Sachi’s son had died after a shark ripped off his leg when he was surfing in Hanalei Bay. Sharks don’t like human flesh, which is why most people can survive a shark bite as long as they don’t panic. However, Sachi’s son suffered a cardiac arrest and drowned. When the Japanese Hawaii consulate sent word to Sachi of the incident, she fell into shock and stared at a spot on the wall for hours. When she came back to her senses, she looked into booking the next flight to Hawaii to identify her son.

Because it was the holiday season, when she called the airlines they all told her that that day and the next’s seats were all booked up. She explained the situation to a United reservationist who told her to come to the airport as soon as possible where she was handed a business class ticket and permitted to board. When she arrived at the Honolulu airport, she realized she’d forgotten to inform the consulate of her arrival time, but she decided she’d travel alone on her next flight to Kauai where she rented a car and drove straight to the police station. Without any doubt, she identified the body in the morgue as her son and asked the mortician to cremate him so she could take his ashes back with her to Tokyo. 

One of the officers was a Japanese-American man named Sakata who returned her son’s belongings and showed her on a map where her son’s body had been found. As she left the station, Sakata asked her for a personal favor. He said that his brother had been killed by the Nazis and that nothing had been recovered from him except his dog tags and a few chunks of flesh. After his death, his mother lost who she was and he asked if, for his sake, she would think of her son’s death as part of a natural cycle of death, instead of the hatred-filled death faced by his brother. 

After the cremation, Sachi visited Hanalei Bay and watched the surfers on the beach. Then, she went to the hotel he’d stayed at and talked with two white men who’d known Takashi. She told them she’d come to pay his hotel bill, but they told her everything had been paid in advance. Sachi ended up staying in Hanalei for a week in a cottage and tried to piece herself back together before her trip back to Japan. Every day, she sat on the beach and watched the surfers. 

The Hanalei visit became a tradition for her, and every year she’d return a few days before the anniversary of her son’s death and stayed in the same cottage and visited the same restaurants. On her way to the Lihue Airport one day, she gave two Japanese hitchhikers a ride to Hanalei Bay. They told her they’d come to surf but didn’t have a place to sleep that night and asked if she could help them since they spoke little English. She warned them that cheap hotels were full of dangerous drugs. She got them a discounted rate at her cottage and they set off to buy surfboards. Later, on the beach, she watched as they surfed. 

Sachi had begun playing piano in high school. She was naturally talented and one day a music teacher overheard her and helped her improve her technique. After she struggled to advance her abilities, she studied cookery after high school in Chicago where a classmate introduced her to a small piano bar where she was hired to play. She was extremely successful at the bar and eventually stopped going to classes to commit her time to playing. When her son had dropped out of high school to surf, she felt it would have been hypocritical to stop him. After a year and a half of playing at the bar, she’d been dating an aspiring actor when an immigration officer arrested her for being in the country illegally and returned to Japan. She married young to a drug addict who cheated on her constantly and together they had Takashi. After five years of marriage, he overdosed while in bed with another woman. 

After her husband’s death, she opened up a small piano bar with her savings which proved very successful. She never remarried, and her son grew up and chased his surfing passion to Hanalei Bay. After he died, she worked harder than ever and sometimes she even played piano in Hanalei and she thinks the way she feels when playing is likely the same way her son had felt when riding the waves. She had never really liked her son because of how selfishly he lived. 

One evening, Sachi was playing in Hanalei when the two hitchhikers approached her and offered to buy her dinner. She was kindly declining their offer when another man approached and requested an upbeat song, but when she refused he tried to bribe her and then insulted Japan by asking why they couldn’t defend their own country and he’d had to be stationed there in the war. She insulted him back and he began to yell at her. The manager apologized to Sachi and said that liquor turns him into a bad man. The hitchhikers thank her for her help and before they walk away one of them asks if she’s ever seen the Japanese one-legged surfer. They said they’d seen him in the Bay twice but he’d always disappeared before they could talk. Every day after, Sachi walked back and forth on the beach and asked local surfers if they’d seen a Japanese man with only one leg, but no one had. 

The night before she left to return to Japan, she cried in bed and wondered why he’d appear to the hitchhikers and not her. She remembered the words of Sakata and tried to accept that there was nothing she could do. After eight months of being back in Tokyo, she ran into one of the hitchhikers in a Starbucks. He told her he was about to graduate college and that he’d cut back on surfing. As he moves to leave, she tells him she’s glad the sharks didn’t eat him in Hanalei Bay and he’s surprised to learn there were sharks. Every night, Sachi plays her keyboard and thinks simply about Hanalei Bay.