The Sound of Waves (17 page)

To make sure it was all right, Shinji accompanied the captain to Jukichi’s house, and Jukichi also strongly urged Shinji to take the job. He said it would be a bit difficult on the
Taihei-maru
without Shinji, but that he couldn’t stand in the way of the boy’s future. So Shinji agreed.

The next day Shinji heard the startling news that Yasuo too was going to serve an apprenticeship on the
Utajima-maru
. The story went that Yasuo had not at all relished the idea of becoming a “rice-rinser” and had been forced to agree only when Uncle Teru declared that the apprenticeship had to come before any betrothal to Hatsue.

When Shinji heard this, his heart was filled with anxiety, pain, and then, at the same time, hope.

Together with his mother, Shinji went to Yashiro Shrine to pray for a safe voyage and to obtain a charm.

The day of departure had come. Accompanied by the captain, Shinji and Yasuo boarded the
Kamikaze-maru
for the ferry-crossing to Toba. A number of people came to see Yasuo off, including Hatsue, but there was no sign of Terukichi. Shinji was seen off by no one but his mother and Hiroshi.

Hatsue did not look in Shinji’s direction. But just as the boat was about to sail, she whispered something to Shinji’s mother and handed her a small package. The mother gave it to her son.

Even after he was on the boat Shinji had no chance to
open the package, as the captain and Yasuo were with him. He gazed at the receding outline of Uta-jima. And as he did so he became aware of his own feelings for the first time.

Here he was, a young man born and bred on that island, loving it more than anything else in the world, and yet he was now eager to leave it. It was his desire to leave the island that had made him accept the captain’s offer of a berth on the
Utajima-maru
.

Once the island was out of sight the boy’s heart became peaceful. As he had never been on his daily fishing trips, he was now free of the thought that tonight he would have to return to the island again.

“I’m free!” he shouted in his heart. This was the first time he had ever realized there could be such a strange sort of freedom as this.

The
Kamikaze-maru
sailed on through a drizzling rain. Yasuo and the captain stretched out on the straw mats in the passenger cabin and went to sleep. Yasuo had not spoken to Shinji once since they had boarded the ferry.

The boy pressed his face close to one of the round portholes, across which the raindrops were running, and by its light examined the contents of the package from Hatsue. It contained another charm from Yashiro Shrine, a snapshot of Hatsue, and a letter. The letter read:

“Every day from now on I’ll be going to Yashiro Shrine to pray for your safety. My heart belongs to you. Please take care of yourself and come back safe and sound. I’m enclosing my picture so I can go voyaging with you. It was taken at Cape Daio. About our voyage—Father hasn’t said a word to me, but I think he must have some special reason for putting both you and Yasuo on his ship. And somehow I think I can see a ray of hope for us. Please, please don’t give up hope; please keep on fighting.”

The letter encouraged the boy. Strength filled his arms and the feeling that life was worth living flooded through his entire body.

Yasuo was still asleep. By the light from the porthole Shinji studied Hatsue’s photograph. In it the girl was leaning against one of Cape Daio’s huge pines and a sea-breeze was blowing her skirts, whirling about inside her thin, white summer dress, caressing her bare skin. And his courage was still further revived by the thought that he too had once done just what the wind in the photograph was doing.

Reluctant to take his eyes off the picture, Shinji had propped it up on the edge of the rain-blurred porthole and had stared at it for a long time, when behind it there slowly moved into view the outline of Toshi Island to port.…

Once again the boy’s heart lost its peacefulness. But the strange way in which love can torture the heart with desire was no longer a novel thing for him.

It had stopped raining by the time they reached Toba. Dull silver rays of light shone down from between rifts in the clouds.

Among the many small fishing-boats in Toba’s harbor the one-hundred-and-eighty-five-ton
Utajima-maru
stood out conspicuously. The three jumped down onto its deck, which was sparkling in the sunshine after the rain. Raindrops were still running gleaming down the white-painted masts, and the imposing booms were folded down over the hatches.

