The clear water of Quartz Creek runs over my wading boots, the Alaska sun bright in a sky of crystal blue. Mountains, impossibly green and rich from the long summer hours of daylight, chew the horizon. Spawning sockeye salmon swim mere feet away, their chrome sides blushing scarlet as they near the graveled nests in which their mothers laid them some five years ago. My steps frighten them, but only for a moment. They dart away, then return to hold and wait until it’s time to move again. Ever farther upstream. Ever higher in the watershed. But I am not here for them.
The creek turns left, current pushing hard and deep against an undercut bank. A pine is losing its long fight to stay on solid ground, its trunk twisting into the dark blue beneath it, its roots silhouetted in the water feet below. There, I think, fingertips tight on the wet cork of my rod — a massive rainbow trout holding in the deep slow eddies behind. I can feel it there: patiently waiting for the current to deliver a meal of insect life, a bit of flesh from a dead salmon, perhaps a bright red protein-rich egg bouncing along the creek bed.
And I am going to catch it.
I GREW UP neither an angler nor Japanese except in name. My immigrant father raised me to be an “All-American Boy,” as he put it, and, like most first-generation children carefully raised to assimilate, I obliged him. Until I couldn’t do it anymore. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake off the coast of Japan unleashed a tsunami that devastated the northeast coast, reaching, in places, heights that exceeded 120 feet. About 22,000 people were killed. Among the dead was my Japanese grandmother — my obāsan — who died on the second floor of a rest home over a mile inland from the waterline of Kesennuma, my father’s hometown. That was the day I laid claim to my ancestry. I became hāfu — our mixed identity community’s slang for half-Japanese.
Since 2011, I’ve built an identity from the debris the tsunami left behind. It has been tough; my adult psyche is less malleable than it was. But my discovery of the centuries-old Japanese method of fly-fishing known as tenkara awoke a strong connection to my lineage. I hybridized the technique, which eschews the modern trappings of the Western fly rod and reel for a collapsible rod with a line affixed to the rod’s tip. I took it from its roots on the small mountain streams of southern Japan and adapted it to the rivers and streams of Alaska.
Each fish landed is an act of identity building.
It has become emblematic of my hāfu identity — sometimes messy, occasionally beautiful, and in every possible moment meaningful beyond compare. Each fish landed is an act of identity building.
DOWNSTREAM, TWO FLY ANGLERS flip imitation salmon eggs beneath bobbers, hoping to entice the small rainbow trout lurking behind the abundant salmon. Their casts are leisurely, but the spot I’m looking at will require precision and planning.
Branches and foliage obscure all but a few feet of the stream before it plunges beneath a tree trunk that sweeps the width of the hole. Provided I can cast into the small opening without snagging a branch, I will have only a second or two to make the fly dance before it becomes entangled with branches and wood. If, after all this, I hook into a fish, I will have to turn it from the main current to keep it from diving and wrapping my line around any number of potential snags. I will have to do all this using my willowy 10-foot tenkara rod, working careful angles and walking backward to keep pressure on the fish.
My fly is one I tied, a weighted, gaudy bit of red-and-black rabbit fur with a painted tungsten bead at the eye of the hook that resembles no aquatic species I’ve ever seen but that still somehow tends to provoke aggressive fish strikes.
I hold short of the hole and fire several preparatory casts using a dozen feet of line and translucent leader. My fly is one I tied, a weighted, gaudy bit of red-and-black rabbit fur with a painted tungsten bead at the eye of the hook that resembles no aquatic species I’ve ever seen but that still somehow tends to provoke aggressive fish strikes. My casts are clean, accurate, the line arcing back, then forward with a few mere wrist flicks of the lightweight rod.
The fly shoots right there, into that shallow bit of stony water before the bed drops away beneath the tree. The current takes the fly. I have time to twitch my rod downstream once. Twice. The fly swims across the small back eddy.
A shadow appears, then withdraws.
TWO WRITERS TOOK TO the pages of the September/October issue of Outside to offer their either/or opinions on the modern revival of tenkara. They stated their respective positions beneath a banner of false dichotomy (“Is Tenkara Pure or Just Boring”), descending along the same paths walked by three centuries of Westerners Judging Japanese Things. But it’s the either/or that gets under my skin. You can be pure, or impure. I am Japanese, or American. My identity, though, as assembled through tenkara fly-fishing, lies somewhere in between. A tenkara purist would sniff at my incorporation of Western methods. A Western die-hard would scoff at my lack of a reel. To both, I would say: I am hāfu, and to be hāfu is to be at peace with one foot in each world.
AGAIN, THE FLY LANDS exactly where it needs to, then sinks. It dances once more. The shadow rises, flits. I see a mouth, a broad side of silver and a slash of red. It strikes. I set the hook. Fish on. Fight’s on. The fish tries to dart into the current, doubling my rod into an impossible curve while I dance in mincing steps backward. Hope! It eddies! But before I can react, it snatches the brief moment of slack in my line to run deep into the murk. The line pulls taut. Dead. It’s snagged. I’m done.
I set the rod down and step into the stream with a sigh, reaching deep for the line to break off the fly. But when I pull on the line, the line pulls back. A branch flexing with the pressure? I pull again. And this time the line answers by jerking back, repeatedly. The fish is still on it.
A blind reach, shoulder deep, and it’s free. Carefully, I pull the line in, fighting the fish by hand. Until there it is: 22 inches of wild Alaska rainbow trout, black leopard spots along its ample green. Gills opening and closing in the shallow water, my own breath coming ragged and rich with adrenaline.
I call to one of the anglers downstream, asking for a picture. He ambles over, his posture reluctant — until he sees the fish. Then his eyes widen, his back straightens and he offers a congratulatory high-five. Picture snapped, I return the trout to the cold water, gripping the tail until its energy returns and it’s gone.
The angler shakes his head. As he walks away, he smiles and says, “Nice fish.”
Matthew Komatsu is a writer and fly angler based in Alaska. You can find more of his work on Substack. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
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