The Sound of Waves (3 page)

Surrounded though he was by the vast ocean, Shinji did not especially burn with impossible dreams of great adventure across the seas. His fisherman’s conception of the sea was close to that of the farmer for his land. The sea was the place where he earned his living, a rippling field where, instead of waving heads of rice or wheat, the white and formless harvest of waves was forever swaying above the unrelieved blueness of a sensitive and yielding soil.

Even so, when that day’s fishing was almost done, the sight of a white freighter sailing against the evening clouds on the horizon filled the boy’s heart with strange emotions. From far away the world came pressing in upon him with a hugeness he had never before apprehended. The realization of this unknown world came to him like distant thunder, now pealing from afar, now dying away to nothingness.

A small starfish had dried to the deck in the prow. The boy sat there in the prow, with a coarse white towel tied round his head. He turned his eyes away from the evening clouds and shook his head slightly.

T
HAT NIGHT
Shinji attended the regular meeting of the Young Men’s Association. This was the name now applied to what in ancient times was called the “sleeping house,” then a dormitory system for the young, unmarried men of the island. Even now many young men preferred to sleep in the Association’s drab hut on the beach rather than in their own homes. There the youths hotly debated such matters as schooling and health; the ways of salvaging sunken ships and making rescues at sea; and the Lion and Lantern Festival dances, functions belonging to the young men of the village since ancient days. Thus they felt themselves part of the communal life and found pleasure in that agreeable weight that comes from shouldering the burdens and duties of full-grown men.

A wind was blowing from the sea, rattling the closed
night-shutters and making the lamp sway back and forth, now dim, now suddenly bright. From outside, the night sea came pressing very near them, and the roar of the tide was constantly revealing the unrest and might of nature as the shadows of the lamp moved over the cheerful faces of the young men.

When Shinji entered the hut one boy was kneeling on all fours under the lamp, having his hair cut by a friend with a pair of slightly rusty hair clippers. Shinji smiled and sat down on the floor against the wall, clasping his knees. He remained silent as usual, listening to what the others were saying.

The youths were bragging to each other of the day’s fishing, laughing loudly and heaping each other unstintingly with insults. One boy, who was a great reader, was earnestly reading one of the out-of-date magazines with which the hut was supplied. Another was engrossed, with no less enthusiasm, in a comic book; holding the pages open with fingers whose knuckles were gnarled beyond his years, he would study some pages for two or three minutes at a time before finally understanding the point and breaking into a loud guffaw.

Here, for the second time, Shinji heard talk of the new girl. He caught a snatch of a sentence spoken by a snaggle-toothed boy who opened a big mouth to laugh and then said:

“That Hatsue, she’s—”

The rest of the sentence was lost to Shinji in a sudden commotion from another part of the room, mixed with answering laughter from the group around the snaggle-toothed boy.

Shinji was not at all given to brooding about things, but this one name, like a tantalizing puzzle, kept harassing
his thoughts. At the mere sound of the name his cheeks flushed and his heart pounded. It was a strange feeling to sit there motionless and feel within himself these physical changes that, until now, he had experienced only during heavy labor.

He put the palm of his hand against his cheek to feel it. The hot flesh felt like that of some complete stranger. It was a blow to his pride to realize the existence of things within himself that he had never so much as suspected, and rising anger made his cheeks even more flaming hot.

The young men were awaiting the arrival of their president, Yasuo Kawamoto. Although only nineteen, Yasuo was the son of a leading family in the village and possessed the power to make others follow him. Young as he was, he already knew the secret of giving himself importance, and he always came late to their meetings.

Opening the door with a bang, Yasuo now entered the room. He was quite fat and had inherited a red complexion from his tippling father. His face was naïve enough in appearance, but there was a crafty look about his thin eyebrows. He spoke glibly, without any trace of the local dialect:

“Sorry to be late.… Well, then, let’s not waste time. There’re definite plans to be made for next month’s projects.”

So saying, he sat down at the desk and opened a notebook. They could all see that he was in a great hurry about something.

“As decided at the last meeting, there’s the business of—er—holding a meeting of the Respect for Old Age Association, and also hauling stones for road repairs. Then
there’s the matter of cleaning the sewers to get rid of the rats—it’s a request of the Village Assembly. We’ll do this as usual—er—on a stormy day when the boats can’t go out. Fortunately, rat-catching can be done in any weather, and I don’t believe the police will get after us even if we kill a few rats outside the sewers.”

There was general laughter and shouts of “You tell ’em! You tell ’em!”

Next, proposals were made to ask the school doctor to give them a talk on hygiene, and to hold an oratorical contest. But the old-style, lunar-calendar New Year was just over, and the youths were so fed up with gatherings that they were lukewarm to both proposals.

So they turned themselves into a committee of the whole and sat in critical judgment on the merits of their mimeographed bulletin,
The Orphan Island
. Something called a quatrain by Verlaine had been quoted at the end of an essay in the last issue by the boy who liked books so much, and this now became the universal target for their jibes:

I know not why

My mournful soul

Flies the sea, fitfully, fitfully
,

On restless, frantic pinions …

“What do you mean by that ‘fitfully, fitfully’?”

