Shipwrecks Read online

  The next morning his mother got up at the Hour of the Ox (about 2 a.m.), made some millet dumplings, and wrapped them in seaweed along with some dried saury. At the Hour of the Tiger (about 4 a.m.) she put on her shoes, picked up a stout walking-stick, and left the house.

  Isaku stood in front of the door and watched the line of people emerge from the village chief’s house and head off on their journey to sell salt. The sky turned a shade of blue. With bales of salt on their backs, the people steadied themselves with their sticks and advanced with deliberate steps.

  By the time they reached the mountain path the morning sunlight was spreading over part of the sea. Eventually the line of people disappeared into the trees, past the last patches of snow on the trail.

  They reappeared off the mountain trail seven days later in the early afternoon. Isaku rushed towards the path with the others. The line of people seemed to notice them and stopped. They put down their loads and spread themselves along the path, sitting down or lying flat on their backs. Isaku ran over to his mother. There were bloodstains on her shoulders, and her feet were caked with dirt and blood from burst blisters. Her lips were dry, and her chest was heaving. Isaku and the other villagers used bucket yokes to carry the bales of grain from there. His mother stood up and made her way falteringly down the slope.

  The straw bales of grain were stacked up in the yard at the village chief’s house. Isaku’s mother and the others dragged their sticks wearily into the house and sat down, their legs folded formally underneath them.

  Isaku was standing in the yard, but from the atmosphere in the house he sensed that something was amiss. With frightened looks on their faces, every one of the people inside seemed to be clamouring to report something to the village chief. The chief’s face turned pale.

  Before long the news spread that when the people selling salt had visited the labour contractor, who also doubled as a salt merchant, they had been questioned by two men. These men were from a shipping agency in a port at the southern tip of the island that ran ships on the western circuit; they had come to inquire about a twelve-hundred-bale ship which was missing. The ship, fully laden with rice and pottery, had set sail at the end of the previous year with favourable winds behind her. It seemed that the weather had turned foul along the way, but the people at the shipping agency had not been particularly worried, because the ship’s captain was a veteran sailor who had weathered many a storm in the past. But they did mention that the previous spring the ship had undergone major repairs, with rotten timbers, rusty metal fittings and so on being replaced. She was an aging vessel known as the Old Granny; it was thirteen years since she had been put into commission.

  The ship would have headed north along the west coast of the island, but had disappeared along the way. She failed to reach her destination, and there were also no signs of her having taken shelter in another port. The ship’s captain was an honest man; it was unthinkable that he should have made off in the ship in order to steal the cargo. Either she had been blown far out to sea, where she sank, or she had been smashed to pieces on the coast.

  If the ship had been wrecked along the coast, it should be possible to retrieve part of the cargo. Because they assumed that their search should be limited to the western coastline, this was where the shipping agency had dispatched their men.

  The timing of the ship’s disappearance more or less matched the appearance of O-fune-sama, but since the vessel that rode up on the reef in front of the village had a capacity of around three hundred bales, it was clear that these men were searching for a different ship. Of course, even if the ships were different, the fact that these men were looking for a missing ship put the village in terrible jeopardy.

  Isaku and the others looked anxious as they jostled their way into the dirt floor area and stared at the village chief’s face.

  The chief moved back to the fireplace and talked quietly with the more senior members of the community. There was still evidence in the village of all sorts of things brought to them by O-fune-sama. While the ship’s timber had been carried away into the forest, the rice and other commodities from the cargo had been distributed among the families. If these men had someone guide them to the village and took a look inside the houses, they would find things that people of their station in life would not normally have, and would become suspicious. No doubt they would judge that the villagers had indeed plundered cargo from a wrecked ship.

  The bailiffs would come to arrest the villagers and subject them to harsh interrogation. In the course of such questioning, the village’s age-old practice of luring O-fune-sama would be revealed. If that came to pass, the village chief and many others, including women and children, would be doomed to a ghastly end. The village would cease to exist. The fact that the men from the shipping agency had come as far as the next village, and had gone out of their way to question those selling salt, was sure proof that their village was one of the areas where they presumed the ship might have run aground.

  All the men in council with the village chief had turned a shade of grey; some were using both hands to stop their knees shaking violently. Isaku himself suddenly started to tremble.

  The slightly built village chief said something to the elder, who nodded, got to his feet, and walked over to the assembled villagers.

  ‘Listen carefully. We’re going to hide every last thing up in the mountains. Everything O-fune-sama bestowed upon us. You’ll build huts up there to store the things in, but first of all we must get everything into the forest. The huts’ll be built afterward,’ said the old man in a hollow voice.

  The villagers bowed, stood up, and scurried to their houses.

  Isaku watched his mother get wearily to her feet, and he followed her as she shuffled along, supporting herself on her stick. When he thought of his mother’s gashed shoulders and feet, and how she had doggedly carried all those bales of rice, he felt miserable about his own lack of strength.

  When his mother stepped inside their house, she stooped over one of the bales of rice stacked on the dirt floor and lifted it onto her shoulder. The heavy weight was obviously a struggle for her as she staggered out the back door. Isaku followed, carrying the jug of rapeseed oil and a tub of soy sauce.

