by Ryu Murakami
Kiku noticed two beams of bright light running along the road; the headlights swept over the warehouses, bringing the gray walls into focus for a moment and deepening the shadows on the seawall before disappearing again. He caught just a glimpse of a red Landrover as it sped past, sending a crimson ripple through the damp gray harbor night. Anemone! he told himself, thinking of her warm, slippery, and delicately tapering tongue somewhere nearby.
The trainees were assigned to simple bunks that had been rigged, for the purposes of the voyage, in the ship’s hold. The hold, barely four meters square, was crammed with five tiers of these bunks in three rows, leaving the occupants no room even to roll over in bed. The rest of the crew slept above deck, with the two guards standing alternate watches over the hatch to the hold. This night, however, almost no one was asleep below, thanks to the heat and the excitement of seeing their family for the first time in a while. The hatch had been left open, but what little breeze there was had no chance of reaching them. The prisoners lay as they were, underwear and bedding soaked through, with the breath from fifteen pairs of lungs adding to the humidity minute by minute. Somewhere in the hold, a muffled weeping could be heard. Kiku, third bunk, middle row, felt Yamane, who was next to him, tap him on the shoulder. He was pointing down at Nakakura, bottom bunk, right side. Nakakura’s face was buried in his little plastic pillow, and he, apparently, was the one crying.
“His grandma died,” Yamane whispered. “He was real close to her; he had some kind of fight with his mother just now. Poor guy.” Kiku, however, cut him short, claiming that Nakakura’s troubles didn’t interest him and that he was sleepy.
“It may seem like it’s too hot to sleep, but if we don’t get some shut-eye, tomorrow’s going to be hell,” he said, eliciting a nod from Yamane. Nakakura went on crying for quite a while.
Shichigahama was the end of the line for the Yuyo Maru. From here they would turn back toward their home port, so if there was going to be an escape, this was his best chance. According to the plan, Anemone would have cars hidden in three separate spots between here and Tokyo. All he had to do now was wait until everyone was asleep. Soon he could hear deep, regular breathing all around him in the dark. Then, just when he was about to get up, he saw Nakakura dart furtively from his bunk. As he went by, Kiku reached out and clapped his hand on his shoulder.
“Where are you going?” he whispered.
“To take a piss,” Nakakura said, but when Kiku let him go he bypassed the head and shot up the stairs that led to the deck. Beginning to feel nervous, Kiku shook Yamane awake.
“Yamane! Nakakura’s making a break; we’ve got to stop him.” As quietly as he could, he hopped down from his bunk and made for the hatch. With only his head poking through, he could see Nakakura, crouching in the shadow of the bridge, watching the guard on the seawall chatting with the cop from the policebox in the street beyond. They were fishing as they talked to help pass the time. Now and then the guard would glance in the direction of the ship. As Kiku watched, Yamane stuck his head up beside him.
“Nakakura, don’t do it,” he hissed. Merely being discovered on deck would be treated as an attempted escape, meaning, at the very least, that he would automatically lose the right to sit for his seamanship test. Even at a distance, they could see his back was heaving. There was clearly no way to climb up the seawall without attracting the guard’s attention, and the only other option—slipping over the side into the water—would involve hanging from the rail on the port side, which the captain might notice if it made them roll a bit. Just then Kiku heard a car engine race. Shit! he thought. He knew Anemone had been watching from a building somewhere nearby, and as soon as she saw Kiku come up on deck she was supposed to create some sort of diversion. She must have mistaken Nakakura for him. The Landrover pulled up on the far side of the seawall, and he could hear her voice.
“Excuse me! There’s some kind of fight going on at the seaman’s club,” she said, and soon Kiku could hear two sets of feet hurry off. While he was debating what to do, Anemone came running back.
“The officer says he’d like you to give him a hand,” he heard her tell the guard, knowing that she would do her best to drag him off to the phony fight without giving him time to wake the other guard on board. So he should probably get a move on and just take Nakakura along with him, but then again…
Anemone’s footsteps, still running, were joined by the sound of the guard jumping down into the road. Kiku made up his mind: to hell with Nakakura, if he didn’t go now there might not be another chance. But just as he was about to sneak out on deck, Nakakura leapt up and—with an “Aaaaaaaaiiii!”—dived over the rail into the water. Kiku ducked his head back down as lights in the wheelhouse came on. A moment later, the captain and the supervisor burst through the door, and the guard reappeared on the wall. Nakakura, making a hell of a racket, was frantically kicking the water.
