The Sound of Waves

by Yukio Mishima

  The crew had not yet returned from shore leave. The captain led the two boys to their quarters, an eight-mat cabin next to the master’s quarters and directly over the kitchen and mess hall. Other than the lockers and a small central space covered with thin straw matting, there was nothing except two sets of two-tiered bunks on the right and, on the left, one set of bunks and a separate bunk for the chief engineer. Several photographs of movie actresses were stuck to the ceiling like charms.

  Shinji and Yasuo were assigned to the first tier of bunks on the right. The chief engineer, the first and second mates, the bosun, the seamen, and the firemen all slept in this one small cabin, but as they alternated the watches, there were always bunks enough to go round at any one time.

  After showing them the bridge, the master’s quarters, the holds, and the mess hall, the captain left them to rest in the crew’s cabin.

  Left alone in the cabin, the two looked at each other. Yasuo felt downhearted and decided to make peace.

  “Well, here we are at last, just the two of us to be friends. A lot of things happened on the island, but let’s forget about them and be good friends from now on.”

  Shinji gave a grunt of agreement and smiled.

  Toward evening the crew returned to the ship. Most of them were from Uta-jima and were known by sight to Shinji and Yasuo. Still smelling of liquor, they all teased the newcomers. Then the two of them were instructed in the daily routine and assigned their various duties.

  The ship was to sail at nine in the morning. Shinji was given the task of taking the anchor-light off the mast at the first crack of dawn the next morning. The anchor-light was very much like the night-shutters of a house ashore: turning it off meant that the ship was awake, just as opening the night-shutters means a house is awake.

  Shinji scarcely closed his eyes all night and was up before the sun the next morning, taking down the anchor-light as things began to turn gray. The morning was wrapped in a misty rain, and the street lamps of Toba ran in two straight lines from the harbor to the railway station. The thick-throated whistle of a freight train sounded from the direction of the station.

  The boy scrambled up the naked mast over the furled sails, used for auxiliary power. The wood was wet and cold, and the rocking motion of the faint waves that lapped the ship’s sides was transmitted directly to the mast. In the first rays of the morning sun, wet with mist, the anchor-light was a hazy, milk-white color. The boy reached up for the hook. As though it disliked being taken down, the anchor-light gave a big swing, the flame flickered inside the drenched glass, and a few drops of water fell into the boy’s upturned face.

  Shinji wondered what port they would be in when he next took down this light.

  The Utajima-maru, on charter to the Yamagawa Transport Company, was to carry lumber to Okinawa and return to Kobe in about six weeks. After sailing through the Kii Channel and calling at Kobe, the ship sailed westward through the Inland Sea and had its quarantine inspection at Moji. It then proceeded southward along the eastern coast of Kyushu and received its sailing clearance at the port of Nichinan in Yamazaki Prefecture, where there was a Customs office.

  The ship then called at the harbor of Fukushima, at the southern tip of Kyushu. There it took on a cargo of fourteen thousand cubic feet of lumber.

  After leaving Fukushima the Utajima-maru became in fact a sea-going vessel and was handled as such. It was due to reach Okinawa in about two or two and a half days. …

  When there was no work to be done with the cargo, or during their rest periods, the crew would loll about on the thin straw matting that covered the three-mat space in the center of their quarters and listen to a portable phonograph. There were only a few records, and most of them were so worn out that they produced only dingy music through the scratching of a rusty needle. Without exception they were all sentimental ballads concerning ports or sailors, fog or memories of women, the Southern Cross or liquor or sighs. The chief engineer was tone-deaf and never succeeded in his efforts to learn at least one tune during a voyage, always forgetting what little he had memorized before the next voyage. Whenever the ship would pitch or roll suddenly, the needle would go sliding across the record, leaving another scratch in its wake.

