The Sound of Waves (2 page)

He announced himself by calling from outside and the wife opened the door.

“Oh, it’s you, Shinji-san,” she said.

The boy held the fish out without a word.

The woman took it from him and called out loudly over her shoulder, this time using the boy’s family name:

“Father, Kubo-san has brought us a fish.”

From another room the good-natured voice of the lighthouse-keeper answered familiarly:

“Thank you, thank you. Come on in, Shinji boy.”

The boy was still standing hesitantly at the kitchen door. The halibut had already been placed on a white enamelware platter, where it lay faintly gasping, blood oozing from its gills, streaking its smooth white skin.

N
EXT MORNING
Shinji boarded his master’s boat as usual and they set out for the day’s fishing. The overcast sky of daybreak was mirrored in a calm sea. It would take about an hour to reach the fishing grounds.

Shinji was wearing a black rubber apron reaching from the breast of his jumper to the tops of his knee-length rubber boots, and a pair of long rubber gloves. Standing in the bow of the boat and gazing ahead to their destination in the Pacific, far ahead under the ashen morning sky, Shinji was remembering the night before, the time between his leaving the lighthouse and going to bed.

Shinji’s mother and brother had been awaiting his return in the small room lit by a dim lamp hanging over the cookstove. The brother was only twelve. As for
the mother, ever since the last year of the war, when her husband had been killed in a strafing attack, until Shinji had become old enough to go to work, she had supported the family all alone on her earnings as a diving woman.

“Was the lighthouse-keeper pleased?”

“Yes. He said: ‘Come in, come in,’ and then asked me to have something they called cocoa.”

“What was it, this cocoa?”

“Some sort of foreign bean soup is what it seemed like.”

The mother knew nothing about cooking. She served their fish either in raw slices—sometimes vinegared—or else simply grilled or boiled—head, tail, bones, and all. And as she never washed the fish properly, they often found their teeth chewing on sand and grit as well as fish.

Shinji waited hopefully during their meal for his mother to say something about the strange girl. But if his mother was not one for complaining, neither was she given to idle gossip.

After supper Shinji and his brother went to the public bath. Here again he hoped to hear something about the girl. As the hour was late, the place was almost empty and the water was dirty. The head of the fishermen’s Co-operative and the postmaster were arguing politics as they soaked in the pool, their booming voices echoing pompously off the ceiling. The brothers nodded to them silently and then went to a far corner to dip hot water from the pool.

No matter how Shinji waited and strained his ears, the men simply would not move on from their politics to talk of the girl. Meanwhile his brother had finished bathing with unusual haste and had gone outside.

Shinji followed him out and asked the reason for all his hurry. Hiroshi, the brother, explained that he and his
friends had been playing at war today, and that he had made the son of the head of the Co-operative cry by hitting him over the head with his wooden sword.

Shinji always went to sleep easily, but last night he had had the strange experience of lying long awake. Unable to remember a day of sickness in his life, the boy had lain wondering, afraid this might be what people meant by being sick.…

That strange unrest was still with him this morning. But the vast ocean stretched away from the prow, where he was standing, and gradually the sight of it filled his body with the energy of familiar, day-to-day toil, and without realizing it he felt at peace again. The boat was shaking mincingly with the vibrations of the engine, and the biting morning wind slapped at the boy’s cheeks.

High on the cliff to starboard, the beacon of the lighthouse was already extinguished. Along the shore, under the brownish pine branches of early spring, the pounding breakers of Irako Channel showed vivid white in the cloudy morning landscape. Two submerged reefs in the channel kept the water in a constant churning turmoil; an ocean liner would have had to work its way gingerly through the narrow passage between them, but with the skillful sculling of its master the
Taihei-maru
sailed smoothly through the swirling current. The water in the channel was between eighteen and a hundred fathoms deep, but over the reefs it was only thirteen to twenty fathoms. It was here, from this spot where buoys marked the passage, on out to the Pacific, that the numberless octopus pots were sunk.

Eighty per cent of Uta-jima’s yearly catch was in octopus. The octopus season, which began in November, was
now about to give way to the squid season, which would begin with the spring equinox. It was the end of the season, the time when the pots were lying in wait for their last chance at what were called the “fleeing octopus” as they moved to the depths of the Pacific to escape the cold waters of the Gulf of Ise.

To master fishermen the exact rise and fall of every inch of the bottom of the shallow waters off the Pacific side of the island were as familiar as their own kitchen gardens. They were always saying: “It’s only a blind man that can’t see the ocean floor.” They knew their direction from their mariner’s compass, and by watching the changing outline of the mountains on the far distant capes they could always tell their exact position. Once they had their bearings, they unerringly knew the topography of the ocean floor beneath them.

Countless ropes had been methodically laid out over the floor of the ocean, to each of which were tied more than a hundred pots, and the floats attached to the ropes rolled and tossed with the rise and fall of the tides. In their boat it was the master who knew the art of octopus fishing; all Shinji and the other boy, Ryuji, had to do was lend their strong bodies willingly to the heavy labor involved.

Jukichi Oyama, master fisherman, owner of the
Taihei-maru
, had a face like leather well-tanned by sea winds. The grimy wrinkles on his hands were mixed indistinguishably with old fishing scars, all burned by the sun down into their deepest creases. He was a man who seldom laughed, but was always in calm good spirits, and even the loud voice he used when giving commands on the boat was never raised in anger. While fishing he seldom left his place on the sculling platform at the stern,
only occasionally taking one hand off the oar to regulate the engine.

Emerging into the fishing grounds, they found already gathered there the many other fishing-boats, unseen until now, and exchanged morning greetings with them. Upon reaching their own fishing area, Jukichi reduced the speed of the engine and signaled Shinji to attach a belt from the engine to the roller-shaft on the gunwale.

