Drawing by Elizabeth Shull for Harper’s Magazine © The artist

The school gave us the eggs at the end of autumn, just as the weather began to turn, the mornings so cold we expected gooseflesh to rise on the smooth surface of the shells. The eggs weren’t very big, the size of a child’s closed fist. They were shiny and white like a rolling eyeball. We were sixteen and trusted to develop a maternal instinct overnight, to become mothers one day and contribute to the dwindling population. We didn’t know where the eggs had come from, only that they were alive and we should take care of them. One egg for each student.

We often spoke about leaving. We dreamed of cities and towns far from the peninsula. Kanazawa, we whispered. Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka. The forbidden words sent thrills through us like waves. Who would we marry? How would we have children when our options were confined to this small town on this thin strip of land that stuck out into the sea?

Although we asked questions about a life beyond, our parents were the ashamed ones, ashamed of the elderly road workers who hid their age by standing straight and covering their bald heads with wool caps. We liked being young among the old. There was a comfort in walking through the market on Sunday mornings and seeing the same faces week after week, the women who sat on low stools behind their stands selling dried squid, tangles of seaweed, salted fish, persimmons, and mandarins. They didn’t change the way we did, our bodies straining against our skin in fluctuations painfully obvious from one day to the next.

On weekends, back from school, I helped my mother at the gift shop. The work wasn’t demanding. In the mornings I made onigiri with three different fillings: umeboshi, bonito flakes, and tuna mayonnaise, the last one my favorite. I liked how the mayonnaise squeezed through the grains of rice with each bite. To shape the onigiri, you had to use rice that was scalding; I was proud of the way my hands withstood heat. We ate whatever went unsold for dinner with boiled spinach.

During the high season we saw two to three visitors a day. A retired couple who had read about the pebble beach in a guidebook, and sometimes, rarely, a foreigner who delighted in the desolate landscape. There is no one here, it’s so unlike anywhere else I’ve been to! My mother would smile and nod. The end of the world, she would say, one of the few phrases she knew in English, hoping they might buy a snack on the way out.

That year we had the option to board Monday through Friday, and since the school was an hour’s drive away, my mother had requested that I stay there during the week. It wasn’t good for a girl my age to spend her evenings alone or with her mother, she said, but I didn’t mind the solitude, and I knew she was glad, too.

Of course I took some pleasure in pretending at freedom. After class, my friends and I walked through the town like tourists, our leather shoes loud on the pavement. There was a movie theater and a drugstore with more beauty products than we’d ever seen. We shared face creams and exfoliants, painted our eyebrows and curled our lashes. We became regulars at the bakery that made cream puffs on the hour, the scent of caramelized sugar and butter wafting through the streets. Still, I felt an ache when I tried to fall asleep in a room full of my classmates, our narrow cots lined up in rows.

The day we were given the eggs, Yuko got up from her chair as soon as the teacher left and addressed us.

What are we, she said, dangerously cupping her egg in one hand, mother hens? Yuko was unafraid to show her disgust. Of all the girls at school, I liked her the best. I often looked at the way her thighs brushed against one another when she walked, the fabric of her tights swooshing under her skirt. She’d sworn never to have children.

Pregnancy is vulgar, she said, the transformation a monstrosity. She showed us the stretch marks on the wide planes of her behind. Because her skin was prone to scarring, she knew her stomach wouldn’t be spared. The marks trembled under her touch, like the cracks we imagined might one day appear on our eggs.

At night, we kept the eggs on our side tables, each one wrapped in a pillowcase so it wouldn’t roll around. Between classes we gathered in the courtyard and held them against our chests, sometimes under our blazers, afraid they would freeze from the cold. We exhaled white mist into the air, our bodies shrinking as our insides compressed to retain heat. We studied one another’s eggs openly, searching for cracks. We were told it would be noiseless and quick, the first crack as fine as a strand of hair, a line of pencil, felt only with the pads of our fingers. By the end of the first week, we knew our eggs’ surfaces so intimately that were they to be swapped in our sleep, we would notice.

My mother called me on my birthday, an hour before bedtime. I almost wished she had forgotten.

Happy birthday, she said, her tone even. How was your day?

I told her it was a day like any other, though they had served chocolate cake for dessert.

That’s more than my parents ever gave me. They never celebrated my birthday.

I bristled at her complaint and said that she told me this every year.

You always bring things back to yourself.

I said it was time for bed and that I would hang up the phone.

Her voice softened slightly: We are always more sensitive on this day, aren’t we?

