That strange unrest was still with him this morning. But the vast ocean stretched away from the prow, where he was standing, and gradually the sight of it filled his body with the energy of familiar, day-to-day toil, and without realizing it he felt at peace again. The boat was shaking mincingly with the vibrations of the engine, and the biting morning wind slapped at the boy’s cheeks.
High on the cliff to starboard, the beacon of the lighthouse was already extinguished. Along the shore, under the brownish pine branches of early spring, the pounding breakers of Irako Channel showed vivid white in the cloudy morning landscape. Two submerged reefs in the channel kept the water in a constant churning turmoil; an ocean liner would have had to work its way gingerly through the narrow passage between them, but with the skillful sculling of its master the Taihei-maru sailed smoothly through the swirling current. The water in the channel was between eighteen and a hundred fathoms deep, but over the reefs it was only thirteen to twenty fathoms. It was here, from this spot where buoys marked the passage, on out to the Pacific, that the numberless octopus pots were sunk.
Eighty per cent of Uta-jima’s yearly catch was in octopus. The octopus season, which began in November, was now about to give way to the squid season, which would begin with the spring equinox. It was the end of the season, the time when the pots were lying in wait for their last chance at what were called the “fleeing octopus” as they moved to the depths of the Pacific to escape the cold waters of the Gulf of Ise.
To master fishermen the exact rise and fall of every inch of the bottom of the shallow waters off the Pacific side of the island were as familiar as their own kitchen gardens. They were always saying: “It’s only a blind man that can’t see the ocean floor.” They knew their direction from their mariner’s compass, and by watching the changing outline of the mountains on the far distant capes they could always tell their exact position. Once they had their bearings, they unerringly knew the topography of the ocean floor beneath them.
Countless ropes had been methodically laid out over the floor of the ocean, to each of which were tied more than a hundred pots, and the floats attached to the ropes rolled and tossed with the rise and fall of the tides. In their boat it was the master who knew the art of octopus fishing; all Shinji and the other boy, Ryuji, had to do was lend their strong bodies willingly to the heavy labor involved.
Jukichi Oyama, master fisherman, owner of the Taihei-maru, had a face like leather well-tanned by sea winds. The grimy wrinkles on his hands were mixed indistin-guishably with old fishing scars, all burned by the sun down into their deepest creases. He was a man who seldom laughed, but was always in calm good spirits, and even the loud voice he used when giving commands on the boat was never raised in anger. While fishing he seldom left his place on the sculling platform at the stern, only occasionally taking one hand off the oar to regulate the engine.
Emerging into the fishing grounds, they found already gathered there the many other fishing-boats, unseen until now, and exchanged morning greetings with them. Upon reaching their own fishing area, Jukichi reduced the speed of the engine and signaled Shinji to attach a belt from the engine to the roller-shaft on the gunwale.
This shaft turned a pulley which extended over the gunwale. One of the ropes to which the octopus pots were tied would be placed over the pulley, and the boat would slowly follow the rope along as the pulley drew one end up from the sea and let the other fall back into the sea. The two boys also would take turns at pulling on the rope, because the water-soaked hemp was often too heavy a load for the pulley alone and also because the rope would slip off unless carefully guided.
A hazy sun was hidden behind the clouds on the horizon. Two or three cormorants were swimming on the sea, their long necks thrust out over the surface of the water. Looking back toward Uta-jima, one could see its southern cliffs shining, dead-white, stained by the droppings of countless flocks of cormorants.
The wind was bitterly cold, but while he pulled the first rope toward the pulley Shinji stared out over the dark-indigo sea and felt boiling up within him energy for the toil that would soon have him sweating. The pulley began to turn and heavy, wet rope came rising from the sea. Through his thin gloves Shinji could feel the thick, icy rope he grasped in his hands. As it passed over the pulley the taut rope threw off a sleet-like spray of salt water.
Soon the octopus pots themselves were rising to the surface, showing a red-clay color. Ryuji stood waiting at the pulley. If a pot was empty, he would quickly pour the water out of it and, not letting it strike the pulley, again commit it to the care of the rope, now sinking back into the sea.
