The Decay Of The Angel (2 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: The Decay Of The Angel
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Three thirty in the afternoon. A single bitter orange represented being on the Bay of Suruga.
Hidden by a wave and appearing again, floating and sinking, like a ceaselessly blinking eye, the bright dot of orange floated slowly off toward the east through the ripples in near the shore.
Three thirty-five. Somberly, a black hull appeared from the west, from the direction of Nagoya.
The sun was behind clouds, like a smoked salmon.
Tōru Yasunaga looked away from the thirty-power telescope.
There was no sign yet of the cargo ship
Tenrō-maru
, due to make port at four.
He went back to his desk and absently scanned the Shimizu shipping notices.
Expected arrivals of nonscheduled ships, Saturday, May 2, 1970.
Tenrō-maru
, Japanese, 16:00. Taishō Shipping Company. Agent, Suzuichi. From Yokohama. Berth 4–5, Hinodé Pier.
2
 
 S
HIGEKUNI
H
ONDA
was seventy-six. He often traveled alone now that his wife Rié was dead. He chose easily accessible places that would not overtax him.
He had visited Nihondaira Heights below Fuji, and on his return had stopped by the Mio Grove and seen such treasures as the cloth, probably from Inner Asia, said to be a fragment of the angel’s robe; and as he started back toward Shizuoka he found himself wanting to be alone for a time on the shore. There were three runs every hour of the Kodama Express. It would be no great matter if he were to miss his train. The return trip to Tokyo took only a little over an hour.
Stopping the cab, he walked with the help of a cane the fifty yards or so to the Komagoé shore. He asked himself, as he gazed out to sea, whether this would be the Udo Beach identified in the fourteenth century by Ichijō Kanera as the precise spot of the angel’s descent. He thought too of the Kamakura coast of his youth. He turned back. The beach was quiet. Children were playing, and there were two or three anglers.
His attention on the sea, he had not noticed earlier, but now his eye caught, the rustic pink of a convolvulus below the breakwater. In the sand along the breakwater a great litter of garbage lay scoured by the sea winds. Empty Coca-Cola bottles, food cans, paint cans, nonperishable plastic bags, detergent boxes, bricks, bones.
The dregs of life on land cascaded down and came against infinity. The sea, infinity not met before. The dregs, like man, unable to meet their end save in the ugliest and filthiest of fashions.
Straggling pines along the embankment sent out blossoms like red starfish. To the left a radish patch put out forlorn little four-petaled white blossoms. Small pines lined the road. For the rest there was a solid expanse of plastic strawberry shelters. In vast numbers, under quonset huts of plastic, strawberries trailed their fruit over stone terraces among a profusion of leaves. Flies crawled along the saw-blade edges of the leaves. Quonset huts, as far as he could see, unpleasantly white, jammed in, one against another. Honda noticed—he had not before—a small tower-like structure among them.
Just in from the prefectural highway on which the cab had stopped, it was a two-story hut on a disproportionately high concrete platform. It was too tall for a watch shelter, too poor for an office building. Three sides were almost unbroken expanses of window.
Curious, he stepped into what appeared to be the yard. White window frames were heaped in great disorder on the sand. Fragments of glass faithfully caught the clouds. Looking up, he saw in a second-floor window what seemed to be shades for telescope lenses. Two huge iron pipes, rust red, protruded from the concrete platform and buried themselves in the earth. Uncertain of his footing, Honda made his way across the pipes and started up a flight of decaying stone steps.
At the foot of the iron stairs leading to the shelter was a shaded signboard.
In English:
TEIKOKU SIGNAL STATION
And in Japanese:
SHIMIZU OFFICE OF THE TEIKOKU SIGNAL
AND COMMUNICATIONS COMPANY
Notice of arrivals, departures, and moorings
Detection and prevention of accidents at sea
Land-to-sea communications
Marine weather information
Receiving and dispatching of ships
Various other matters related to shipping
The peeling white paint of the characters, here and there worn thin, with the name of the company in an antique hand, pleased Honda. The smell of the sea poured forth, quite without restraint, from the list of duties and functions.
He looked up the stairs. All was quiet.
Below and behind him, to the northwest, beyond the prefectural highway and the town, where pinwheels caught the light over carp streamers on new blue-tiled roofs, lay the complex of Shimizu Harbor, a crisscrossing of cranes on land and derricks on ships, white silos of factories and black hulls, iron bleached by the sea winds and thickly painted chimneys, one mass stopping at the shore, the other coming in from the several seas; there in the distance was the mechanism of the harbor laid bare, meeting at the appointed spot, glaring across the line. And the shining dismembered snake of the sea.
Fuji rose far above the hills. Only the summit was visible, as if a great sharp white boulder had been flung up through the uncertainty of the clouds.
Honda stopped to look.
3
 
