Shipwrecks Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  Old conical hats made of sedge moved in the line of surf. Spray shot up from the breakers, first at the end of the reef-lined shore, and then closer and closer as the waves rushed in, until the water where Isaku was standing swelled up and smashed onto the rocks before streaming back out again.

  The surface of the water was foaming white from the fierce rain. A mixture of raindrops and spume from the waves trickled down through the holes in Isaku’s hat. There was only a sliver of sandy beach on this rockbound coast, and there, too, people in sedge hats were busy collecting driftwood.

  Isaku waited for a wave to subside, then stepped into the water and grabbed a piece of driftwood stuck between two rocks. Judging by its gentle arc and the nailhole-like depressions, there was no doubt that it was from a wrecked ship. It was too tightly wedged in for him, a mere boy of nine, to dislodge easily, but when he planted his foot firmly against one of the rocks and pulled, the wood started to come free.

  Isaku scurried back to shore when he saw the next wave surge in, hurling spray into the air. He heard it breaking behind him, and seawater rained noisily onto his hat. When the wave subsided and began to flow back towards the sea, he stepped into the frothing water and grasped the piece of driftwood again.

  After several attempts, he managed to work the driftwood in closer until a big wave finally washed it ashore. He hung onto it to avoid being carried away by the next wave. Digging his fingers into the depressions in the wood, he pulled it towards the path to the village.

  Pelted by the rain, people carried bundles of wood on their backs up the path. The timber Isaku was pulling was considerably larger than theirs, and looked to be of firm, good quality. It seemed a shame to use it for burning a corpse when it could be used as firewood at home.

  When Isaku reached the path, a woman wearing a sedge hat emerged from the house of the bereaved family and helped him with his load. They pulled it into the house and put it beside a rough pile of wood on the dirt floor of the lower section of the room.

  He untied his hat and sat down on the woodpile, glancing across the room. The deceased was an old man, over fifty, named Kinzo. His body was naked except for a loincloth. When Kinzo had become too sick to move, he had lost his appetite, and for the last few days his family had been giving him nothing but water. Nobody would feed those judged certain to die.

  Dead people due to be placed in a sitting coffin were tied seated with their back to a funeral post, their legs bent at the knees and then tightly bound with rough straw rope before rigor mortis could set in. Kinzo’s bones jutted out beneath his skin; his abdomen was distended and taut. His head hung down and slightly forward, revealing the hemp stalk tied to a cross placed on the thin grey hair of his topknot to ward off demons.

  Isaku’s mother was wiping down the coffin that sat on the floor. A large pot of vegetable porridge, provided by the people of the village, simmered away on the fire, the smell wafting down to the dirt floor.

  The downpour seemed to intensify. The noise of the waves faded as the house was enveloped in the sound of the rain.

  Isaku gazed at the woman’s hand stirring the porridge with a ladle.

  The next morning the rain stopped and a typical clear autumn sky unfolded.

  People emerged from their houses and gathered at the home of the bereaved family. Inside, the old women of the village chanted sutras in hushed voices.

  Isaku left Kinzo’s house carrying a bundle of chopped driftwood on his back. He joined men lugging unwieldy bundles of sticks and twigs on their backs up the narrow village path onto the trail that led to the mountain pass.

  The mountain’s rugged face, flecked with bare rocks, loomed behind the village. The seventeen little houses seemed to be clinging to the narrow coastline so as not to be pushed down into the sea. Perhaps because of the constant exposure to the salty winds off the sea, the wooden walls of the houses were white, as if dusted with powder. The thatched roofs were weighted down against the wind with stones similarly blanched. Around the houses, on the more gently sloped land, there was a terraced field. Even with manure, the stony soil could yield only the meagrest of crops, nothing more than a few simple varieties of millet.

  Isaku followed the men off the path into the forest. The ground was damp from the rain and there was an occasional puddle; at times he struggled to get his footing. Eventually the trees thinned out and they came to a clearing in front of a line of small headstones and old wooden grave-tablets. The men set down their bundles of firewood and dry branches near the three-sided stone crematory at one corner of the clearing.

  Isaku sat down on a rock near the men. Sweat dripped from his brow and down his neck but felt good in the sea breeze. He looked down at his pile of wood.

  The long, thin funeral procession moved away from Kinzo’s house along the village path near the waterside. At its head a long white cloth fluttered on the end of a bamboo rod; next came the coffin, suspended from a thick pole. Children walked at the end of the procession.

  ‘I don’t want to be left for dead like him,’ whispered one of the men.

  Kinzo had been laid up at home since summer. One day he had lost his footing and slammed his back against a rock while out spearing octopus on the reef. Unable to work, he became a burden on his family. In a village flirting with starvation, an invalid would be written off as dead.

  People would grieve for a short while, but as they believed in reincarnation they quickly reconciled themselves to loss. Life was entrusted to humans by the gods, and upon death a person’s spirit departed for a far-off place beyond the seas, but after a time it would return to the village, to take shelter in a woman’s womb and come back in the form of an infant. Death was merely a period of deep sleep until the return of the spirit; excessive mourning would disturb the dead person’s repose. The headstones and the wooden grave-tablets faced the sea to guide the spirits home.

