Shipwrecks Page 6

  Isaku guided his boat up onto the beach, then pulled it farther up the shore with his mother. She said nothing as she ran her eyes over the bottom of the boat.

  That night he went to see Takichi again. The smell of grilled saury and smoke from the cooking-fire still hung in the air in Takichi’s house.

  ‘Not even one,’ sighed Isaku as he sat down on the edge of the bed, but Takichi merely smiled faintly from beside the fireplace.

  ‘How do you know when the fish have come under the matting out behind the boat?’ asked Isaku.

  ‘Instinct, experience … Water changes colour slightly. Seems to move, too,’ replied Takichi.

  Isaku said nothing. His cousin stood up and said, ‘Eat this,’ holding out some grilled saury on skewers. Isaku shook his head frantically, got to his feet, and left the house without saying a word.

  Except on days when the sea was rough, Isaku took his boat out every day with the other fishermen. The saury season was approaching its peak, and the catch increased day by day. It seemed that Sahei had been taught by his father, too, and almost without fail he brought back ten fish a day. The other men came back with the bottoms of their boats covered with saury.

  Isaku was ashamed to be heading back to shore without having caught anything at all. His mother said nothing about his fishing and made a thin vegetable and rice porridge for his younger brother and sister. The fact that he couldn’t catch any fish for them tormented Isaku.

  About two weeks after he’d started going out after saury, Isaku noticed a faint hint of spray in the water near the straw matting. Not only that, but he felt he could just make out a difference in the colour of the water at that spot. Maybe his eyes were playing a trick on him, he thought. The sea was calm, with only the slightest of swells and no suggestion of any change. He thought there was no way he would ever be able to judge whether or not fish were there.

  Isaku grasped the rope and gently started to reel it in. He thought, There’s nothing to lose if there are no saury there. The matting came closer, at last lining up alongside that tied to the gunwale. Tying up the rope, he sneaked a look under the matting.

  He could see a seething mass of shiny, silver objects. Isaku felt flushed with excitement. His eyes hadn’t been deceiving him after all. He had actually been able to detect the fish’s presence from a distance of forty yards. No doubt it was simple for the other fishermen, but for Isaku this was very much a milestone.

  Stretching out his hand, he slowly dipped it into the sea between the mats and began to move his outspread fingers flauntingly. The water under the matting was teeming with saury. These fish were in prime condition, beautiful in terms of both shape and colour. Their little eyes gleamed. The fish started to pass through his fingers. He saw one of them pause right in his hand. Lifting his hand out of the water, he looked at the struggling saury, its body glistening in the afternoon sun. Tears came to his eyes. He was elated at the thought that he would be able to feed the fish to his little brother and sister sipping their thin rice soup by the fireside.

  Isaku placed the fish in the bottom of the boat and put his arm into the water again through a hole in the matting.

  That night his mother cut the saury into four equal portions, skewered each one, and held them up over the fire. A hint of smoke rose, and the flames flared a little each time some oil dripped into the fire from the skewered saury. His brother and sister stared at the fish, their eyes glowing.

  His mother handed him the skewered head portion and gave the other three to his brother and sister. Isaku realised that serving him the head was his mother’s way of acknowledging him as the breadwinner of the family.

  The hot saury was delicious. The sight of his brother and sister wolfing down the flesh of the fish and then sucking the bones made him realise that he would have to keep bringing more.

  That season turned out to be exceptional. As the days went by, more and more saury seemed to swarm under the matting. In the short time they were on the water, the fishermen were grabbing one saury after another, and the majority of the boats were returning to shore loaded with more than a hundred fish.

  Eventually Isaku, too, seemed to learn the technique involved, and before long he was catching several saury a day. Occasionally there were even days when he would bring back as many as ten. His mother rationed them to one fish a day and preserved the others in salt.

  One night the rainy season came to a crescendo with peals of thunder and a furious downpour. After that the sun became stronger, and with it Isaku’s arms and legs turned a dark shade of brown. The women were hard at work collecting seaweed. The summer heat intensified, and at times the village was drenched by showers. The saury began moving north, growing scarcer by the day, until suddenly in early July they vanished altogether. Squid started to appear again, and the men worked hard to hook them, using little pieces of fish as bait.

  The women of the village carried salted saury on their backs to the next town. They had caught enough to store for their own needs and wanted to trade the surplus for grain. But this year all the coastal villages had experienced similarly large catches, and more than half the fish were being used as fertiliser for the fields, so they came back with very little grain to show for their efforts. Of course, Isaku’s family had been able to store away only a small amount of salted saury, so they had not gone to the next village.

  Those who made the trip came back telling of how a fever had killed many people in other villages that summer. But thanks to its isolation no one in Isaku’s village had suffered from the sickness. Other than the very young, most who had perished had been either old people or those whose brain or lungs had been fatally damaged by the disease.

  Worried about the risk of a contagious disease being brought in from outside, the village chief prohibited anyone from leaving the village. He ordered those who had returned from the next village to wash themselves in the sea, without fail, early each morning for two weeks.

  The time of the Bon festival came, and the fishing-season was brought to a halt.