November was cold and we ate with abandon, or at least I did. I waited for my mother to call or send me a letter. The other girls often received envelopes with money or packages of fruits and sweets. There was nothing for me but the plates of food from the cafeteria. Most of the girls were on a diet, so I took their rice, drowning the grains in broth and gulping it down. It was bad manners, but my mother wasn’t there to see.

On weekends, I noticed that her gait was lighter, as though I were a weight that had been lifted. She left clothes in the living room and dishes on the drying rack. Even her voice had changed. Sometimes I caught her humming a tune from a black-and-white movie she liked. I looked at her with suspicion, not knowing how to share these feelings of distrust with my classmates, who all seemed to ignore their own mothers.

At home, I placed the egg on a shelf in my bedroom. If my mother saw it, she would question me, would want to touch it. She often dropped fragile items without warning. She’d be standing in the middle of the kitchen, drying a plate, and all of a sudden it would crash to her feet. But she didn’t come to my room. We ate breakfast separately because she awoke long before me.

That month we had a few visitors from the mainland and from abroad. Two middle-aged women from Beijing, a backpacker from New Zealand, a father and son from Germany. Otherwise it was quiet. I spent hours on the pebble beach, staring out at the sea. To access the beach, one had to walk through the visitors’ center and gift shop, past the glass doors, and down a stone stairway. A rope handrail ran along one side of the steps. Far below, the cove opened onto dark-blue waves that frothed up against the land. On both sides, tall rock formations shielded most of the beach from the sun, creating a dramatic contrast between the pale sky and the black rocks. The peninsula was surrounded by uninhabited islands. We had three in our cove. They were perfectly round and covered with dense forest; from afar they looked like floating green puffs. The summers were always scorching, but the sea brought in a cool breeze and the rocks protected me from the sun. On the hottest days, I would stand in their shade and press my cheek against their hard, wet surface.

We had no visitors that first Saturday of December. The wind picked up in the afternoon and the sky darkened. I sat on a stool and listened to the wind wail against the glass doors, louder than the tinkling music that we played through speakers in the ceiling. My mother was unperturbed by the storm. She restocked the shelves, moving items around and testing new positions, hoping they might draw a customer’s eye. She wiped dust with a damp cloth. Her expression was calm, just as when she daydreamed. At the end of the day, we slowly walked home, crouched against the wind, our arms pressing our coats shut.

Unlike other mothers, mine wasn’t skilled in the kitchen. She could make rice, soup, and simple vegetables, but she cooked fish and meat to death, flesh dry and blackened, skin stuck to the pan. I had become the cook. I would make bacon and eggs for dinner, tuna sandwiches for lunch. That night I fried rice with old vegetables: half a cabbage and a few carrots, their tips soft. I loved the crust that formed on the bottom of the pan, the rice translucent and crisp with oil. I would wait a few minutes for it to loosen and then scrape it off with a metal spoon. We ate the rice with salted fish and the last of our pickled greens.

I once had an egg like yours, my mother said. She was chasing grains of rice on her plate, difficult to catch when they weren’t clumped together. So she had seen it.

The school gave them to us in our final year, she added.

You were older.

She caught a grain with her chopsticks. I wonder why you’re receiving yours now.

What are they for?

My mother gathered our plates and began washing them in the sink.

I asked her again. Why did you have an egg?

After a moment of silence, she said that she couldn’t remember.

What did you do with it?

She turned to me and laughed: An egg is for eating, isn’t it.

The following morning, I was sitting on the pebble beach when I saw a man walk down the stairway. He held on to the rope and took the steps one at a time. I was used to their unevenness and ran down them, often jumping over the last three. It was the coldest it had been that month and I had chosen a rock that had warmed in the sun. There was no wind, and piles of seaweed lined the shore. The water was dark and swollen from the storm. I’d brought the egg with me and nestled it among the pebbles. Its dome sparkled in the sun.

The man walked in my direction. He wore a gray suit, leather shoes, and sunglasses. From the city, I guessed. He seemed to be younger than my mother, but it was hard to tell with the glasses hiding his eyes. As he came closer, I wished I’d had time to hide the egg under my coat. He sat on a rock close to mine and stared out at the water.

I’ve wanted to come here for a long time, he said. He continued to look away from me.

This is the only place I’ve ever known.

The man smiled.

Why did you come here? I asked.

A woman I once loved told me about this beach.

Is she from here?

He nodded. She would close her eyes and describe it as if it were her childhood house. Her memories became my own. I knew about the gift shop and those steps and the rope. I even knew how the rope would feel, heavy from the salt.

He rubbed his fingers where they had touched the rope.

