Shipwrecks (12 page)

They had stayed only one night in the dirt floor area of the broker's house, but Isaku would never forget the feeling of sublime tranquillity he'd experienced when they came back over the mountain pass and saw the houses below. He was sure that he could never live anywhere but his own village.

From the moment he heard that the shipping agents were searching for a missing ship, the next village represented to Isaku all that was mysterious and frightening. The next village was part of the same island, and it belonged to the vast land across the sea. Each village had its own set of edicts, passed down through the ages.

Rare though it might be, the coming of
O-
fune-
sama
was looked upon in the same light as unexpected schools of fish appearing near the shore, or unusually large quantities of mushrooms or mountain vegetables being found in the forest.
O-
fune-
sama
was part of the bounty offered by the sea, and its deliverance barely saved the people in the village from starvation. For Isaku's village the shipwrecking of
O-
fune-
sama
was the happiest event imaginable, but for those in other places, such as the next village, it was an evil deed meriting the supreme penalty. But if
O-
fune-
sama
had never graced their shores, the village would have long since ceased to exist, and the bay would have been nothing more than an expanse of sea girded by a stretch of rocks. Their ancestors had lived there, and they themselves were able to continue thanks only to
O-
fune-
sama
.

It was said that dead souls from their village would go far away across the sea and, in time, return to find a host among the pregnant women. There was nowhere for them to return to but their own village. If they came back to a place where the rules were different, where happy events were regarded as
crimes, the result could be nothing but confusion. If Isaku were to have his own family, he knew that he would have to go to the next village to sell salt and the like, but he was determined to avoid such journeys. He wanted to stay safe in the village, where fixed tenets of living were followed.

At times he thought about his own death. His body being burnt and his bones buried in the ground, his soul leaving the village and heading across the water. A long journey before he reached the place far across the sea where the souls of other dead villagers would be waiting. The spirits had a settlement at the bottom of the sea where everything was bright and clear. Dense clumps of fresh green seaweed swayed like groves of trees, and all sorts of barnacles and other colourful shellfish clung to the rocks, shining like mother-of-pearl.

Schools of little fish, silver scales glistening as they swam, turned in unison as their leader changed direction, just like a flutter of snowflakes dancing in the air.

The sea bottom was always calm and the water temperature unchanging. The dead souls looked like jellyfish in their translucent clothes, and they had a healthy sheen to their hair. They always smiled and they never talked. They were in the state of deep serenity that death brings. There he saw his grandmother, of whom he had only hazy memories, and Teru, his little sister who had died two years ago. The people standing behind them must be his ancestors.

He moved over to them and stood beside Teru. Before he knew it, he, too, was draped in translucent clothes and his face wore a gentle smile. He felt pleasantly warm inside.

At times, some spirits would drift away, seen off by those who stayed behind. They were the souls returning to the village to be reincarnated in the womb through the sexual union of man and woman. And when would reincarnation happen? Most likely a very long time after death.

He harboured no doubts that he, too, had been a reincarnated spirit in his mother's womb. He believed that the settlement of dead souls far across the sea was not just his imagining but
existed so clearly in his memory because it was a place he had at one time been part of.

He had no fear of dying, especially since he believed that there was a place to live peacefully after death. But if he were hauled away and killed in an unfamiliar place, he thought it unlikely that his spirit would reach the sanctuary for the dead souls from his village. No doubt his spirit would be doomed to a hell full of the souls of grim-faced strangers.

If the men from the shipping agency were to come to the village and find that the villagers had plundered cargo from a wrecked ship, they would be arrested and killed, they would be unable to savour the tranquillity after death. Isaku prayed that the men from the shipping agency would never appear.

The snow had started to melt in the mountains, and the houses shuddered each time the rumbling avalanches reverberated through the village. The flow of water through the small stream that ran between the houses increased to a torrent.

By March the snow had all but disappeared from the mountains; the traces glistened only on the far-off ridges. No people were to be seen on the mountain path, and no boats out on the water.

The chief summoned the more senior members of the community; it was decided that two men would be sent to the neighbouring village. Their mission was to find out what the shipping agencies were doing, and whether or not the village was under suspicion.

The next morning, just as if they were going to do some trading, the men shouldered bales of dried fish and set off up the mountain path. Each had a pair of sturdy legs, and in no time they disappeared into the forest.

Five days later, around sunset, the men reappeared and hurried down to the village chief's house. Isaku joined the other villagers in front of the house.

The news the men brought put the village at ease. At the salt merchant's where they traded the dried fish for grain, they had inquired in passing about the shipping agent's men who had
stayed at the merchant's house. The men, they were told, had already returned to the shipping merchant's office at a port on the southern part of the island. They had asked the captains of ships that came into port and visitors from villages along the coast about the missing ship, but had received no clues as to what had happened.

‘It must've got blown out to sea in a storm and sunk. Those fellows gave up and eventually went home,' the merchant had said indifferently.

The villagers exchanged delighted looks. The danger was over. However, the chief did not give them permission to carry the rice back home from the forest. They should continue to be vigilant, he decided, just in case.

In the middle of March, the ritual to pray for a good fishing catch was held on the beach, and that day the village chief gave them permission to retrieve their rice from the mountains. That night, the villagers cooked rice for their dinners, as in Isaku's family, where they boiled up rice gruel. Isaku also had a little wine with his mother.

