The Sound of Waves (9 page)

“Now you’re not ashamed any more, are you?” He flung the question at her as though cross-examining a witness.

Without realizing the enormity of what she was saying, the girl gave an amazing explanation:

“Yes …”

“Why?”

“You—you still haven’t taken everything off.”

Now the sense of shame returned, and in the firelight the boy’s body flushed crimson. He started to speak—and choked on the words. Then, drawing so near the fire that his fingertips were all but burned, and staring at the girl’s chemise, which the flames set swaying with shadows, Shinji finally managed to speak:

“If—if you’ll take that away—I will too.”

Hatsue broke into a spontaneous smile. But neither she nor Shinji had the slightest idea what the meaning of her smile might be.

The white chemise in the girl’s hands had been half covering her body, from breast to thigh. Now she flung it away behind her.

The boy saw her, and then, standing just as he was, like some piece of heroic sculpture, never taking his eyes from the girl’s, he untied his loincloth.

At this moment the storm suddenly planted its feet wide and firmly outside the windows. All along, the
wind and rain had been raging madly around the ruins with the same force as now, but in this instant the boy and girl realized the certainty of the storm’s existence, realized that directly beneath the high windows the wide Pacific was shaking with everlasting frenzy.

The girl took a few steps backward.… There was no way out. The sooty concrete wall touched her back.

“Hatsue!” the boy cried.

“Jump across the fire to me. Come on! If you’ll jump across the fire to me …” The girl was breathing hard, but her voice came clearly, firmly.

The naked boy did not hesitate an instant. He sprang from tiptoe and his body, shining in the flames, came flying at full speed into the fire. In the next instant he was directly in front of the girl. His chest lightly touched her breasts.

“Firm softness—this is the firm softness that I imagined the other day under that red sweater,” he thought in a turmoil.

They were in each other’s arms. The girl was the first to sink limply to the floor, pulling the boy after her.

“Pine needles—they hurt,” the girl said.

The boy reached out for the white chemise and tried to pull it under the girl’s body.

She stopped him. Her arms were no longer embracing him. She drew her knees up, crushed the chemise into a ball in her hands, thrust it down below her waist, and exactly like a child who has just thrown cupped hands over an insect in the bushes, doggedly protected her body with it.

The words which Hatsue spoke next were weighted with virtue:

“It’s bad. It’s bad!… It’s bad for a girl to do that before she’s married.”

“You really think it’s so bad?” the crestfallen boy asked, without any conviction.

“It’s bad.” As the girl’s eyes were closed, she could speak without hesitation, in a tone of voice that seemed to be both reproving and placating. “It’s bad for
now
. Because I’ve decided it’s you I’m going to marry, and until I do, it’s really bad.”

Shinji had a sort of haphazard respect for moral things. And even more because he had never yet known a woman, he believed he had now penetrated to the moralistic core of woman’s being. He insisted no further.

The boy’s arms were still embracing the girl. They could hear each other’s naked throbbing. A long kiss tortured the unsatisfied boy, but then at a certain instant this pain was transformed into a strange elation.

From time to time the dying fire crackled a little. They heard this sound and the whistling of the storm as it swept past the high windows, all mixed with the beating of their hearts. To Shinji it seemed as though this unceasing feeling of intoxication, and the confused booming of the sea outside, and the noise of the storm among the treetops were all beating with nature’s violent rhythm. And as part of his emotion there was the feeling, forever and ever, of pure and holy happiness.

He moved his body away from hers. Then he spoke in a manly, composed tone of voice:

“Today on the beach I found a pretty shell and brought it for you.”

“Oh, thanks—let me see it.”

Getting up, Shinji went to where his clothes had fallen
and began putting them on. At the same time Hatsue softly pulled on her chemise and then put on the rest of her clothes.

After they were both fully dressed, the boy brought the shell to where the girl was sitting.

“My, it
is
pretty.” Delighted, the girl mirrored the flames in the smooth face of the shell. Then she held it up against her hair and said:

“It looks like coral, doesn’t it? Wonder if it wouldn’t even make a pretty hair ornament?”

Shinji sat down on the floor close beside the girl.

Now that they were dressed, they could kiss in comfort.…

When they started back, the storm still had not abated, so this time Shinji did not part from her above the lighthouse, did not take a different path out of deference to what the people in the lighthouse might think. Instead, together they followed the slightly easier path that led down past the rear of the lighthouse. Then, arm in arm, they descended the stone stairs leading from the lighthouse past the residence.

Chiyoko had come home, and by the next day was overcome with boredom. Not even Shinji came to see her. Finally a regular meeting of the etiquette class brought the village girls to the house.

There was an unfamiliar face among them. Chiyoko realized this must be the Hatsue of whom Yasuo had spoken, and she found Hatsue’s rustic features even more beautiful than the islanders said they were. This was an odd virtue of Chiyoko’s: although a woman with the slightest degree of self-confidence will never cease pointing
out another woman’s defects, Chiyoko was even more honest than a man in always recognizing anything beautiful about any woman except herself.

With nothing better to do, Chiyoko had begun studying her history of English literature. Knowing not a single one of their works, she memorized the names of a group of Victorian lady poets—Christina Georgina Rossetti, Adelaide Anne Procter, Jean Ingelow, Augusta Webster—exactly as though she were memorizing Buddhist scriptures. Rote memorization was Chiyoko’s forte; even the professor’s sneezes were recorded in her notes.

Her mother was constantly at her side, eager to gain new knowledge from her daughter. Going to the university had been Chiyoko’s idea in the first place, but it had been her mother’s enthusiastic support that had overcome her father’s reluctance.

