The Sound of Waves (14 page)

Be that as it may, the story goes that long, long ago, in a golden ship, the prince drifted from a far land to this island, took a girl of the island to wife, and when he died was buried in an imperial tumulus. No accounts have been handed down concerning the prince’s life, nor are there recounted any of those tragic tales that are apt to grow up and adhere to such a legendary figure. Assuming the legend to be based on fact, this silence suggests that Prince Deki’s life on Uta-jima must have been so happy and uneventful that it left no room for the birth of tragic yarns.

Perhaps Prince Deki was a heavenly being who descended to a nameless land. Perhaps he lived out his earthly years without being recognized and, do what he would, will as he could, was never separated from happiness, nor from the blessings of Heaven. Perhaps this is
the reason why his remains were interred in a mound overlooking the beautiful Five League Beach and Hachijo Isle, leaving behind not a single story.…

But the boy knew only unhappiness as he wandered about the shrine until exhausted. Then he sat down absent-mindedly on the grass, hugged his knees, and gazed out at the moonlit sea. There was a halo around the moon, foretelling rain on the morrow.…

The next morning when Ryuji stopped by Hatsue’s house to pick up the daily letter, he found it sticking out a little from under one corner of the wooden lid on the water jar, covered with a metal basin to keep the rain from wetting it.

The rain continued during the entire day’s fishing, but Shinji managed to read the letter during the noon rest by protecting it with his raincoat.

Her handwriting was terribly difficult to read, and she explained that she was writing in her bed early in the morning, groping in the dark to avoid arousing her father’s suspicions by turning on the light. Usually she wrote her letters at odd moments during the day and “posted” them before the fishing-boats went out the next morning, but this morning, she wrote, she had something she wanted to tell him at once, so she had torn up the long letter she had written him yesterday and was writing this in its place.

Hatsue’s letter went on to say that she had had a lucky dream. In the dream a god had told her that Shinji was a reincarnation of Prince Deki. Then they had been happily married and had had a jewel-like child.

Shinji knew that Hatsue could not have known about his visit to Prince Deki’s tomb the night before. He was
so struck by this uncanny happening that he decided to write Hatsue at length when he got home that night and tell her this amazing proof of her dream’s deep meaning.

Now that Shinji was working to support the family it was no longer necessary for his mother to go diving when the water was still cold. So she had decided to wait until June to start diving. But she had always been a hard worker, and now, as the weather became warm, she became dissatisfied, with nothing to do but the housework. Whenever she found herself unoccupied she was apt to let herself become upset with all sorts of unnecessary worries.

Her son’s unhappiness was always on her mind. Shinji was now completely different from the person he had been three months before. He was as taciturn as ever, but the youthful gaiety that had lighted up his face even when he was silent was now extinguished.

One day she had finished her darning in the morning and was facing a boring afternoon. Idly she began to wonder if there was not something she could do to relieve her son’s misery. Theirs was not a sunny house, but over the roof of the next-door neighbor’s godown she could see the tranquil sky of late spring. Making up her mind, she left the house.

She went directly to the breakwater and stood there watching the waves as they dashed themselves to pieces. Like her son, she too went to take counsel with the sea whenever she had something to think about.

The breakwater was covered with the ropes of the octopus pots, spread there to dry. The beach too, now almost empty of boats, was spread with drying nets.
The mother caught sight of a lone butterfly that came flying capriciously from the outspread nets toward the breakwater. It was a large and beautiful black swallowtail. Perhaps the butterfly had come searching for some new and different flower here among the fishing tackle and sand and concrete. The fishermen’s houses had no gardens worthy of the name, but only ragged flowerbeds along the narrow, stone-fenced paths, and the butterfly had apparently come to the beach, disgusted with their niggling blossoms.

Beyond the breakwater the waves were always churning up the bottom of the sea, and the water was a muddy yellow-green. And as the waves rolled in, the muddiness was chopped into patterns of tossing bamboo leaves. Presently the mother saw the butterfly take off from the breakwater and fly close to the surface of the muddy water. There it seemed to rest its wings a moment, and then it soared high into the air again.

