Beyond the Break Lie My Broken Dreams

An excerpt from a short story I recently posted on Medium. Read the rest here.

https://medium.com/@stevenbhow/beyond-the-break-lie-my-broken-dreams-6291dd3f83a0

He paddles out of the calm marina into the dark open ocean chop that chills him despite his thick wetsuit. His longboard cuts cleanly through the water with each powerful stroke. Four hundred yards away a small red light atop a buoy bobs in time to the current. He pulls hard towards it. A typhoon south of Kyushu is pushing huge waves over the break, but he can’t see them in the early morning darkness yet. He can hear the roar though. Out to sea, the horizon is just starting to turn blue.

As he makes his way to the buoy he hears his father’s voice in his head,

“Hiro, this is your last year of goofing off. You had seven years of university, five in Hawaii. Time to put that MBA to use. The family business is waiting for you to take the reins.”

That was in June at the start of summer vacation. Hiro had spent all of July surfing as many of the famous California breaks as he could. At Mavericks he’d fallen on a twenty-eight foot wave, the biggest he’d ever ridden, and was held under for over a minute. He didn’t surf for four days after that and nearly flew home early, but decided the risk was worth the extra time he would spend still free from what awaited him at home. In August he was in Baja California catching his final wave of the summer.

A week later he landed back in Japan and made his way south from Narita on the Shinkansen to Oita watching the mix of bamboo forests, square rice fields, evergreen covered mountains, the dark blue of the Pacific, and all the villages, small towns, and massive squat cities with their temples, shrines, modern houses and skyscrapers tucked in between flash past in the window.

The week long Buddhist Obon holiday had already started, a time when most Japanese people traditionally went home to visit their families and honor relatives and ancestors who had passed. At Fukuoka he changed to a local train and headed south towards his home town, but he didn’t stop there. His parents didn’t even know he was in Japan yet.