  His mother plodded slowly up the narrow path into the mountains behind the village. Occasionally she paused to catch her breath. Isaku looked on fearfully, worrying that his mother’s back might break.

  Trees stretched all around as his mother stepped off the path into the forest. Sunlight slipped through the gaps in the forest canopy, allowing peach trees to blossom in the smallest of open spaces. His mother laid the bale of rice behind a large rock and sat down, panting for breath, the sweat dripping from her brow.

  ‘Cut some wood with the axe and make a foundation,’ she said, getting to her feet and heading back towards the path.

  Isaku returned home and grabbed a tub full of wine, his axe and a hatchet, before going back into the forest. He sank the blade of his axe into the trunk of a tree; after felling it he trimmed off the branches with his hatchet and laid it down behind the rock. When he had several such trees lined up side by side, his mother placed the bales of straw on top. It was almost evening by the time they had stacked the eighth and last bale, part of which had already been used, and Isaku covered them with a straw raincoat and some matting.

  That night his mother broke out in a terrible fever. Isaku applied a poultice of medicinal herbs to the cracked skin on her shoulders and feet, but pus oozed from the wounds. His mother clenched her teeth and groaned in pain.

  The next morning Isaku made some vegetable porridge and fed his prostrate mother, as well as his younger brother and sister, before going into the forest with Isokichi. They worked hard putting together a makeshift hut from pieces of wood. Their main concern was to keep the rain and dew off the bales of rice, so they attached a grass thatch roof to the planks at the bottom. Shadows of branches swayed on the rooftop.

  When they got back home, their mother w
as sitting by the fire roasting beans.

  ‘Is it all right for you to be up?’ Isaku asked, but his mother remained silent. Her face was pallid and sickly, her cheeks sunken, and her splayed legs blue and swollen.

  He moved the poultice of medicinal herbs from the corner of the earthen floor area next to his mother.

  ‘Go to the chief’s house and let him know that every grain of rice has been carried into the forest and that you’ve built a hut over it,’ said his mother, and she continued to roast the beans.

  Isaku nodded and left the house. The western sky glowed bright red, and the sea shimmered below. The colour of the sky reminded him of the blood of the murdered deckhands. He hurried along the village path.

  An eerie silence reigned over the village. At this time of year there was much to be gathered on the shore, but there was not a soul to be seen on the beach. Even the children sensed the mood of the adults, and they were not out playing on the village path. After hiding all the rice and other plundered goods in the mountains, the villagers spent their days cooped up indoors, holding their breath. Isaku’s mother tended her wounds while she dried the grain from the other village or wove cloth on her loom.

  Isaku spent his time repairing his fishing-tackle, occasionally looking out the back door up the path to the next village, or out at the sea. If the men from the shipping agency were to come, it would be either along the mountain pass or by ship along the coast. There was talk of placing lookouts near the pass and on the promontories, but this was overruled because, as some people pointed out, if the lookouts were noticed, they would invite suspicion.

  Isaku overheard the men of the village discussing how punishment might be carried out. He was terrified. They talked of people being whipped, then dragged around by a rope before being crucified upside-down and stuck with a spear until their entrails hung out. Of people being hacked with a saw before being crucified. If it were found out that they had plundered a ship’s cargo and beaten its captain to death, no doubt they would be subjected to a similar fate.

  Only one path led out of the village, and to get to the next one had to follow the narrowest of trails carved through the heart of the mountains, traversing a number of valleys and peaks along the way. Isaku had gone to the next village for the first time when he saw his father off into indentured service, and the overpowering impression he had come back with was enough to make him dizzy. Rows of houses, and shops selling all sorts of goods, as well as two-storey buildings to accommodate travellers. The streets were crowded with people, and things that he had only heard about but had never seen, such as oxen, passed in front of him with packages lashed to their backs. In the port he had seen cargo ships as well as fishing-boats. He hadn’t stopped moving for a second, but cast his eyes about restlessly until he was exhausted.

  They had stayed only one night in the dirt floor area of the broker’s house, but Isaku would never forget the feeling of sublime tranquillity he’d experienced when they came back over the mountain pass and saw the houses below. He was sure that he could never live anywhere but his own village.

  From the moment he heard that the shipping agents were searching for a missing ship, the next village represented to Isaku all that was mysterious and frightening. The next village was part of the same island, and it belonged to the vast land across the sea. Each village had its own set of edicts, passed down through the ages.

  Rare though it might be, the coming of O-fune-sama was looked upon in the same light as unexpected schools of fish appearing near the shore, or unusually large quantities of mushrooms or mountain vegetables being found in the forest. O-fune-sama was part of the bounty offered by the sea, and its deliverance barely saved the people in the village from starvation. For Isaku’s village the shipwrecking of O-fune-sama was the happiest event imaginable, but for those in other places, such as the next village, it was an evil deed meriting the supreme penalty. But if O-fune-sama had never graced their shores, the village would have long since ceased to exist, and the bay would have been nothing more than an expanse of sea girded by a stretch of rocks. Their ancestors had lived there, and they themselves were able to continue thanks only to O-fune-sama.