My mother owns the gift shop, I said, glancing at the small building above the cove.

We sat in silence for a few minutes.

Is it how you pictured it?

The man considered my question. A moment later, he removed his glasses and squinted at the sea. Everything is how I imagined it, even the smell, but she never told me about those islands. They look like forests, don’t they?

He turned to me. His eyes were pale brown in the sun, an unusual color. I blushed. His gaze lingered and then shifted to my feet, where the egg rested. He flinched and turned white.

Are you all right? I asked, wanting the egg to disappear. I cursed myself for having brought it to the beach.

What a beautiful stone, he said. Can I touch it?

I was reminded of my mother once asking a pregnant woman if she could touch her, all seven months of her rounded stomach. The woman had pushed aside her scarf and unbuttoned her coat so that my mother could place her hand, palm down, directly onto her dress.

I overheard my mother tell a woman at the market that I cried all the time as a baby. We had paused in front of a stand that sold baked goods. The loaves were small and dense, studded with dried fruit, nuts, and cheese. She exhausted me, my mother said. The woman listened and selected a long loaf the shape of a stick. I had never seen her before, perhaps she had moved recently.

Isn’t it normal for babies to cry? the woman asked, uncertain. She paid for the bread and put it in her bag. A dark-brown walnut ruptured its crust.

I waited for my mother to respond. Her shoulders tensed under her wool jacket. It was almost one in the afternoon and the light was strong.

This was something else, she said. It would have driven anyone mad.

The woman nodded goodbye and walked away.

What do you want? my mother asked me, pointing at the loaves.

I gestured to the milk bread, its top shiny and burnished. The inside would be soft from the eggs, ready to be pulled apart with our hands. We ate it warm from the oven, with a thick layer of strawberry jam.

As we put away the food, I asked her what it had been, the something else that made me cry.

I think you cried because you were hungry. I knew my supply was low. My mother had to feed me goat’s milk. She always said the women in our family couldn’t nurse, and I felt I was defying her by breastfeeding you as long as I could.

How long?

It must have been two and a half years.

I tried to imagine her holding a child. It was difficult to conjure. Instead I saw a sack of potatoes in her arms, their rounded shapes rolling against her chest.

As a two-year-old, I would have walked up to her and opened her shirt with my hands and she would have been free to continue doing whatever she was doing with her own hands. I would have served myself. I had no memories of this, just a sense of security, similar to when we shared the same bathwater after dinner. The familiarity of her silhouette in the tub, her shoulders rising above the water. An impression that I knew her better unclothed.

We stayed at the table for a while drinking cold tea, the afternoon a blank canvas.

We used to play a game when you were little, my mother said.

What was it?

You would stretch out on the floor, close your eyes, and pretend to be dead. I would walk into the room, not see you for a moment, and then scream. Each time was different, but the ending was the same: I would lie down next to you and pretend to die, too.

On Monday, we sneaked glances at each other to see whether anyone had forgotten their egg. A rumor floated that someone’s egg had broken and spilled onto the floor. What was inside? we asked, our skin prickling from the cold. The pungent smell of a decomposing body, three bright orange yolks, the translucent skeleton of a small child, like the shell of a shrimp.

Yuko held her egg beneath her chin. She stroked its private surface. Her face shone red. Later, I would pinch my cheeks for the same color.

There is nothing inside, she told us.

I don’t believe you, said Mari. She made as if to shake her egg, to see whether she could hear the sound of a thing inside it. We held our breaths. There was a moment of terror as we watched her. She paused midair and gently lowered the egg.

They are worried that one day everyone will be gone, Yuko said.

Old age was like catching a cold, the teachers liked to tell us, afraid that if we stayed, our youthful essence would be sanded away.

We’ll be gone, Mari said.

I’ll stay here. The sound of my voice surprised me. Why had I spoken?

Yuko smiled, as though she understood.

When I thought about it some more during class, I couldn’t picture myself at my mother’s age, seated behind the counter of the gift shop, just as I couldn’t imagine her growing old or us becoming close. But where would I go? Would I follow my classmates to the mainland and evaporate into a city? What would happen to my mother? A part of me thought she might stay in the gift shop forever, though maybe she would leave too, no longer bound to the peninsula by me.

More theories swirled around the classroom. A deep attachment between the egg and its caregiver meant the egg would never break, even if thrown against marble. These were ordinary emu eggs, imported from Australia. No, they were made in China and the shell was plastic while the inside held a liquid resembling water.

