Book Description
In a remote Japanese fishing village, a grief-stricken boy teams up with a local diver to uncover the secret behind his sister’s tragic drowning
A mesh bag filled to the brim with wakame seaweed was all seventeen-year-old Ren Ioka’s sister, Nagisa, left behind when she disappeared off the coast of their remote Japanese fishing village. Nagisa was an ama—a traditional free diver who harvests abalone from the sea, a profession that stretches back over two thousand years. In this treacherous line of work, breath and timing are everything. Training the lungs from a young age is crucial, yet Nagisa joined the ama as a teen. Why would his sister make this unusual decision, and what does wakame have to do with it?
His anguish and uncertainty soon find an outlet when he befriends the inscrutable Eiko, Nagisa’s childhood friend and fellow ama. Ren is convinced that the spirit of his sister has brought them together. When he discovers an unsent love letter written by his sister years earlier, Ren becomes certain that this confession holds the secret behind Nagisa’s tragic final dive. Gradually, Ren and Eiko grow closer as the pair work together to decode the meaning of the letter, and Ren begins falling for Eiko, not realizing that she harbors a secret.
Haunting and uplifting, The Love an Abalone Feels for the Sea is a coming-of-age story that charts the myriad forms love takes.
Praise For This Book
"What is the love an abalone feels for the sea? It’s a wonderfully strange question, and one that opens onto mysteries both earthly and surreal. Drawing on meticulous research into the centuries-old traditions of Japan’s ama divers, Genki Ferguson brings this extraordinary and little-known world vividly to life, weaving the divers’ intimate knowledge of the sea into a moving and evocative story about grief, love, and the unknowable depths of the human heart." —Ruth Ozeki"The Love and Abalone Feels for the Sea left me enchanted and undone. What an extraordinary book. A gripping mystery told in exquisite prose, Genki Ferguson peels back layer after shimmering layer of these characters as they navigate tangled paths of grief, grace and discovery." —Rebecca Kauffman, author of The Reservation
"A story that takes place on the boundaries between reality and the supernatural, between life and death, but also on the boundary between childhood and adulthood. Both haunted and haunting, so spare in much of its writing but rich in its detail. Genki's writing is open and tender, honest, warm, atmospheric." —Claire Kohda, author of Woman, Eating