Her thirst for knowledge whetted by a life of moving from lighthouse to lighthouse, from remote island to remote island, the mother always pictured her daughter’s life as an ideal dream. Never once did her eyes perceive her daughter’s little inner unhappinesses.

On the morning of the storm both mother and daughter slept late. The storm had been building up since the evening before, and they had kept vigil most of the night with the lighthouse-keeper, who took his responsibilities most seriously. Very much contrary to their usual ways, their midday meal was also their breakfast. And after the table had been cleared, the three of them passed the time quietly indoors, shut in by the storm.

Chiyoko began to long for Tokyo. She longed for the Tokyo where, even on such a stormy day, the automobiles went back and forth as usual, the elevators went up and down, and the streetcars bustled along. There in the
city almost all nature had been put into uniform, and the little power of nature that remained was an enemy. Here on the island, however, the islanders enthusiastically entered into an alliance with nature and gave it their full support.

Bored with studying, Chiyoko pressed her face against a windowpane and gazed out at the storm that kept her shut up in the house. The storm was a monotone of dullness. The roar of the waves came as persistently as the garrulity of a drunk man.

For some reason Chiyoko recalled the gossip about a classmate who had been seduced by the man she was in love with. The girl had loved the man for his gentleness and refinement, and had even said so openly. After that night, so the story went, she loved him for his violence and willfulness—but this she never breathed to anyone.…

At this moment Chiyoko caught sight of Shinji descending the storm-swept stairs—with Hatsue snuggled against him.

Chiyoko was convinced of the advantages of a face as ugly as she believed her own to be: once such a face hardened in its mold, it could hide emotions far more cleverly than could a beautiful one. What she regarded as ugly, however, was actually only the plaster-of-Paris mask of self-preoccupied virginity.

She turned away from the window. Beside the sunken hearth her mother was sewing and her father was silently smoking his New Life. Outdoors was the storm; indoors, domesticity. Nowhere was there anyone to heed Chiyoko’s unhappiness.

Chiyoko returned to her desk and opened the English book. The words had no meaning; there was nothing but
the lines of type running down the page. Between the lines the vision of birds wheeling high and low flickered in her eyes. They were sea gulls.

“When I returned to the island,” Chiyoko told herself, “and made that bet about a sea gull flying over Toba’s tower—
this
is what the sign meant.…”

A
MESSAGE CAME
by express delivery from Hiroshi on his trip. It was written on a picture postcard showing Kyoto’s famous Kiyomizu Temple and was impressed with a large, purple souvenir seal. If he had sent it by ordinary mail, he himself would probably have been back on the island before it arrived. Even before reading it, his mother became angry, saying that Hiroshi had been extravagant to pay all that extra postage, that children nowadays didn’t know the value of money.

Hiroshi’s closely written card was all about seeing his first motion picture, with not so much as a word about the famous scenic spots and historic places he was seeing:

“The first night in Kyoto they let us do as we pleased, so Sochan, Katchan, and I went straight to a big moviehouse in the neighborhood. It was really swell—just like a palace. But the seats seemed awful narrow and hard, and when we tried to sit on them it was just like perching on a chicken roost. Our bottoms hurt so that we couldn’t get comfortable at all
.

“After a few minutes the man behind us yelled: ‘Down in front! Down in front!’ We were already sitting down, so we thought this was funny. But then the man very kindly showed us what to do. He said they were folding seats, and that if we’d turn them down, they’d become chairs. We all scratched our heads, knowing we’d made a foolish mistake. And when we put them down, sure enough they were seats soft enough for the Emperor himself to sit on. I told myself that some day I’d like to have Mother sit on these seats too.”

As Shinji read the card aloud for his mother, that last sentence brought tears to her eyes. She put the card up on the god-shelf and made Shinji kneel down with her to pray that the storm two days before had not interfered with Hiroshi’s excursion and that nothing would happen to him before he came home the day after tomorrow.

After a minute, as though the thought had just occurred to her, she started heaping Shinji with abuse, going on about how terrible his reading and writing were and how much smarter Hiroshi was than he. What she called Hiroshi’s smartness was nothing more or less than his ability to make her shed happy tears.

She wasted no time in hurrying off to show the postcard at the homes of Hiroshi’s friends Sochan and Katchan. Later that evening, when she and Shinji went to the public bath, she met the postmaster’s wife, and she got down on her bare knees in the midst of the steam to
bow and thank her because the express delivery had been made in such good order.

Shinji soon finished his bathing and waited before the bathhouse entrance for his mother to come out of the women’s side. The carved and painted wood under the eaves of the bathhouse was faded and peeling where the steam came curling out. The night was warm, the sea calm.

Shinji noticed someone standing a few yards farther along the street, his back turned in Shinji’s direction, apparently looking up toward the eaves of one of the houses. The man stood with both hands in his pockets and was beating time on the flagstones with his wooden clogs. In the twilight Shinji could see that he was wearing a brown leather jacket. On Uta-jima it was not everyone who could afford a leather jacket, and Shinji was sure this was Yasuo.

Just as Shinji was about to call out to him, Yasuo happened to turn around. Shinji smiled. But Yasuo only stared back at him, the blank expression on his face never changing, and then turned away again.

Shinji did not particularly take this as a slight, but it did seem a bit odd. Just then his mother came out of the bathhouse, and the boy walked along home with her, silent as usual.

The day before, after the boats had returned from a day of fishing in the fine weather that followed the storm, Chiyoko had gone to see Yasuo. She said she had come to the village shopping with her mother and had decided to drop by, and explained her coming to Yasuo’s place alone
by saying her mother was visiting the home of the head of the Co-operative, which was near by.