crab species.” “I’m not in high school.” “But you were then. Though I can’t guess how you looked in your school uniform, Kana-chan.” “Me? Very ordinary.” “Right.” A strained laugh escaped him, dan dari bawah kemeja flanel kotak-kotaknya yang kusam, aku mencium bau keringatnya yang kuat.
On my next trip home, I visited the river. I took the train
to the station and walked along the familiar route. A yellow bulldozer was parked diagonally on the embankment. Otherwise, the scene from the bridge was just as I’d remembered: tall reeds swaying, the river full of smooth, brownish water. A flock of sparrows had gathered in the reeds, chirping noisily. They would land on the tips of the reeds, pulling them down with their weight, then immediately flutter up, repeating the same motion, as if playing some kind of game. It looked like harmless behavior—a group of sparrows doing the same thing over and over, all chirping and chattering excitedly. A single sparrow’s chirp was soft, but a whole group together created an unpleasant cacophony. I watched from the bridge, gazing dreamily, when suddenly, in between the reed tips, something long and pointed broke through the surface of the water—it was white, and pronged, and thick. Alarmed, I stared at it: a huge crab claw, its serrated pincers interlocked, the outer edges a sandy orange color, strands of seaweed tangled on its rough surface. Any crab that large would have to be a monster: The claw was the size of a human child. The sparrows fluttered into the air, wings beating against each other in panic. But one of them, perhaps too slow, or too confused, lingered a second longer, and the claw opened and snapped shut. Caught in that enormous claw, the sparrow looked tiny: Its pale body barely visible against the faint yellow-brown surface of the pincers. From where I stood, I could hardly see the sparrow, just a faint, desperate flailing. White feathers fell into the water. The other sparrows had all flown off. I could still hear nearby chirping. Were the sparrows watching too, from somewhere I couldn’t see? Or was it a different flock? Slowly, the giant claw, still clutching the sparrow, sank into the river, the tips of its pincers slipping beneath the surface with a plop. Ripples expanded outward, losing their shape as they merged with the steadily flowing current of the river. I lifted my gaze toward the estuary. In the distance, a huge mobile crane, or some other piece of machinery, loomed, impossibly tall, shimmering in the air like a mirage. The reclamation work was ongoing. Who knew, now, where the original shoreline lay? The sea would come in, and then recede again, endlessly. It would never stop. I continued walking to my old school. The gate had been locked with a padlock. A sign on the bars read: Authorized Personnel Only. The school grounds had fallen completely silent. The fence was covered in rust. Weeds pushed up between the cracks in the sidewalks. The windows were dark—I didn’t think it was because school was on break. This was a place that had died, a place where life no longer existed. I felt a tiny vibration in my pocket. It was my phone. The screen showed the name of the student who’d laughed at my crab-egg story. I heard a soft scuttling sound and felt tiny sharp-tipped legs climbing up my ankles.
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“Crabs” translated by Lucy North from Garden, copyright © 2018 by Hiroko Oyamada, translation copyright © 2026 by Lucy North. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