The next day he went out on the water in his boat with Isokichi. At first they could catch nothing but small fry. Once they were into April, however, they began to hook large sardines in great quantities. They couldn't fish together because the lines would get tangled, so Isaku entrusted the steering to Isokichi and concentrated on catching sardines. Of course, with Isokichi still inexperienced, whenever they came near the reef Isaku would take the oar and work the boat away from the rocks. The skin on Isokichi's hands split and blood oozed out.

The sardine run seemed larger than normal, and even from the boat they could see a teeming mass of shimmering, silvery scales darting about under the water. The colour of the sea would change where they were densest, and at times whole areas of water would appear to be boiling. If he attached several hooks to his line and dropped it over the side, he felt the line being pulled right away. With sardines on almost all the hooks, it became a chore to remove them.

In the evening when they went in to shore, they would
transfer the sardines into tubs and carry them back home, where his mother would skewer them and grill them by the fire. The fish were at their succulent best, and each time some fat dripped into the fire the flames would flare up. To Isaku the taste of the hot sardines was delicious beyond compare.

His mother split some of the fish in half and got his little sister, Kane, to hand them to her as she hung them out on a length of twine to dry.

The temperature rose and the mountains were blanketed in greenery.

The men of the village all took their boats out at the same time, but in a slightly different way from the previous year. Normally they would go out at dawn, but some boats could be seen leaving the shore well after the sea was flooded with sunlight. They finished earlier, too, hurrying back around the time the sun started to set. There were men who used physical ailments as excuses not to take their boats out at all.

‘Getting slack is the worst thing that can happen to a person,' his mother muttered as she added some more wood to the fire.

The men who were no longer taking fishing seriously had been spoiled by the food brought by
O-
fune-
sama
. They would use all they caught to feed their families and saw no need for additional catch to barter for grain. Fortunately, this year sardines had come in force, and one could bring in a large catch without having to spend too much time out on the water. They could even take days off.

Isaku wanted to take it easy, too, but when he thought of what his mother had said, he could not bring himself to do so.

The sea was calm for days on end and occasionally it drizzled from morning to night. Even on such days Isaku would take Isokichi out in the boat. His mother tilled their little field and planted vegetable seeds. From out on the water he could see the terraced fields carved out of the hillside, and he often watched the sedge hats moving in the field worked by Tami's family.

One day in mid-April, a man in a boat near Isaku called to him across the water and pointed to the mountain path. Isaku felt a
chill run up his spine. He could just see two men, walking slowly toward the village. They were a long way away and difficult to make out properly, but it seemed as if they were looking at Isaku. He thought they must be the men from the shipping agency. He had heard that they had stopped their search for the ship and gone home, but maybe they had not given up but had simply gone to another village before heading here. Bales of rice and other exotic bounty from
O-
fune-
sama
were back in the village; if the agents spotted it, they would know that it had been plundered from a ship.

Isaku began to shake all over.

He looked back at the boat next to his. The man was staring at Isaku. He turned his eyes to the mountain but lost sight of the two men as they disappeared behind the trees along the sides of the path.

Isaku followed the other boats as they turned back toward shore, relieving Isokichi of the oar and rowing with all his might. No time to move the bales of rice back up into the forest, but he thought at least he could try to hide them by throwing some matting on top.

Boats were reaching the shore one after another as Isaku pulled his out of the water and onto the sand before running back to his house. The women and children, who would normally have been down near the water's edge, had already disappeared.

Isaku ran into their house to find his mother covering the bales of rice with straw matting and stacking firewood on top. He helped her carry the jars and tubs of wine, white sugar and soy sauce out of the back door and hide them in a bamboo grove.

He peeked from behind their house towards the mountain path. The treetops were swaying in the wind as the sun beat down. Only the sound of the waves was heard as a profound stillness spread through the village. Every one of the villagers cowered indoors.

He could see movement between the treetrunks, and before long the two men appeared at the top of the path. One of them
was supporting himself with a long stick, the other was helping him down the path. The man with the stick had had one leg cut off at the knee.

These men certainly didn't look anything like Isaku's idea of people from a shipping agency. Surely they wouldn't send a crippled man on a job of this kind? Besides, they were poor, their clothes little better than rags.

The two men came to a halt a short way down the path, alternately staring at the village and casting their eyes out to sea, before crumpling to their knees on the ground, sobbing.

Isaku's mother stepped out and walked in their direction; Isaku followed her. Men and women began to emerge from their houses and head towards the mountain path. The wariness he had felt earlier had all but dissolved when he saw a woman run ahead of the crowd and embrace the man with the stick.

‘Someone's back from bondage,' said his mother, quickening her step.

Isaku's father had another year left before his term was up, so it wasn't him. Isaku followed his mother and the other villagers. The two men were sitting on the ground, their faces a dark reddish colour, their cheeks sunken and hollow. Isaku recognised neither of them; both men seemed in their forties, one completely grey, the other almost bald.

They had returned after finishing their ten-year indentures. The villagers were surprised to see how much the two had aged, obviously an indication of how hard they had been worked. The man with the stick had gone into the forest to fell trees in deep snow and had fallen from a cliff when hauling the timber out. He was knocked unconscious and saved only because the other men had searched for him. They had found him two days later, buried up to his waist in snow. Though the other injuries he received in the fall had healed, his left foot, which had been under the snow, had turned gangrenous. Because this could lead to death, they had amputated his leg at the knee. Crippled as he was, he was indeed fortunate to have got back to the village alive.

Isaku's father was bonded in the same port as these two
men, so that evening his mother went to ask how her husband was faring.