To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (34 page)

The house seemed even smaller and shabbier than when we had looked up at it from below. There was a wooden dipper nailed above the door, a charm against evil with characters written on it forbidding whooping cough to enter the house of the Heikichi Yoshino family. At last we knew the name of the owner. It was to Goichi's credit that he had been alert enough to find it and read it aloud to us. We glanced inside the house, whose ceilings and walls were all in a black luster.

The only person there was an old woman. By way of apology she explained that since the weather was bad, the fisherman had assumed the party would not come, so he had gone down to the sea quite early. "I'll go to the shore and call him back," she said.

"Did he go out in a boat?" asked my uncle.

The woman pointed toward the water. "Looks like that's his boat there."

Though the mist had not yet cleared, the sky was brighter, and we had a comparatively clear view of the offing where the small boat was lying.

"That won't be easy to signal," said Takagi, looking through the binoculars he had with him.

"She's certainly easygoing about it. How on earth can she call it back from that distance?" Chiyoko said with a laugh, accepting the glasses Takagi handed her.

"It's easy," the old woman replied and hurriedly descended the stone steps in her straw sandals.

My uncle laughed. "How relaxed country people are!"

Goichi ran down after her. Absentmindedly, Momoyoko sat down on the dirty veranda. I glanced around the yard, which hardly deserved the name, since it was a mere dozen or so square yards in front of the house. In a corner was a fig tree with only a few green leaves moving in the fishy breeze. On its branches were some unripe figs that barely testified to its ability to bear fruit. An empty insect cage was suspended from a fork in one of the branches. Beneath it a few lean hens wildly scraped the ground with their claws, pecking at the earth with their hungry beaks. What looked like a coop made of wire was close by, and it amused me to see its ludicrous shape irregularly warped like a
btishukan
orange.

Just then my uncle said, "It certainly does stink!"

In a feeble voice Momoyoko said, "I don't want to go fishing any more. I'd like to go home."

Takagi, who had been looking through the binoculars toward the sea and talking incessantly with Chiyoko, turned around. "What could they be doing? I'll go see." He then turned toward the veranda to put down his raincoat and binoculars.

Chiyoko, who was beside him, held out her hands even before he began to move. "Give them here. I'll hold them for you." When she took these from him, she again looked at him in his short-sleeved shirt. "Now you're a real Bohemian," she said with a laugh.

Takagi only smiled helplessly as he began his descent to the beach.

I silently observed the well-developed muscles around his athletic shoulders, which moved vigorously with the swinging of his arms as he hurried down the stone steps.

About an hour later all of us were at the beach ready to sail. I was attracted to two tall flagpoles, each embedded deeply in the sand for some festival that had taken place or was about to occur. From somewhere along the sandy beach Goichi had picked up a withered branch washed ashore and was drawing a series of enormous faces and large characters on the broad stretch of sand.

"All right, get in," said the boatman, whose hair was clipped short, and the six of us clambered without order over the side of the boat. Somehow Chiyoko and I were pushed by the others into the prow, which was partitioned off from the rest of the boat, and sat down knee-to-knee. Before anyone else had a chance to, my uncle ensconced himself like a patriarch cross-legged in the wide middle section—what do you call it, the waist? He shouted for Takagi to sit beside him, probably intending to treat him as the guest of the day, so Takagi had to settle there. Momoyoko and Goichi went astern with the boatman into another partitioned part.

Takagi looked back to Momoyoko and told her to come and sit with him, since there was plenty of room. She thanked him but did not move from her seat.

From the first I didn't want to sit on that one thin matting with Chiyoko. I've already confessed my jealousy of Takagi, and I probably was as jealous that day as the day before. But not even a whiff of competitive spirit stirred in me along with the jealousy. Being a man, I may fall passionately in love with a woman someday, but I positively assert that if I had to get involved in a rivalry as intense as the love itself in order to win the object of love, I would sooner give her up by standing aloof with my hands in my pockets, no matter what pain or sacrifice I might have to endure. Others may criticize me as unmanly, cowardly, weak-willed, or whatever. But if the woman is one so wavering between her suitors that she can only be won through that kind of painful competition, I can't regard her as worth the bitter rivalry. It's far more satisfying to my conscience to have the manliness to allow my rival free play in the field of love and for me to gaze in loneliness at the scars of love than to have the pleasure of embracing by force a woman who would not willingly give me her heart.

"Isn't it better over there, Chiyo-chan? It's a lot more comfortable," I said.

"Why? Am I in your way here?" So saying, she showed no sign of moving.

I had no courage to explain that the reason for my suggestion was Takagi's presence there; my words would have sounded too direct or too obviously sarcastic. That a flash of joy spread through me on hearing her reply was good evidence for the inconsistency of human speech and human feeling, and this dealt me a hard blow, so unaware was I of my own weak character.