“ ‘Fitfully, fitfully’ means ‘fitfully, fitfully’—that’s what!”

“Maybe it’s a mistake for ‘flitfully, flitfully.’ ”

“That’s it! If you’d said ‘it flies flitfully, flitfully’—then that would’ve made some sense.”

“Who’s this Verlaine fellow anyhow?”

“One of the most famous French poets—that’s who!”

“And what do you know about French poets, hey? You probably got it all out of some popular song somewhere.”

Thus the meeting had ended as usual in a give-and-take of insults.

Wondering why Yasuo, the president, had been in such a hurry to leave, Shinji stopped one of his friends and asked him.

“Don’t you know?” the friend replied. “He’s invited to the party Uncle Teru Miyata’s giving to celebrate his daughter’s homecoming.”

Normally Shinji would have walked home with the others as they talked and laughed, but now, hearing of the party to which in no case would he have been invited, he soon slipped away and walked alone along the beach toward the stone steps leading to Yashiro Shrine.

Looking up at the village houses, built one above the other on a steep rise, he picked out the lights shining from the Miyata house. All the lights in the village came from the same oil lamps, but these looked somehow different, more sparkling. Even if he could not see the actual scene of the banquet, he could clearly imagine how the sensitive flame of the lamps there must be throwing flickering shadows from the girl’s tranquil eyebrows and long lashes down onto her cheeks.

Reaching the bottom of the stone steps, Shinji looked up the flight of stairs, dappled with shadows of pine branches. He began to climb, his wooden clogs making a dry, clicking sound. There was not a soul to be seen around the shrine, and the light in the priest’s house was out.

Even though he had just bounded up two hundred steps, Shinji’s thick chest was not laboring in the least
when he reached the shrine. He stopped before it, filled with a feeling of reverence.

He tossed a ten-yen coin into the offertory chest. Thinking a moment, he tossed in ten yen more. The sound of his clapped hands, calling the god’s attention, sounded through the shrine garden, and Shinji prayed in his heart:

“God, let the seas be calm, the fish plentiful, and our village more and more prosperous. I am still young, but in time let me become a fisherman among fishermen. Let me have much knowledge in the ways of the sea, in the ways of fish, in the ways of boats, in the ways of the weather … in everything. Let me be a man with surpassing skill in everything.… Please protect my gentle mother and my brother, who is still a child. When my mother enters the sea in the diving season, please protect her body somehow from all the many dangers.… Then there’s a different sort of request I’d like to make.… Some day let even such a person as me be granted a good-natured, beautiful bride … say someone like Terukichi Miyata’s returned daughter.…”

The wind came blowing, and the pine branches set up a clamor. It was a gust of wind that raised solemn echoes even in the dark interior of the shrine. Perhaps it was the sea-god, accepting the boy’s prayer.

Shinji looked up at the star-filled sky and breathed deeply. Then he thought:

“But mightn’t the gods punish me for such a selfish prayer?”

I
T WAS
some four or five days later and the wind was blowing a gale. The waves were breaking high across the breakwater of Uta-jima’s harbor. The sea, far and wide, was choppy with whitecaps.

The skies were clear, but because of the high wind not a single fishing-boat had gone out.

Shinji’s mother had asked a favor of him. The women of the village gathered firewood on the mountain and left it stored at the top in what had formerly been a military observation tower. His mother had marked hers with a red rag. Since he had finished by noon with the Young Men’s Association’s work of carrying stones for the road building, she asked him to bring her gatherings down from the mountain for her.

•    •    •

Shinji shouldered the wooden frame on which brushwood was carried, and set out. The path led up past the lighthouse. As he rounded Woman’s Slope the wind died as completely as though it had been a trick.

The residence of the lighthouse-keeper was as quiet as though in a deep noonday sleep. He could see the back of a watchman seated at the desk in the watchhouse. A radio was blaring music.

Climbing the pine-grove slope behind the lighthouse, Shinji began to sweat.

The mountain was utterly still. Not a single human form was to be seen; there was not even so much as a stray dog prowling about. In fact, because of a taboo of the island’s guardian deity, there was not a single stray dog on the entire island, let alone a pet dog. And as the island was all uphill and land was scarce, neither were there any horses or cows for draft animals. The only domestic animals were the cats that came trailing the tips of their tails through the jagged shadows thrown in sharp relief in the lanes leading always downward in cobbled steps between the rows of village houses.

The boy climbed to the top of the mountain. This was the highest point on Uta-jima. But it was so overgrown with
sakaki
and silverberry bushes and tall weeds that there was no view. There was nothing but the sound of the sea roaring up through the vegetation. The path leading down the other side to the south had been practically taken over by bushes and weeds, and one had to make quite a detour to reach the observation tower.

Presently, beyond a sand-floored pine thicket, the three-story, reinforced-concrete tower came into view. The white ruins looked uncanny in the deserted, silent scene.

In former days soldiers had stood on the second-floor
balcony, binoculars to their eyes, and checked the aim of the guns that were fired for target practice from Mt. Konaka on the far side of Irako Cape. Officers had called out from inside the tower to know where the shells were hitting, and the soldiers had called back the ranges. This way of things had continued until mid-war, and the soldiers had always blamed a phantom badger for any provisions that were mysteriously short.