The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea

  At last the test of Noboru’s hard, cold heart! Just a minute before, he had taken a cold bath, but he was sweating heavily again. He felt it blow up through his breast like the morning sea breeze: intent to kill. His chest felt like a clothes rack made of hollow metal poles and hung with white shirts drying in the sun. Soon the shirts would be flapping in the wind and then he would be killing, breaking the endless chain of society’s loathsome taboos.

  Noboru seized the kitten by the neck and stood up. It dangled dumbly from his fingers. He checked himself for pity; like a lighted window seen from an express train, it flickered for an instant in the distance and disappeared. He was relieved.

  The chief always insisted it would take acts such as this to fill the world’s great hollows. Though nothing else could do it, he said, murder would fill those gaping caves in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror. Then they would achieve real power over existence.

  Resolved, Noboru swung the kitten high above his head and slammed it at the log. The warm soft thing hurtled through the air in marvelous flight. But the sensation of down between his fingers lingered.

  “It’s not dead yet. Do it again,” the chief ordered.

  Scattered through the gloom in the shed, the five naked boys stood rooted, their eyes glittering.

  What Noboru lifted between two fingers now was no longer a kitten. A resplendent power was surging through him to the tips of his fingers and he had only to lift the dazzling arc seared into the air by this power and hurl it again and again at the log. He felt like a giant of a man. Just once, at the second impact, the kitten raised a short, gurgling cry. . . .

  The kitten had bounced off the log for the final time. Its hind legs twitched, traced large lax circles in the dirt floor, and then subsided. The boys were overjoyed at the spattered blood on the log.

  As if staring into a deep well, Noboru peered after the kitten as it plummeted down the small hole of death. He sensed in the way he lowered his face to the corpse his own gallant tenderness, tenderness so clinical it was almost kind. Dull red blood oozed from the kitten’s nose and mouth, the twisted tongue was clamped against the palate.

  “C’mon up close where you can see. I’ll take it from here.” Unnoticed, the chief had put on a pair of rubber gloves that reached up to his elbows; now he bent over the corpse with a pair of gleaming scissors. Shining coolly through the gloom of the shed, the scissors were magnificent in their cold, intellectual dignity: Noboru couldn’t imagine a more appropriate weapon for the chief.

  Seizing the kitten by the neck, the chief pierced the skin at the chest with the point of the blade and scissored a long smooth cut to the throat. Then he pushed the skin to the sides with both hands: the glossy layer of fat beneath was like a peeled spring onion. The skinned neck, draped gracefully on the floor, seemed to be wearing a cat mask. The cat was only an exterior, life had posed as a cat.

  But beneath the surface was a smooth expressionless interior, a placid, glossy-white inner life in perfect consonance with Noboru and the others; and they could feel their own intricate, soot-black insides bearing down upon and shadowing it like ships moving upon the water. Now, at last, the boys and the cat, or, more accurately, what had been a cat, became perfectly at one.

  Gradually the endoderm was bared; its transparent mother-of-pearl loveliness was not at all repellent. They could see through to the ribs now, and watch, beneath the great omentum, the warm, homey pulsing of the colon.

  “What do you think? Doesn’t it look too naked? I’m not sure that’s such a good thing: like it was bad manners or something.” The chief peeled aside the skin on the trunk with his gloved hands.

  “It sure is naked,” said number two.

  Noboru tried comparing the corpse confronting the world so nakedly with the unsurpassably naked figures of his mother and the sailor. But compared to this, they weren’t naked enough. They were still swaddled in skin. Even that marvelous horn and the great wide world whose expanse it had limned couldn’t possibly have penetrated so deeply as this . . . the pumping of the bared heart placed the peeled kitten in direct and tingling contact with the kernel of the world.

  Noboru wondered, pressing a crumpled handkerchief to his nose against the mounting stench and breathing hotly through his mouth: “What is beginning here now?”

  The kitten bled very little. The chief tore through the surrounding membrane and exposed the large, red-black liver. Then he unwound the immaculate bowels and reeled them onto the floor. Steam rose and nestled against the rubber gloves. He cut the colon into slices and squeezed out for all the boys to see a broth the color of lemons. “This stuff cuts just like flannel.”