“What a strange butterfly,” she told herself. “It’s imitating a sea gull.” And at the thought her attention became riveted upon the butterfly.

Soaring high, the butterfly was trying to fly away from the island, directly into the sea-breeze. Mild though it seemed, the breeze tore at the butterfly’s tender wings. In spite of it, however, the butterfly, high in the air, finally got clear of the island. The mother stared until it was only a black speck against the dazzling sky.

For a long time the butterfly continued to flutter there in one corner of her field of vision, and then, flying low and hesitantly over the surface of the water, it returned to the breakwater, bewitched by the wideness and glitter of the sea, doubtless driven to despair by the way the next island looked so close and was yet so far.
The butterfly added what appeared to be the shadow of a large knot to the shadow made by one of the drying ropes, and rested its wings.

The mother was not one to put faith in signs and superstitions, and yet the butterfly’s futile labor cast a shadow over her heart.

“Foolish butterfly! And if it wants to get away, all it has to do is perch on the ferryboat and go in style.”

And yet she herself, having no business in the world outside the island, had not been on the ferryboat now for many, many years.

At this moment for some reason a reckless courage was born within her heart. With firm steps she strode quickly from the breakwater. A diving woman greeted her along the way and was surprised when Shinji’s mother walked steadily on as though deep in thought, not even returning the greeting.

Terukichi Miyata was one of the richest men in the village. Of course, about all that could be said of his house was that it was a bit newer than the other village houses. Otherwise it could not even be said that its tile roof towered in particular above the houses around it. The house had neither an outer gate nor a stone wall. Nor was it different from the other houses in its arrangement: the hole for ladling out night soil was to the left of the main door, and the kitchen window to the right, both insisting majestically upon their equal rank, precisely in the same way that the Ministers of the Left and the Right occupy their seats of honor at either side of a Doll Festival arrangement. And yet, being built on a slope, the house did derive a certain air of stability from a stoutly constructed concrete basement on the
lower level, where the slope dropped away; this was used as a storeroom and had windows opening directly on the narrow road.

Beside the kitchen door there was a water jar large enough for a man to crawl into. Its wooden lid, under which Hatsue left her letter each morning, gave the outward appearance of protecting the water from dust and dirt, but when summer came it could not keep out the mosquitoes and other flying insects whose dead bodies would suddenly be found floating on the water in the jar.

Shinji’s mother hesitated a moment as she was about to enter the house. Just the fact that she had come calling at the Miyata house, where she was not on intimate terms, would be enough to set the villagers’ tongues to wagging. She looked about; there was not a human form to be seen. There was nothing but a few chickens scratching in the alley and the color of the sea below, glimpsed through the scanty azalea blossoms of the next house.

The mother put her hand to her hair and, finding it still disarranged from the sea-breeze, took from her bosom a small, red celluloid comb with several teeth missing and quickly combed her hair. She was wearing her everyday work-clothes. Beneath her face, which was bare of any make-up, there was the beginning of her sunburned chest; then came her kimono-like jacket and bloomer-like work-pants, both with many patches, and the wooden clogs on her bare feet.

Her toes had been toughened by the repeated cuts and bruises they had received from the diving women’s customary way of always kicking off against the floor of the sea when ready to surface, and the nails were thick and badly twisted; her feet could in no way have been called
beautiful, but when planted on the earth they were firm and unshakable.

She opened the door and entered the central work-room. Several pairs of clogs had been taken off and dropped pellmell on the earthen floor, one lying upside down. A pair with red thongs seemed to have just returned from a trip to the sea; wet sand in the shape of footprints was still clinging to the surface of each clog.

The house was filled with silence, and the odor of the toilet floated on the air. The rooms opening off the earthen floor were dark, but sunlight was streaming in through a window somewhere at the back of the house and had spread a bright patch, like a saffron-colored wrapping cloth, in the middle of the floor of one of the farther rooms.