The crew had not yet returned from shore leave. The captain led the two boys to their quarters, an eight-mat cabin next to the master’s quarters and directly over the kitchen and mess hall. Other than the lockers and a small central space covered with thin straw matting, there was nothing except two sets of two-tiered bunks on the right and, on the left, one set of bunks and a separate bunk for the chief engineer. Several photographs of movie actresses were stuck to the ceiling like charms.

Shinji and Yasuo were assigned to the first tier of bunks on the right. The chief engineer, the first and second mates, the bosun, the seamen, and the firemen all slept in this one small cabin, but as they alternated the watches, there were always bunks enough to go round at any one time.

After showing them the bridge, the master’s quarters, the holds, and the mess hall, the captain left them to rest in the crew’s cabin.

Left alone in the cabin, the two looked at each other. Yasuo felt downhearted and decided to make peace.

“Well, here we are at last, just the two of us to be friends. A lot of things happened on the island, but let’s forget about them and be good friends from now on.”

Shinji gave a grunt of agreement and smiled.

Toward evening the crew returned to the ship. Most of them were from Uta-jima and were known by sight to Shinji and Yasuo. Still smelling of liquor, they all teased the newcomers. Then the two of them were instructed in the daily routine and assigned their various duties.

The ship was to sail at nine in the morning. Shinji was given the task of taking the anchor-light off the mast at the first crack of dawn the next morning. The anchor-light
was very much like the night-shutters of a house ashore: turning it off meant that the ship was awake, just as opening the night-shutters means a house is awake.

Shinji scarcely closed his eyes all night and was up before the sun the next morning, taking down the anchor-light as things began to turn gray. The morning was wrapped in a misty rain, and the street lamps of Toba ran in two straight lines from the harbor to the railway station. The thick-throated whistle of a freight train sounded from the direction of the station.

The boy scrambled up the naked mast over the furled sails, used for auxiliary power. The wood was wet and cold, and the rocking motion of the faint waves that lapped the ship’s sides was transmitted directly to the mast. In the first rays of the morning sun, wet with mist, the anchor-light was a hazy, milk-white color. The boy reached up for the hook. As though it disliked being taken down, the anchor-light gave a big swing, the flame flickered inside the drenched glass, and a few drops of water fell into the boy’s upturned face.

Shinji wondered what port they would be in when he next took down this light.

The
Utajima-maru
, on charter to the Yamagawa Transport Company, was to carry lumber to Okinawa and return to Kobe in about six weeks. After sailing through the Kii Channel and calling at Kobe, the ship sailed westward through the Inland Sea and had its quarantine inspection at Moji. It then proceeded southward along the eastern coast of Kyushu and received its sailing clearance at the port of Nichinan in Miyazaki Prefecture, where there was a Customs office.

The ship then called at the harbor of Fukushima, at the
southern tip of Kyushu. There it took on a cargo of fourteen thousand cubic feet of lumber.

After leaving Fukushima the
Utajima-maru
became in fact a sea-going vessel and was handled as such. It was due to reach Okinawa in about two or two and a half days.…

When there was no work to be done with the cargo, or during their rest periods, the crew would loll about on the thin straw matting that covered the three-mat space in the center of their quarters and listen to a portable phonograph. There were only a few records, and most of them were so worn out that they produced only dingy music through the scratching of a rusty needle. Without exception they were all sentimental ballads concerning ports or sailors, fog or memories of women, the Southern Cross or liquor or sighs. The chief engineer was tone-deaf and never succeeded in his efforts to learn at least one tune during a voyage, always forgetting what little he had memorized before the next voyage. Whenever the ship would pitch or roll suddenly, the needle would go sliding across the record, leaving another scratch in its wake.

Often at night they would sit up late arguing ridiculous points. Such subjects as love and marriage, or whether the human body can take as large an injection of salt as of dextrose, were sufficient to keep them talking for hours. The person who maintained his point with the most stubbornness usually won in the end, but the reasoning of Yasuo, who had been president of the Young Men’s Association on the island, was so logical that it even won the respect of his elders. As for Shinji, he always sat silent, hugging his knees and smiling as he listened to the others’ opinions.

