Page 169 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

Outsiders thought the ama the opposite of beautiful. They were too brown from the sun,

too stocky with necessary fat and muscle, coarse of hand and tongue, dirty with sand

and slaughtered sea-snail slime, slithering in in-betweens. But their almost inhuman

strangeness, the sense that their dolphin-esque ability was some kind of mutation, and

the bareness that shocked Mikimoto's clientele lured anthropologists, physiologists, and

photographers to Kaiyono. Salarymen followed, seeking the slender, white-clad pearl-

divers and topless Amazons they'd seen in advertisements and a James Bond

blockbuster. The demand for awabi sashimi shot up, hotels shot up and dumped

sewage in the ocean.