The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea Read Free Page A

and eventually to Pakistan.
    What a joy the tropics were! Hoping to trade for nylons or wrist watches, native children met them at every port with bananas and pineapples and papayas, bright-colored birds and baby monkeys. And Ryuji loved the groves of wine palms mirrored in a muddy, slow-flowing river. Palms must have been common to his native land in some earlier life, he thought, or they could never have bewitched him so.
    But as the years passed, he grew indifferent to the lure of exotic lands. He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.
    Ryuji hated the immobility of the land, the eternally unchanging surfaces. But a ship was another kind of prison.
    At twenty, he had been passionately certain: there’s just one thing I’m destined for and that’s glory; that’s right, glory! He had no idea what kind of glory he wanted, or what kind he was suited for. He knew only that in the depths of the world’s darkness was a point of light which had been provided for him alone and would draw near someday to irradiate him and no other.
    And it seemed increasingly obvious that the world would have to topple if he was to attain the glory that was rightfully his. They were consubstantial: glory and the capsized world. He longed for a storm. But life aboard ship taught him only the regularity of natural law and the dynamic stability of the wobbling world. He began to examine his hopes and dreams one by one, and one by one to efface them as a sailor pencils out the days on the calendar in his cabin.
    Sometimes, as he stood watch in the middle of the night, he could feel his glory knifing toward him like a shark from some great distance in the darkly heaping sea, see it almost, aglow like the noctilucae that fire the water, surging in to flood him with light and cast the silhouette of his heroic figure against the brink of man’s world. On those nights, standing in the white pilot-house amid a clutter of instruments and bronze signal bells, Ryuji was more convinced than ever:
    There must be a special destiny in store for me; a glittering, special-order kind no ordinary man would be permitted.
    At the same time, he liked popular music. He bought all the new records and learned them by heart while at sea and hummed the tunes when he had a minute, stopping when anyone came near. He liked sailor songs (the rest of the crew scorned them) and his favorite was one called “I Can’t Give Up the Sailor’s Life.”
    The whistle wails and streamers tear,
    Our ship slips away from the pier.
    Now the sea’s my home, I decided that.
    But even I must shed a tear
    As I wave, boys, as I wave so sad
    At the harbor town where my heart was glad.
    As soon as the noon watch was over he would shut himself up in his darkening cabin and play the record again and again until it was time for dinner. He always turned the volume down because he didn’t want to share the song; besides, he was afraid a fellow officer might drop in with some scuttlebutt if he happened to hear the music. The rest of the crew knew how he felt and no one ever disturbed him.
    Sometimes, as he listened to the song or hummed it, tears brimmed in his eyes, just as in the lyrics. Strange that a man with no ties should become sentimental about a “harbor town,” but the tears welled directly from a dark, distant, enervated part of himself he had neglected all his life and couldn’t command.
    The actual sight of land receding into the distance never made him cry. Wharf and docks, cranes and the roofs of warehouses slipping quietly away, he watched with contempt in his eye. Once the cast-off had lighted a fire in his breast, but more than ten years at sea had quelled those flames. He had