This shaft turned a pulley which extended over the gunwale. One of the ropes to which the octopus pots were tied would be placed over the pulley, and the boat would slowly follow the rope along as the pulley drew one end up from the sea and let the other fall back into the sea. The two boys also would take turns at pulling on the rope, because the water-soaked hemp was often too heavy a load for the pulley alone and also because the rope would slip off unless carefully guided.

A hazy sun was hidden behind the clouds on the horizon. Two or three cormorants were swimming on the sea, their long necks thrust out over the surface of the water. Looking back toward Uta-jima, one could see its southern cliffs shining, dead-white, stained by the droppings of countless flocks of cormorants.

The wind was bitterly cold, but while he pulled the first rope toward the pulley Shinji stared out over the dark-indigo sea and felt boiling up within him energy for the toil that would soon have him sweating. The pulley began to turn and heavy, wet rope came rising from the sea. Through his thin gloves Shinji could feel the thick, icy rope he grasped in his hands. As it passed over the pulley the taut rope threw off a sleet-like spray of salt water.

Soon the octopus pots themselves were rising to the
surface, showing a red-clay color. Ryuji stood waiting at the pulley. If a pot was empty, he would quickly pour the water out of it and, not letting it strike the pulley, again commit it to the care of the rope, now sinking back into the sea.

Shinji stood with his legs spread wide, one foot stretched to the prow, and continued his endless tug-of-war against whatever there was in the sea. One hand-pull by one hand-pull, the rope came up. Shinji was winning. But the sea was not surrendering: one after the other, mockingly, it kept sending the pots up—all empty.

More than twenty pots had already been pulled up at intervals of from seven to ten yards along the rope. Shinji was pulling the rope. Ryuji was emptying water from the pots. Jukichi, keeping a hand on the sculling oar and never once changing his expression, silently watched the boys at their work.

Sweat gradually spread across Shinji’s back and began to glisten on his forehead, exposed to the morning wind. His cheeks became flushed. Finally the sun broke through the clouds, casting pale shadows at the feet of the quickly moving boys.

Ryuji was facing away from the sea, in toward the boat. He upended the pot that had just come up, and Jukichi pulled a lever to disengage the pulley. Now for the first time Shinji looked back toward the pulley.

Ryuji poked around inside the pot with a wooden pole. Like a person awakened from a long nap, an octopus oozed its entire body out of the pot and cowered on the deck. Quickly the cover was jerked off a large bamboo creel standing by the engine room—and the first catch of the day went slithering down into it with a dull thud.

•    •    •

The
Taihei-maru
spent most of the morning octopus fishing. Its meager catch consisted of five octopuses. The wind died and the sun shone gloriously. Passing through the Irako Channel, the
Taihei-maru
sailed back into the Gulf of Ise to do some “drag fishing” on the sly in the prohibited waters there.

To make their drag they tied a number of large hooka and lines on a crossbar, tied it to a stout hawser, and then, putting the boat in motion, dragged this across the floor of the gulf like a rake. After a time they pulled the drag in; with it four flatheads and three soles came flapping up from the water.

Shinji took them off the hooks with his bare hands, The flatheads fell to the blood-smeared deck, their white bellies gleaming. The black, wet bodies of the soles, their little eyes sunk deep in folds of wrinkles, reflected the blue of the sky.

Lunchtime came. Jukichi dressed the flatheads on the engine-room hatch and cut them into slices. They divided the raw slices onto the lids of their aluminum lunchboxes and poured soy sauce over them from a small bottle. Then they took up the boxes, filled with a mixture of boiled rice and barley and, stuffed into one corner, a few slices of pickled radish. The boat they entrusted to the gentle swell.

“Say, what do you think about old Uncle Teru Miyata bringing his girl back?” Jukichi said abruptly.

“I didn’t know he had.”

“Me neither.”

Both boys shook their heads and Jukichi proceeded with his story:

“Uncle Teru had four girls and one boy. Said he had
more than enough of girls, so he married three of them off and let the other one be adopted away. Her name was Hatsue and she was adopted into a family of diving women over at Oizaki in Shima. But then, what do you know, that only son of his, Matsu, dies of the lung sickness last year. Being a widower, Uncle Teru starts feeling lonely. So he calls Hatsue back, has her put back in his family register, and decides to adopt a husband into the family for her, to have someone to carry on the name.… Hatsue’s grown up to be a real beauty. There’ll be a lot of youngsters wanting to marry her.… How about you two—hey?”

Shinji and Ryuji looked at each other and laughed. Each could guess that the other was blushing, but they were too tanned by the sun for the red to show.

Talk of this girl and the image of the girl he had seen on the beach yesterday immediately took fast hold of each other in Shinji’s mind. At the same instant he recalled, with a sinking heart, his own poor condition in life. The recollection made the girl whom he had stared at so closely only the day before seem very, very far away from him now. Because now he knew that her father was Terukichi Miyata, the wealthy owner of two coasting freighters chartered to Yamagawa Transport—the hundred-and-eighty-five-ton
Utajima-maru
and the ninety-five-ton
Harukaze-maru
—and a noted crosspatch, whose white hair would wave like lion whiskers in anger.

Shinji had always been very level-headed. He had realized that he was still only eighteen and that it was too soon to be thinking about women. Unlike the environment of city youths, always exploding with thrills, Uta-jima had not a single pin-ball parlor, not a single bar, not
a single waitress. And this boy’s simple daydream was only to own his own engine-powered boat some day and go into the coastal-shipping business with his younger brother.