  Family groups of villagers headed up the mountain path to clean the graves of their ancestors before returning to their houses to place offerings of grain or dried fish on their own Buddhist altars. In the evening they would burn a hemp stalk at their doorway, and flaming torches would be driven into the sandy part of the beach. It was said that the souls who had departed for a distant place across the ocean would rely on these torches to find their way back through the darkness as far as the beach; the light of the burning hemp stalks would guide them home. They believed that the spirits would wash their feet before entering the house, so the villagers prepared a washtub full of fresh water and placed it in the entrance.

  For Isaku’s mother this would be the first Bon since Teru had died in February of that year, so she tied a piece of white cloth to a thin bamboo rod she had cut herself, and stood this at the door. The pain of losing a child seemed to come back to her again as she stood there beside the bamboo rod for quite some time.

  Three days later, in the evening, a little boat made of bark and bamboo was taken down to the shore, while young children ran around the village shouting, ‘The boat’s about to go!’

  Carrying the offerings of food from the altar, Isaku followed his mother when she grabbed the bamboo rod and headed down to the beach. The little boat was set afloat down at the waterside, where Isaku and the other villagers loaded it with offerings of food. His mother stood her bamboo rod in the boat as well.

  On the village chief’s command, the bark and bamboo vessel was towed away from the shore by two boats and released about forty yards offshore. The two fishermen tossed their flaming torches into the little boat, which started to burn immediately. Engulfed in flames, it slowly drifted out to sea. They saw the white banner burn and fall. The spirits would make their journey back across the sea by the light of the burning boat.

  The sea slipped into darkness as the flames gradually died down and eventually went out. Isaku and his mother
stood on the beach for a long time.

  Fine weather continued for days on end, and gigantic columns of clouds stretched out along the horizon. Occasionally the sky would abruptly turn dark and unleash furious squalls on the village.

  His mother spent her days picking wild vegetables in the mountains with the other women or foraging for shellfish and seaweed down on the shore. Isaku noticed that at times she would sit motionless, staring blankly into space. Every time he saw his mother like this he remembered the sight of his father’s body moving up and down on top of her in the darkness of the night. His father was silent, but his mother sounded as though she were being crushed to death. Though it sounded like the groans of someone in agony, Isaku knew that she was in ecstasy.

  Already a year and a half had passed since his father had left. His mother had spent this time without experiencing any pleasure; no doubt she was recalling the last time she had been held by her husband. Weaving cloth to make something for his father to wear, she stopped the loom and silently caressed the cloth.

  The summer heat abated and the nights became cooler. It was typical for rain to fall persistently in early autumn, and that year was no exception.

  After about a month the sky turned a clear, lucent colour and a cloudless blue sky unfolded. The sea was calm and the squid were biting.

  Two men headed for the next village, loaded with dried squid to trade for fishing-gear such as hooks and spears. Five days later they returned with news from the labour contractor of villagers still in servitude. They had heard nothing of Isaku’s father, but Tami’s elder sister had died. It had happened six weeks earlier, and by all accounts she was cremated in the town where she had been working.

  The following day fishing was called off, and Isaku joined the other villagers at Tami’s house. In place of the body, the bowl and chopsticks that Tami’s sister had used were placed inside the coffin while the old women of the village intoned the sutras.

  The funeral procession formed and headed out. Isaku brought up the rear with a bundle of firewood on his back. Tami’s family walked directly behind the coffin. They followed the path up the slope, through the forest, and into the clearing. There the coffin was laid in the crematory.

  The fire was lit and flames consumed the coffin. The spirit was in the coffin even without the body, and would depart with the smoke to a place far off across the sea. The chanting of the sutras intensified, and Isaku pressed his palms together in prayer. Suddenly Tami burst into tears. Her hair was tied at the back, and loose strands blew in the wind. Isaku watched her from behind; her shoulders trembled as she sobbed. The villagers spent three days of mourning in their homes.

  The time came for the women to go up to the narrow terraced fields to gather millet and other grain, which they would carry back in bags to their families, but the soil was stony and barren, yielding only the meagrest of crops. Isaku’s mother went to their field and came back with a pitiful amount of grain to store away in their larder.

  Down at the shore the men started catching autumn octopuses. Normally they began to appear about the time the eulalia grass came into ear, but this year they were coming in to shore unusually early. Isaku took his boat out on the water among the rocks and occupied himself catching octopuses. He stopped working the oar and slipped the barbed spear with its red cloth into the water, moving it towards crannies in the rocks or clumps of seaweed. When an octopus mistook the waggling red cloth for food and showed itself, Isaku would hook it on the end of the spear. Before too long, around all the houses in the village, octopuses could be seen hanging out to dry in the sun.

  The autumn winds began to blow, and when the ears of the eulalia grass reached their full length the octopus catch dropped off noticeably. There was almost no sign of them, however much Isaku fluttered the red cloth. Even so, on the rare occasions he did see an octopus lured out toward the rag, he unerringly hooked it every time. Isaku thought his skills had improved since the previous autumn.