  Noboru managed, while following his own dreamy thoughts, to pay scrupulous attention to the details. The kitten’s dead pupils were purple flecked with white; the gaping mouth was stuffed with congealed blood, the twisted tongue visible between the fangs. As the fat-yellowed scissors cut them, he heard the ribs creak. And he watched intently while the chief groped in the abdominal cavity, withdrew the small pericardium, and plucked from it the tiny oval heart. When he squeezed the heart between two fingers, the remaining blood gushed onto his rubber gloves, reddening them to the tips of the fingers.

  What is really happening here?

  Noboru had withstood the ordeal from beginning to end. Now his half-dazed brain envisioned the warmth of the scattered viscera and the pools of blood in the gutted belly finding wholeness and perfection in the rapture of the dead kitten’s large languid soul. The liver, limp beside the corpse, became a soft peninsula, the squashed heart a little sun, the reeled-out bowels a white atoll, and the blood in the belly the tepid waters of a tropical sea. Death had transfigured the kitten into a perfect, autonomous world.

  I killed it all by myself—a distant hand reached into Noboru’s dream and awarded him a snow-white certificate of merit—I can do anything, no matter how awful.

  The chief peeled off the squeaky rubber gloves and laid one beautiful white hand on Noboru’s shoulder. “You did a good job. I think we can say this has finally made a real man of you—and isn’t all this blood a sight for sore eyes!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  MEETING Ryuji on the way back from the chief’s house just after they had buried the cat was pure bad luck. Noboru had scrubbed his hands, but what if there was blood somewhere else on his body or on his clothes? What if he reeked of dead kitten? What if his eyes betrayed him—like those of a criminal encountering an acquaintance just after the crime?

  For one thing, there would be trouble if his mother learned that he had been near the park at this time of day: he was supposed to be in Kamakura with a different group of friends. Noboru had been caught off guard, he was even a little frightened, and he decided arbitrarily that Ryuji was entirely to blame.

  The others scattered after hurried goodbyes and they were left alone on the hot road with their long afternoon shadows.

  Noboru was mortified. He had been waiting for an opening to introduce Ryuji casually. If, under perfect circumstances, the introduction had succeeded, the chief might have admitted reluctantly that Ryuji was a hero and Noboru’s honor would have been redeemed.

  But at this unhappy, unexpected meeting, the sailor had presented himself as a pitiful figure in a water-logged shirt and, as if that wasn’t enough, smiled like a fawning idiot. That smile was a disparagement, for it was meant to mollify a child; besides, it transformed Ryuji himself into a disgraceful caricature of the adult lover of youngsters. Overbright and artificial, an unnecessary, outrageous blunder of a smile!

  On top of that, Ryuji had said things he should never have said: “Small world, isn’t it? Have a good swim?” And when Noboru challenged the soaking shirt, he should have answered: “Oh, this? I rescued a woman who had thrown herself off the pier. This makes the third time I’ve had to go swimming with all my clothes on. . . .”

  But he hadn’t said anything of the kind. Instead he had offered this ridiculous explanation: “I t
ook a little shower at the fountain up there in the park.” And with that unwarranted smile all over his face!

  He wants me to like him. I guess having your new woman’s brat kid like you can be pretty convenient at times.

  They found themselves walking in the direction of the house. Ryuji, who still had two hours on his hands, fell into step with the boy, feeling pleased to have found someone to pass the time with. “There’s something funny about both of us today,” he volunteered as they walked along.

  Noboru didn’t like the show of eager sympathy, but it made asking an important favor easy: “Mr. Tsukazaki, would you mind not telling Mom about seeing me at the park?”

  “You bet.”

  The sailor’s pleasure at being entrusted with a secret, his reassuring smile and quick assent, disappointed Noboru. At least he could have threatened a little.