“That’s fucked it,” Kiku muttered, coming up on deck. A searchlight had come on, and the supervisor was pointing it over the rail at Nakakura. By this time Yamane and Hayashi had also emerged from the hatch, but, seeing them standing around, the guard came running up, nightstick waving, and told them to get down below. As he was heading back to the hatch, Kiku saw Anemone’s pale face appear above the sea wall. Realizing that Kiku wasn’t the guy in the water, she checked the deck, just in time to see him wave her off before he disappeared down the ladder. She lowered herself back onto the road and started the engine, and as the guard clapped the hatch shut over Kiku’s head, he heard the Landrover roar away, with the captain’s voice bellowing in the background: “Nakakura! Grab the fucking hook!”
The ship was four hours late leaving port the next day due to the inquiry into Nakakura’s little adventure and the obligatory report for the detention center. In the end, they decided to postpone a ruling on his punishment until they were back in Hakodate, though in the meantime he was to be confined to the hold.
“You know, I wasn’t really planning to escape,” he told Kiku when he brought him his dinner. He had always loved his grandmother, he explained, and the whole thing had started yesterday when his mother, a former nurse with dyed hair and body odor whom he hated and who had always been mean to Granny, had told him, with a disgusting grin on her face, that the old woman had been killed in a traffic accident. With the insurance and a little out-of-court settlement, she and her boyfriend had been able to go to Hawaii, she’d said, laughing. He wasn’t going to escape last night; he was just going to kill his mother and come straight back to the ship. Kiku had to restrain the urge to club him over the head as he told his story, staring at his plate. Thanks to you, asshole, there’s no way I can escape now, he thought. From here on in, they’ll watch us like hawks.
The Yuyo Maru was heading home under a full head of steam, partly to make up for lost time and partly because the typhoon that was supposed to die out south of Okinawa had changed course. The ship’s radio continuously monitored the weather forecast as they made for the next scheduled port, which Captain Eda seemed determined to reach despite their late start. Given the sort of crew they had on board, he knew it would be difficult to find anchorage and shelter anywhere else.
It hadn’t yet started to rain, and the heavy dome of clouds made it all the hotter. Hanging low over the ship, the sky looked like a huge metal lid, dull with rust and decaying plankton, from which no reflection could escape. The first sign of the storm was the wind that seemed to duck through the narrow gap between sea and cloud and blow over them, churning the waves white. Heated by the swollen clouds, the wind felt warm on their faces. After the first few gusts, it grew in strength until it whipped the flags about, threatening to shred them, and plucked up the trainees’ uniforms drying on the deck and tossed them over the stern. But when it died down for a moment, the men could feel the first signs of seasickness, a sense that the warm, clammy tingling on their skin was sinking into their bodies.
With the wind came swells, and for the first time on the voyage
the captain took the wheel himself. As he steered the ship into the waves, he pointed behind him: a leaden wall was moving fast toward them. Then the squall overtook them, and the ship lurched violently. The wind lashed the waves into a frenzy, leaving a trail of foam behind.
At last it started to rain, and in no time at all the deck was awash. The rain seemed to fall sideways, blowing up under the crew’s rain gear, soaking the clothes underneath, and flailing at what felt like bare skin. Each time the ship bobbed up on a big wave, Kiku felt a numbing at the base of his neck. The captain ordered the deck anchor readied, and the first mate told the trainees to get below. In the hold, they found Nakakura rolling around moaning on the floor, clutching his hands to his chest. The smell of vomit hit them as soon as they set foot inside. The order was to get in their bunks and secure themselves, but the pitching of the ship made it impossible even to climb up. As they lurched about, someone slipped in Nakakura’s puke and fell, while hot, heavy air cascaded down the hatch. Kiku held tight to the bed frame and concentrated on working out the numbness in his neck.