Perhaps it was my own imagination, but Takagi seemed more reserved than he had been the previous day. He was pretending indifference to the words Chiyoko and I had exchanged even though he was obviously hearing them. As the boat moved away from the beach, he was speaking with my uncle, saying something about how lucky we were to be having nicer weather, how much better it was not to be exposed to the hot sun, and how ideal the situation was for boating.

Suddenly my uncle asked in his loud voice, "Well, skipper, what're we going to catch?" None of us, my uncle included, had known what we were going to be fishing for.

In a coarse manner the fisherman said, "Octopus, that's what."

This extraordinary answer provided more amusement than surprise to Chiyoko and Momoyoko, who both came out with a laugh.

My uncle asked, "And where are these octopuses?"

And the fisherman responded, "Right around here somewhere."

He placed on the water an oval wooden bucket a little deeper than the kind used in public bathhouses but with a glass bottom and, thrusting his head into it, peered at the bottom of the sea. He called this unusual tool a mirror. He had a few others, which he passed around. Since Goichi and Momoyoko were seated nearest him, they were the first to try.

The mirrors went around from person to person. "This makes it all look clear. You can really see everything!" my uncle said, full of admiration. While he tends to underestimate most things, probably because of his wide knowledge of numerous aspects of society, he's apt to be easily overwhelmed when confronted by such natural phenomena.

I took the mirror Chiyoko handed me—I was the last to use it—and looked through it into the sea only to find a most ordinary scene little different from what I had imagined. There among a range of small, jagged rocks sprawled endless masses of dark green seaweed. Their slender stalks wavered back and forth quietly and endlessly to the rhythm of the undulating waves as though they were being played with by a warm wind.

"Any octopuses down there, Ichi-san?"

"Not a one."

I raised my head. Chiyoko poked her face back into the bucket. The fluttering brim of the straw hat she was wearing dipped into the water and raised tiny ripples whenever it went against the advance of the boat propelled by the fisherman. I looked at her dark hair and the white nape beneath it. I thought that her neck was even lovelier than her face.

"Are you finding any, Chiyo-chan?" I asked.

"No such luck. Not an octopus swimming anywhere."

"I've heard they're very difficult to see unless you're used to looking for them," Takagi explained.

With both her hands on the bucket against the water, Chiyoko twisted her body toward him even while she was hanging out the side of the boat. "Well, I guess that's why I can't see any." As she bent forward, she jerked the bucket, plunging it in as though playing with the water. "Chiyoko!" Momoyoko called out in warning from the opposite end of the boat.

Goichi was eagerly trying to thrust around for octopuses without knowing where any were. An odd tool is used for stabbing an octopus, a long and lean bamboo rod about a dozen feet in length with a kind of spearhead attached to one end. Our fisherman held the bucket in his mouth with his teeth, managing the rod with one hand even as the boat kept moving. As soon as he located one of the limp monsters, he deftly pierced it with the long bamboo harpoon.

A great many octopuses were thrown aboard single-handedly by the boatman, but all were nearly the same size, none of any surprising bulk. At first all of us were shouting at the novelty of each catch, but afterward, even my uncle, man of vigor that he is, seemed to tire of the sport and called out, "It's no fun just to keep catching octopuses this way!"

Takagi, smoking now, began gazing at the mass at the bottom of the boat. "Chiyo-chan, have you ever seen octopuses swimming? Come over and have a look. It's quite strange." Glancing at me he said, "And how about you, Sunaga-san? The octopuses are having a swim."

"Are they?" I replied. "That's nice." But I did not immediately rise from my seat.

"Well, let's see," said Chiyoko, moving toward Takagi and taking a seat beside him.

I asked her from my seat whether they were still swimming.

"Yes, it's quite interesting. Come and look."

Each octopus put its eight legs together and with its body elongated went straight ahead, pausing momentarily after each glide until it collided against a plank of the boat. Some of the octopuses ejected a black ink, just as squid do. I bent forward merely to glance at the sight and soon sat back down, but Chiyoko remained at Takagi's side.

"That's enough octopus," my uncle said to the boatman.

"Want to go back?" the man asked.

What looked like a few bamboo cages were floating in the distance, and my uncle, hoping to give some variety to the single kind of catch we had had so far on the trip, made the boatman row over to one of them. All of us stood up at once in the boat to look into the cage. There we found fish seven or eight inches long swimming in every direction within the narrow confines of their watery cage. Some of them had on their scales a blue sheen indistinguishable from the blue of the water, and these shone as though the tiny waves that the fish made as they rushed to and fro were sparkling transparently through their flesh.

"Try to scoop one up," Takagi said and had Chiyoko grab the handle of a large net. For the fun of it she took the net and tried moving it in the water, but didn't get anywhere. Takagi offered her his hand, and together they rummaged around with great difficulty inside the cage. But the effort fell far short of scooping up a fish, and soon Chiyoko returned the net to the boatman. With the same net he picked out as many fish as my uncle ordered him to.

Again we were on the beach, glad to have relieved the monotony of the catch of eerie-looking octopuses by having a variety of fish—grunts, sea bass, and black bream.