It was the Yamataka-maru of the Y.S. Line, 9,183 tons, bound for Yokohama.
“A Yamashita ship has just left, bound in your direction. Yamataka, Yamataka. It’s now seventeen twenty.”
Having telephoned his message to the main office in Yokohama, he returned to the binoculars and once more followed the Yamataka-maru, its masts now disappearing into the mist.
The mark was a single black line near the top of a persimmon-colored ground. Y.S. LINE in large black letters on the hull. White bridge, red cranes. The ship was in desperate flight from the circle in the telescope. Sending white lines from its prow, it moved out to sea.
It was gone.
There were bonfires in what had been strawberry patches below the window.
The plastic shelters which had until about the end of the summer rains covered the whole expanse had all been taken away. The strawberry season was past. Cuttings for forced cultivation were off at the fifth station of Fuji welcoming a man-made winter. They would return late in October, to be ready for the Christmas market.
People were working among the foundations and on black paddies from which even the foundations had been removed.
Tōru went to get dinner.
He had a simple dinner at his desk. It was nightfall.
Five forty.
A half moon came from the clouds, high in the southern sky. Another moment and the half moon, like an ivory comb dropped down into the sky, was indistinguishable from a cloud.
The pines along the sea were black. It was already dark enough to make out the red taillights of the anglers’ cars parked on the beach.
Children were swarming over the road through the strawberry patches. Strange children of the evening. Weird children, coming out into the dusk from nowhere, cavorting insanely through the fields.
The bonfires sent up tongues of flame beyond.
Five fifty.
Tōru glanced up. He caught a ship mark quite indistinguishable to the ordinary naked eye, and reached for the telephone. Such was his confidence that his hand went for the telephone even before he had verified the mark.
The ship’s agent answered.
“Hello? This is Teikoku Signal. The Daichū. I’ve just sighted it.”
It was like a smudge drawn by a dirty finger across faint pink on the southwest horizon. As if examining a fingerprint on the glass, he picked it out and identified it.
The register told him that the Daichū-maru, 3,850 tons, was a lauan transport, one hundred meters long, speed 12.4 knots. The only ships capable of more than twenty knots were international freighters. Lumber ships were slower.
He felt particularly close to the Daichū-maru. It had been launched the spring before from the Kanazashi Shipyards here in Shimizu.
Six.
In the pink offing, the dim form of the Daichū-maru was edging past the Okitama-maru, leaving the harbor. It was a strange moment when an image oozes from a dream into everyday life, an actuality from an abstraction—a poem becomes corporate, a fantasy an object. If something meaningless yet ominous is through some process taken into the heart, there is born in the heart an urgency to give it shape, and so a something comes to exist. Perhaps the Daichū-maru was born of Tōru’s heart. An image indistinct as the sweep of a brush had become a gigantic hull of some four thousand tons. And the same thing was forever happening, somewhere in the world.
Six ten.
Foreshortened by the angle of its approach, it raised its two derricks like the horns of a great black beetle.
Six fifteen.
It was quite clear now to the naked eye, but it hesitated black on the horizon like an object forgotten on a shelf. The distance was accordioned, and it stayed on and on, a black beetle left on the shelf of the horizon.
Six thirty.
Through the lens, diagonally, he could see the funnel mark, a red “N” in a circle on a white ground. He could make out piles of lauan.
Six fifty.
Now broadside in the channel, the Daichū-maru was showing red mast lights against a cloudy twilight sky which no longer held a moon. It slipped past the Okitama, making its mirage-like way out to sea. There was a considerable distance between them, but the lights were caught in fore-shortened perspective; and it was as if, out on the dark sea, the embers of two cigarettes were brushing and parting.
In from a foreign port, the Daichū-maru had two great iron rails on its deck to keep the lauan from falling overboard. In such quantities that the waterline was not showing, great trunks burned by the tropical sun lay piled one on another, like the bundled corpses of huge, powerful brown slaves.
Tōru thought of the new regulations for waterlines, jungle-like in their details. Waterlines for lumber vessels were of six varieties, summer, winter, winter North Atlantic, tropical, freshwater summer, and freshwater tropical. The tropical category was further divided into tropical by zone and tropical by season. The Daichū-maru fell into the former, and under the “special regulations for deck lumber transport.” Tōru had memorized with fascination the lines that define the tropical zone.
From the east coast of North America along the thirteenth parallel east to sixty degrees west longitude; thence directly to ten degrees north by fifty-eight degrees west; thence along the tenth parallel to twenty degrees west; thence along the twentieth meridian to thirty degrees north; thence to the west coast of Africa . . . thence to the west coast of India . . . to the east coast of India . . . to the west coast of Malaya . . . thence along the southeast coast of Asia to the tenth parallel on the coast of Vietnam . . . from Santos . . . the east coast of Africa to the west coast of Madagascar . . . the Suez Canal . . . the Red Sea, Aden, the Persian Gulf.
An invisible line was drawn from continent to continent and ocean to ocean and what was within was named “tropical,” and so, suddenly, a “tropical” made its appearance, with its coconuts, its reefs, its cobalt seas, its storm clouds, its squalls, the screams of its multicolored parrots.