Shinji stood with his legs spread wide, one foot stretched to the prow, and continued his endless tug-of-war against whatever there was in the sea. One hand-pull by one hand-pull, the rope came up. Shinji was winning. But the sea was not surrendering: one after the other, mockingly, it kept sending the pots up—all empty.
More than twenty pots had already been pulled up at intervals of from seven to ten yards along the rope. Shinji was pulling the rope. Ryuji was emptying water from the pots. Jukichi, keeping a hand on the sculling oar and never once changing his expression, silently watched the boys at their work.
Sweat gradually spread across Shinji’s back and began to glisten on his forehead, exposed to the morning wind. His cheeks became flushed. Finally the sun broke through the clouds, casting pale shadows at the feet of the quickly moving boys.
Ryuji was facing away from the sea, in toward the boat. He upended the pot that had just come up, and Jukichi pulled a lever to disengage the pulley. Now for the first time Shinji looked back toward the pulley.
Ryuji poked around inside the pot with a wooden pole. Like a person awakened from a long nap, an octopus oozed its entire body out of the pot and cowered on the deck. Quickly the cover was jerked off a large bamboo creel standing by the engine room—and the first catch of the day went slithering down into it with a dull thud.
. . .
The Taihei-maru spent most of the morning octopus fishing. Its meager catch consisted of five octopuses. The wind died and the sun shone gloriously. Passing through the Irako Channel, the Taihei-maru sailed back into the Gulf of Ise to do some “drag fishing” on the sly in the prohibited waters there.
To make their drag they tied a number of large hooks and lines on a crossbar, tied it to a stout hawser, and then, putting the boat in motion, dragged this across the floor of the gulf like a rake. After a time they pulled the drag in; with it four flatheads and three soles came flapping up from the water.
Shinji took them off the hooks with his bare hands. The flatheads fell to the blood-smeared deck, their white bellies gleaming. The black, wet bodies of the soles, their little eyes sunk deep in folds of wrinkles, reflected the blue of the sky.
Lunchtime came. Jukichi dressed the flatheads on the engine-room hatch and cut them into slices. They divided the raw slices onto the lids of their aluminum lunchboxes and poured soy sauce over them from a small bottle. Then they took up the boxes, filled with a mixture of boiled rice and barley and, stuffed into one corner, a few slices of pickled radish. The boat they entrusted to the gentle swell.
“Say, what do you think about old Uncle Teru Miyata bringing his girl back?” Jukichi said abruptly.
“I didn’t know he had.”
“Me neither.”
Both boys shook their heads and Jukichi proceeded with his story:
“Uncle Teru had four girls and one boy. Said he had more than enough of girls, so he married three of them off and let the other one be adopted away. Her name was Hatsue and she was adopted into a family of diving women over at Oizaki in Shima. But then, what do you know, that only son of his, Matsu, dies of the lung sickness last year. Being a widower, Uncle Teru starts feeling lonely. So he calls Hatsue back, has her put back in his family register, and decides to adopt a husband into the family for her, to have someone to carry on the name. … Hatsue’s grown up to be a real beauty. There’ll be a lot of young
sters wanting to marry her. … How about you two—hey?”
Shinji and Ryuji looked at each other and laughed. Each could guess that the other was blushing, but they were too tanned by the sun for the red to show.
Talk of this girl and the image of the girl he had seen on the beach yesterday immediately took fast hold of each other in Shinji’s mind. At the same instant he recalled, with a sinking heart, his own poor condition in life. The recollection made the girl whom he had stared at so closely only the day before seem very, very far away from him now. Because now he knew that her father was Terukichi Miyata, the wealthy owner of two coasting freighters chartered to Yamagawa Transport—the hundred-and-eighty-five-ton Utajima-maru and the ninety-five-ton Harukaze-maru—and a noted crosspatch, whose white hair would wave like lion whiskers in anger.
