The Sound of Waves Read online

  Entering the pine grove, the path became dark and steep. The girl was lighting her way with a small flashlight. Her steps became slower and, before she was aware of it, Shinji had taken the lead.

  Suddenly the girl gave a little scream. The beam of the flashlight soared like a startled bird from the base of the pine trees up into the treetops.

  The boy whirled around. Then he put his arms around the girl, lying sprawled on the ground, and pulled her to her feet.

  As he helped Hatsue up, the boy remembered with shame how he had lain in wait for her a while ago, had given that whistled signal, had followed after her: even though his actions had been prompted by the circumstances, to him they still seemed to smack of evil. Making no move to repeat yesterday’s caress, he brushed the dirt off the girl’s clothing as gently as though he were her big brother. The soil here was mostly dry sand and the dirt brushed off easily. Luckily there was no sign of any damage.

  Hatsue stood motionless, like a child, resting her hand on Shinji’s strong shoulder while he brushed her. Then she looked around for the flashlight, which she had dropped. It was lying on the ground behind them, still throwing its faint, fan-shaped beam, showing the ground covered with pine needles. The island’s heavy twilight pressed in upon this single area of faint light.

  “Look where it landed! I must have thrown it behind me when I fell.” The girl spoke in a cheerful, laughing voice.

  “What made you so mad?” Shinji asked, looking her full in the face.

  “All that talk about you and Chiyoko-san.”

  “Stupid!”

  “Then there’s nothing to it?”

  “There’s nothing to it.”

  The two walked along side by side, Shinji holding the flashlight and guiding Hatsue along the difficult path as though he were a ship’s pilot. There was nothing in particular to say, so the usually silent Shinji began to talk stumblingly to fill in the silence:

  “As for me, some day I want to buy a coastal freighter with the money I’ve worked for and saved, and then go into the shipping business with my brother, carrying lumber from Kishu and coal from Kyushu. … Then I’ll have my mother take it easy, and when I get old I’ll come back to the island and take it easy too. … No matter where I sail, I’ll never forget our island. … It has the most beautiful scenery in all Japan”—every person on Uta-jima was firmly convinced of this—“and in the same way I’ll do my best to help make life on our island the most peaceful there is anywhere … the happiest there is anywhere. … Because if we don’t do that, everybody will start forgetting the island and quit wanting to come back. No matter how much times change, very bad things—very bad ways—will all always disappear before they get to our island. … The sea—it only brings the good and right things that the island needs … and keeps the good and right things we already have here. … That’s why there’s not a thief on the whole island—nothing but brave, manly people—people who always have the will to work truly and well and put up with whatever comes—people whose love is never double-faced—people with nothing mean about them anywhere. …”

  Of course the boy was not so articulate, and his way of speaking was confused and disconnected, but this is roughly what he told Hatsue in this moment of rare fluency.

  She did not interrupt, but kept nodding her head in agreement with everything he said. Never once looking bored, her face overflowed with an expression of genuine sympathy and trust, all of which filled Shinji with joy.

  Shinji did not want her to think he was being frivolous, and at the end of his serious speech he purposely omitted that last important hope that he had included in his prayer to the sea-god a few nights before.

  There was nothing to hinder, and the path continued hiding them in the dense shadows of the trees, but this time Shinji did not even hold Hatsue’s hand, much less dream of kissing her again. What had happened yesterday on the dark beach—to them that seemed not to have been an act of their own volition. It had been an undreamed-of event, brought about by some force outside themselves; it was a mystery how such a thing had come about. This time, they barely managed to make a date to meet again at the observation tower on the afternoon of the next time the fishing-boats could not go out.

  When they emerged from the back of Yashiro Shrine, Hatsue gave a little gasp of admiration and stopped walking. Shinji stopped too.

  The village was suddenly ablaze with brilliant lights. It was exactly like the opening of some spectacular, soundless festival: every window shone with a bright and indomitable light, a light without the slightest resemblance to the smoky light of oil lamps. It was as though the village had been restored to life and come floating up out of the black night. … The electric generator, so long out of order, had been repaired.