The breath of fifteen trainees crammed into the hold soon mixed with the stink already there to form a gas that seemed to cling to their skin, sapping all feeling from their bodies. Before long, the numbness at the base of Kiku’s neck had crawled up over his face and from there invaded his whole head, leaving him without any sensation from the neck up or anywhere on the surface of his body. Only his muscles and his insides seemed to be working. One after another, the trainees were being thrown to the floor, clutching at the sheets they’d peeled from the bunks and stuffing them in their mouths. Kiku managed to hold on, but he had the feeling that his head had become a magnet, drawing the other parts of him toward it. Something seemed to be stuck in his throat, and if he opened his lips the least bit, sour spittle dribbled down his chin. He found himself staring as hard as he could at the ceiling, afraid his stomach would pop into his mouth if he so much as glanced down. A bare light bulb was swinging in violent arcs directly overhead, leaving a deep orange afterimage in its wake. One strange orange curve piled up on the next until they had traced a star, and the star then twirled above Kiku until it gradually faded, to be replaced by another. He was aware that someone was retching at his feet; the floor sucked at the soles of his shoes. And when the man grabbed his ankle and let fly, the colored patterns on his retina ran together like bright vomit, making him wish that he could sever all connection with his head—cut it off and leave the rest of him in peace.
Just then, he realized someone was calling him. A voice from the hatch was yelling names.
“Kuwayama! Yamane! Hayashi! Get up to the wheelhouse!”
Keeping a firm grip on the bunks, Kiku climbed over the backs of his fallen comrades and made his way to the hatch. Other than Kiku, only Hayashi, Yamane, and two of the engineering trainees were still on their feet. When they had crawled across the deck to reach the wheelhouse, they found the first mate unconscious, with a gash on his head.
“Ah, you made it,” said the captain, ordering one of them to watch the radar while the others used the loran to check their position. Wave after wave rose up in front of the ship, and as each reached its highest point, the wind would shred the crest into strands of glass and blow them off to leeward. The fine spray from this made it impossible to tell whether the drops hitting the windows of the wheelhouse were rain or seawater. Still, the trainees who’d made it outside were sure they were better off here, wind, waves, and all, than down in the filthy hold. The feel of the storm on their faces had even relieved their seasickness a little.
“What a bitch,” the captain muttered. The ship seemed to be making almost no headway, it being all he could do to avoid being broadsided by incoming waves. The radio reported that a small-craft warning had been issued urging ships to seek shelter at the nearest port. The captain ordered Hayashi to find the closest harbor.
“Ishinomaki!” Hayashi answered after a moment. The radio officer tried to raise the coast guard station, but their frequencies were apparently overloaded since there was no response. Next he tried the fishing co-op in Ishinomaki, asking for permission to make an emergency call and for a guarantee of anchorage. The co-op reported that fishing boats were fast filling up all their space, and they should get a move on if they wanted one of the remaining berths.
The sea was churned snow-white, and the foam from the waves skittered across the surface ahead of the wind. Yamane shouted that there was a blip on the radar that seemed to be dead in the water, just as an S.O.S. began coming in on the radio. An eight-ton fishing boat was sinking; present location, 142°18’ east by 38°58’ north.
“They need help,” said the radio officer, “and they’re just 0.8 nautical miles to the northeast.” The captain, however, ignored the report, paying no attention to the shocked looks they all gave him.
“We’ll maintain this course,” he announced. “The storm’s picking up and we’ve got no time to lose on a rescue. They want us in Ishinomaki by 1905 hours. Anyway, the coast guard will be out after them; get on the radio and let them know about this, and if they’re still not answering, ask the fishing co-op to contact them.”
“Let’s go help them,” Yamane blurted out, but even this failed to get a rise out of him. A minute later word came back from Ishinomaki that all available coast guard boats were already out on rescue missions.
“Captain, sir,” Yamane spoke up again. “It seems to me we’ve got to go save that ship,” he said, adding a crisp bow, only to be told to shut the fuck up.
“Three minutes more on this course and we’ll be at our nearest approach to the vessel,” said Hayashi, looking up from the charts.
