Youth t-shirt
For anyone who has outgrown kids' sizes, this youth anglerfish t-shirt carries the portrait of Naoko Mochizuki. The anglerfish is the deep-sea fish that goes around with a light hanging off its forehead, and Naoko works surveying damaged ships in Japan. It is from Animal Kinhood, my series of animals who wear clothes and get on with their lives like people.
Foto: Emőke Dénes / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)Melanocetus johnsonii
The light a place already has is never any good. I always bring my own.
Meso and bathypelagic zone of tropical and temperate seas worldwide, usually between 200 and 1,500 meters deep, with occasional records a good deal deeper. Permanent darkness, cold and high pressure.
At nine there was a blackout in her neighbourhood, on a summer night. Her family got up to hunt through the drawers for candles and torches; she stayed where she was, finishing her dinner. When her mother came back with a lit candle and asked whether she could see anything, she said she could. She has never talked about it with anyone, and to this day she is slow to turn on the light when she gets home.
At eighteen she left for Tokyo to study naval architecture, which is what you study when you want to understand why a ship holds and why it stops holding. Four years. She brought nobody home at New Year and nobody from her city came up to see her, and both things struck her as normal. She came back at twenty-three and joined the shipowners' mutual where she still works.
