The Sound of Waves Read Free Page B

his younger brother.
    Surrounded though he was by the vast ocean, Shinji did not especially burn with impossible dreams of great adventure across the seas. His fisherman’s conception of the sea was close to that of the farmer for his land. The sea was the place where he earned his living, a rippling field where, instead of waving heads of rice or wheat, the white and formless harvest of waves was forever swaying above the unrelieved blueness of a sensitive and yielding soil.
    Even so, when that day’s fishing was almost done, the sight of a white freighter sailing against the evening clouds on the horizon filled the boy’s heart with strange emotions. From far away the world came pressing in upon him with a hugeness he had never before apprehended. The realization of this unknown world came to him like distant thunder, now pealing from afar, now dying away to nothingness.
    A small starfish had dried to the deck in the prow. The boy sat there in the prow, with a coarse white towel tied round his head. He turned his eyes away from the evening clouds and shook his head slightly.

T HAT NIGHT Shinji attended the regular meeting of the Young Men’s Association. This was the name now applied to what in ancient times was called the “sleeping house,” then a dormitory system for the young, unmarried men of the island. Even now many young men preferred to sleep in the Association’s drab hut on the beach rather than in their own homes. There the youths hotly debated such matters as schooling and health; the ways of salvaging sunken ships and making rescues at sea; and the Lion and Lantern Festival dances, functions belonging to the young men of the village since ancient days. Thus they felt themselves part of the communal life and found pleasure in that agreeable weight that comes from shouldering the burdens and duties of full-grown men.
    A wind was blowing from the sea, rattling the closednight-shutters and making the lamp sway back and forth, now dim, now suddenly bright. From outside, the night sea came pressing very near them, and the roar of the tide was constantly revealing the unrest and might of nature as the shadows of the lamp moved over the cheerful faces of the young men.
    When Shinji entered the hut one boy was kneeling on all fours under the lamp, having his hair cut by a friend with a pair of slightly rusty hair clippers. Shinji smiled and sat down on the floor against the wall, clasping his knees. He remained silent as usual, listening to what the others were saying.
    The youths were bragging to each other of the day’s fishing, laughing loudly and heaping each other unstintingly with insults. One boy, who was a great reader, was earnestly reading one of the out-of-date magazines with which the hut was supplied. Another was engrossed, with no less enthusiasm, in a comic book; holding the pages open with fingers whose knuckles were gnarled beyond his years, he would study some pages for two or three minutes at a time before finally understanding the point and breaking into a loud guffaw.
    Here, for the second time, Shinji heard talk of the new girl. He caught a snatch of a sentence spoken by a snaggle-toothed boy who opened a big mouth to laugh and then said:
    “That Hatsue, she’s—”
    The rest of the sentence was lost to Shinji in a sudden commotion from another part of the room, mixed with answering laughter from the group around the snaggle-toothed boy.
    Shinji was not at all given to brooding about things, but this one name, like a tantalizing puzzle, kept harassinghis thoughts. At the mere sound of the name his cheeks flushed and his heart pounded. It was a strange feeling to sit there motionless and feel within himself these physical changes that, until now, he had experienced only during heavy labor.
    He put the palm of his hand against his cheek to feel it. The hot flesh felt like that of some complete stranger. It was a blow to his pride to realize the existence of things within himself that he