  “I’m supposed to have been at the beach all day—just a minute.” Noboru sprinted to a sand pile at the side of the road and, kicking off his tennis shoes, began to rub his feet and legs with handfuls of sand. The smug, affected boy moved with an animal quickness Ryuji hadn’t seen before. Conscious of being watched, Noboru was putting on a show, smearing the sand on the backs of his legs and all the way up his thighs. When he was satisfied, he stepped into his shoes gingerly so as not to dislodge the sand and minced back to Ryuji. “Look,” he said, indicating the sand on his sweating thigh, “it stuck in the shape of a draftsman’s curve.”

  “Where are you headed now?”

  “Home. Why don’t you come too, Mr. Tsukazaki? There’s an air conditioner in the living room and it’s really cool.”

  They turned on the air conditioner and Ryuji slumped into a rattan chair. Noboru, after returning from an artfully reluctant trip to the bathroom under orders from the housekeeper to wash his feet, sprawled on the rattan couch near the closed window.

  The housekeeper came in with cool drinks and began to scold again: “I’m going to tell your mother just how bad you behave in front of company—flopping all over the place like that.”

  Noboru’s eyes sought help from Ryuji.

  “It doesn’t bother me a bit. And swimming all day does seem to have tired him out.”

  “I suppose so—but he should know better. . . .”

  Obviously the housekeeper resented Ryuji and she appeared to be venting her disgruntlement on Noboru. Heaving from side to side buttocks heavy with discontent, she lumbered out of the room.

  Ryuji’s defense had united them in a tacit pact. Noboru swilled his drink, dribbling yellow fruit juice on his throat. Then he turned to look at the sailor, and, for the first time, his eyes were smiling. “I know just about everything when it comes to ships.”

  “You’d probably put an old pro like me to shame.”

  “I don’t like to be flattered.” Noboru raised his head from a cushion his mother had embroidered; for an instant, there was fury in his eyes.

  “What time do you stand watch, Mr. Tsukazaki?”

  “From noon to four and from midnight to four. That’s why they call it ‘thieves’ watch.’”

  “Thieves’ watch! Boy, that sounds great!” This time Noboru laughed outright and arched his back into a bow.

  “How many men stand watch together?”

  “A duty officer and two helmsmen.”

  “Mr. Tsukazaki, how much does a ship list in a squall?”

  “Thirty to forty degrees when it gets really bad. Try walking up a forty-degree grade sometimes. It’s like scaling a damn wall—fantastic. There are times when . . .”

  Groping for words, Ryuji stared into space. Noboru saw in his eyes the billows of a storm-riled sea and felt mildly seasick. He was ecstatic.

  “The Rakuyo is a tramp steamer, isn’t she, Mr. Tsukazaki?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Ryuji admitted halfheartedly: his pride was hurt a little.

  “I guess most of your routes are between Japan and China and then India, right?”

  “You do know what you’re talking about, don’t you? Sometimes we ship wheat from Australia to England too.”

  Noboru’s questions were precipitate, his interest leaped from one subject to another. “What was the Philippines’ chief product again?”

  “Lauan wood, I guess.”

  “How about Malaya?”

  “That’d be iron ore. Here’s one for you: what’s Cuba’s chief product?”

  “Sugar. What else? Anybody knows that. Say, have you ever been to the West Indies?”

  “Yes. Just once, though.”

  “Did you get to Haiti?”

  “Yes.”

  “Boy! How about the trees there?”

  “Trees?”

  “You know, like shade trees or—”

  “Oh, that—palms mostly. And then the mountains are full of what they call flamboyants. And silk trees. I can’t remember whether the flamboyant looks like the silk tree or not. Anyway, when they blossom, they look like they’re on fire. And when the sky gets pitch black just before an evening storm they turn fantastic colors. I’ve never seen blossoms like that again anywhere.”

  Ryuji wanted to talk about his mysterious attachment to a grove of wine palms. But he didn’t know how to tell that kind of story to a child, and as he sat and wondered, the doomsday glow of sunset in the Persian Gulf roused in his mind, and the sea wind caressing his cheek as he stood at the anchor davit, and the rankling fall of the barometer that warned of an approaching typhoon: he was sensible again of the sea’s nightmarish power working endlessly on his moods, his passions.

