The Sound of Waves

by Yukio Mishima

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. …”

  9

  A MESSAGE CAME by express delivery from Hiroshi on his trip. It was written on a picture postcard showing Kyoto’s famous Shimizu 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 movie-house 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.

  Chiyoko’s version of how she had seen Shinji and Hatsue coming down together from the deserted mountain, clinging to each other, certainly did nothing to make the event less compromising; and her story was a staggering blow to Yasuo’s pride. He brooded about it all night. And the next night, when Shinji happened to see him, what he was actually doing was reading the roster displayed under the eaves of a house beside the steep street that ran through the center of the village.

  Uta-jima had a meager water supply, which reached its lowest point about the time of the old-calendar New Year, leading to endless quarrels over water rights. The village’s sole source of water was a narrow stream beside the cobbled street that tumbled in flights of steps down through the center of the village. During the wet season or after a heavy rain the stream would become a muddy torrent, on whose banks the village women would do their laundry, chattering together noisily. Here too the children would hold the launching ceremonies for their hand-carved warships. But during the dry season the stream would all but become a dried-up marsh, without strength enough to wash away even the slightest bit of rubbish.

  The stream was fed by a spring. Perhaps it was because the rains that fell on the peaks of the island all filtered down to this spring, but whatever the cause, this was the only such spring on the island. Hence the village government had long since been given the power of determining the order in which the villagers should draw their water, the order being rotated each week.

  Only the lighthouse filtered rain water and stored it in a tank; all the other houses on the island depended solely upon this spring, and each family in its turn had to put up with the inconvenience of being assigned the midnight hours for water drawing. But after a few weeks even a midnight turn would gradually move up the roster to the convenient hours of early morning. Drawing water was women’s work.

  So Yasuo was looking up at the water-drawing roster, posted where the most people passed. He found the name Miyata written precisely under the 2 A.M. column. This was Hatsue’s turn.

  Yasuo clicked his tongue. He wished it were still octopus season, as the boats did not put out quite so early in the morning then. During the squid season, which had now arrived, the boats had to reach the fishing grounds in the Irako Channel by the crack of dawn. So every household was up preparing breakfast by three o’clock at the latest, and impatient houses were sending up smoke from their cooking fires even earlier.

  Even so, this was preferable to next week, when Hatsue’s turn would come at three o’clock. … Yasuo swore to himself that he would have Hatsue before the fishing-boats put out the next morning.

  Standing looking at the roster, he had just made this firm resolve when he saw Shinji standing before the men’s entrance to the bathhouse. The sight of Shinji annoyed him so that he completely forgot his usual punctilious ways and turned his back to hurry home.

  Reaching home, Yasuo glanced out of the corner of his eye into the sitting-room, where his father and elder brother were still serving each other their evening saké and listening to a ballad singer on the radio, which was resounding throughout the house. Yasuo went straight on to his own room on the second floor, where he angrily puffed on a cigarette.

  Because of his experience and way of thinking, Yasuo saw the matter thus: As Shinji had seduced Hatsue, he had certainly been no virgin. All the time he had been coming to the meetings of the Young Men’s Association, sitting there innocently clasping his knees, smiling and listening attentively to the others’ talk, putting on his childish airs—all that time he’d been having women on the sly. The damn little fox!

  And yet, given the honesty of Shinji’s face, even Yasuo simply could not believe him capable of having won the girl by deceit. The inevitable conclusion then—and this was the most unbearable thought of all—was that Shinji had had his way with the girl fairly and squarely, with complete honesty.

  In bed that night Yasuo kept pinching his thighs to keep from going to sleep. But this was not really necessary: the animosity he felt toward Shinji and the jealousy he felt at Shinji’s having stolen a march on him were enough to keep him awake of themselves.

  Yasuo was the proud and always bragging owner of a watch with a luminous dial. Tonight he had left this on his wrist and had slipped into bed still wearing his jacket and trousers. From time to time he put the watch to his ear, looking often at its luminously glowing face. In Yasuo’s opinion the mere ownership of such a wonderful watch made him by rights a favorite with the women.

  At twenty minutes past one Yasuo stole out of the house. In the dead of night the sound of the waves could be plainly heard, and the moon was shining brightly. The village was silent.

  There were only four street lamps on the island—one at the jetty, two along the steep street through the center of the village, and one on the mountain beside the spring. Except for the ferryboat there were nothing but fishing-boats in the harbor, so there were no masthead lights to enliven the night there, and every last light in the houses had been turned off. Moreover, here in a fishing village where the roofs were made of tile or galvanized iron, there were none of those rows of thick, black roofs that seem so imposing at night in a farm village; there was none of the solemn weightiness of thatch to intimidate and hold back the night.

  Yasuo quickly mounted the sloping street to the right, his sneakers making not so much as a footfall. He passed through the playground of the elementary school, enclosed in rows of cherry trees, their blossoms half-open. This playground was a recent addition to the school, and the cherry trees had been transplanted from the mountains. One of the young trees had
been blown over by the storm; its trunk showed dead-black against a moonlit sand pile.

  Yasuo climbed the stone steps beside the stream until he reached a spot where he could hear the sound of the spring. In the light of the solitary street lamp he could see the outlines of the spring.

  Clear water flowed out from between moss-covered rocks, into a stone cistern, and then brimmed over one edge of the stone. The stone there was covered with glossy moss, and it seemed, not that water was flowing down over the moss, but that the moss had been thickly coated with some beautiful transparent enamel. From somewhere in the thicket around the spring an owl was hooting.

  Yasuo hid himself behind the lamp-post. There was a tiny flutter of wings taking flight. Yasuo leaned against a huge beech tree and waited, trying to outstare the luminous eyes of his watch.

  Soon it was two o’clock and Yasuo caught sight of Hatsue coming across the schoolyard, carrying a water bucket on either end of a wooden pole across her shoulders. Her outline was sharply etched in the moonlight.

  Although a woman’s body is ill-suited for midnight labor, on Uta-jima men and women alike, rich and poor, had to perform their own tasks. Robust Hatsue, hardened by the life of a diving woman, came up the stone steps without the slightest difficulty, swinging the empty pails to and fro and giving rather the merry appearance of actually enjoying her untimely work.

  At long last Hatsue had put her buckets down beside the spring. This was the moment when Yasuo had intended to jump out at her, but now he hesitated and decided to hold back until she had finished drawing her water. Preparing to leap out when the moment came, he reached up and caught hold of a high branch with his left hand. Then he stood perfectly still, imagining himself to be a stone statue. He watched the girl’s strong hands, red arid slightly frostbitten, as she filled the buckets, splashing the water about with lush sounds, and the sight quickened his imagination with delightfully carnal pictures of her healthy young body.

  All the time the luminous watch of which Yasuo was so proud, strapped above the hand with which he was holding onto the branch of the beech tree, was giving off its phosphorescent glow, faintly but distinctly ticking away the seconds. This aroused a swarm of hornets in the nest fastened to this same branch and greatly excited their curiosity.