The Sound of Waves Read Free Page A

quickly moving boys.
    Ryuji was facing away from the sea, in toward the boat. He upended the pot that had just come up, and Jukichi pulled a lever to disengage the pulley. Now for the first time Shinji looked back toward the pulley.
    Ryuji poked around inside the pot with a wooden pole. Like a person awakened from a long nap, an octopus oozed its entire body out of the pot and cowered on the deck. Quickly the cover was jerked off a large bamboo creel standing by the engine room—and the first catch of the day went slithering down into it with a dull thud.
•    •    •
    The Taihei-maru spent most of the morning octopus fishing. Its meager catch consisted of five octopuses. The wind died and the sun shone gloriously. Passing through the Irako Channel, the Taihei-maru sailed back into the Gulf of Ise to do some “drag fishing” on the sly in the prohibited waters there.
    To make their drag they tied a number of large hooka and lines on a crossbar, tied it to a stout hawser, and then, putting the boat in motion, dragged this across the floor of the gulf like a rake. After a time they pulled the drag in; with it four flatheads and three soles came flapping up from the water.
    Shinji took them off the hooks with his bare hands, The flatheads fell to the blood-smeared deck, their white bellies gleaming. The black, wet bodies of the soles, their little eyes sunk deep in folds of wrinkles, reflected the blue of the sky.
    Lunchtime came. Jukichi dressed the flatheads on the engine-room hatch and cut them into slices. They divided the raw slices onto the lids of their aluminum lunchboxes and poured soy sauce over them from a small bottle. Then they took up the boxes, filled with a mixture of boiled rice and barley and, stuffed into one corner, a few slices of pickled radish. The boat they entrusted to the gentle swell.
    “Say, what do you think about old Uncle Teru Miyata bringing his girl back?” Jukichi said abruptly.
    “I didn’t know he had.”
    “Me neither.”
    Both boys shook their heads and Jukichi proceeded with his story:
    “Uncle Teru had four girls and one boy. Said he hadmore than enough of girls, so he married three of them off and let the other one be adopted away. Her name was Hatsue and she was adopted into a family of diving women over at Oizaki in Shima. But then, what do you know, that only son of his, Matsu, dies of the lung sickness last year. Being a widower, Uncle Teru starts feeling lonely. So he calls Hatsue back, has her put back in his family register, and decides to adopt a husband into the family for her, to have someone to carry on the name.… Hatsue’s grown up to be a real beauty. There’ll be a lot of youngsters wanting to marry her.… How about you two—hey?”
    Shinji and Ryuji looked at each other and laughed. Each could guess that the other was blushing, but they were too tanned by the sun for the red to show.
    Talk of this girl and the image of the girl he had seen on the beach yesterday immediately took fast hold of each other in Shinji’s mind. At the same instant he recalled, with a sinking heart, his own poor condition in life. The recollection made the girl whom he had stared at so closely only the day before seem very, very far away from him now. Because now he knew that her father was Terukichi Miyata, the wealthy owner of two coasting freighters chartered to Yamagawa Transport—the hundred-and-eighty-five-ton Utajima-maru and the ninety-five-ton Harukaze-maru —and a noted crosspatch, whose white hair would wave like lion whiskers in anger.
    Shinji had always been very level-headed. He had realized that he was still only eighteen and that it was too soon to be thinking about women. Unlike the environment of city youths, always exploding with thrills, Uta-jima had not a single pin-ball parlor, not a single bar, nota single waitress. And this boy’s simple daydream was only to own his own engine-powered boat some day and go into the coastal-shipping business with