Her toes had been toughened by the repeated cuts and bruises they had received from the diving women’s customary way of always kicking off against the floor of the sea when ready to surface, and the nails were thick and badly twisted; her feet could in no way have been called beautiful, but when planted on the earth they were firm and unshakable.
She opened the door and entered the central workroom. Several pairs of clogs had been taken off and dropped pellmell on the earthen floor, one lying upside down. A pair with red thongs seemed to have just returned from a trip to the sea; wet sand in the shape of footprints was still clinging to the surface of each clog.
The house was filled with silence, and the odor of the toilet floated on the air. The rooms opening off the earthen floor were dark, but sunlight was streaming in through a window somewhere at the back of the house and had spread a bright patch, like a saffron-colored wrapping cloth, in the middle of the floor of one of the farther rooms.
“Good day,” the mother called.
She waited awhile. There was no answer. She called again.
Hatsue came down the ladder-like steps at the side of the earth-floored room.
“Why, Auntie!” she said. She was wearing quiet-colored work-pants, and her hair was tied with a yellow ribbon.
“That’s a pretty ribbon,” the mother complimented her. As she spoke she made a thorough inspection of this girl for whom her son was so lovesick.
It may have been her imagination, but Hatsue’s face seemed a little haggard, her complexion a little pale. And because of this her black eyes, clear and shining, seemed all the more prominent.
Becoming aware of the other’s scrutiny, Hatsue blushed.
The mother was firm in her courage. She would meet Terukichi, champion her son’s innocence, lay bare her heart, and get the two married. The only solution to the situation was for the two parents to talk it over face to face. …
“Is your father at home?”
“Yes, he is.”
“I’ve something to talk over with him. Will you please tell him so?”
“Just a minute.”
Hatsue climbed the stairs, an uneasy expression on her face.
The mother took a seat on the step leading up from the earthen room into the house proper. …
She waited a long time, wishing she had brought cigarettes with her. And as she waited her courage drooped. She began to realize what folly her imagination had led her into.
The stairs creaked softly as Hatsue started down. But she did not come all the way. She called from mid-stairs, seeming to bend her body slightly. The stairs were dark and her face could not be seen clearly as she looked down.
“Uh … Father says he won’t see you. …”
“He won’t see me?”
“That’s right, but …”
With this reply the mother’s courage was utterly crushed, and her feeling of humiliation spurred her to a fit of passion. In a flash she recalled her long life of sweat and toil, all the hardships she had faced as a widow. Then, in a tone of voice that sounded as though she were spitting in someone’s face—but not until she was already half out the front door—she bawled out:
“All right then! So you say you don’t want to see a poor widow. You mean you don’t want me to cross your threshold ever again. Well, let me tell you something—and you tell that father of yours—hear! Tell him I said it first—that never in my life will I ever cross his damned threshold again!”
The mother could not bring herself to tell her son about this fiasco of hers. Looking for a scapegoat, she turned her spite against Hatsue and said such bad things about her that, instead of having helped her son, she had a quarrel with him.
Mother and son did not speak to each other for one whole day, but then the next day they made up. Thereupon the mother, suddenly overcome with the desire for her son’s sympathy, told him all about her abortive call on Terukichi. As for Shinji, he had already learned of it from one of Hatsue’s letters.
In her confession the mother omitted the final scene, in which she had spewed forth those outrageous parting words of hers, and Hatsue’s letter also, out of consideration for Shinji’s feelings, had made no mention of this. So for Shinji there was nothing but the smarting thought of how his mother had had to eat the humiliation of being turned away from Terukichi’s door. And the soft-hearted boy told himself that, even if he could not agree with the bad things his mother said about Hatsue, still he could not blame her for saying them. Until now he had never tried to hide his love for Hatsue from his mother, but he made up his mind that henceforth he must never confide in anyone except the master and Ryuji. It was out of devotion for his mother that he made this decision.
Thus it came about that, because she had tried to do a good deed and had failed, the mother was lonelier than ever.
. . .
It was fortunate that there was not a single day of rest from fishing, for if there had been, it would have served only to make him bemoan the tedium of a day in which he could not meet Hatsue. Thus the month of May came, and their meetings were still prohibited. Then one day Ryuji brought a letter which made Shinji wild with joy:
“… Tomorrow night, for a wonder, Father is having visitors. They’re some prefectural officials from Tsu and will spend the night. Whenever Father has guests he always drinks a lot and goes to bed early. So I think, it’ll be safe for me to slip out of the house about eleven o’clock. Please wait for me in front of Yashiro Shrine. …”
When Shinji returned from fishing that day he changed into a new shirt. His mother, given no explanation, sat looking up at him nervously. She felt as though she were once more looking at her son on that day of the storm.
Shinji had now learned well enough the pain of waiting. So he decided it would be better if he let the girl do the waiting this time. But he could not do it. As soon as his mother and Hiroshi were in bed, he went out. It still lacked two hours of eleven o’clock.
He thought maybe he could kill the time by going to the Young Men’s Association. Light was shining from the windows of the hut on the beach and he could hear the voices of the boys who were sleeping there. But then he had the feeling that they were gossiping about him, and he went on by.