  Outside the village they took different paths, and Hatsue went on alone down the stone steps and into the village, lit again, after such a long time, with street lamps.

  7

  THE DAY CAME for Shinji’s brother, Hiroshi, to go on the school excursion. They were to tour the Kyoto-Osaka area for six days, spending five nights away from home. This was the way the youths of Uta-jima, who had never before left the island, first saw the wide world outside with their own eyes, learning about it in a single gulp. In the same way, schoolboys of an earlier generation had crossed by boat to the mainland and stared with round eyes at the first horse-drawn omnibus they had ever seen, shouting: “Look! Look! A big dog pulling a privy!”

  The children of the island got their first notions of the world outside from the pictures and words in their school-books rather than from the real things. How difficult, then, for them to conceive, by sheer force of imagination, such things as streetcars, tall buildings, movies, subways, But then, once they had seen reality, once the novelty of astonishment was gone, they perceived clearly how useless it had been for them to try to imagine such things, so much so that at the end of long lives spent on the island they would no longer even so much as remember the existence of such things as streetcars clanging back and forth along the streets of a city.

  Before each school excursion Yashiro Shrine did a thriving business in talismans. In their everyday lives the island women committed their own bodies, as a matter of course, to the danger and the death that lurked in the sea, but when it came to excursions setting forth for gigantic cities they themselves had never seen, the mothers felt their children were embarking on great, death-defying adventures.

  Hiroshi’s mother had bought two precious eggs and made him a lunch of terribly salty fried eggs. And deep in his satchel, where he would not quickly find them, she had tucked away some caramels and fruit.

  On that day alone the island’s ferryboat, the Kamikaze-maru, left Uta-jima at the unusual hour of one in the afternoon. Formerly the stubborn old-timer who captained this putt-putt launch of something under twenty tons had refused as an abomination any departure from the established schedule. But then had come the year when his own son went on the excursion. Ever since then he had understood what they meant by saying the children would squander their money if the boat got to Toba too much ahead of time for their train to leave, and had grudgingly agreed to let the school authorities have their own way with the schedule.

  The cabin and the deck of the Kamikaze-maru were overflowing with schoolboys, satchels and canteens hanging across their breasts. The teachers in charge were terror-stricken by the swarm of mothers on the jetty. On Uta-jima a teacher’s position depended upon the disposition of the mothers. One teacher had been branded a Communist by the mothers and driven off the island, while another, who was popular with the mothers, had even gotten one of the women teachers pregnant—and still been promoted to be acting assistant-principal.

  It was the early afternoon of a truly springlike day, and as the boat set sail every mother was screaming the name of her own child. The boys, with the straps of their student-caps fixed under their chins, waited until they were sure their faces could no longer be distinguished from the shore and then began to y
ell back in high-spirited fun:

  “Good-by, stupid! … Hooray! you old goose! … To hell with you! …”

  The boat, jam-packed with black student-uniforms, kept throwing reflections of metal cap-badges and polished buttons back to shore until it was far out at sea. …

  Once Hiroshi’s mother was back, sitting on the straw mats of her own house, gloomy and deadly quiet even in the daytime, she began weeping, thinking of the day when both her sons would finally leave her for good and take to the sea.

  The Kamikaze-maru had just discharged its load of students at the Toba pier opposite Mikimoto’s “Pearl Island” and, regaining its usual happy-go-lucky, countrified air, was preparing for the return crossing to Uta-jima. There was a bucket atop the ancient smokestack, and water reflections were playing over the underside of the prow and over the great creels hanging from under the pier. A gray godown stood looking out across the sea, with the large white character for “Ice” painted on its side.

  Chiyoko, the daughter of the lighthouse-keeper, was standing at the far end of the pier, holding a Boston bag. This unsociable girl, returning to the island after a long absence, disliked having the islanders greet and speak to her.

