The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea Read online

  Noboru stared hard at the sailor. His sun-blackened face looked even more virile than before, the thick eyebrows and white teeth more sharply accented. But Noboru had sensed something unnatural about the sailor’s monologue, a forced attempt to relate to his own fancies, a truckling to the exaggerated sentiments he had set down in his frequent letters. There was something counterfeit about this Ryuji. When he couldn’t bear it any longer, Noboru spoke. “I don’t know—there’s something phony about this . . .”

  “Are you kidding? Because he’s so small?” It was a good-natured misunderstanding. “Even crocodiles are small when they’re kids. Try going to the zoo sometime.”

  “Noboru! I’m surprised at you. Now why don’t you stop being so impolite and show Mr. Tsukazaki your stamp album.”

  But before he could move a hand, his mother had snatched the album from the desk and was showing Ryuji the carefully mounted stamps he had mailed to Noboru from ports around the world.

  She sat in the chair with her face toward the light and turned the pages while Ryuji, one arm across the chair, looked over her shoulder. Noboru noticed they both had handsome profiles: the thin, clear winter light silvered the bridges of their noses. They seemed oblivious of his presence in the room.

  “Mr. Tsukazaki, when will you be sailing again?” Noboru asked abruptly.

  His mother turned to him with a shocked face and he could see that she had paled. It was the question she most wanted to ask, and most dreaded. Ryuji was posing near the window with his back to them. He half closed his eyes, and then, very slowly, said: “I’m not sure yet.”

  Noboru was stunned. Fusako didn’t speak, but she looked like a bottle full of feeling boiling against the small cork stopper. Her expression might have meant joy or sorrow—a woman’s sodden face. To Noboru, she looked like a washerwoman.

  A brief pause, and Ryuji calmly spoke again. His tone was sympathetic, the compassion a man feels when he is certain he holds the power to affect another’s fate: “At any rate, it’ll take at least until after New Year’s to get the ship unloaded. . . .”

  Red with rage and coughing violently, Noboru pulled his diary from under the pillow as soon as they had left, and wrote a short entry.

  CHARGES AGAINST RYUJI TSUKAZAKI

  THREE: answering, when I asked when he would be sailing again: “I’m not sure yet.”

  Noboru put down his pen and thought for a minute while his anger mounted. Then he added:

  FOUR: coming back here again in the first place.

  But soon he began to feel ashamed of his anger. What good had been all that training in “absolute dispassion”? He carefully explored every corner of his heart to make certain not even a fragment of rage remained, and then reread what he had written. When he had finished, he was convinced: revision would not be necessary.

  Then he heard a stirring in the next room. Apparently his mother had gone into the bedroom. Ryuji seemed to be there too . . . the door to his own room wasn’t locked. Noboru’s heart began to hammer. How, he wondered, in an unlocked room at this time of morning and quickly—that was important—could he remove the drawer and steal into the space in the wall without being discovered?

  CHAPTER TWO

  FUSAKO’S present was an armadillo pocketbook. It was a bizarre affair, with a handle that looked like a rat’s neck, and crude clasps and stitching, but she left the house with it happily and displayed it proudly at the shop while Mr. Shibuya scowled his disapproval.

  They spent the last day of the year apart: Fusako was needed at Rex and Ryuji had to take the afternoon watch. This time it seemed perfectly natural that they should go separate ways for half a day.

  It was after ten when Fusako returned that evening. Ryuji had been helping Noboru and the housekeeper with the traditional New Year’s Eve cleaning and together they had managed to finish the job more quickly than in previous years. Ryuji issued brisk instructions as though he were directing a scrub-down on the deck, and Noboru, whose fever had come down that morning, carried out his orders with delight.

  Fusako came in as they were descending the stairs with mops and pails after having cleaned all the upstairs rooms. Ryuji had rolled up the sleeves of his sweater and bound a towel around his head; Noboru was turbaned in the same fashion, his cheeks flushed and glowing. The scene surprised and delighted Fusako, but she couldn’t help worrying a little about Noboru’s health.

