The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea Page 2

  He was choked, wet, ecstatic. Certain he had watched a tangle of thread unravel to trace a hallowed figure. And it would have to be protected: for all he knew, he was its thirteen-year-old creator.

  “If this is ever destroyed, it’ll mean the end of the world,” Noboru murmured, barely conscious. I guess I’d do anything to stop that, no matter how awful!

  CHAPTER TWO

  SURPRISED, Ryuji Tsukazaki woke up in an unfamiliar bed. The bed next to his was empty. Little by little, he recalled what the woman had told him before she had fallen asleep: Noboru was going swimming with friends in Kamakura in the morning; she would get up early and wake him, and would come back to the bedroom as soon as he left . . . would he please wait for her quietly. He groped for his watch on the night table and held it up to the light that filtered through the curtains. Ten minutes to eight: probably the boy was still in the house.

  He had slept for about four hours, after falling asleep at just the time he would ordinarily be going to bed after night watch. It had been hardly more than a nap, yet his head was clear, the long pleasure of the night still coiled inside him tight as a spring. He stretched and crossed his wrists in front of him. In the light from the window, the hair on his muscled arms appeared to eddy into golden pools; he was satisfied.

  Though still early, it was very hot. The curtains hung motionless in front of the open window. Stretching again, Ryuji, with one extended finger, pushed the button on the fan.

  Fifteen minutes to Second Officer’s watch—stand by please. He had heard the Quartermaster’s summons distinctly in a dream. Every day of his life, Ryuji stood watch from noon to four and again from midnight to four in the morning. Stars were his only companions, and the sea.

  Aboard the freighter Rakuyo, Ryuji was considered unsociable and eccentric. He had never been good at gabbing, never enjoyed the scuttlebutt supposed to be a sailor’s only source of pleasure. Tales of women, anecdotes from shore, the endless boasting . . . he hated the lowbrow chatter meant to sweeten loneliness, the ritual of affirming ties with the brotherhood of men.

  Whereas most men choose to become sailors because they like the sea, Ryuji had been guided by an antipathy to land. The Occupation interdict forbidding Japanese vessels to travel the open sea had been revoked just as he was graduated from a merchant-marine high school, and he had shipped out on the first freighter since the war to sail to Taiwan and Hong Kong. Later he had been to India and eventually to Pakistan.

  What a joy the tropics were! Hoping to trade for nylons or wrist watches, native children met them at every port with bananas and pineapples and papayas, bright-colored birds and baby monkeys. And Ryuji loved the groves of wine palms mirrored in a muddy, slow-flowing river. Palms must have been common to his native land in some earlier life, he thought, or they could never have bewitched him so.

  But as the years passed, he grew indifferent to the lure of exotic lands. He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.

  Ryuji hated the immobility of the land, the eternally unchanging surfaces. But a ship was another kind of prison.

  At twenty, he had been passionately certain: there’s just one thing I’m destined for and that’s glory; that’s right, glory! He had no idea what kind of glory he wanted, or what kind he was suited for. He knew only that in the depths of the world’s darkness was a point of light which had been provided for him alone and would draw near someday to irradiate him and no other.

  And it seemed increasingly obvious that the world would have to topple if he was to attain the glory that was rightfully his. They were consubstantial: glory and the capsized world. He longed for a storm. But life aboard ship taught him only the regularity of natural law and the dynamic stability of the wobbling world. He began to examine his hopes and dreams one by one, and one by one to efface them as a sailor pencils out the days on the calendar in his cabin.

  Sometimes, as he stood watch in the middle of the night, he could feel his glory knifing toward him like a shark from some great distance in the darkly heaping sea, see it almost, aglow like the noctilucae that fire the water, surging in to flood him with light and cast the silhouette of his heroic figure against the brink of man’s world. On those nights, standing in the white pilot-house amid a clutter of instruments and bronze signal bells, Ryuji was more convinced than ever:

  There must be a special destiny in store for me; a glittering, special-order kind no ordinary man would be permitted.