  Often at night they would sit up late arguing ridiculous points. Such subjects as love and marriage, or whether the human body can take as large an injection of salt as of dextrose, were sufficient to keep them talking for hours. The person who maintained his point with the most stubbornness usually won in the end, but the reasoning of Yasuo, who had been president of the Young Men’s Association on the island, was so logical that it even won the respect of his elders. As for Shinji, he always sat silent, hugging his knees and smiling as he listened to the others’ opinions.

  “There’s no doubt but what the boy’s a fool,” the chief engineer once told the captain.

  It was a busy life aboard the ship. From the moment the newcomers got up there were always decks for them to clean or some other of their numerous odd jobs to be performed.

  It gradually became abundantly clear to the crew that Yasuo was lazy. His attitude was that it was enough just to go through the motions of performing his duties. Shinji, however, covered up for him and even did part of Yasuo’s work, so this attitude of his did not become immediately apparent to his superiors.

  But one morning the bosun, finding Yasuo loafing in the cabin after having stolen away from his deck-cleaning duties on the pretext of going to the head, lost his temper and berated him roundly.

  Yasuo gave a most ill-considered reply:

  “Oh well, anyway, when this voyage is over I’m going to become Uncle Teru’s son. Then this ship will belong to me.”

  The bosun was in a rage, but he prudently held his tongue, telling himself it just might turn out the way Yasuo said. He never again scolded Yasuo to his face, but from his whispered words the other men soon learned what the insubordinate youngster had said, and the result was all to Yasuo’s disadvantage rather than otherwise.

  Shinji was extremely busy, and the only chance he had to look at Hatsue’s picture was a brief moment each night before going to bed or when he was on watch. He never let anyone else so much as set eyes on the picture. One day when Yasuo was bragging about being adopted by Terukichi as Hatsue’s husband, Shinji took what was for him a most unusually devious means of revenge. He asked Yasuo if he had a photograph of Hatsue.

  “Sure I have,” Yasuo replied immediately.

  Shinji knew without a doubt that this was a lie and his heart was filled with glee.

  A few moments later Yasuo spoke very nonchalantly.

  “Do you have one too?” he asked.

  “Have one what?”

  “A picture of Hatsue.”

  “No, I don’t have one.”

  This was probably the first deliberate lie Shinji had ever told in his life.

  The Utajima-maru arrived at Naha. After clearing quarantine, it entered the harbor and discharged its cargo. It was forced to lie at anchor two or three days, waiting and waiting for permission to enter the closed port of Unten, where it was to load scrap metal for the return voyage to Japan. Unten was on the northern tip of Okinawa, where the American forces had made their first landing in the war.

  Since the crew were not allowed ashore, they spent their time staring from the deck out at the desolate, barren hills. The Americans had burned down every tree on the hills when they landed, fearing unexploded mines.

  The Korean war had come to an end for the time being, but in the crew’s eyes the island still had a most unusual air. From morning to night there was the droning thunder of fighter planes practicing, and countless vehicles, gleaming in the sun of a tropical summer, were constantly moving back and forth along the broad, paved highway that bordered the harbor—sedans and trucks and various military vehicles. Beside the road, the prefabricated houses for families of American military personnel were aglint with the color of new cement, while the patched tin roofs of the battered native ho
uses were ugly blotches on the landscape.

  The only person who went ashore—to get the agent for Yamagawa Transport to send a chandler—was the first mate.

  At last the permit to enter Unten was received. The Utajima-maru entered the port and took on its cargo of scrap. They had just finished when the report came that Okinawa was in the path of a threatening typhoon. Hoping to escape the typhoon by sailing as quickly as possible, they cleared port early the next morning. Then all the ship had to do was lay its course straight for Japan.

  That morning a light rain was falling. The waves were high and the winds southwesterly. The hills quickly vanished from view behind them, and the Utajima-maru sailed on by compass for six hours, with very poor visibility. The barometer fell steadily and the waves became still higher. The atmospheric pressure reached an abnormal low.