  It was said that dead souls from their village would go far away across the sea and, in time, return to find a host among the pregnant women. There was nowhere for them to return to but their own village. If they came back to a place where the rules were different, where happy events were regarded as crimes, the result could be nothing but confusion. If Isaku were to have his own family, he knew that he would have to go to the next village to sell salt and the like, but he was determined to avoid such journeys. He wanted to stay safe in the village, where fixed tenets of living were followed.

  At times he thought about his own death. His body being burnt and his bones buried in the ground, his soul leaving the village and heading across the water. A long journey before he reached the place far across the sea where the souls of other dead villagers would be waiting. The spirits had a settlement at the bottom of the sea where everything was bright and clear. Dense clumps of fresh green seaweed swayed like groves of trees, and all sorts of barnacles and other colourful shellfish clung to the rocks, shining like mother-of-pearl.

  Schools of little fish, silver scales glistening as they swam, turned in unison as their leader changed direction, just like a flutter of snowflakes dancing in the air.

  The sea bottom was always calm and the water temperature unchanging. The dead souls looked like jellyfish in their translucent clothes, and they had a healthy sheen to their hair. They always smiled and they never talked. They were in the state of deep serenity that death brings. There he saw his grandmother, of whom he had only hazy memories, and Teru, his little sister who had died two years ago. The people standing behind them must be his ancestors.

  He moved over to them and stood beside Teru. Before he knew it, he, too, was draped in translucent clothes and his face wore a gentle smile. He felt pleasantly warm inside.

  At times, some spirits would drift away, seen off by those who stayed behind. They were the souls returning to the village to be reincarnated in the womb through the sexual union of man and woman. And when would reincarnation happen? Most likely a very long time after death.

  He harboured no doubts that he, too, had been a reincarnated spirit in his mother’s womb. He believed that the settlement of dead souls far across the sea was not just his imagining but existed so clearly in his memory because it was a place he had at one time been part of.

  He had no fear of dying, especially since he believed that there was a place to live peacefully after death. But if he were hauled away and killed in an unfamiliar place, he thought it unlikely that his spirit would reach the sanctuary for the dead souls from his village. No doubt his spirit would be doomed to a hell full of the souls of grim-faced strangers.

  If the men from the shipping agency were to come to the village and find that the villagers had plundered cargo from a wrecked ship, they would be arrested and killed, they would be unable to savour the tranquillity after death. Isaku prayed that the men from the shipping agency would never appear.

  The snow had started to melt in the mountains, and the houses shuddered each time the rumbling avalanches reverberated through the village. The flow of water through the small stream that ran between the houses increased to a torrent.

  By March the snow had all but disappeared from the mountains; the traces glistened only on the far-off ridges. No people were to be seen on the mountain path, and no boats out on the water.

  The chief summoned the more senior members of the community; it was decided that two men would be sent to the neighbouring village. Their mission was to find out what the shipping agencies were doing, and whether or not the village was under suspicion.

  The next morning, just as if they were going to do some trading, the men shouldered bales of dried fish and set off up the mountain path. Each had a pair of sturdy legs, and in no time they disappeared into the forest.
r />   Five days later, around sunset, the men reappeared and hurried down to the village chief’s house. Isaku joined the other villagers in front of the house.

  The news the men brought put the village at ease. At the salt merchant’s where they traded the dried fish for grain, they had inquired in passing about the shipping agent’s men who had stayed at the merchant’s house. The men, they were told, had already returned to the shipping merchant’s office at a port on the southern part of the island. They had asked the captains of ships that came into port and visitors from villages along the coast about the missing ship, but had received no clues as to what had happened.

  ‘It must’ve got blown out to sea in a storm and sunk. Those fellows gave up and eventually went home,’ the merchant had said indifferently.

  The villagers exchanged delighted looks. The danger was over. However, the chief did not give them permission to carry the rice back home from the forest. They should continue to be vigilant, he decided, just in case.

  In the middle of March, the ritual to pray for a good fishing catch was held on the beach, and that day the village chief gave them permission to retrieve their rice from the mountains. That night, the villagers cooked rice for their dinners, as in Isaku’s family, where they boiled up rice gruel. Isaku also had a little wine with his mother.

  The next day he went out on the water in his boat with Isokichi. At first they could catch nothing but small fry. Once they were into April, however, they began to hook large sardines in great quantities. They couldn’t fish together because the lines would get tangled, so Isaku entrusted the steering to Isokichi and concentrated on catching sardines. Of course, with Isokichi still inexperienced, whenever they came near the reef Isaku would take the oar and work the boat away from the rocks. The skin on Isokichi’s hands split and blood oozed out.

  The sardine run seemed larger than normal, and even from the boat they could see a teeming mass of shimmering, silvery scales darting about under the water. The colour of the sea would change where they were densest, and at times whole areas of water would appear to be boiling. If he attached several hooks to his line and dropped it over the side, he felt the line being pulled right away. With sardines on almost all the hooks, it became a chore to remove them.