  At the same time, he liked popular music. He bought all the new records and learned them by heart while at sea and hummed the tunes when he had a minute, stopping when anyone came near. He liked sailor songs (the rest of the crew scorned them) and his favorite was one called “I Can’t Give Up the Sailor’s Life.”

  The whistle wails and streamers tear,

  Our ship slips away from the pier.

  Now the sea’s my home, I decided that.

  But even I must shed a tear

  As I wave, boys, as I wave so sad

  At the harbor town where my heart was glad.

  As soon as the noon watch was over he would shut himself up in his darkening cabin and play the record again and again until it was time for dinner. He always turned the volume down because he didn’t want to share the song; besides, he was afraid a fellow officer might drop in with some scuttlebutt if he happened to hear the music. The rest of the crew knew how he felt and no one ever disturbed him.

  Sometimes, as he listened to the song or hummed it, tears brimmed in his eyes, just as in the lyrics. Strange that a man with no ties should become sentimental about a “harbor town,” but the tears welled directly from a dark, distant, enervated part of himself he had neglected all his life and couldn’t command.

  The actual sight of land receding into the distance never made him cry. Wharf and docks, cranes and the roofs of warehouses slipping quietly away, he watched with contempt in his eye. Once the cast-off had lighted a fire in his breast, but more than ten years at sea had quelled those flames. He had gained only his sunburn and keen eyes.

  Ryuji stood watch and slept, woke up, stood watch and slept again. He was full of unexpressed feelings, and his savings steadily increased, for he tried to be alone as much as possible. He became expert at shooting the sun, he counted the stars as friends, he mastered the arts of mooring and warping and towing until finally, listening to the din of waves at night, his ear could discern the surge of the sea from the slake. While he grew more familiar with lustrous tropical clouds and the many-colored coral seas, the total in his bankbook climbed and now he had almost two million yen* in the bank, an extraordinary sum for a Second Mate.

  He had sampled the pleasures of dissipation too. He had lost his virginity on his first cruise. They were in Hong Kong, and a senior officer had taken him to a Chinese whore. . . .

  Ryuji lay on the bed letting the fan scatter his cigarette ashes and half closed his eyes as if to measure on a balance the quantity and quality of the previous night’s pleasure against the pitiful sensations of that first experience. Staring into space, he began to see again at the back of his mind the dark wharves of Hong Kong at night, the turbid heaviness of water lapping at the pier, the sampans’ feeble lanterns . . .

  In the distance, beyond the forest of masts and the lowered straw-mat sails of the moored fleet, the glaring windows and neon signs of Hong Kong outshone the weak lanterns in the foreground and tinted the black water with their colors. Ryuji and the older seaman who was his guide were in a sampan piloted by a middle-aged woman. The oar in the stern whispered through the water as they slipped across the narrow harbor. When they came to the place where the flickering lights were clustered, Ryuji saw the girls’ rooms bobbing brightly on the water.

  The fleet was
moored in three long lines so as to form an inner court of water. All the sterns were faced in and were decorated with sticks of burning incense and red and green paper flags celebrating regional deities. Flowery silk cloth lined the semicircular tarpaulin shells on the flat decks. At the rear of each shell a raised stand, draped with the same material, held a small mirror: an image of Ryuji’s sampan wobbled from room to room as they slipped past.

  The girls pretended not to notice them. Some lay swaddled in quilts, baring to the cold only dollish, powder-white necks. Others, quilts wrapped around their thighs, played with fortunetelling cards. The luscious reds and golds on the faces of the cards glittered between slender sallow fingers.

  “Which one do you want?” the officer asked. “They’re all young.”

  Ryuji didn’t answer. He was about to choose the first woman in his life and, having traveled sixteen hundred leagues to this bit of dirty, reddish seaweed afloat in the turbid waters of Hong Kong, he felt curiously fatigued, perplexed. But the girls certainly were young, and attractive. He chose before the older man had a chance to offer a suggestion.