  “Stop worrying so much! Working up a good sweat’s the best way to kick a cold.” The remark may have been crude as an attempt at reassurance but at least it was “man talk,” something Fusako’s house hadn’t heard for a long time. The walls and the old beams in the ceiling seemed to shrink from the masculine utterance.

  When the whole family had gathered to listen to the midnight bells and feast on special buckwheat noodles, the housekeeper told an anecdote from her past which she repeated every New Year’s Eve: “At the Macgregors’—that’s the folks I used to work for—New Year’s Eve always meant a big party with lots of company. And at twelve o’clock on the dot everybody started kissing everybody else like it wasn’t anything! One time I even had an old Irish gentleman with whiskers smooch me on the cheek—he just hung on there like he was a leech or something. . . .”

  Ryuji embraced Fusako as soon as they were alone in the bedroom. Later, when the first pale promise of the dawn appeared, he proposed something childish: why didn’t they walk over to the park and watch the first sunrise of the New Year? Fusako was captivated by the lunacy of racing into the cold. She jumped out of bed and bundled into everything she could get on—tights, slacks, a cashmere sweater, and a gorgeous Danish ski sweater over that; and tiptoeing down the stairs, they unlocked the front door and stepped outside.

  The dawn air felt good against their heated bodies. Racing into the deserted park, they laughed out loud and chased each other in and out among the fir trees, and took deep breaths, vying to see who could exhale the whitest steam into the cold, dark air. They felt as though thin crusts of ice were coating their love-staled mouths.

  It was well past six when they leaned against the railing that overlooked the harbor: Venus had banked into the south. Though the lights of buildings and the red lamps blinking on distant masts were still bright, and though the beacon’s red and green blades of light still knifed through the darkness in the park, outlines of houses could be discerned and the sky was touched with reddish purple.

  Small and distant, the first cock call of the year reached them on the chill morning wind, a tragic, fitful cry. “May this be a good year for us all.” Fusako spoke her prayer aloud. It was cold, and when she nestled her cheek against Ryuji’s he kissed the lips so close to his and said: “It will be. It has to be.”

  Gradually a blurred form at the water’s edge was sharpening into a building. As Ryuji stared at a red bulb blooming above an emergency exit, he became painfully conscious of the texture of shore life. He would be thirty-four in May. It was time to abandon the dream he had cherished too long. Time to realize that no specially tailored glory was waiting for him. Time, no matter if the feeble eaves lamps still defied the green-gray light of morning by refusing to come awake, to open his eyes.

  Though it was New Year’s Day, a submerged tremolo pervaded the harbor. Every few minutes a barge unraveled from the moored fleet and hacked dryly down the canal. As a rosy hue stained the surface of the water and seemed to inflate itself into round abundance, the poles of light slanting away from anchored ships began to dwindle. Twenty minutes past six: the mercury lamps in the park clicked out.

  “Are you getting cold?” Ryuji asked.

  “My gums are stinging, it’s so cold—but I don’t mind. The sun will be coming up any minute now.”

  Are you getting cold? . . . Are you getting cold? Ryuji asked again and again, and all the time he was directing another question to himself: Are you really going to give it up? The feeling of the sea, the dark, drunken feeling that unearthly rolling always brings? The thrill of saying goodbye? The
sweet tears you weep for your song? Are you going to give up the life which has detached you from the world, kept you remote, impelled you toward the pinnacle of manliness? The secret yearning for death. The glory beyond and the death beyond. Everything was “beyond,” wrong or right, had always been “beyond.” Are you going to give that up? His heart in spasm because he was always in contact with the ocean’s dark swell and the lofty light from the edge of the clouds, twisting, withering until it clogged and then swelling up again, and he unable to distinguish the most exalted feelings from the meanest and that not mattering really since he could hold the sea responsible—are you going to give up that luminous freedom?