“There’s no doubt but what the boy’s a fool,” the chief engineer once told the captain.

It was a busy life aboard the ship. From the moment the newcomers got up there were always decks for them to clean or some other of their numerous odd jobs to be performed.

It gradually became abundantly clear to the crew that Yasuo was lazy. His attitude was that it was enough just to go through the motions of performing his duties. Shinji, however, covered up for him and even did part of Yasuo’s work, so this attitude of his did not become immediately apparent to his superiors.

But one morning the bosun, finding Yasuo loafing in the cabin after having stolen away from his deck-cleaning duties on the pretext of going to the head, lost his temper and berated him roundly.

Yasuo gave a most ill-considered reply:

“Oh well, anyway, when this voyage is over I’m going to become Uncle Teru’s son. Then this ship will belong to me.”

The bosun was in a rage, but he prudently held his tongue, telling himself it just might turn out the way Yasuo said. He never again scolded Yasuo to his face, but from his whispered words the other men soon learned what the insubordinate youngster had said, and the result was all to Yasuo’s disadvantage rather than otherwise.

Shinji was extremely busy, and the only chance he had to look at Hatsue’s picture was a brief moment each night before going to bed or when he was on watch. He never let anyone else so much as set eyes on the picture. One day when Yasuo was bragging about being adopted by Terukichi as Hatsue’s husband, Shinji took what was for him a most unusually devious means of revenge. He asked Yasuo if he had a photograph of Hatsue.

“Sure I have,” Yasuo replied immediately.

Shinji knew without a doubt that this was a lie and his heart was filled with glee.

A few moments later Yasuo spoke very nonchalantly.

“Do you have one too?” he asked.

“Have one what?”

“A picture of Hatsue.”

“No, I don’t have one.”

This was probably the first deliberate lie Shinji had ever told in his life.

The
Utajima-maru
arrived at Naha. After clearing quarantine, it entered the harbor and discharged its cargo. It was forced to lie at anchor two or three days, waiting and waiting for permission to enter the closed port of Unten, where it was to load scrap metal for the return voyage to Japan. Unten was on the northern tip of Okinawa, where the American forces had made their first landing in the war.

Since the crew were not allowed ashore, they spent their time staring from the deck out at the desolate, barren hills. The Americans had burned down every tree on the hills when they landed, fearing unexploded mines.

The Korean war had come to an end for the time being, but in the crew’s eyes the island still had a most unusual air. From morning to night there was the droning thunder of fighter planes practicing, and countless vehicles, gleaming in the sun of a tropical summer, were constantly moving back and forth along the broad, paved highway that bordered the harbor—sedans and trucks and various military vehicles. Beside the road, the prefabricated houses for families of American military personnel were aglint with the color of new cement, while the
patched tin roofs of the battered native houses were ugly blotches on the landscape.

The only person who went ashore—to get the agent for Yamagawa Transport to send a chandler—was the first mate.

At last the permit to enter Unten was received. The
Utajima-maru
entered the port and took on its cargo of scrap. They had just finished when the report came that Okinawa was in the path of a threatening typhoon. Hoping to escape the typhoon by sailing as quickly as possible, they cleared port early the next morning. Then all the ship had to do was lay its course straight for Japan.

That morning a light rain was falling. The waves were high and the winds southwesterly. The hills quickly vanished from view behind them, and the
Utajima-maru
sailed on by compass for six hours, with very poor visibility. The barometer fell steadily and the waves became still higher. The atmospheric pressure reached an abnormal low.

The captain decided to return to Unten. The rain was blown to mist by the wind, visibility had gone down to absolute zero, and the six-hour run back to port was extremely difficult.

Finally the hills of Unten were sighted. The bosun, who was quite familiar with these waters, stood on lookout in the bow. The harbor was enclosed by about two miles of coral reef, and the channel through the reef, not even marked with buoys, was most difficult to navigate.