  Chiyoko never wore a trace of make-up and her face was made all the more inconspicuous by the plain, dark-brown suit she was wearing. There was something about the cheerful, slapdash way her dingy features were thrown together that might have appealed to some. But she always wore a gloomy expression and, in her constantly perverse way, insisted upon thinking of herself as unattractive. Until now this was the most noticeable result of the “refinements” she was learning at the university in Tokyo. But probably the way she brooded over her commonplace face as being so unlovely was just as presumptuous as if she had been convinced she was an utter beauty.

  Chiyoko’s good-natured father had also contributed, unwittingly, to this gloomy conviction of hers. She was always complaining so openly that she had inherited her ugliness from him that, even when she was in the next room, the outspoken lighthouse-keeper would grumble to his guests:

  “Well, there’s no doubt about this grown-up daughter of mine being homely. It really makes me sad. I’m so ugly myself that I guess I have to take the blame for it. But then, I suppose that’s fate.”

  . . .

  Someone clapped Chiyoko on the shoulder and she turned around. It was Yasuo Kawamoto, the president of the Young Men’s Association. He stood there laughing, his leather jacket glistening in the sun.

  “Ho! Welcome home. Spring vacation, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Exams were over yesterday.”

  “So now we’ve come back to have another drink of mother’s milk?”

  The day before, Yasuo’s father had sent him to attend to some business for the Co-operative with the prefectural authorities at Tsu. He had spent the night at an inn in Toba run by relatives and now was taking the boat back to Uta-jima. He took great pride in showing this girl from a Tokyo university how well he could speak, without any trace of island dialect.

  Chiyoko was conscious of the masculine joviality of this young man her own age; his worldly manner seemed to be saying: “There’s no doubt but what this girl has a fancy for me.” This feeling made her even more bad-tempered.

  “Here it is again!” she told herself. Influenced both by her natural disposition and by the movies seen and novels read in Tokyo, she was always wishing that she could have a man look at her at least once with eyes saying “I love you” instead of “You love me.” But she had decided she would never have such an experience in all her life.

  A loud, rough voice shouted from the Kamikaze-maru:

  “Hey! Where the blazes is that load of quilts? Somebody find them!”

  Soon a man came carrying a great bale of arabesque-patterned quilts on his shoulders. They had been lying on the quay, half hidden in the shadows of the godown.

  “The boat’s about ready to leave,” Yasuo said.

  As they jumped from the pier to the deck, Yasuo took Chiyoko’s hand and helped her across. Chiyoko thought how different his iron-like hand felt from the hands of men in Tokyo. But in her imagination it was Shinji’s hand she was feeling—a hand she had never even so much as shaken.

  Peering down through the small hatchway into the murky passenger cabin, all the more darkly stagnant to their daylight-accustomed eyes, they could barely make out, from the white towels tied around their necks or the occasional flickering reflection from a pair of spectacles, the forms of people lolling on the straw matting.

  “It’s better on deck. Even if it’s a bit cold, it’s still better.”

  Yasuo and Chiyoko took shelter from the wind behind the wheelhouse and sat down, leaning against a coil of rope.

  The captain’s snappish young helper came up and said:

  “Hey! How’s about lifting your asses a minute?”

  With that, he pulled a plank out from under them. They had sat down on the hatch used for closing the passenger cabin.

  Up in the wheelhouse, where scruffy, peeling paint half revealed the grain of the wood underneath, the captain rang the ship’s bell. … The Kamikaze-maru was under way.

  Surrendering their bodies to the shuddering of the ancient engine, Yasuo and Chiyoko gazed back at Toba’s receding harbor. Yasuo very much wanted to drop a hint about how he had slipped off and bought himself a piece last night, but decided he had better not. If he had been a boy from an ordinary farming or fishing village, his experience with women would have been cause for boasting, but on strait-laced Uta-jima he had to keep his mouth tightly shut. Young as he was, he had already learned to play the hypocrite.

  Chiyoko was betting with herself as to the instant when a sea gull would fly even higher than the steel tower of the cableway that ascended the mountain behind Toba station. This girl who, out of shyness, had never had any sort of adventures in Tokyo, had been hoping that when she returned to the island something wonderful would happen to her, something that would completely change her world.