  And yet Ryuji had discovered on the return leg of his last voyage that he was tired, tired to death of the squalor and the boredom in a sailor’s life. He was convinced that he had tasted it all, even the lees, and he was glutted. What a fool he’d been! There was no glory to be found, not anywhere in the world. Not in the Northern Hemisphere. Not in the Southern Hemisphere. Not even beneath that star every sailor dreams about, the Southern Cross!

  Now they could make out the lumber yards beyond the canal: roosters had crowed at the sky until a coy blush spread across her face. Finally the mast lamps blinked out and ships withdrew like phantoms into the fog that shrouded the harbor. Then, as an angry red began to smolder along the edges of the sky, the space of park behind them unfurled into whitish emptiness and the skirts on the beacon beam fell away, leaving only glinting needlepoints of red and green light.

  It was very cold; leaning against the railing with their arms around each other, they stamped their feet.

  “It can’t be long now,” Fusako said, her voice rising above the chatter of small birds. The lipstick she had dashed on before they left the house, a spot of vivid red rising out of the whiteness of her chilled, drawn face, looked beautiful to Ryuji.

  A minute later, far to the right of the floating lumber and surprisingly high up, a gauzy red ring loomed in the slate-gray sky. Immediately the sun became a globe of pure red but still so weak they could look straight at it, a blood-red moon.

  “I know this will be a good year; it couldn’t be anything else with us here like this, watching the first sunrise together. And you know something? This is the first time I’ve ever seen the sunrise on New Year’s Day.” Fusako’s voice warped in the cold. Ryuji heard himself bellow in the resolute voice he used to shout orders into the wind on the winter deck: “Will you marry me?”

  “What?”

  Annoyed at having to repeat himself, he blurted things better left unsaid: “I’m asking you to marry me. I may be just a dumb sailor but I’ve never done anything I’m ashamed of. You may laugh when I say this, but I have nearly two million yen saved up—you can see my bankbook later. That’s everything I have to my name and I’m going to give it all to you whether you marry me or not.”

  His artless proposal touched the worldly lady more deeply than he knew. Overjoyed, Fusako began to cry.

  The sun was blazing now, too dazzlingly bright for Ryuji’s anxious eyes, and the whistle-wailing, gear-grinding cacophony of the harbor was surging toward full pitch. The horizon was misted over, the sun’s reflection spreading like a reddish haze over the surface of the water.

  “Yes—of course I will. But I think there are some problems we ought to discuss first. There’s Noboru, for example, and my work at the shop. Can I make just one condition? What you’ve just said, I mean—if you’re planning to leave again soon—it would be hard. . . .”

  “I won’t be sailing again for a while. As a matter of fact . . .” Ryuji faltered, and was silent.

  There wasn’t a single Japanese room in Fusako’s house; her mode of living was thoroughly Western except on New Year’s Day, when she observed tradition by serving the special New Year’s breakfast on lacquered trays and drinking toasts with spiced sake.

  Ryuji hadn’t slept at all. He washed his face with “young water,” the first water drawn in the year, and went into the dining room. It was a strange feeling, as though he were still in Europe, at the Japanese Consulate in some northern seaport. In the past, he and the other officers of the Rakuyo had been invited to New Year’s breakfast at consulates abroad: the sake dipper and the wooden cups stacked on a stand inlaid with gold, and the lacquered boxes filled with traditional side dishes, were always arrayed on a table in a bright Western dining room just as they were here.

  Noboru came down wearing a new necktie, and New Year’s congratulations were exchanged. In previous years Noboru had always drunk the first toast, but when the time came and he reached for the uppermost and smallest of the three cups, Fusako stopped him with a reproving look.

  Pretending to be embarrassed, he simpered:

  “It seems pretty silly for Mr. Tsukazaki to drink out of the smallest.” But his eyes never left the cup. It seemed to wither in the grasp of the huge, calloused hand that carried it to the sailor’s lips. Buried under the thick fingers of a hand accustomed to grappling rope, the vermilion plum-branch cup looked horribly vulgar.