Trunks of lauan, splashed with the scarlet and gold and green labels of the tropics. Heaped-up logs of lauan: they had been wet by tropical rains and they had reflected warm starlit skies, they had been attacked by waves and eaten by the shining bugs of the deep; and they could not dream that they were headed at the end of the journey for the boredom of everyday life.
Seven.
The Daichū-maru passed the second pylon. The lights of the harbor were aglow.
Since it had come in at an odd hour, quarantine and unloading would have to wait until the next morning. Even so, Tōru made the usual calls: the pilot, the police, the harbor superintendent, the agent, the provisioners, the laundry.
“The Daichū is coming into three-G.”
“Hello? This is Teikoku Signal. The Daichū is coming into three-G. The cargo? The line is barely showing.”
“Shimizu Provisioners? This is Teikoku Signal. Thank you for everything. The Daichū has just come into three-G. It’s off the Mio lighthouse at the moment.”
“Shizuoka Police? The Daichū is coming in. Tomorrow at seven, if you will, please.”
“The Daichū. D-a-i-c-h-ū. Yes, if you will, please.”
14
OFF DUTY on an evening in late August, Tōru had finished his dinner and bath. He went out to take the cool of the south wind under the blue awning of the veranda, still warm from the heat of the day. There were doors all along the shabby veranda, which he reached by iron stairs.
Immediately to the south was a lumber yard more than a hundred yards square, its huge cross-section dark under lights. The lumber sometimes seemed to Tōru like a great silent beast.
There was a crematory in the grove beyond. Tōru would like to have seen a flame that could show itself in the smoke from such an enormous chimney. He never had.
The summit of the dark mountain to the south was Nihondaira. He could see the streams of automobile lights on the road leading up to it. There were clusters of hotel lights, and the red lights of television towers.
Tōru had
not been to the hotels. He knew nothing of the affluent life. He did know that wealth and virtue were incompatible, but he had no interest in making the world virtuous. Revolution could be left to others. There was no concept for which he had a greater dislike than equality.
He was about to go inside when a Corona pulled up at the stairs. He could not make out the details, but he was sure he had seen it before. He was startled when the superintendent got out.
A large envelope clutched in his hand, the superintendent lurched up the stairs, as he always did when he came to the signal station.
“Yasunaga is it? Good evening. I’m glad I caught you at home. I’ve brought something to drink. Let’s have a drink and a talk.” He did not mind being overheard.
Overwhelmed by this unique visit, Tōru reached for the door behind him.
“You’re very neat.” The superintendent seated himself on the cushion Tōru offered, and, wiping at his forehead, looked around him.
The building had been finished only the year before. It was as if the dust had not been allowed to gather. There was a maple-leaf pattern on the frosted glass of the aluminum-sashed windows, inside which were paper doors. The walls were lavender, the wood of the ceiling was of almost too good a grain, waist-high at the door was a frosted pane with a bamboo pattern, and the doors between the rooms too were decorated in unusual patterns. The tastes of the occupant demanded the newest wares.
The rent was twelve thousand five hundred yen a month, and two hundred fifty yen besides went each month into a common maintenance fund. Tōru thanked the superintendent for the half of the rent paid by the company.
“But aren’t you lonely, all by yourself?”
“I’m used to being alone. I’m alone at the station too.”
“That’s true, of course.”
The superintendent took a bottle of Suntory Square from his bag, and side dishes as well, shredded cuttlefish and prawn crackers. If Tōru had no glasses, he said, cups would do as well.
Something unusual was afoot. It was not the superintendent’s practice to come calling upon subordinates thus provisioned. The visit could mean no good. Since Tōru had nothing to do with the accounts, it was not likely that he was about to be charged with fiscal venalities; but he must have made a grievous blunder without himself being aware of it. And here was the superintendent pressing liquor upon the boy he had scolded for his addiction to tobacco. Tōru was reconciled to dismissal; but he knew well enough that, even without a labor union, it was a world in which industrious young men were not to be treated roughly, though they might be no more than signalmen third class. There were plenty of other jobs, if he took the trouble to look for them. In control of himself once more, he glanced at the superintendent with something like pity. He was confident that he could meet with dignity whatever came, even if it be notice of his dismissal. Whatever his adversary might think, Tōru knew that he was a jewel not easily come by.
Refusing the whiskey the superintendent pressed upon him, Tōru sat in an airless corner, his beautiful eyes alight.
He might be alone in the world, but he lived in a small castle of ice, quite free of the ambition and greed and lust upon which people lose their step. Because he disliked comparing himself with others, he was quite free from envy and jealousy. Because he had cut off the road to mundane harmony from the outset, he quarreled with no one. He let people think of him as a gentle, harmless, cuddly white bunny. The loss of a job was the smallest triviality.
“I had a call from the main office the other day.” The superintendent was drinking to build up courage. “I wondered what it might mean, and it turned out to be a summons from the president himself. Let me tell you I was surprised. I went into his office wondering what would come next, and I have to admit that I was shaking in spite of myself. And there he was, all smiles. Have a seat, he said. I knew the news wasn’t going to be bad, but it turned out not to be good and not to be bad either as far as I myself was concerned. What do you think it was? Well, it had to do with you.”
