The short story “Whale Meat” by Ekaterina Sedia was published for the first time in 2012.
A Japanese-American blogger earns her living as a fashion blogger but also writes about what she calls serious topics. During a visit to her Japanese father, she discovers that he’s going on a Russian island to unofficially investigate the death of a Japanese fisherman. She accompanies him and discovers the local economy linked to fishing, where there are those who recover the bodies of the whales left by the Japanese after they took the parts they sought.
The protagonist of “Whale Meat” is a blogger whose parents are divorced with the complication in the fact that her mother is an American and her father is a Japanese. She can seldom visit her father and for that reason she feels guilty so she accompanies him when he goes to unofficially investigate the death of a Japanese fisherman.
The journey brings her to a Russian island at the center of historical territorial disputes between Russia and Japan. Somehow the island is like the protagonist, with an identity split between two nations and two very different cultures. In the case of the island there are political complications.
On the island the protagonist comes into contact mainly with the world of fishermen and the issue of protected species. Every year the Japanese kill many whales under the guise of scientific research of an unclear kind and even less clear alleged results. Eventually the father’s investigation is an excuse for the protagonist to be in a place where she must directly face certain environmental problems.
It’s Ekaterina Sedia herself who tells what are the themes of this short story: identity, guilt, politics and environmental protection. These are the topics called serious by the protagonist, who as a blogger has also a split identity as she’s a fashion blogger to earn money and have a chance to write about those serious topics.
“Whale Meat” was published in the USA in a few science fiction anthologies but it’s a very borderline short story that can be read easily without thinking about that label. You can find it also in the anthology “Citizen Komarova Finds Love”.