  When he had finished the toast, Ryuji began an account of a hurricane in the Caribbean before Noboru even had a chance to coax him:

  “When the pitching gets really bad you can hardly cook your rice. But you manage somehow and then eat it plain, just squeezed into little balls. Of course, the bowls won’t stay put on a table, so you push the desks in the lounge up against the wall and sit on the floor and try to gulp it down.

  “But this hurricane in the Caribbean was really something. The Rakuyo was built overseas more than twenty years ago and she starts leaking when you hit rough weather. Well, this time the water came pouring in around the rivet holes in the hull. And at a time like that there’s no difference between officers and deck-hands, everybody works together like drowning rats, bailing and throwing mats down and pouring cement as fast as you can get it mixed. And even if you get slammed against a wall or hurled into the dark when the power shorts out, you haven’t got time to be scared.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though: no matter how long you’ve been on a ship, you never get used to storms. I mean you’re sure every time you run into one that your number is up. Anyway, the day before this last hurricane the sunset looked too much like a big fire and the red in the sky was kind of murky and the water was quiet as a lake. I had sort of a feeling then that something was coming—”

  “Stop it, please stop!” Fusako screamed, clapping her hands over her ears. “Please don’t talk about things like that any more.”

  His mother’s histrionics annoyed Noboru: why did she have to cover her ears and protest about an adventure story which obviously was being told for his benefit! Or had it been intended for her in the first place?

  The thought made him uncomfortable. Ryuji had told the same sort of sea story before, but this time his delivery seemed different. The tone of his voice reminded Noboru of a peddler selling sundry wares while he handled them with dirty hands. Unsling a pack from your back and spread it open on the ground for all to see: one hurricane Caribbean-style—scenery along the banks of the Panama Canal—a carnival smeared in red dust from the Brazilian countryside—a tropical rainstorm flooding a village in the twinkling of an eye—bright parrots hollering beneath a dark sky. . . . No doubt about it: Ryuji did have a pack of wares.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ON the fifth of January the Rakuyo sailed and Ryuji was not aboard. He stayed on as a guest in the Kuroda house.

  Rex opened on the sixth. Relieved and in high spirits because Ryuji had stayed behind, Fusako arrived at the shop just before noon and received New Year’s congratulations from Mr. Shibuya and the rest of the staff. Waiting on her desk was an invoice from an English distributor:

  Messrs. Rex, Ltd., Yokohama

  ORDER No. 1062-B

  The shipment had arrived during the vacation on the El Dorado; there were two and a half dozen men’s vests and pullovers, and a dozen and a half pairs of sports slacks, sizes 34, 38, and 40. Including the 1
0 per cent commission for the distributor, the bill came to ninety thousand yen. Even if they shelved the order for a month or so they could count on clearing fifty thousand yet in profits: half the merchandise was on special order and could be sold at any time. And not having to worry about depreciation no matter how long the rest remained on the shelf was the advantage of handling English products through a first-rate distributor. The retail prices were established in England and their account would be canceled if they tried to undersell.

  Mr. Shibuya came into the office and announced: “The Jackson Company is having a pre-season showing of their spring and summer collections on the twenty-fifth. We have received an invitation.”

  “Oh? I suppose that means we’ll be competing with buyers from the big Tokyo stores again—not that those people aren’t all blind as bats.”

  “They have no feel for fabric or design because they have never worn fine clothes themselves.”

  “Isn’t it the truth!” Fusako noted the date in the memo book on her desk. “Is it tomorrow that we’re supposed to go to the Foreign Trade Ministry? Bureaucrats always make me so nervous, I’ll probably just sit there and grin. I’m counting on you to get us through.”

  “I’ll do what I can. One of the senior clerks happens to be an old friend.”

  “Oh yes, you’ve mentioned that before—I feel better already.”

  Hoping to satisfy the tastes of some new customers, Rex had entered into a special agreement with the Men’s Town and Country Shop in New York: letters of credit had already been issued and now it was up to Fusako to apply through the Foreign Trade Ministry for an import license.