  The funeral procession slowed when it reached the mountain trail.

  As he watched the procession, Isaku thought of his father. That spring his father had been sold for three years of indentured service to a shipping agent at a southern port frequently visited by ships on the east–west run. His father went willingly and was undoubtedly now working on the boats. It seemed that his father had made up his mind to become indentured at the end of the previous year when another baby girl was born, joining Isaku, the eldest, his younger brother, Isokichi, and sister, Kane.

  He had heard that in other places people killed their newborns, but not in this village. A pregnancy meant the spirit of a dead person had returned to the village, and infanticide was unthinkable, even if the family risked starvation.

  On several occasions, Isaku had seen his father’s body moving rhythmically on top of his mother at night, in the semi-darkness of their room, her splayed legs bending at the knees then thrusting out straight. He knew that they were urging the spirits of his ancestors to return, but he also knew that another child would further impoverish the family.

  The village was bordered on the south by the cliffs of a cape which jutted out sharply into the sea. The only path to the outside world was the trail to the north along the mountain pass. The path was steep and rocky, traversing two deep gorges and then ascending an almost sheer slope through a thicket of trees and vines. The village owed its isolation to the terrain. The villagers followed this path to other villages to exchange seafood for farm produ
ce and the like. But this was never enough to satisfy their hunger.

  A simple method of saving one’s family from starvation was indentured servitude. In the next village beyond the pass there was a salt merchant who doubled as a labour contractor. He would pay a lump sum as a bond for service. The family would use this money to buy grain to take back home to the village.

  Mostly daughters were sold, but sometimes even the head of a family would sell himself. A fourteen-year-old girl called Tatsu had left the village at the same time as Isaku’s father, to enter into a ten-year term of bondage in return for sixty silver momme, but his father was given the same payment for a three-year term, to all eyes an unusually favourable arrangement. His father was noted in the village for his sturdy build, and was an expert helmsman as well.

  ‘I’ll be back in three years. Don’t let the children starve while I’m away.’

  Isaku’s father had looked intently at him and his mother in the doorway of the broker’s office.

  His mother had bought some grain with part of the money, and carrying this on their backs they had set off along the mountain path toward the village. He was in awe of his father for receiving so much silver and wished for an admirable physique like his.

  The men pausing to rest in the graveyard had all sold sons or daughters into bondage. The previous autumn, the frail man sitting next to Isaku had sold his wife for five years. The men who had carried the firewood and branches up to the graveyard and the four pallbearers were the only remaining male heads of households in the village.

  On seeing the front of the line of people enter the forest, the men slowly stood up. They smoothed out the ashes left in the crematory and removed the dirt and ash blocking the draft holes in its stone walls. Untying the ropes round the bundles of dry branches, they placed the wood in parallel crosses inside the walls.

  They could hear the sound of a bell. The procession was drawing closer to the middle of the forest. Isaku’s mother carried the bamboo rod with the white cloth under her arm and held it high as they emerged from the trees. Behind the aged man sounding the bell came the old women, chanting the sutras. Then the coffin swayed into view. Isaku’s mother stuck the rod into the ground and the coffin was placed beside the crematory. The pallbearers sat down here and there, opening their shirts and wiping the sweat from their brows. The men who had prepared the pyre released the coffin from the pole used to carry it up, and lifted it onto the pyre. Following the men’s instructions, Isaku slipped pieces of firewood into the gaps in the branches.

  Smoke poured forth after the lighted hemp stalk was dropped onto the tinder and soon the branches began to burn. Those seated rose to their feet and stood around the stone walls. The bell was sounded, and again the sutras were recited.

  As the criss-crossed pile of wood caught fire, the coffin was enveloped in flames. The sea breeze made the flames dance; they sounded like a cloth flapping in the wind. Sparks flew every time the wood cracked.

  Isaku and the men had soaked some straw mats in a nearby stream, and now they threw them up on top of the pyre, smothering the flames to ensure that the body burned well. The coffin crumbled in the fire and colourful flames started to shoot out of the exposed corpse. Just when he thought he saw flames of a dazzling yellow, they would change and flicker green. More firewood was stoked and wet mats were again thrown on top.

  When the body had become quite small, toasted dumplings made of millet were passed round. Isaku chewed away as he stared into the blaze. Tiny multicoloured flames spurted forth when the men poked sticks roughly at the charred corpse. After they had done this several times the fire died down, and the body turned the bright red of burning charcoal.

  The sun began to set.

  Kinzo’s family would spend the night under a canopy of straw mats strung up in the trees at the edge of the forest; the next morning they would recover the bones. The villagers pressed their hands together in prayer and then left the clearing.

