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

gained only his sunburn and keen eyes.
    Ryuji stood watch and slept, woke up, stood watch and slept again. He was full of unexpressed feelings, and his savings steadily increased, for he tried to be alone as much as possible. He became expert at shooting the sun, he counted the stars as friends, he mastered the arts of mooring and warping and towing until finally, listening to the din of waves at night, his ear could discern the surge of the sea from the slake. While he grew more familiar with lustrous tropical clouds and the many-colored coral seas, the total in his bankbook climbed and now he had almost two million yen * in the bank, an extraordinary sum for a Second Mate.
    He had sampled the pleasures of dissipation too. He had lost his virginity on his first cruise. They were in Hong Kong, and a senior officer had taken him to a Chinese whore. . . .
    Ryuji lay on the bed letting the fan scatter his cigarette ashes and half closed his eyes as if to measure on a balance the quantity and quality of the previous night’s pleasure against the pitiful sensations of that first experience. Staring into space, he began to see again at the back of his mind the dark wharves of Hong Kong at night, the turbid heaviness of water lapping at the pier, the sampans’ feeble lanterns . . .
    In the distance, beyond the forest of masts and the lowered straw-mat sails of the moored fleet, the glaring windows and neon signs of Hong Kong outshone the weak lanterns in the foreground and tinted the black water with their colors. Ryuji and the older seaman who was his guide were in a sampan piloted by a middle-aged woman. The oar in the stern whispered through the water as they slipped across the narrow harbor. When they came to the place where the flickering lights were clustered, Ryuji saw the girls’ rooms bobbing brightly on the water.
    The fleet was moored in three long lines so as to form an inner court of water. All the sterns were faced in and were decorated with sticks of burning incense and red and green paper flags celebrating regional deities. Flowery silk cloth lined the semicircular tarpaulin shells on the flat decks. At the rear of each shell a raised stand, draped with the same material, held a small mirror: an image of Ryuji’s sampan wobbled from room to room as they slipped past.
    The girls pretended not to notice them. Some lay swaddled in quilts, baring to the cold only dollish, powder-white necks. Others, quilts wrapped around their thighs, played with fortunetelling cards. The luscious reds and golds on the faces of the cards glittered between slender sallow fingers.
    “Which one do you want?” the officer asked. “They’re all young.”
    Ryuji didn’t answer. He was about to choose the first woman in his life and, having traveled sixteen hundred leagues to this bit of dirty, reddish seaweed afloat in the turbid waters of Hong Kong, he felt curiously fatigued, perplexed. But the girls certainly were young, and attractive. He chose before the older man had a chance to offer a suggestion.
    The whore had been sitting in silence, her face puckered in the cold, but as Ryuji stepped onto her boat, she laughed happily. And he found himself half-heartedly believing in the happiness he was bringing her. She drew the flowery curtain over the entrance to the shell.
    They performed in silence. He trembled a little out of vanity, as when he had first scaled the mast. The woman’s lower body, like a hibernating animal had asleep, moved lethargically under the quilts; he sensed the stars of night tilting dangerously at the top of the mast. The stars slanted into the south, swung to the north, wheeled, whirled into the east, and seemed finally to be impaled on the tip of the mast. By the time he realized this was a woman, it was done. . . .
    There was a knock on the door and Fusako Kuroda came into the room with a large breakfast tray. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long. Noboru just left a minute ago.” Putting the