“Good day,” the mother called.

She waited awhile. There was no answer. She called again.

Hatsue came down the ladder-like steps at the side of the earth-floored room.

“Why, Auntie!” she said. She was wearing quiet-colored work-pants, and her hair was tied with a yellow ribbon.

“That’s a pretty ribbon,” the mother complimented her. As she spoke she made a thorough inspection of this girl for whom her son was so lovesick.

It may have been her imagination, but Hatsue’s face seemed a little haggard, her complexion a little pale. And because of this her black eyes, clear and shining, seemed all the more prominent.

Becoming aware of the other’s scrutiny, Hatsue blushed.

The mother was firm in her courage. She would meet Terukichi, champion her son’s innocence, lay bare her
heart, and get the two married. The only solution to the situation was for the two parents to talk it over face to face.…

“Is your father at home?”

“Yes, he is.”

“I’ve something to talk over with him. Will you please tell him so?”

“Just a minute.”

Hatsue climbed the stairs, an uneasy expression on her face.

The mother took a seat on the step leading up from the earthen room into the house proper.…

She waited a long time, wishing she had brought cigarettes with her. And as she waited her courage drooped. She began to realize what folly her imagination had led her into.

The stairs creaked softly as Hatsue started down. But she did not come all the way. She called from mid-stairs, seeming to bend her body slightly. The stairs were dark and her face could not be seen clearly as she looked down.

“Uh … Father says he won’t see you.…”

“He won’t see me?”

“That’s right, but …”

With this reply the mother’s courage was utterly crushed, and her feeling of humiliation spurred her to a fit of passion. In a flash she recalled her long life of sweat and toil, all the hardships she had faced as a widow. Then, in a tone of voice that sounded as though she were spitting in someone’s face—but not until she was already half out the front door—she bawled out:

“All right then! So you say you don’t want to see a poor widow. You mean you don’t want me to cross your threshold ever again. Well, let me tell you something—and
you tell that father of yours—hear! Tell him I said it first—that never in my life will I ever cross his damned threshold again!”

The mother could not bring herself to tell her son about this fiasco of hers. Looking for a scapegoat, she turned her spite against Hatsue and said such bad things about her that, instead of having helped her son, she had a quarrel with him.

Mother and son did not speak to each other for one whole day, but then the next day they made up. Thereupon the mother, suddenly overcome with the desire for her son’s sympathy, told him all about her abortive call on Terukichi. As for Shinji, he had already learned of it from one of Hatsue’s letters.

In her confession the mother omitted the final scene, in which she had spewed forth those outrageous parting words of hers, and Hatsue’s letter also, out of consideration for Shinji’s feelings, had made no mention of this. So for Shinji there was nothing but the smarting thought of how his mother had had to eat the humiliation of being turned away from Terukichi’s door. And the soft-hearted boy told himself that, even if he could not agree with the bad things his mother said about Hatsue, still he could not blame her for saying them. Until now he had never tried to hide his love for Hatsue from his mother, but he made up his mind that henceforth he must never confide in anyone except the master and Ryuji. It was out of devotion for his mother that he made this decision.

Thus it came about that, because she had tried to do a good deed and had failed, the mother was lonelier than ever.

•    •    •

It was fortunate that there was not a single day of rest from fishing, for if there had been, it would have served only to make him bemoan the tedium of a day in which he could not meet Hatsue. Thus the month of May came, and their meetings were still prohibited. Then one day Ryuji brought a letter which made Shinji wild with joy:

“… Tomorrow night, for a wonder, Father is having visitors. They’re some prefectural officials from Tsu and will spend the night. Whenever Father has guests he always drinks a lot and goes to bed early. So I think it’ll be safe for me to slip out of the house about eleven o’clock. Please wait for me in front of Yashiro Shrine.…”

When Shinji returned from fishing that day he changed into a new shirt. His mother, given no explanation, sat looking up at him nervously. She felt as though she were once more looking at her son on that day of the storm.