The Sound of Waves Read online

Licking his fingers, the boy carefully counted the bills in his big, rough hands. Then he returned them to the envelope with his name on it and put it deep in the bottom of the inner pocket of his jumper. With a bow toward the master, he left the office. The master had drawn up to the brazier with the head of the Co-operative and was proudly exhibiting a cigarette holder he had carved himself out of a piece of coral.

  The boy had intended to go straight home, but somehow his feet took him of their own accord back to the darkening beach.

  The last boat was just being pulled up onto the sand. There were only a few men to turn the winch and to help it along by pulling on the rope, so the women, who usually only placed the “abacus” frames under the keel, were pushing from behind. It was obvious that no headway was being made. The beach was growing dark and no trace was to be seen of the grammar-school boys who usually came out to help. Shinji decided to lend a hand.

  Just at that moment one of the women pushing the boat raised her head and looked in Shinji’s direction. It was Hatsue. He had no wish to see the face of this girl who had put him in such a black mood all day. But his feet carried him on to the boat. Her face was glowing in the semi-darkness; he could see her forehead moist with sweat, her rosy cheeks, her dark, flashing eyes fixed again steadily in the direction the boat was being pushed.

  Without a word, Shinji took hold of the rope. The men at the winch called out:

  “Much obliged.”

  Shinji’s arms were powerful. In an instant the boat was sliding up over the sand, and the women were running helter-skelter after it with their “abacus” frames.

  Once the boat was beached, Shinji turned and walked off toward home, not once looking back. He wanted terribly to turn around, but smothered the impulse.

  Opening the sliding door of his house, under the dim lamp Shinji saw the familiar expanse of straw mats, turned reddish-brown with age and use. His brother was lying on his stomach reading, holding a textbook out under the light. His mother was busy at the cookstove. Without taking off his rubber boots, Shinji lay back face up, the upper half of his body on the straw mats and his feet still in the tiny entry.

  “Welcome back,” said his mother.

  Shinji liked to hand his pay envelope to his mother without saying anything. And, being a mother, she understood and always pretended to have forgotten that this was the tenth day, payday. She knew how much her son liked to see her look surprised.

  Shinji ran his hand into the inner pocket of his jumper. The money was not there! He searched the pocket on the other side. He searched his trouser pockets. He even ran his hands down inside his trousers.

  Surely he must have dropped it on the beach. Without a word, he ran out of the house.

  Shortly after Shinji had left, someone came calling in front of the house. Shinji’s mother went to the entry and found a young girl standing in the darkness of the alleyway.

  “Shinji-san—is he at home?”

  “He came home just a bit ago, but then he went out again.”

  “I found this on the beach. And since Shinji-san’s name was written on it …”

  “Well, now that’s truly kind of you. Shinji must have gone to look for it.”

  “Shall I go tell him?”

  “Oh, would you? Much obliged, much obliged.”

  The beach was now completely dark. The meager lights of Toshi-jima and Sugashi-jima were glinting from across the sea. Fast asleep in the starlight, many fishing-boats were lined up, facing domineeringly out to sea.

  Hatsue caught a glimpse of Shinji’s shadow. But at that instant he disappeared behind a boat. He was stooping over, searching the sand, and apparently had not seen Hatsue. She came upon him face to face in the shadow of a boat, standing stock-still, in a rage.

  Hatsue told him what had happened and that she had come to tell him his money was already safely in his mother’s hands. She went on to explain that she had had to ask two or three people the way to Shinji’s house, but had always satisfied their curiosity by showing them the envelope she had found, with Shinji’s name on it.

  The boy gave a sigh of relief. He smiled, his white teeth flashing handsomely in the darkness. The girl had come in a hurry and her breasts were rising and falling rapidly. Shinji was reminded of opulent dark-blue waves on the open sea. All the day’s torment disappeared, and his spirits revived within him.

  “I hear you’re going to marry Yasuo Kawamoto. Is it true?” The words rushed out of the boy’s mouth.