  Isaku trailed his sturdily built mother down the path through the forest. He had been struck by her repeatedly in the past. She was surprisingly powerful, and sometimes her blows left him temporarily deaf in one ear. She hit him for various reasons, but usually it was for being lazy. ‘Just look at the fish!’ she would scold him. ‘They don’t slack off.’ She was a frightening figure, but at the same time he also felt a kind of security knowing that he could rely completely on this mother who beat him mercilessly.

  They made their way through the forest and onto the mountain path. The scene was bathed in the afternoon sunlight, and the sea glistened. They could see crows circling above the little cape.

  His mother chatted with the old women as they trudged along the path. Isaku was happy; for the first time he had helped the men carry firewood up to the crematory for a funeral. He was being treated as an adult; before long he would be carrying the coffin with the men. But he was small for his age and slight of build. His father was due to return in two and a half years, and like other teenage boys and girls in the village Isaku would no doubt be sent into bondage in his father’s place, pretending to be two or three years older than he actually was. At such time, if he was small, the broker either would refuse to barter for him or would take him on for a paltry amount.

  As he usually did, Isaku tiptoed down the path, trying to appear taller. The women walking in front of him came to a halt, and the villagers behind them also stopped. As one they looked to the left. Isaku did the same.

  In the distance, between two low mountains with bare rocky faces, he could see a green-mantled ridge. ‘The mountains have started to turn red,’ whispered the old woman beside him.

  The ridges glimmered in the setting sun, but the top of one ridge, towering conspicuously above the others, appeared to be a light shade of washed-out red. Two days of rain had kept the crest shrouded in mist, but during that time the trees must have begun turning red. Isaku gazed at the ridge.

  Every year the autumn colour appeared on that crest first, steadily spreading to other ridges and then gathering speed like an avalanche, dyeing the surface of the mountain red as it advanced downward. It would traverse the deeply chiselled valleys, envelop the hills, and soon colour the mountains behind the village. By the time that happened the yellowish brown of leaves about to fall could be seen unfolding on the more distant ridges.

  In the village the feeling of autumn was thick in the air. When the eulalia grass came into ear the men would start catching the little autumn octopuses as they came closer to shore. These were a delicacy that could be eaten either raw or boiled. In most families the children would salt and dry them, cutting them in half and hanging them up on strings from poles.

  The leaves would change to their autumn hues after these little octopuses appeared, and the villagers would be filled with anticipation at the sight of the red-tinted mountains.

  The sea would become rough when the autumn colours faded and the leaves would begin to fall. If there were two days of calm, the next few days would be marked by angry, surging seas and spray from the waves raining down on the houses. But sometimes the rough seas would bring unexpected blessings, so much more bountiful than anything from the beach or the barren fields that no one would have to be sold into bondage for years. Such manna was all too rare, but the people lived in constant hope. The autumn colours heralded the time when the village might be visited by this good fortune.

  The line of people moved along, their eyes still turned toward the top of the ridge. Isaku looked at the sea as he walked down the path. At low tide the rocks at the bottom of the sharply jutting promontory were exposed, and down in front of the village, set back ever so slightly from the sea, the tips of rocks could be seen projecting out of the foaming water.

  The sea near the coast masked an intricate stretch of reef – home for octopus and shellfish, a haven for fish. Seaweed swayed back and forth and kelp lay thickly plastered against the rocks. The men fished in small boats, while the women and children picked seaweed from among the rock
s and gathered shellfish. The sea around the reef was not only a precious fishing ground which sustained the village, it was also a source of such luxuries as food, money, clothing and everyday utensils. But such bounty might come for two or three years in succession and then not for another ten. The most recent visitation had been at the beginning of winter six years earlier, when Isaku was three years old.

  His memory of his early childhood days was rather dim, but he could vividly remember that incident. Everyone in the house had been unusually cheerful. His parents and all the other people in the village had been grinning, their cheeks flushed red with excitement. He remembered that the strange atmosphere had frightened him so much that he cried.

  It was two years ago that he had learned the reason behind the excitement in the village.

  As was the custom, when the autumn colours arrived the whole village took part in a ceremony that mystified Isaku. He asked a boy his age named Sahei what it was about.

  ‘You don’t know?’ Sahei said, looking at him contemptuously.

  Feeling ashamed, Isaku asked his mother when he got home.

  ‘O-fune-sama,’ she replied.

  Isaku looked perplexed.

  ‘Look, that bowl there, that’s from O-fune-sama,’ his mother said with obvious irritation as she glanced towards the shelf.

  He looked at the bowl in a new light. It was different from rough-cut bowls that had merely been hollowed out of pieces of wood. This bowl was almost waferlike and of uniform thickness. It looked as though it had been lacquered in some way; the red surface of the wood had a shiny gloss to it, and two fine gold lines were drawn just below the lip. The bowl was used only to hold food placed before the ancestral tablets at New Year and the Bon festival; otherwise, it never left the shelf.

  His mother said nothing more.

  He had no idea what link there was between the bowl and the village ritual, and it was Sahei, who had earlier derided him for his ignorance, who told him about O-fune-sama and the significance of the wooden bowl.