  The captain decided to return to Unten. The rain was blown to mist by the wind, visibility had gone down to absolute zero, and the six-hour run back to port was extremely difficult.

  Finally the hills of Unten were sighted. The bosun, who was quite familiar with these waters, stood on lookout in the bow. The harbor was enclosed by about two miles of coral reef, and the channel through the reef, not even marked with buoys, was most difficult to navigate.

  “Stop! … Go! … Stop! … Go! …”

  Checking its headway countless times and then moving ahead very slowly, the ship passed through the channel between the coral reefs. It was then six o’clock in the evening.

  One bonito ship had taken shelter within the reefs. Fastening themselves together with several ropes, the two ships proceeded side by side into Unten’s harbor.

  The waves in the harbor were low, but the wind grew always stronger. Still side by side, the Utajima-maru and the bonito ship threw out four lines each—two hawsers and two cables—tying their bows to a buoy the size of a small room, and prepared to ride out the storm.

  The Utajima-maru had no radio equipment, depending solely upon its compass. So the radio operator on the bonito ship passed on to them every report he received concerning the typhoon’s development and course.

  When night came the bonito ship put out a deck watch of four men and the Utajima-maru put out a three-man watch. Their duty was to watch the hawsers and cables, as one could never be sure they might not snap at any moment.

  There was also the uneasy feeling that die buoy itself might not hold. But the danger of snapping lines was much the greater. Fighting the wind and the waves, the watch courted death many times to keep the ropes wet with salt water, fearing they might fray if they became too dry in the wind.

  By nine o’clock that night the two ships were beset by, a wind with a speed of fifty-six miles an hour.

  An hour before midnight Shinji and Yasuo and one of the young seamen took the watch. Their bodies were hurled against the wall as soon as they began crawling out onto the deck. The wind-whipped rain struck their cheeks as though it were needles.

  It was impossible to stand upright on the deck, which rose up like a wall before their very eyes. Every timber of the ship was creaking and rumbling. The waves in the harbor were not quite high enough to sweep the decks, but the spray of the waves, blown on the wind, had become a billowing mist, shrouding their vision. Crawling along the deck, the three finally reached the prow and clung to the bitts there. The two hawsers and two cables that secured the ship to the buoy were tied to these bitts.

  They could see the buoy dimly about twenty-five yards away in the night, just barely revealing its white-painted existence through the pervading darkness. And when, to the accompaniment of the creaking of the cables, which was like shrieks, a huge mass of wind would strike the ship and lift it high into the air, the buoy would fall far below them into the blackness and seem all the smaller.

  The three looked at each other’s faces as they clung to the bitts, but they did not speak. And the salt water striking their faces made it all but impossible for them even to keep their eyes open. The neighing of the wind and the roar of the sea, surprisingly enough, gave the infinite night that enveloped them a quality of frenzied serenity.

  Their job was to keep their eyes riveted on the lines tying the Utajima-maru to the buoy. Stretched taut, the hawsers and cables drew the only indomitably straight lines across a scene in which everything else was pitching and rolling with the gale’s madness. The way they stared fixedly at these rigidly drawn lines created in their hearts a feeling akin to confidence, born of their very concentration.

  There were times when it seemed as if the wind had suddenly stopped, but instead of reassuring them, such moments made the three young men shiver with terror. Instantly the huge mass of the wind would come crashing again, rattling the yardarms and thrusting the atmosphere aside with a tremendous roar.

  The three continued their silent watch over the lines. Even above the sound of the wind they could hear intermittently the shrill and piercing creaking of the lines.

  “Look!” Yasuo cried in a thin voice.

  One of the cables wrapped around the bitts was rasping ominously; it seemed to be slipping a little. The bitts were directly before their eyes, and they perceived an extremely slight but sinister alteration in the way the lines were wrapped about the bitts.

  At that instant a length of cable came recoiling out of the darkness, flashing like a whip, and hit the bitts with a snarling sound.