  The girl burst out laughing. Her laughter gradually increased until she was choking with it.

  Shinji wanted to stop her but did not know how. He put his hand on her shoulder.

  His touch was light, but Hatsue dropped to the sand, still laughing.

  “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” Shinji squatted down beside her and shook her by the shoulders.

  At last the girl’s laughter abated and she looked seriously into the boy’s face. Then she broke into laughter again.

  Shinji stuck out his face toward hers and asked:

  “Is it true?”

  “Silly! It’s a big lie.”

  “But that’s what they’re saying all right.”

  “It’s a big lie.”

  The two had clasped their knees and were sitting in the shadow of the boat.

  “Oh, I hurt! I’ve laughed so much that I hurt—right here,” the girl said, putting her hand over her breast.

  The stripes of her faded work-clothes were moving and shifting where they crossed her breasts.

  “This is where it hurts,” Hatsue said again.

  “Are you all right?” And without thinking Shinji put his own hand on the spot.

  “When you press it, it feels a little better,” the girl said.

  And suddenly Shinji’s breast too was moving fast.

  Their cheeks came so close they were almost touching. They could plainly smell each other—it was a fragrance like that of salt water. They could feel each other’s warmth.

  Their dry, chapped lips touched. There was a slight taste of salt.

  “It’s like seaweed,” Shinji thought.

  Then the moment was past. The boy moved away and stood up, propelled by a feeling of guilt at this first experience in his life.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to take some fish to the lighthouse-keeper’s place when I come back from fishing.” Still looking out to sea, Shinji had now recovered his dignity and could make this declaration in a manly voice.

  “I’m going there too tomorrow afternoon,” the girl replied, likewise looking out to sea.

  With that, the two parted and went walking away on opposite sides of the row of boats. Shinji was starting for home, but he noticed that the girl had not appeared from behind the boats. Just then he saw her shadow cast on the sand from behind the last boat and knew she was hiding there.

  “Your shadow’s giving you away,” he called out.

  Suddenly the figure of a girl dressed in wide-striped work-clothes came darting out, like some wild animal, and went running at full speed across the beach, never looking back.

  6

  RETURNING FROM FISHING the next day, Shinji set out for the lighthouse carrying two scorpion-fish, each about five or six inches long, strung by the gills on a straw rope. He had already climbed to the rear of Yashiro Shrine when he remembered that he had not yet offered a prayer of thanks to the god for having showered him with blessings so quickly. He went back to the front of the shrine and prayed devoutly.

  His prayer finished, Shinji gazed out over the Gulf of Ise, already shining in the moonlight, and breathed deeply. Clouds were floating above the horizon, looking like ancient gods.

  The boy felt a consummate accord between himself and this opulence of nature that surrounded him. He inhaled deeply, and it was as though a part of the unseen something that constitutes nature had permeated the core of his being. He heard the sound of the waves striking the shore, and it was as though the surging of his young blood was keeping time with the
movement of the sea’s great tides. It was doubtless because nature itself satisfied his need that Shinji felt no particular lack of music in his everyday life.

  Shinji lifted the scorpion-fish to the level of his eyes and stuck out his tongue at their ugly, thorny faces. The fish were definitely alive, but they made not the slightest movement. So Shinji poked one in the jaw and watched it flop about in the air.

  Thus the boy was loitering along the way, loath to have the happy meeting take place too quickly.

  Both the lighthouse-keeper and his wife had taken Hatsue, the newcomer, to their warm hearts. Just when she was so silent that they were thinking maybe she was not so attractive after all, suddenly she would break into her lovely, girlish laughter; and if she sometimes seemed lost in the clouds, she was also most considerate. For instance, at the end of an etiquette lesson Hatsue would immediately begin clearing away the cups they had drunk their tea in—a thoughtful action that never would have occurred to the other girls—and while she was at it she would go on to wash any other dirty dishes she might find in the kitchen.