  The whore had been sitting in silence, her face puckered in the cold, but as Ryuji stepped onto her boat, she laughed happily. And he found himself half-heartedly believing in the happiness he was bringing her. She drew the flowery curtain over the entrance to the shell.

  They performed in silence. He trembled a little out of vanity, as when he had first scaled the mast. The woman’s lower body, like a hibernating animal had asleep, moved lethargically under the quilts; he sensed the stars of night tilting dangerously at the top of the mast. The stars slanted into the south, swung to the north, wheeled, whirled into the east, and seemed finally to be impaled on the tip of the mast. By the time he realized this was a woman, it was done. . . .

  There was a knock on the door and Fusako Kuroda came into the room with a large breakfast tray. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long. Noboru just left a minute ago.” Putting the tray down on the tea table, she opened the curtains and the window. “There’s not a bit of breeze. It’s going to be hot again.”

  Even the shade beneath the window ledge was as hot as burning asphalt. Ryuji sat up in bed and wrapped the wrinkled sheet around his waist. Fusako was dressed to go out. Her bare arms, moving not to embrace him but to pour morning coffee into cups, seemed unfamiliar. They were no longer the arms of the night.

  Ryuji beckoned Fusako to the bed and kissed her. The thin, sensitive skin of her lips betrayed the fluttering of her eyes: this morning, he knew, she was uneasy even while her eyes were closed.

  “What time do you go to work?” he said.

  “As long as I can be there by eleven. What are you going to do?”

  “I might go down to the dock for a while, just to see what’s going on.”

  They had created in a single night a new situation and now it appeared to bewilder them. For the moment, their bewilderment was their only etiquette. Ryuji, with what he liked to call the unbelievable arrogance of intolerable people, was calculating how far he might be able to go.

  The expression on Fusako’s radiant face suggested a number of things. Resurrection. Or an utter effacement from memory. Or even determination to prove to herself and the world that it had not, in any sense of the word, been a mistake.

  “Shall we eat over here?” she suggested, moving to the couch. Ryuji jumped out of bed and threw on his clothes. Fusako was standing at the window. “I wish we could see your ship from here.”

  “If that pier wasn’t so far out of town . . .” Coming up behind her, Ryuji put his arms around Fusako’s waist. Together they looked out at the harbor.

  The window overlooked the red roofs of old warehouses. A block of new warehouses, like concrete apartment buildings, hulked up from the pier to the north. The canal was buried under sculls and barges. Beyond the warehouse district piles of seasoning lumber merged into an intricate wooden mosaic. Extending like a concrete finger from the seaward side of the lumber yards, a long breakwater stretched all the way to the sea.

  The summer morning sun lay as thin as a dazzling sheet of hammered metal across the colossal anvil of the harbor scene.

  Ryuji’s fingers touched her nipples through the blue cotton dress. She tossed her head, her hair tickled his nose. As always, he felt as if he had traveled some huge distance, sometimes from the far side of the world, finally to arrive at a point of delicate sensation—a thrilling in his fingertips near a window on a summer morning.

  The fragrance of coffee and marmalade filled the room.

  “There was something about Noboru this morning, almost as if he knew. Of course, he seems to like you a lot, so it doesn’t matter really. . . . I still don’t understand how this could have happened. I mean”—her confusion rang a little false—“it’s just incredible!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  REX, LTD., was one of the oldest and best-known luxury shops in Yokohama’s swank Motomachi district. Since her husband’s death, Fusako had been running the business by herself. The Moorish architecture of the small two-story building was distinctive; the Mosque window set into the thick white wall at the front of the shop always contained a tasteful display. Inside, an open mezzanine much like a veranda overlooked a patio of imported Spanish tile. A small fountain bubbled in the center of the patio. A bronze Bacchus, some Vivax neckties carelessly draped over its arms, was one of the many curios collected by Fusako’s husband before his death; these were priced so as to discourage any would-be buyer.