Tōru’s eyes were fixed on him. The news proved to be quite beyond his imagining. Dismissal had nothing to do with the case.
“Wasn’t I surprised, though. It had come through an older man who had done a great deal for the president. There’s someone who wants to adopt you. And it’s up to me to make you agree, even if I have to force you. That’s quite a responsibility, coming from the president himself. Someone’s put a high price on you. Or it might be that someone knows a good article when he sees it.”
An intimation came to Tōru. It had to be the elderly lawyer who had left his calling card.
“I should imagine his name is Honda.”
“That’s right. How did you know?” The superintendent was astonished.
“He came once to look at the station. But it seems odd that he should want to adopt me after just the one time.”
“It seems that he’s made two or three very careful investigations.”
Tōru frowned. He remembered the tidings from Kinué. “Not a very pleasant sort of thing to do to a person.”
The superintendent hurried on in some confusion. “But it’s all right. He found out that you’re a model young man. Not a mark against you.”
It was not so much the elderly lawyer Tōru was thinking of. It was that spoiled, Westernized old woman, from a world utterly alien to Tōru, spreading her scaly powder like a gaudy moth.
The superintendent kept Tōru awake until eleven thirty. Sometimes, his knees in his arms, Tōru would doze off; but the superintendent, now in his cups, would shake him and go on talking.
The man was a wealthy and famous old widower. He saw that it would far better serve the interests of the Honda family and of Japan to adopt a truly talented and willing young man than to take in a dolt from a high-placed family. He would hire tutors as soon as the adoption had been accomplished, to put Tōru into the best preparatory school and university. The prospective father rather hoped that Tōru would choose law or business, but the final choice must of course be his own, and the father would be quite unstinting with his help. He did not have long to live, but there were no family complications, and the whole of his estate would go to Tōru. Could any proposal be more attractive?
But why? The question tickled at Tōru’s self-respect.
The other person had jumped over something. It corresponded, by wonderful coincidence, to something Tōru himself had jumped over. It seemed to the other and to Tōru himself that the irrationality of it all was natural; and the ones who had been taken in were the common-sense ones in between, the president and the others.
The news came to Tōru as nothing to be surprised by at all. He had been prepared for a curious denouement the moment he had met the quiet old man. He was confident that no one would find him out, but the faculty of not being caught by surprise had given him the confidence to pass generous judgment on wholly outrageous mistakes about himself and to swallow the results. If in the end they came to nonsense, they were the results of beautiful error. If a confusion in the world’s awareness was taken to be a self-evident premise, then anything could follow. The view that all the benevolence and malevolence directed at him were based upon error brought a blinding of self-respect, and self-denial as the final conclusion to cynicism.
Tōru had only contempt for inevitability, and to him volition was nothing. If he imagined himself caught up in an antiquated comedy of errors, he had ample reason. There could be no doubt that nothing was more ridiculous than the anger of a volitionless person who thought his volition was being trampled on. If he behaved in a coolly rational manner, then to say that he had no particular wish to become an adopted son amounted to the same thing as saying that he was quite prepared to become an adopted son.
Most people would immediately have become suspicious of the inadequate reasons offered. But that was a matter of weighing the appraisal of another against one’s self-esteem, a road which Tōru’s thoughts did not choose to travel. He compared himself with no one. In the
measure, indeed, that the proposal was child’s play lacking inevitability and became something very like the whim of an old man, the element of the inescapable grew more tenuous, and the proposal easier for Tōru to accept. A person without fate or destiny is not bound by the inescapable.
The proposal came, in sum, to alms masking themselves as educational endeavor.
An ordinarily proud and high-spirited boy could have said: “I’m no beggar.”
But that sort of protest had about it the smell of boys’ magazines. Tōru had the more enigmatic weapon of a smile. He accepted by denying.
As a matter of fact, the play of light, when he investigated his enigmatic smile in a mirror, sometimes made it seem like that of a young girl. Perhaps a young girl in some distant land, speaking some incomprehensible language, had just such an enigmatic smile as her only route of communication. He did not wish to be understood as saying that the smile was girlish. Yet it was not a man’s smile. It had in it a quality as of a bird waiting in its nest at the most delicate moment, free of either coquetry or timidity, between hesitation and resolution, preparing because of an adversary for a crisis as of walking a dark path. Between dark and dawn, neither road nor hill could be made out, and each step might mean drowning. It sometimes seemed to Tōru that it was a smile he had inherited from neither of his parents, but acquired rather from a young girl, a stranger, he had met in his distant youth.
Nor was it conceit that made him think so. He could see himself from corner to corner and the confidence that the most perceptive of persons could not see him as he saw himself was the basis of his self-respect; and so long as it was to the Tōru seen by others, the offer of alms was an offer to a shadow of the real Tōru, quite incapable of wounding his self-respect. Tōru was secure.
But were the motives of the man so incomprehensible? There was nothing in the least incomprehensible about them. Tōru understood perfectly. The victim of boredom is quite capable of selling a world to a rag-picker.