  The couple at the lighthouse had one child, a daughter, who was attending the university in Tokyo. She only came home during vacations and, in her absence, they regarded these village girls who came so often to the house as their own children. They took a deep interest in the girls’ futures, and when good fortune came to one of them they were as pleased as though the girl had been their own child.

  The lighthouse-keeper, who had been in this service for thirty years, was feared by the village children because of his stern look and the tremendous voice with which he stormed at the young scamps who stole in to explore the lighthouse; but at heart he was actually a gentle person. Solitude had divested him of any feeling that men could have base motives. At a lighthouse there can be no greater treat than to have visitors. Surely no one would go the great distance to call at an isolated lighthouse with hidden ill-will, or at least any such feelings would surely vanish from his heart in the face of the unreserved hospitality he was certain to receive. Actually, it was just as the lighthouse-keeper so often said: “Bad intentions cannot travel as far as good.”

  The mistress too was truly a good person, and also very well read. Not only had she once been a teacher in a rural girls’ school, but her many years of living in lighthouses had fostered her love of reading even more, until she now possessed an almost encyclopedic knowledge about everything. If she knew that La Scala Opera House was in Milan, she also knew that such-and-such a Tokyo film star had recently sprained her right ankle at such-and-such a place. She would argue her husband into a corner, and then, as if to make amends, put her whole soul into darning his socks or fixing his supper. When visitors came she would chatter away incessantly. The villagers listened spellbound to the mistress’s eloquence, some of them comparing her unfavorably with their own taciturn women and feeling a meddlesome sort of sympathy for the lighthouse-keeper. But he himself had great respect for his wife’s learning.

  The living-quarters provided for the lighthouse-keeper was a one-story house of three rooms. Everything about it was kept as neat and polished as the lighthouse itself. A steamship-company calendar hung on the wall, and the ashes in the sunken hearth of the sitting-room were always neatly shaped up around the charcoal. Even in their daughter’s absence, her desk stood in one corner of the parlor, its polished surface reflecting the blue glass of an empty pen-tray and decorated with a French doll. Behind the house there was a caldron-style bath heated by gas made from the dregs of the oil used to lubricate the beacon light. Unlike conditions in the squalid houses of the fishermen, here even the indigo pattern of the new-washed hand towel hanging by the basin at the toilet-room door was always bright and clean.

  The lighthouse-keeper spent the greater part of each day beside the sunken hearth, smoking cheap New Life cigarettes, economically cutting them into short lengths and fitting them into a long, slender brass pipe. The lighthouse was dead during the daytime, with only one of the young assistants in the watchhouse to report ship movements.

  Toward evening that day, even though no etiquette lesson was scheduled, Hatsue came visiting, bringing a door-gift of some sea-cucumbers wrapped in newspaper. Beneath her blue-serge skirt she was wearing long flesh-colored stockings, and over them red socks. Her sweater was her usual scarlet one.

  Hatsue had no sooner entered the house than the mistress began giving advice, not mincing her words:

  “When you wear a blue skirt, Hatsue-san, you ought to wear black hose. I know you have some because you were wearing them only the other day.”

  “Well …” Blushing slightly, Hatsue sat down beside the hearth.

  At the regular lessons of etiquette and home-making the girls sat listening fairly intently and the mistress spoke in a lecturing tone of voice, but now, seated by the hearth with Hatsue, she began talking in a free and easy way. As her visitor was a young girl, she talked first in a general sort of way about love, and finally got around to asking such direct questions as “Isn’t there someone you like very much?” At times, when the lighthouse-keeper saw the girl become rattled, he would ask a teasing question of his own.

  When it began to grow late they asked Hatsue several times if she didn’t have to get home for supper and if her father wouldn’t be waiting for her. It was Hatsue who finally made the suggestion that she help prepare their supper.