  Once the boat was well away from Toba harbor, it would be an easy matter for even the lowest-flying gulls to seem to rise higher than the receding steel tower. But right now the tower was still soaring high in the air. Chiyoko looked closely at the second-hand of her wrist watch, fastened with its red-leather strap.

  “If a sea gull flies higher than that within the next thirty seconds, that’ll mean something wonderful really is waiting for me.”

  Five seconds passed. … A sea gull that had come following alongside the boat suddenly flew high into the air, flapping its wings—and rose higher than the tower!

  Afraid that the boy at her side might remark on her smile, Chiyoko broke her long silence:

  “Is there any news on the island?”

  The boat was passing Sakate Island to port Yasuo’s cigarette had become so short it was burning his lips. He crushed the butt out on the deck and answered:

  “Nothing in particular. … Oh, yes, the generator was broken down until ten days ago and the whole village was using lamps. But it’s fixed now.”

  “Yes, my mother wrote me about that.”

  “Oh, she did? Well, as for any more news …”

  Yasuo narrowed his eyes against the glare of the sea, which was overflowing with the light of spring. The Coast Guard cutter Hiyodori-maru was passing them at a distance of about ten yards, sailing in the direction of Toba.

  “… Oh, I forgot. Uncle Teru Miyata has brought his daughter back home. Her name’s Hatsue, and she’s a real beauty.”

  “So?”

  Chiyoko’s face had clouded at the word “beauty.” Just the word alone seemed an implied criticism of her own looks.

  “I’m a great favorite of Uncle Teru’s, all right. And there’s my older brother to carry on our own family. So everybody in the village is saying I’m sure to be chosen for Hatsue’s husband and adopted into her family.”

  Soon the Kamikaze-maru had brought Suga Island into view to starboard, and Toshi Island to port.
No matter how calm the weather, once a boat passed beyond the protection of these two islands, high-running waves would always set the boat’s timbers to creaking. From this point on they saw numerous cormorants floating in the wave-troughs and, farther out to sea, the many rocks of Oki Shallows projecting up above the water.

  Yasuo knitted his brows and averted his eyes from the sight of Oki Shallows, the reminder of Uta-jima’s one and only humiliation. Fishing rights in these shallows, where the blood of Uta-jima’s youth had been shed in ancient rivalries, had now been restored to Toshi Island.

  Chiyoko and Yasuo got to their feet and, looking across the low wheelhouse, waited for the shape of an island that would soon appear in the ocean before them. …

  As always, Uta-jima rose from the level of the sea shaped like some amorphous, mysterious helmet.

  The boat tilted—and the helmet seemed to tilt with it.

  8

  A DAY OF REST from fishing seemed never to come. Finally, two days after Hiroshi left on the school excursion, the island was struck by such a storm that no boats could put out. It seemed that not one of the island’s meager cherry blossoms, just then beginning to open, could escape destruction.

  On the previous day an unseasonably damp wind had enveloped and clung to the sails, and at sunset a strange light had spread over the sky. A ground swell set in; the beach was aroar with incoming waves; the sea-lice and dango bugs scurried for high ground. During the night a high wind came blowing, mixed with rain, and the heavens and the sea were filled with sounds like human shrieks and shrilling fifes. …

  . . .

  Shinji listened to the voice of the storm from his pallet. It was enough to tell him the boats would not put out today. This would be too much even for braiding rope or repairing fishing tackle, perhaps too much even for the Young Men’s Association’s rat-catching project.

  Not wanting to waken his mother, whose breathing from the next pallet told him she was still asleep, Shinji thoughtfully kept still, waiting eagerly for the first grayness at the window. The house was shaking violently and the windows were rattling. Somewhere a sheet of tin fell with a great clatter. The houses on Uta-jima, the big rich houses as well as the tiny one-story houses such as Shinji’s, were all built alike, with the entrance into a dirt-floored work-room, flanked by the toilet-room on the left and the kitchen on the right; and amid the wind’s fury, in the pre-dawn blackness, there was a single odor that dominated the entire house, hanging quietly on the air inside—that darkish, cold, meditative odor of the toilet-room.