Going out onto the nighttime breakwater, the boy turned his face to the sea-breeze. As he did so he recalled the white ship he had seen sailing against a background of sunset clouds on the horizon that day when he had first learned Hatsue’s identity from Jukichi, recalled the strange feeling he had had as he watched the ship sail away. That had been the “unknown.” So long as he had observed the unknown from a distance, his heart had been peaceful, but once he himself had boarded the unknown and set sail, uneasiness and despair, confusion and anguish had joined forces and borne down upon him.
He believed he knew the reason why his heart, which should have been filled with joy at this moment, was instead crushed and unable to move: the Hatsue whom he would meet tonight would probably insist upon some hasty solution or other to their problem. Elopement? But they were living on an isolated island, and if they were to flee by boat, Shinji had no boat of his own nor, even more important, did he have any money. Double suicide then? Even on this island there had been lovers who took that solution. But the boy’s good sense repudiated the thought, and he told himself that those others had been selfish persons who thought only of themselves. Never once had he thought about such a thing as dying; and, above all, there was his family to support.
While he had been pondering these matters, time had moved ahead surprisingly fast. This boy who was so inexpert at thinking was surprised to discover that one of the expected properties of thought was its efficacy as a time-killer. Nevertheless the strong-willed young man abruptly turned off his thoughts: no matter how efficacious it might be, what he had discovered above all else about this new habit of thinking was that it also comprised point-blank peril.
Shinji did not have a watch. As a matter of fact, he needed none. In its place he was endowed with th
e marvelous ability of being able to sense what time it was in stinctively, day or night.
For instance, the stars moved. And even if he was not an expert at measuring their changes precisely, still his body perceived the turning of the immense wheel of the night, the revolution of the giant wheel of the day. Placed as he was, close to the workings of nature, it was not surprising that he should understand nature’s precise system.
But, to tell the truth, as he sat on the stairs at the entrance to the office of Yashiro Shrine he had already heard the clock give the single stroke of the half-hour and so was doubly sure it was past ten thirty. The priest and his family were fast asleep. Now the boy pressed his ear to the night-shutters of the house and counted, at full length, the eleven strokes that sounded lonesomely from the wall clock inside.
The boy stood up and, passing through the dark shadows of the pine trees, came to a stop at the top of the flight of two hundred stone steps leading downward to the village. There was no moon, thin clouds covered the sky, and only an occasional star was to be seen. And yet the limestone steps gathered together every last gleam of the night’s faint light and, looking like some immense, majestic cataract, fell away from the spot where Shinji stood.
The vast expanse of the Gulf of Ise was completely hidden by the night, but lights could be seen on the farther shores, sparse along the Chita and Atsumi peninsulas, but beautifully and thickly clustered about the city of Uji-Yamada.
The boy was proud of the brand-new shirt he was wearing. He felt sure that its unparalleled whiteness would immediately catch the eye even from the bottommost of the two hundred steps. About halfway down the stone steps there crouched a black shadow, caused by the pine branches that hung over both sides of the stairway there. …
A human figure came into view at the bottom of the steps, looking very small. Shinji’s heart pounded with joy. The sound of the wooden clogs running determinedly up the steps echoed with a loudness out of all proportion to the smallness of the figure. The footsteps sounded tireless.
Shinji resisted the desire to run down the steps to meet her. After all, since he had waited so long, he had the right to stay calmly at the top. Probably, however, when she came close enough for him to see her face, the only way he could keep from shouting out her name in a loud voice would be to go running down to her. When would he be able to see her face clearly? At about the hundredth step? What—
At that instant Shinji heard a strange roar of anger from below. The voice seemed for certain to be calling Hatsue’s name.
Hatsue came to an abrupt halt on the hundredth step, which was slightly wider than the others. He could see her breast moving.
Her father came out of the shadows where he had been hiding. He caught his daughter by the wrist, and Shinji watched them exchange a few violent words. He stood motionless at the top of the steps as though bound there. Terukichi never once so much as glanced in Shinji’s direction. Still holding his daughter’s wrist, he started down the steps.
Not knowing what he ought to do and feeling as though even his head was half-paralyzed, the boy continued to stand in the same motionless posture, like a sentinel at the top of the stone steps.
The figures of the father and daughter reached the bottom of the steps, turned to the right, and disappeared from view.
13
THE YOUNG GIRLS of the island faced the arrival of the diving season with precisely the same heart-strangling feeling city youths have when confronted by final school-term examinations. Their games of scrambling for pebbles on the bottom of the sea close to the beach, begun during the early years of grade school, first introduced them to the art of diving, and they naturally became more skillful as their spirit of rivalry increased. But when they finally began diving for a living and their carefree games turned into real work, without exception the young girls became frightened, and the arrival of spring meant only that the dreaded summer was approaching.
