Mandarins Read Free Page A

lay at my feet and handed it to him. He was dressed for the season in casual jacket and shorts.
    â€œIt isn’t knotweed. I wonder what it is. H-san should know. He’s a native, not like me.”
    We had heard that N-san had come from T ō ky ō to be adopted into his wife’s family and that sometime around the summer of the previous year she had abandoned home and hearth to run off with a lover.
    â€œH-san also knows much more about fish than I do.”
    â€œOh? Is H really so learned a scholar then? I would have thought he knew nothing other than kend ō .”
    H, who was using a piece of an old bow as a walking stick, responded to the provocation with no more than a smirk.
    â€œWhat about you, M-san?”
    â€œI, I only swim.”
    N-san lit a cigarette, a Golden Bat, and told us the story of a stockbroker in T ō ky ō , who the previous summer, while swimming, had been stung by a scorpion fish. He adamantly insisted, however, that it was preposterous to think that anything of the sort could have stung him and that instead it must have been a sea serpent.
    â€œAre there really sea serpents?”
    H was the only one to respond. He was tall and wore a swimming cap.
    â€œSea serpents? In the ocean here there certainly are sea serpents.”
    â€œEven now?”
    â€œYes, but they’re rare.”
    The four of us burst out laughing. Now coming toward us were two men, fish baskets dangling from their hands. Their prey was nagarami , a variety of spiral shellfish. Clad in red loincloths, they were sturdy and muscular. Glistening wet from the sea, they also seemed less pitiable than simply wretched. As they passed, N-san replied to their perfunctory greeting by calling out: “Come for a bath at the inn!”
    â€œWhat a dreadful occupation!” I exclaimed. It occurred to me that I myself might very well wind up becoming a diver for nagarami .
    â€œYes, dreadful indeed!” said N-san. “First, you have to swim out into the offing, then dive again and again to the bottom.”
    â€œAnd to make it all the worse,” added H, “if you get caught in a channel, the chances are eight or nine to ten that you won’t come back again.”
    Waving his walking stick in the air, H told us many a tale about the channels, even of the one that extends from shore for a full league and a half.
    â€œTell us, N-san. When was it, the matter about the ghost of the nagarami fisherman?”
    â€œLast year. No, it was in the autumn, the year before last.”
    â€œThere really was one?”
    N-san’s voice was already betraying a chuckle as he responded.
    â€œIt wasn’t a ghost. But where the said ghost supposedly appeared was in a cemetery at the back of a slope that reeks of the sea, and when, to top it all, the remains of the fisherman in question came to the surface, they were covered with shrimp, so even though no one would have taken the story at face value, it was certainly an eerie one. But then finally a retired naval officer who had been keeping watch in the cemetery after dusk made a positive sighting. He pounced on the phantom, but when he took a good look, it was nothing of the sort—just a teahouse strumpet the fisherman had promised to marry. But even so, it had for a time stirred up talk of will-o’-the-wisps and ghostly voices, all in all, a total madhouse!”
    â€œSo the woman hadn’t any intent to frighten people?”
    â€œNo, not in the least. She merely would go visit the grave of the fisherman around midnight and stand in front of it as though lost in a daze.”
    N-san’s story was a splendidly appropriate comedy of errors for this seaside setting, though none of us laughed but rather, for whatever reason, merely walked on in silence.
    â€œWell now, perhaps it’s time to turn back,” said M.
    There had already been a lulling of the wind as he spoke; we were walking a now utterly deserted shore.