“They’ve stopped transmitting the S.O.S.,” the radio officer shouted. At this point, three more trainees joined them in the wheelhouse. It turned out they were all fishermen, and when they heard the situation they also begged the captain to do something.
“Now listen up, you bastards,” Captain Eda howled. “You’re prisoners, or have you forgotten? And you’ve got no business chasing around saving people.”
“But we’re fishermen first, sir. And there’s no way a little boat like that is going to make it in this storm.”
“And just how the hell do you think we’d go about it? The mate’s out cold, and I’ve got to steer. Who’s going to do the rescuing?”
“We will,” said Yamane, feeling that the captain was beginning to relent.
“There they are!” Hayashi cried, as a plume of orange smoke became visible off the bow. The captain called Yamane over and began shouting in his ear. Yamane nodded several times, then turned to ask Hayashi to fetch some metal cable they had stored below.
“And while you’re at it, round up five or six guys who look like they can still stand up,” he added as Hayashi went off in search of the cable. When he came back, the first thing they did was tie one end of the safety line around their waists and the other to the bridge, then Kiku and Hayashi split up, one going to the bow and the other to the stern. Hayashi was able to hold on to the rail and keep his feet, but Kiku was almost instantly tossed up by the wind and dropped onto the deck, only managing to cover the distance by crawling along hand over hand. As he went, he ran out the cable, securing it first to the windlass and then the mooring winch. When the lines were in place, the rest of the rescuers followed them out, forward and aft, in four pairs, each man being belayed to the fixed line. Kiku, armed with a boat hook, was lashed together with Nakakura who seemed to have recovered somewhat from his seasickness. When the fishing boat was at last in sight, they could see that it had capsized and the crew were clinging to a red buoy, bobbing up on one wave and then plunging out of sight before the next. As the Yuyo Maru approached, hands started waving all over the buoy. Once the ship was in position, Kiku tried to use the boat hook to catch onto their life preservers and drag the men to the ladder hung over the stern. He reached the end out toward a young man who was shouting something, teeth bared, but just as he was about to grab it
, a huge wave engulfed the ship. Kiku and Nakakura managed to ride it out clinging to the rail, though for a moment they thought they were done for, but the man in the water was lifted bodily on the crest of the wave and slammed down head first on the deck. Kiku was able to snag his collar with the hook and haul him over, bleeding and unconscious. The man was a foreigner.
“Pirate fishermen,” Nakakura mumbled as he got a good look at the sailor’s face. He was, it appeared, from somewhere in Southeast Asia. When he was close enough, Nakakura wrapped his arms around the man; the hard lump in the hip pocket of his camouflage pants turned out to be a gun.
The only lights to be seen were the signal buoys marking the entrance to the harbor at Ishinomaki and the revolving beacon of an unmanned lighthouse further out on the cape. There had been two searchlights on the seawall inside, but the typhoon had already toppled them, shattering the lenses; the shards of glass had clung to the concrete for a time before being washed up by the enormous breakers and swept into the black sky by the wind. The rest of the town appeared to be blacked out.
As the Yuyo Maru was being made fast to the seawall, four policemen in heavy blue raincoats came out to meet them, followed by the men from the fishing co-op who formed a circle some distance behind them. The prison supervisor went ashore to discuss accommodation for the trainees and spent a long time huddled with the cops. Apparently, the phone lines were down in town and they were keeping in touch by walkie-talkie. To make things worse, the co-op’s meeting hall was already full of men from fishing boats sheltering from the storm, and the other likely place—an elementary school—had been ruled out by the principal, who didn’t want a bunch of criminals staying there. In the end, the only possibility the police could suggest was a warehouse in the fish market, and the supervisor’s argument that the state had responsibility for the men and they deserved better treatment seemed to fall on deaf ears. While these negotiations were going on, the men in question were kept locked up in the hold until at last a compromise was struck: the supervisor agreed to having them sleep on the floor of the warehouse provided they were each given a change of clothes and a blanket. When the deal was done, he explained that they were all exhausted and urged moving them as soon as possible, but with only four officers in town, the police were in favor of waiting until reinforcements arrived from the prefectural station.