There was the cold, the strangling feeling of running out of breath, the inexpressible agony when water forced its way under the water-goggles, the panic and sudden fear of collapsing that invaded the entire body just when an abalone was almost at the fingertips. There were also all kinds of accidents; and the wounds inflicted on the tips of the toes when kicking off against the sea’s bottom, with its carpet of sharp-edged shells, to rise to the surface; and the leaden languor that possessed the body after it had been forced to dive almost beyond endurance. … All these things had become sharper and sharper in the remembering; the terror had become all the more intense in the repeating. And often sudden nightmares would awaken the girls from sleep so deep as seemingly to leave no room for dreams to creep in. Then, in the dead of night, in the darkness surrounding their peaceful, danger-less beds, they would peer at the flood of sweat clenched within their fists.
It was different with the older divers, with those who had husbands. Coming out of the water from diving, they would sing and laugh and talk in loud voices. It seemed as though work and play had become united in a single whole for them. Watching them enviously, the young girls would tell themselves that they could never become like that, and yet as the years passed they would be surprised to discover that, without their quite realizing it, they themselves had reached the point where they too could be counted among those lighthearted, veteran divers.
The divers of Uta-jima were at their busiest during June and July. Their operations centered about Garden Beach, on the eastern side of Benten Promontory.
One day, before the onset of the rainy season, the beach lay under a strong, noonday sun that could no longer be called that of early summer. A drying-fire had been lit, and a southerly breeze was carrying its smoke in the direction of the ancient grave-mound of Prince Deki. Garden Beach embraced a small cove, directly beyond which there stretched the Pacific. Summer clouds were towering over the distant sea.
As its name suggested, Niwa-hama—Garden Beach—did indeed have the qualities of a landscaped park. Many limestone crags surrounded the beach, seeming to have been arranged purposely in order that children could hide themselves and fire their pistols in games of cowboys and Indians; moreover, the surfaces of the rocks were smooth to the touch, with occasional finger-size holes as dwellings for crabs and sea-lice. The sand held in the arms of these crags was pure white. Atop the cliff facing the sea to the left the flowers called beach-cotton were in full bloom; their blossoms were not those of the season’s end, looking like disheveled sleepers, but were vividly white petals, sensuous and leek-like, brandished against the cobalt sky.
It was the noonday rest period and the area around the fire was noisy with laughing banter. The sand was not yet so hot as to scorch the soles of the feet and, though cold, the water was no longer of that freezing temperature that made the divers rush to put on their padded garments and huddle around the fire the minute they emerged from the sea.
Laughing boisterously, all the divers were thrusting out their chests, boastfully exhibiting their breasts. One of them started to lift her breasts in both hands.
“No, no, it’s no fair using your hands. There’s no telling how much you might cheat if you used your hands.”
“Listen to who’s talking! Why, with those breasts of yours you couldn’t cheat even if you did use your hands.”
Everybody laughed. They were arguing as to who had the best-shaped breasts.
All of their breasts were well tanned, and if they lacked the quality of mysterious whiteness, still less did they have the transparent skin that reveals a tracery of veins. Judging merely by the skin, there seemed to be no particular indication of any sensitivity. But beneath the sunburned skin the sun had created a lustrous, semi-transparent color like that of honey. The dark areolas of the nipples did not stand out as isolated spots of black, moist mystery, but instead shaded off gradually into this honey color.
Among the many breasts jostling around the fire there were some which already hung slack and others whose last vestiges remained only in form of dry, hard nipp
les. But in most cases there were well-developed pectoral muscles, which supported the breasts on firm, wide chests, without letting them droop under their own weight. Their appearance bespoke the fact that these breasts had developed each day beneath the sun, without any knowledge of shame, like ripening fruit.
One of the girls lamented the fact that one of her breasts was smaller than the other, but an outspoken old woman consoled her:
“That’s nothing to worry about. Any day now there’ll be some handsome young swain to pet them into shape for you.”
Everyone laughed again, but the girl still seemed to be worried.
“Are you sure, Grandma Ohara?” she asked.
“I’m sure. I knew a girl like that once before, but once she got herself a man, her breasts evened right up.”
Shinji’s mother was proud of the fact that her own breasts were still young and fresh, the most youthful among the married women of her age. As though they had never known the hunger of love or the pains of life, all summer long her breasts turned their faces toward the sun, deriving there, first-hand, their inexhaustible strength.
The breasts of the young girls did not particularly arouse her jealousy. There was, however, one beautiful pair that had become the object of everyone’s admiration, including that of Shinji’s mother. These were the breasts of Hatsue.
This was the first day Shinji’s mother had come out to dive. So it was also her first opportunity to have a leisurely look at Hatsue. Even after she had hurled those insulting parting words at Hatsue, they had kept exchanging nods whenever they happened to meet, but Hatsue was by nature not a talkative person. Today again they had been busy with one thing and another and had not had many opportunities for speaking with each other. Even now during the breast-beautiful contest it was mainly the older women who were doing all the talking, and so Shinji’s mother, already prejudiced anyway, purposely avoided getting into conversation with Hatsue.
But when she looked at Hatsue’s breasts she nodded to herself, understanding why with the passage of time the ugly rumor about the girl and Shinji had died out. No woman who saw those breasts could have any more doubts. Not only were they the breasts of a girl who had never known a man, but they had just begun to bloom, making one think how beautiful they would be once they were in full flower.