  Noboru, just as he had seen storm billows a minute before, beheld one by one in the sailor’s eyes the phantoms he had summoned. Surrounded by visions of distant lands and by white-paint nautical jargon, he was being swept away to the Gulf of Mexico, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf. And the journey was made possible by this authentic Second Mate. Here at last was the medium without which his imagination had been helpless. How long he had waited for it!

  Rapturous, Noboru shut his eyes tight.

  The two-horsepower motor in the air conditioner whispered to the room. It was perfectly cool now, and Ryuji’s shirt had dried. He clasped his rough hands behind his head: the ridges in the finely laced rattan nestled coolly against his fingers.

  His eyes roved the dim room and he marveled at the golden clock enthroned on the mantel, the cut-glass chandelier depending from the ceiling, the graceful jade vases poised precariously on open shelves: all delicate, all absolutely still. He wondered what subtle providence kept the room from rocking. Until a day before, the objects here had meant nothing to him, and in a day he would be gone; yet, for the moment, they were connected. The link was a glance met by a woman’s eyes, a signal emanating from deep in the flesh, the brute power of his own manhood; and to know this filled him with a sense of mystery, as when he sighted an unknown vessel on the open sea. Though his own flesh had fashioned the bond, its enormous unreality with respect to this room made him tremble.

  What am I supposed to be doing here on a summer afternoon? Who am I, sitting in a daze next to the son of a woman I made last night? Until yesterday I had my song—“the sea’s my home, I decided that”—and the tears I cried for it, and two million yen in my bank account as guarantees of my reality—what have I got now?

  Noboru didn’t realize that Ryuji was sinking into a void. He didn’t even notice that the sailor wasn’t looking in his direction any more. Lack of sleep and a succession of shocks had exhausted him, the bloodshot eyes he had told the housekeeper were from the salt water were beginning to close. He pondered, as he rocked toward sleep, the glistening figures of absolute reality twice glimpsed since the night before during lapses in the unmoving, tedious, barren world. . . .

  He saw them as marvelous gold embroideries leaping off a flat black fabric: the naked sailor twisting in the moonlight to confront a horn—the kitten’s death mask, grave and fang-bared—its ruby heart. . . . gorgeous entities all and absolutely authentic: then Ryuji too was an au
thentic hero . . . all incidents on the sea, in the sea, under the sea—Noboru felt himself drowning in sleep. “Happiness,” he thought. “Happiness that defies description. . . .” He fell asleep.

  Ryuji looked at his watch: it was time to go. He knocked lightly on the door leading to the kitchen and called the housekeeper.

  “He’s fallen asleep.”

  “That’s just like that boy.”

  “He might catch a chill. If there’s a blanket or something—”

  “I’ll get one from upstairs.”

  “Well—I’ll be going now.”

  “I suppose we can expect you back tonight?” A smirk appeared around the housekeeper’s eyes and trickled down her face as she glanced once, quickly, ogling up at Ryuji.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SINCE dark antiquity the words have been spoken by women of every caste to sailors in every port; words of docile acceptance of the horizon’s authority, of reckless homage to that mysterious azure boundary; words never failing to bestow on even the haughtiest woman the sadness, the hollow hopes, and the freedom of the whore: “You’ll be leaving in the morning, won’t you? . . .”

  But Fusako was determined not to submit, though she knew Ryuji would try to make her speak. She understood that he was staking a simple man’s pride on the tears of a woman lamenting the farewell. And what a simple man he was! Their conversation in the park the night before was proof of that. First he had misled her with his pensive look into expecting profound observations or even a passionate declaration, and then he had begun a monologue on shreds of green leaf, and prattled about his personal history, and finally, horribly entangled in his own story, burst into the refrain of a popular song!

  Yet she was relieved to know that he was not a dreamer, and his plainness, a quality more durable than imaginative, like a piece of sturdy old furniture, she found reassuring. Fusako needed a guarantee of safety, for she had pampered herself too long, avoided danger in any form, and her unexpected and dangerous actions since the night before had frightened her. Feeling up in the air as she did, it seemed vitally important that the man with whom she was involved be down-to-earth. There were still things to learn of course, but at least she was convinced that Ryuji was not the sort of man to burden her financially.