That night, Yuko and I brushed our teeth side by side before bed. We had started at the same time, and I wondered who would finish first. She was vigorous, reaching far into the back of her mouth, whereas I was gentle on my gums. I finally yielded and turned on the faucet to rinse. Yuko leaned against the sink after wiping her lips dry. She told me that the previous summer her parents had taken her on a bus off the peninsula. It was just for a day, they had a meeting with an accountant, and she had begged to accompany them.

She described a city with tall buildings that required elevators, wide roads with streetlights, people of all ages hurrying from one place to the next. What surprised her was the silence—even the restaurant where they had lunch was quiet. She had expected the city to be loud and bustling, strings of people walking together, animated in conversation. You don’t have the ocean, she said. She felt enclosed in a large empty space, something vast and clean.

What you felt wasn’t freedom, I offered, hoping I had grasped the meaning of her words.

She swept her arms around the bathroom we shared with twenty girls. Don’t tell the others, but I was happy to return that night.

Before going to sleep, I watched my egg up close. The color seemed to have changed from a milky white to a more transparent, pulsing yellow that rippled from the crown to the middle, like the skin on the inside of my wrists.

I thought about the man on the pebble beach, how he knelt and wrapped his hands around my egg, color returning to his face.

Yuko didn’t come to class the following week. We assumed it had to do with her egg. We tried to avoid staring at her empty seat. Mari dropped her head onto her desk and closed her eyes. On weekends she woke up before sunrise to help her grandmother at the market, and afterward she dried strands of seaweed on their clotheslines. The salt had damaged her hands. They were like my mother’s, cracked at the fingers and red.

We waited for Yuko to return. Her desk remained vacant, her chair tucked into its place.

My mother was sick that weekend and stayed in bed both days. I worked at the gift shop alone, dusting the shelves, lining the onigiri in the refrigerator by the entrance, checking the toilet paper in the restrooms. One family came by on Sunday morning. They walked past me without looking but bowed their heads to acknowledge my presence. It was getting too cold for tourists. The sun set at four in the afternoon. I locked the door and walked home. I had grown used to the egg and almost forgot it was there. It was heavier than I remembered.

My mother lay in bed, her back turned away from me. I knew she was faking sleep. I sat in the kitchen and held the egg on the table. I heard my mother cough, a wet sound. I pictured her lungs soaked in a viscous liquid that rose to her throat and filled her mouth. The egg fit under my outstretched fingers and I rolled it back and forth, applying more pressure. It grew hotter the more I pushed it against the surface.

I brushed a leftover onigiri with soy sauce and grilled it on the stove with sesame oil. I placed it on a plate with a pickled plum and brought it to my mother with a cup of hot buckwheat tea. She was seated in bed, a pillow behind her lower back.

Did you see that man in the gift shop? I asked.

She narrowed her eyes. You know I’ve been in bed all day.

Last weekend. He was wearing a suit and sunglasses.

No one came by last weekend.

I set the tray on her lap. She picked up the plum and popped it in her mouth. Her lips puckered at the sourness.

Did your friends leave after high school? I asked her. Did they go to the mainland?

Some of them, yes.

And you never thought of it?

She sipped her tea. Of course I thought of leaving, all the time, but I knew that leaving would change me and that when I returned I would no longer find my place, like a square inside a circle.

Two more girls were absent and Yuko’s desk had been removed. We didn’t dare ask the teachers about it. Between classes, Mari pulled me aside and whispered into my ear: Yuko’s mother always comes to the market, but this weekend she wasn’t there. As I listened to her, I felt a new warmth radiate from the bottom of my bag, where the egg was cradled.

Where could they have gone? I asked.

Tokyo, Mari said. Yuko was always bragging about her uncle in Tokyo.

Saitama, I corrected her, which was thirty kilometers north of the city.

Mari brushed me off. Regardless, she never liked living so close to the sea. You know she was afraid of drowning.

I moved away from Mari. If they’re gone, then there’s no point in dwelling on them.

In the cafeteria that evening, we rearranged our seating to account for the missing students. We sat next to girls who had once been at the other end of the table, whose eating habits we had never observed. It was strange to have an unfamiliar presence beside us, new sounds and movements. A sudden shyness overcame me, and I remembered to chew each mouthful and sip slowly.

Mari sat to my left and finished her sweet potato soup before anyone else. She had chosen an apple for dessert. She kept a Swiss Army knife in her pocket and used it to peel the apple, her thumb pressed against the blade. She cut just under the skin, a thin layer of white flesh clinging to the peel. She didn’t pause until she was finished and then held up the long peel like a prize. One curled strip, unraveling from where she pinched it with her fingers. We watched the coil bounce in the air.