  Until now Hatsue had simply sat there blushing furiously and looking down at the floor, not so much as touching the refreshments put before her. But, once in the kitchen, she quickly recovered her good spirits. Then, while slicing the sea-cucumbers, she began singing the traditional Ise chorus used on the island for accompanying the Lantern Festival dancing; she had learned it from her aunt the day before:

  Tall chests, long chests, traveling chests—

  Since your dower is so great, my daughter,

  You must never think of coming back.

  But oh, my mother, you ask too much:

  When the east is cloudy, they say the wind will How;

  When the west is cloudy, they say the rain will fall;

  And when a fair wind changes—

  Yoil Soral—

  Even the largest ship returns to port.

  “Oh, have you already learned that song, Hatsue-san?” the mistress said. “Here it’s already three years since we came here and I don’t know it all even yet.”

  “Well, but it’s almost the same as the one we sang at Oizaki,” Hatsue answered.

  Just then there was the sound of footsteps outside, and from the darkness someone called:

  “Good evening.”

  “That must be Shinji-san,” the mistress said, sticking her head out the kitchen door. Then:

  “Well, well! More nice fish. Thanks. … Father, Kubo-san’s brought us more fish.”

  “Thanks again, thanks again,” the lighthouse-keeper called from the hearth. “Come on in, Shinji boy, come on in.”

  During this confusion of welcome and thanks Shinji and Hatsue exchanged glances. Shinji smiled. Hatsue smiled too. But the mistress happened to turn around suddenly and intercept their smiles.

  “Oh, you two already know each other, do you? H’m, it’s a small place, this village. But that makes it all the better, so do come on in, Shinji-san—Oh, and by the way, we had a letter from Chiyoko in Tokyo. She particularly asked about Shinji-san. I don’t guess there’s much doubt about who Chiyoko likes, is there? She’ll be coming home soon for spring vacation, so be sure and come to see her.”

  Shinji had been just on the point of coming into the house for a minute, but these words seemed to wrench his nose. Hatsue turned back to the sink and did not look around again. The boy retreated back into the dusk. They called him several times, but he would not come back. He made his bow from a distance and then took to his heels.

  “That Shinji-san—he’s really the bashful one, isn’t he, Father?” the mistress said, laughing.

  The lone sound of her laughter echoed through t
he house. Neither the lighthouse-keeper nor Hatsue even smiled.

  Shinji waited for Hatsue where the path curved around Woman’s Slope.

  At that point the dusk surrounding the lighthouse gave way to the last faint light that still remained of the sunset. Even though the shadows of the pine trees had become doubly dark, the sea below them was brimming with a last afterglow. All through the day the first easterly winds of spring had been blowing in off the sea, and even now that night was falling the wind did not feel cold on the skin.

  As Shinji rounded Woman’s Slope even that small wind died away, and there was nothing left in the dusk but calm shafts of radiance pouring down between the clouds.

  Looking down, he saw the small promontory that jutted out into the sea to form the far side of Uta-jima’s harbor. From time to time its tip was shrugging its rocky shoulders swaggeringly, rending asunder the foaming waves. The vicinity of the promontory was especially bright. Standing on the promontory’s peak there was a lone red-pine, its trunk bathed in the afterglow and vividly clear to the boy’s keen eyes. Suddenly the trunk lost the last beam of light. The clouds overhead turned black and the stars began to glitter above Mt. Higashi.

  Shinji laid his ear against a jutting rock and heard the sound of short, quick footsteps approaching along the flagstone path that led down from the stone steps at the entrance to the lighthouse residence. He was planning to hide here as a joke and give Hatsue a scare when she came by. But as those sweet-sounding footsteps came closer and closer he became shy about frightening the girl. Instead, he deliberately let her know where he was by whistling a few lines from the Ise chorus she had been singing earlier:

  When the east is cloudy, they say the wind will blow;

  When the west is cloudy, they say the rain will fall;

  And even the largest ship …

  Hatsue rounded Woman’s Slope, but her footsteps never paused. She walked right on past as though she had no idea Shinji was there.

  “Hey! Hey!”

  But still the girl did not look back. There was nothing to do but for him to walk silently along after her.