Shinji had always been very level-headed. He had realized that he was still only eighteen and that it was too soon to be thinking about women. Unlike the environment of city youths, always exploding with thrills, Uta-jima had not a single pin-ball parlor, not a single bar, not a single waitress. And this boy’s simple daydream was only to own his own engine-powered boat some day and go into the coastal-shipping business with his younger brother.
Surrounded though he was by the vast ocean, Shinji did not especially burn with impossible dreams of great adventure across the seas. His fisherman’s conception of the sea was close to that of the farmer for his land. The sea was the place where he earned his living, a rippling field where, instead of waving heads of rice or wheat, the white and formless harvest of waves was forever swaying above the unrelieved blueness of a sensitive and yielding soil.
Even so, when that day’s fishing was almost done, the sight of a white freighter sailing against the evening clouds on the horizon filled the boy’s heart with strange emotions. From far away the world came pressing in upon him with a hugeness he had never before apprehended. The realization of this unknown world came to him like distant thunder, now pealing from afar, now dying away to nothingness.
A small starfish had dried to the deck in the prow. The boy sat there in the prow, with a coarse white towel tied round his head. He turned his eyes away from the evening clouds and shook his head slightly.
3
THAT NIGHT Shinji attended the regular meeting of the Young Men’s Association. This was the name now applied to what in ancient times was called the “sleeping house,” then a dormitory system for the young, unmarried men of the island. Even now many young men preferred to sleep in the Association’s drab hut on the beach rather than in their own homes. There the youths hotly debated such matters as schooling and health; the ways of salvaging sunken ships and making rescues at sea; and the Lion and Lantern Festival dances, functions belonging to the young men of the village since ancient days. Thus they felt themselves part of the communal life and found pleasure in that agreeable weight that comes from shouldering the burdens and duties of full-grown men.
A wind was blowing from the sea, rattling the closed night-shutters and making the lamp sway back and forth, now dim, now suddenly bright. From outside, the night sea came pressing very near them, and the roar of the tide was constantly revealing the unrest and might of nature as the shadows of the lamp moved over the cheerful faces of the young men.
When Shinji entered the hut one boy was kneeling on all fours under the lamp, having his hair cut by a friend with a pair of slightly rusty hair clippers. Shinji smiled and sat down on the floor against the wall, clasping his knees. He remained silent as usual, listening to what the others were saying.
The youths were bragging to each other of the day’s fishing, laughing loudly and heaping each other unstintingly with insults. One boy, who was a great reader, was earnestly reading one of the out-of-date magazines with which the hut was supplied. Another was engrossed, with no less enthusiasm, in a comic book; holding the pages open with fingers whose knuckles were gnarled beyond his years, he would study some pages for two or three minutes at a time before finally understanding the point and breaking into a loud guffaw.
Here, for the second time, Shinji heard talk of the new girl. He caught a snatch of a sentence spoken by a snaggle-toothed boy who opened a big mouth to laugh and then said:
“That Hatsue, she’s—”
The rest of the sentence was lost to Shinji in a sudden commotion from another part of the room, mixed with answering laughter from the group around the snaggle-toothed boy.
Shinji was not at all given to brooding about things, but this one name, like a tantalizing puzzle, kept harassing his thoughts. At the mere sound of the name his cheeks flushed and his heart pounded. It was a strange feeling to sit there motionless and feel within himself these physical changes that, until now, he had experienced only during heavy labor.
He put the palm of his hand against his cheek to feel it. The hot flesh felt like that of some complete stranger. It was a blow to his pride to realize the existence of things within himself that he had never so much as suspected, and rising anger made his cheeks even more flaming hot.
The young men were awaiting the arrival of their president, Yasuo Kawamoto. Although only nineteen, Yasuo was the son of a leading family in the village and possessed the power to make others follow him. Young as he was, he already knew the secret of giving himself importance, and he always came late to their meetings.
Opening the door with a bang, Yasuo now entered the room. He was quite fat and had inherited a red complexion from his tippling father. His face was naïve enough in appearance, but there was a crafty look about his thin eyebrows. He spoke glibly, without any trace of the local dialect:
“Sorry to be late. … Well, then, let’s not waste time. There’re definite plans to be made for next month’s projects.”