You can learn so much from a person by observing the way they peel fruit, Mari said.

She cut the apple into quarters and sliced off the seeds.

Like what? I asked.

Whether someone taught them to do it.

I indulged her and asked how she could see whether someone had been taught.

The way you place the knife, she said. Toward you or away from you. I always cut toward me. It’s more dangerous but gives you better control. My mother taught me.

I envied her for having a mother who knew how to peel fruit and sat patiently with her daughter, pressing her thumb against hers. But I also felt I should defend my mother, who would never have allowed herself such a frivolous activity.

The following day, we received notice that the school would shut down in the new year. There were so few of us to begin with, and several families and teachers had chosen to leave for the mainland. We were distracted by the news and started to forget our eggs in classrooms, took someone else’s by accident, misplaced them for hours. Mari even dropped hers. We watched in horror as it rolled under a desk. It came to a stop against the wall, unscathed.

My mother only spoke about my father once. He arrived in the rainy season and stayed until the first change of leaves in October. One morning, not long before he left, they went down to the pebble beach. It was cold and cloudy, but he removed his clothes and waded into the water. No one swam in the cove; it was dangerous, with whirlpools that sucked you under. A child was once found at the shore, cut up from being thrown against the sharp rocks.

My father swam out until he was a speck on the horizon. My mother was already pregnant with me, though she didn’t know it yet. She waited at the edge of the water, holding her cardigan tightly, telling herself that she shouldn’t be afraid. If she kept her eyes on him, then he wouldn’t drown. Soon she couldn’t see him, but she continued to stare at the sea. After a while he appeared again, a black dot, then his arms beating into the waves.

Where did you go? she asked, as she dried him with her cardigan.

I wanted to see if I could swim to one of the islands.

Did you?

He shook his head. Not even halfway. Once he had started swimming, he saw they were much farther than they appeared.

Listening to him, she realized that she had never thought about swimming to the islands, or anywhere really. Until then, the possibility of leaving the island had not occurred to her.

There were no photos of my father. All I had was my reflection in the mirror and the ways I was different from my mother: my darker skin, the sharp tip of my chin, the black flecks in my eyes. When I dreamt of him, I saw a man like the one I had met at the beach, dressed in city clothes, with eyes like mine behind his sunglasses.

I had to go home on Wednesday because my mother was still sick and called the school. I’d never known her to miss a day of work, even when she had a fever. I slid open the door and called out.

No one answered. The wind rattled the slender frame of our house. The wood paneling had begun to rot from the humidity.

My mother was in bed and I smelled the sweat on her sheets. She opened her eyes and smiled faintly.

What do you have? I asked.

I don’t know, she said, her voice a quiet rasp.

Have you eaten?

She shook her head. I began to peel the sheets away from her. I have to replace them, I explained. They were soaked in sweat. I bathed her with a hand towel and changed her into a clean nightgown. Her body looked thinner than I remembered, rib cage bowing against her skin, nipples dark and shriveled from the cold.

Let’s call the doctor, I said.

No, don’t bother. She looked away. I sat in her bedroom until I could see the pale-yellow outline of the moon.

There was almost no food in the kitchen. The two onigiri that I’d left in the fridge had vanished. She hadn’t gone to the market and we didn’t keep many dried goods aside from a bag of rice and a few strips of kombu.

I opened my schoolbag and took out the egg. I placed it on the table and gave it a gentle tap. It made a dull sound. I tapped harder. My heart banged against my chest and my ears filled with its loud beat.

The egg cracked and spilled onto the table. Split open it was merely a yolk held by a thin membrane. Surprise passed through me as the white spread along the flat surface. I placed a bowl beneath one end of the table and scraped every last bit with my hands.

I knew to heat the pan until the oil shimmered but before it smoked. The first layer hit with a hiss. I used long chopsticks to flip and fold the egg and added more oil when the pan began to dry. The omelet was a thin log, barely enough for one person. I carried the plate to my mother.

Two spots of color had formed on her cheeks.

I could smell it, she said, even with the door closed.

She lifted herself and folded the sheet over her lap, as though setting the table. She leaned over the plate and inhaled. I watched her eat, one bite at a time. Her throat rose and fell as she swallowed. When she had finished, she placed the plate on the floor.

What did it taste like? I asked.

She disappeared into the bed and drew the sheet up to her face.

Sweet, the way rice does after you’ve chewed it for a while. She licked her lips. Salty, like sweat.

The school is closing, I said.

Yes, I heard. She covered her mouth to cough. Where would you like to go?

I lay down beside her.