 T
HE CONCRETE PLATFORM
was a water tank.
Water was pumped into it from a well and stored for irrigating strawberries. Teikoku Signal had seen the possibilities of the high platform and put up a wooden shelter. It was ideal for sighting ships from Nagoya to the west or Yokohama to the east.
Normally four signalmen worked eight-hour shifts. One of them had long been ill, however, and the other three took turns at twenty-four-hour duty. The first floor was the office of the superintendent, who from time to time came from the downtown office. The three signalmen had only a bare-floored room, some four yards square and surrounded on three sides by windows, on the second floor.
Attached to one window was a desk with a view on the three sides. Facing south was a thirty-power telescope, facing the harbor facilities to the east were fifteen-power binoculars, and at the southeast corner, for night signals, was a one-kilowatt beam. Two telephones on the desk at the southwest corner, a book shelf, maps, signal flags arranged on high shelves, and to the northwest a kitchen with a closet and a cot completed the furnishings. In front of the eastern window was a steel electric pylon, its porcelain insulators repeating the color of the clouds. The power line ran down to the beach, where it was caught by a second pylon. A turn to the northeast took it to a third, and so around the coast, a diminishing curve of silver towers, to Shimizu Harbor. The third pylon was, from this vantage point, a good marker. A ship came into the harbor, and one knew as it passed the third pylon that it was approaching Basin 3-G, which included the piers.
Even now identification was by naked eye. So long as vagaries in cargoes and currents ruled the movements of ships, they would continue to come in too soon or too late, and a certain nineteenth-century romanticism would not disappear from welcoming parties. There was a need for more precise observations to tell the customs and quarantine officials and the stevedores and pilots and laundries and provisioners when to put out their welcoming flags. There was a still greater need for a just arbiter to decide which was to take precedence when two ships came in together and competed for the last berth.
That was Tōru’s work.
A fairly large ship had appeared. The horizon was already obscure, and it took a quick and well-trained eye to determine a ship’s origins. Tōru went to the telescope.
In the clear atmosphere of midsummer or midwinter, there would be an instant when a ship would move rudely in over the high threshold of the horizon; but in the mists of early summer such an appearance was a gradual separation from the inchoate. The horizon was like a long, white, soggy pillow.
The size of the black cargo ship seemed right for the 4,780-ton
Tenrō-maru
, and the stern bridge also corresponded to what the registry had told Tōru. The wake was white and clean, as was the bridge. There were three yellow derricks. What was the round red mark on the black funnels? Tōru strained his eyes. He made out the character for
tai
, “large,” in a red circle. Taishō Shipping, no mistake about it. All the while the ship kept up a speed of twelve and a half knots, and threatened to outrun the telescope. It was like a fly crossing a round window screen.
He could still not make out the name. He was sure that there were three characters, and foreknowledge told him that the first was
ten
, “heaven.”
He returned to the desk and telephoned the agent.
“Hello. This is Teikoku Signal. You should be ready for the
Tenrō-maru.
It’s just coming past the pylon. The cargo?” Tōru conjured up an image of the waterline dividing the ship into red and black. “I’d think about half full. When will the stevedores be out? At five?”
That would give them an hour. The number of places that must be informed had grown.
Tōru moved busily back and forth between the desk and the telescope, and made some fifteen calls.
The pilot station. The tugboat
Shunyō-maru.
The pilot’s house. Various provisioners. The Port Service Patrol. Customs. The agency once more. The Harbor Management Section of the Harbor Control Office. The Office of Statistics for weighing the cargo. Shipping offices.
“The
Tenrō-maru
is coming in. Hinodé four-five. If you will, please.”
The
Tenrō-maru
was already at the third pylon. As the image moved past land it was distorted by heat shimmerings.
“Hello. The
Tenrō-maru
is coming into three-G.”
“Hello. This is Teikoku Signal. The
Tenrō-maru
is in three-G.”
“Hello. Customs? The police, please. The
Tenrō-maru
has come into three-G.”
“Hello. The
Tenrō-maru
is in three-G. Sixteen fifteen.”
“Hello. The
Tenrō-maru
came in five minutes ago.”
Ships not from abroad but from Nagoya or Yokohama were more frequent at the end of the month than at the beginning. Yokohama was one hundred fifteen nautical miles away, nine and a half hours at twelve knots. Tōru had no duties except to be on watch for an hour or so before a projected arrival. There were no other arrivals today save the
Nitchō-maru
at nine in the evening, from Keelung.
Tōru always felt a little dejected when he had finished a round of calls. The harbor would be suddenly alive. He would light a cigarette as he watched the stir from remote isolation.
Actually he should not be smoking. The superintendent had had a sharp word or two when he had first noticed a boy of sixteen with a cigarette in his mouth. Afterward he had said nothing. No doubt he had concluded that inattention was the more profitable policy.

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