So saying, he sat down at the desk and opened a notebook. They could all see that he was in a great hurry about something.
“As decided at the last meeting, there’s the business of—er—holding a meeting of the Respect for Old Age Association, and also hauling stones for road repairs. Then there’s the matter of cleaning the sewers to get rid of the rats—it’s a request of the Village Assembly. We’ll do this as usual—er—on a stormy day when the boats can’t go out Fortunately, rat-catching can be done in any weather, and I don’t believe the police will get after us even if we kill a few rats outside the sewers.”
There was general laughter and shouts of “You tell ’em! You tell ’em!”
Next, proposals were made to ask the school doctor to give them a talk on hygiene, and to hold an oratorical contest. But the old-style, lunar-calendar New Year was just over, and the youths were so fed up with gatherings that they were lukewarm to both proposals.
So they turned themselves into a committee of the whole and sat in critical judgment on the merits of their mimeographed bulletin, The Orphan Island. Something called a quatrain by Verlaine had been quoted at the end of an essay in the last issue by the boy who liked books so much, and this now became the universal target for their jibes:
I Know not why
My mournful soul
Flies the sea, fitfully, fitfully,
On restless, frantic pinions …
“What do you mean by that ‘fitfully, fitfully’?”
“ ‘Fitfully, fitfully’ means ‘fitfully, fitfully’—that’s what!”
“Maybe it’s a mistake for ‘flitfully, flitfully.’ ”
“That’s it! If you’d said ‘it flies flitfully, flitfully’—then that would’ve made some sense.”
“Who’s this Verlaine fellow anyhow?”
“One of the most famous French poets—that’s who!”
“And what do you know about French poets, hey? You probably got it all out of some popular song somewhere.”
Thus the meeting had ended as usual in a give-and-take of insults.
Wondering why Yasuo, the president, had been in such a hurry to leave, Shinji stopped one of his friends and asked him.
“Don’t you know?” the f
riend replied. “He’s invited to the party Uncle Teru Miyata’s giving to celebrate his daughter’s homecoming.”
Normally Shinji would have walked home with the others as they talked and laughed, but now, hearing of the party to which in no case would he have been invited, he soon slipped away and walked alone along the beach toward the stone steps leading to Yashiro Shrine.
Looking up at the village houses, built one above the other on a steep rise, he picked out the lights shining from the Miyata house. All the lights in the village came from the same oil lamps, but these looked somehow different, more sparkling. Even if he could not see the actual scene of the banquet, he could clearly imagine how the sensitive flame of the lamps there must be throwing flickering shadows from the girl’s tranquil eyebrows and long lashes down onto her cheeks.
Reaching the bottom of the stone steps, Shinji looked up the flight of stairs, dappled with shadows of pine branches. He began to climb, his wooden clogs making a dry, clicking sound. There was not a soul to be seen around the shrine, and the light in the priest’s house was out.
Even though he had just bounded up two hundred steps, Shinji’s thick chest was not laboring in the least when he reached the shrine. He stopped before it, filled with a feeling of reverence.
He tossed a ten-yen coin into the offertory chest Thinking a moment, he tossed in ten yen more. The sound of his clapped hands, calling the god’s attention, sounded through the shrine garden, and Shinji prayed in his heart:
“God, let the seas be calm, the fish plentiful, and our village more and more prosperous. I am still young, but in time let me become a fisherman among fishermen. Let me have much knowledge in the ways of the sea, in the ways of fish, in the ways of boats, in the ways of the weather … in everything. Let me be a man with surpassing skill in everything. … Please protect my gentle mother and my brother, who is still a child. When my mother enters the sea in the diving season, please protect her body somehow from all the many dangers. … Then there’s a different sort of request I’d like to make. … Some day let even such a person as me be granted a good-natured, beautiful bride … say someone like Terukichi Miyata’s returned daughter. …”