  They had dodged instantly, just in time to escape being slashed by the severed cable, which had force enough to have cut them to the bone. Like some living thing that takes long in dying, the cable writhed about in the darkness of the deck, making a shrill noise. Finally it came to rest in a semicircle.

  When they finally grasped the situation, the three young men turned pale. One of the four lines tying the ship to the buoy had given way. And no none could guarantee that the cable and two hawsers that remained might not give way also at any moment.

  “Let’s tell the captain,” Yasuo said, moving away from the bitts.

  Searching for handholds as he went creeping along, being thrown off his feet many times, Yasuo groped his way to the bridge and made his report to the captain.

  The burly captain remained calm, or at least gave the outward appearance of doing so.

  “I see. Well, then, let’s just use a lifeline. The typhoon passed its peak at one o’clock, so there’s no danger at all in using a lifeline now. Someone can just swim out to the buoy and tie the lifeline to it.”

  Leaving the second mate in charge of the bridge, the captain and the chief mate followed Yasuo back. Like mice tugging at a rice cake, they rolled and dragged a lifeline and a new marline along with them step by step from the bridge to the bow bitts.

  Shinji and the sailor looked up at them inquiringly.

  The captain stooped over them and shouted to the three youths in a loud voice:

  “Which one of you fellows is going to take this lifeline over there and tie it to that buoy?”

  The roaring of the wind covered the youths’ silence.

  “Don’t any of you have any guts?” the captain shouted again.

  Yasuo’s lips quivered. He pulled his neck down into his shoulders.

  Then Shinji shouted out in a cheerful voice, and as he did so the white flash of his teeth shone through the blackness to prove that he was smiling.

  “I’ll do it,” he shouted clearly.

  “Good! Go ahead!”

  Shinji rose to his feet. He was ashamed of himself for the way he had been squatting on the deck until now, practically cowering. The wind came attacking out of the black reaches of the night, striking him full in the body, but to Shinji, accustomed to rough weather in a small fishing-boat, the heaving deck on which his feet were firmly planted was nothing but a stretch of earth that was frankly a bit out of sorts.

  He stood listening.

  The typhoon was directly above the boy’s gallant head. It was as right for Shinji to be invited to a seat at this banquet of madness as to a quiet and natural afternoon
nap.

  Inside his raincoat the sweat was running so profusely that both his back and chest were drenched. He took the raincoat off and threw it aside. As he did so his barefoot figure, wearing a white T shirt, loomed through the blackness of the storm.

  Under the captain’s directions, the men tied one end of the lifeline to the bitts and the other end to the marline. Hindered by the wind, the operation progressed slowly.

  When the ropes were finally tied, the captain handed the free end of the marline to Shinji and yelled into his ear:

  “Tie this around your waist and swim for it! When you reach the buoy, haul the lifeline over and make it fast!”

  Shinji wrapped the marline twice around his waist above his belt. Then, standing in the bow, he stared down at the sea. Down beneath the spray, down beneath the whitecaps that beat themselves to pieces against the prow, there were the jet-black, invisible waves, twisting and coiling their bodies. They kept repeating their patternless movements, concealing their incoherent and perilous whims. No sooner would one seem about to come rising into sight than it would drop away to become a whirling, bottomless abyss again.

  At this point there flashed across Shinji’s mind the thought of Hatsue’s photograph in the inside pocket of his coat hanging in the crew’s quarters. But this idle thought was blown to bits upon the wind.

  He dived from the prow of the ship.

  The buoy was about twenty-five yards away. Despite his great physical strength, which he was confident would have to yield to none, and despite too his ability to swim around his home island five times without stopping, still it seemed impossible that these would suffice to get him across the immensity of those twenty-five yards.

  A terrible force was upon the boy’s arms; something like an invisible bludgeon belabored them as they tried to cut a way through the waves. In spite of himself, his body was tossed on the waves, and when he tried to bring his strength into opposition to the waves and grapple with them, his movements were as useless as though he were trying to run through grease.