  Fusako employed an elderly manager and four salesgirls. Among the clientele were wealthy foreigners who lived in Yokohama, a large number of dandies and movie people from Tokyo, and even some buyers from small retail shops on the Ginza who came down to forage: Rex enjoyed a reputation for uncanny discernment of fine quality, particularly in imported men’s wear and accessories. Both Fusako and the manager, a man called Shibuya, who possessed her husband’s tastes, were scrupulous buyers.

  Whenever a ship docked in Yokohama, an import agent who was an old friend of the family used his connections to get them into the bonded warehouse as soon as the cargo had been unloaded: often Fusako was able to place a bid before other buyers had seen the shipment. Her policy was to emphasize quality labels while providing a wide price range in every item. Rex’s order for Jaeger sweaters, for example, would be divided equally between the manufacturer’s most exclusive and more modest lines. The same was true of imported Italian leather: Rex’s selection included leather from the tanning school attached to the Chiesa Santa Croce in Florence as well as the most expensive gloves and purses from the Via Condotti.

  Though Fusako was unable to travel abroad herself, because of Noboru, she had sent Mr. Shibuya on a buying trip to Europe the year before, and he had established new connections all over the Continent. Shibuya had devoted his life to elegance in dress: Rex even stocked English spats, an article not to be found in any of the Ginza shops.

  Fusako reached the shop at the usual time and was greeted with the usual morning cordiality. She asked a few business questions and then went up to her office on the mezzanine and opened the day’s mail. The air conditioner in the window whirred solemnly.

  Being able to sit at her desk at the usual time was a great relief. It had to be this way. Today of all days, she couldn’t imagine what might have happened if she had stayed home from work.

  She took a lady’s cigarette from her purse and glanced, as she lit it, at the memo book on her desk. Yoriko Kasuga, a movie actress in Yokohama on location, was due to arrive at noon for some colossal shopping: she had just returned from a film festival in Europe and, having spent all her gift money on other things, hoped to cover up with presents from Rex. “Some stunning French accessories,” she had telephoned to say, “for about twenty men—pick out whatever you like.” Later in the afternoon, a private secretary from Yokohama Importers was coming over to pick up some of the Italian polo shirts her boss, the company president, wore on the golf links. Faithful customers
, these women were remarkably easy to please.

  A part of the patio was visible beneath the louvered swinging doors. It was hushed. The tips of leaves on a rubber tree in one corner shone with a dull luster. Apparently no one had arrived yet.

  Fusako was worried that Mr. Shibuya might have noticed what felt to her like a flush around her eyes. The old man looked at a woman as though he were examining a piece of fabric in his hand. Even if she was his employer.

  She had never actually counted until that morning: five years since her husband’s death! It hadn’t seemed so long in passing, but all of a sudden, like a white obi she would never be able to wind up, five years was a dizzying length.

  Fusako teased the ashtray with her cigarette and then snuffed it out. The man still nested in every nook of her body. She was aware of her flesh beneath the clothes as continuous, thigh and breast in warm accordance: it was a new sensation. And she could still smell the sweat of the man. As if to test them, she curled her stockinged toes.

  Fusako had met Ryuji for the first time two days before. Noboru, who was a fanatic about ships, had wheedled her into asking a shipping executive friend for a letter of introduction, and they had gone to see the Rakuyo, a ten-thousand-ton freighter anchored at Takashima Pier. . . .

  Stopping for a minute at the far end of the dock, mother and son gazed at the cream-and-green-colored ship gleaming in the distance. Fusako unfurled a parasol with a long white snakeskin handle.

  “You see those ships out in the offing?” Noboru said knowingly. “They’re all waiting their turn for a berth to open up.”

  “That’s why our shipments are always so late getting in,” Fusako drawled. She felt hot just looking up at the ship.