  When he moved the spear around in the water, he remembered the saury fishing. His had been the smallest catch among the fishermen, but since it was only his second season, he was happy that he had reached the stage where he could grab the fish. He felt confident that as the years went by and he got more experience, he would eventually become a full-fledged fisherman.

  The men were puzzled by the small octopus catch. Normally octopus would be dried and then sold to merchants in the next village or to people in mountain villages for the New Year, in exchange for grain. The octopus was essential to acquire enough provisions to see them through winter, and a poor catch would have a serious effect on the village’s food supply. An air of gloom set in among the fishermen.

  Isaku’s mother took his younger brother and sister on repeated trips into the forest to gather dry branches. In preparation for the coming winter, Isaku helped his mother cut them up into firewood to be stacked in a corner of the house.

  He would often stop what he was doing out on the water and look over toward the far-off crests of the ridges. The chances that they would be blessed with a visitation were slim, but if one did come there was no doubt that the villagers would be saved and the dark cloud cast over the village by the poor octopus catch would disappear in an instant.

  One morning, while sitting in his boat out on the water, Isaku noticed the faintest hint of change on the crest of the farthest ridge. The mountains were either covered in green or the colour of bare rocks, but the green along that crest was somewhat different from the other ridges. It could only be the first sign that the autumn hues were on their way.

  That evening, when Isaku returned home, he said to his mother, ‘The mountains look as if they’re changing colour.’ She kept chopping firewood, saying nothing, not even glancing in his direction. Maybe she had already noticed the change on the ridge, or maybe she had half given up hope of O-fune-sama’s visiting their shores that winter. Isaku could not tell.

  About two weeks later the crest of the ridge began to turn red, and as the days went by it deepened in colour and eventually spread to the other ridges. Fleecy clouds drifted across the otherwise clear sky, and there was a chill on the water.

  The autumn colours approached like wildfire, staining the hills behind them before enveloping the village itself. In the meantime it seemed that the little octopus had already left the shoreline, to be seen no more.

  Takichi’s wife Kura was chosen to be the pregnant woman for the O-fune-sama ritual. Her belly had started to swell around the time the octopus first appeared in the shallows, and in view of her conspicuous large frame the village chief did not hesitate to appoint her for the task.

  That day, the villagers assembled on the beach. Her hair combed and tied up behind her head, Kura wore a solemn expression as she stepped into Takichi’s boat. She looked especially large next to her slight husband.

  Takichi took up the oar and worked the boat away from the shore. Avoiding the places where the water foamed above hidden rocks, he rowed the boat a little farther out before finally stopping. Kura stood up and threw into the sea the sacred festoon she had been holding. Isaku and the others pressed their palms together in prayer as the boat turned back to the shore.

  They all followed Kura to the village chief’s house.

  The chief was sitting in orthodox style, his legs folded under him as he welcomed her into the room. Kura knelt in front of him and placed her hands on the floor as she bowed deeply. Rising to her feet, she kicked the little square table placed in front of the village chief. It flew almost as far as the wall, the food in the bowl scattering on the floor. Kura was much more powerful than the woman Isaku had seen the previous year; she even drew murmurs of admiration from the men gathered in the entrance.

  After adjusting her kimono she bowed again to the village chief and left with Takichi to go back to her own house.

  That night Isaku was invited to represent his family at Takichi’s house. Kura’s selection for the O-fune-sama ritual was an auspicious occasion, and tradit
ion held that her baby would grow up to be sturdy and strong. Kura’s father was also there. Millet wine was brought out, and they were served bowls of dumpling soup. Takichi’s mother was sitting hunched over by the fireside.

  ‘With your missus kicking the table across the room like that, people are saying that O-fune-sama could well be on the way,’ said Isaku, sipping the wine in his bowl. If only a ship would capsize for them the way that table had been turned over, he thought.

  ‘That’d be good all right,’ Takichi muttered.

  Kura’s father just sat there drinking his wine while his daughter poured some plain hot water into Takichi’s mother’s bowl. Takichi screwed up his face, which was flushed red from the wine. ‘We’ll be in trouble if O-fune-sama doesn’t come. The baby’ll mean another mouth to feed. Maybe I’ll have to do the same as your father and sell myself to keep them from starving,’ he said, looking at Isaku dolefully.

  Isaku cringed, but it was hardly unexpected. Takichi was going to have to shoulder the burden of supporting not only his aged mother but also his wife, Kura, and the baby that was due before long. Being unable to sell the saury, and then the poor octopus catch on top of that, meant that Takichi’s family had not been able to get any grain from the next village, putting them in dire straits.

  Their situation was exactly the same as that of Isaku’s family. Even though his father had been a skilled fisherman, a poor season had left him with no option but to sell himself into bondage. There was a limit to the food to be reaped from the sea, and every year the catch was getting smaller. If O-fune-sama did not grace their shores soon, there would likely be a flood of people leaving to go into bondage.

  ‘I had to smack Kura once to set her straight. Said she’d go once the baby’s weaned. She’s big and could probably get a good price, but I’m not having any of that. No wife of mine’s selling herself. It’s me who’s gotta go.’ Takichi’s eyes glistened as he spoke. Kura’s father said nothing, merely stared at the flames.