Japan Sinks

by Sakyo Komatsu

  Suddenly there was a loud thump, as though something had struck the bottom of the boat.

  “Did we hit something?” asked Onodera.

  “I don’t think there’s any reef around here,” said Yukinaga.

  Just at that moment, though there was no sound, a wave of air struck their faces. Then came what sounded like the rumble of a far-off cannon.

  A shout came from the bridge. Sailors were running across the deck and down the passageways.

  “It’s an eruption!” cried Yuki, coming out on deck.

  The loud rumbling went on, and when they looked behind them, they saw gray-brown smoke pouring up from the Bayon-naise Rocks, orange flame glowing at the border between smoke and water.

  “Dr. Tadokoro!” the captain called from the bridge. “What is the situation? Are we all right?”

  “There’s no need to worry about something no bigger than that,” answered Tadokoro, who had appeared on deck and was holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes. “Warn the ships in the area, but we should hurry on to where we’re going.”

  “Look, over by Myojin, too, there’s vapor rising,” said Yukinaga, looking through the binoculars he had taken from Tadokoro. “It doesn’t seem too large a volcano.”

  “That shock before—was it a tidal wave?” asked Onodera.

  “Yes. A small one, though,” answered Tadokoro.

  Onodera took the binoculars from Yukinaga. Tongues of orange flame rose up out of the ocean. The peak of the rock had been blown away. The surface of the sea about the island began to boil, and the brown smoke and the white steam seemed to be quenching the flames. The smoke climbed higher and higher into the sky, though a part spread out in a heavy layer over the water. Torrid projectiles and pumice stone peppered the surface of the sea like a sudden squall, whipping the water into a froth beneath the pall of smoke. And the surface of the sea shuddered as muffled explosions continued.

  While they had been intent upon the volcano, the Hokuto had increased its speed. The waves at the bow rose so high that they broke over the foredeck, and the spray stung the men’s faces. Tremors ran through the ship, and the groaning of the gas turbines took on the pitch of wind howling through a cave.

  “I’ve moved up the rendezvous time,” said the captain after coming down from the bridge. “After I get you to the survey ship, I have to go back to Torishima to pick up the Weather Service people.”

  “Torishima?” Yukinaga asked in surprise. “Are there indications of an eruption there, too?”

  “I don’t know. They say it’s a precautionary measure. You’re going to get wet here. I think it would be best to go inside.” Then, as he was climbing the ladder to the bridge, the captain turned and said: “Oh, and by the way, that tidal wave seems to have had nothing to do with that underwater eruption. We just got a warning about an undersea earthquake in the eastern part of the Ogasawara Trench, and that’s most likely what caused it.”

  For some reason, this news provoked a fierce frown on Tadokoro’s face.

  4

  It was seven in the evening when the Hokuto arrived at its rendezvous point eighteen miles northeast of Torishima. At this latitude the setting sun had force enough to strike the sea with fierce intensity, but the water lay calm beneath the consuming rays, its surface slick and still except for a faint breeze from south-southeast.

  The Wadatsumi was lowered into the water by a derrick and drawn by towlines to the Weather Service ship the Dai to Maru #3, where it was lifted once more and secured to the rear deck.

  When the work was completed at dusk, the Hokuto sounded its departure siren at once and sailed off at full speed, bound for Torishima.

  Onodera, leaving to Yuki the overseeing of the Wadatsumi s securing, left the afterdeck of the Daito Maru and went inside. As he was walking down a passageway, the door to the ward room opened and Yukinaga put his head out.

  “Onodera,” he called. “Come in, we want you here, too.”

  When Onodera stepped through the door, he saw some ten or more men, scientists and research personnel, gathered around the wardroom table, which was spread with sea charts and other papers.

  “The Polynesian fishermen who were on the island when it sunk—where are they?” Tadokoro asked in a loud voice. “Are they on board?”

  “We’ve just sent for them,” answered an elderly man who seemed every inch a university professor. “Tomorrow they’ll be transferred to an American naval ship and taken home.”

  “It seems to me, gentlemen,” said Tadokoro, sizing up the group around the table, “that this is a lot of fuss to be making over an insignificant little island. Here we have the Weather Service, the Fisheries Bureau, the Technological Bureau, all going to the trouble of outfitting and dispatching a ship of this size. What was this island like anyway?”

  “Well, a weather-survey ship discovered it only five or six years ago,” answered a man from the Weather Service. “It was very small—only one mile from north to south and eight hundred yards from east to west. The highest elevation was about two hundred feet.”

  The door opened and a man of about fifty entered. His shoulders were incredibly broad, and the sun had turned his complexion swarthy. His arms, bared by his T-shirt were thick and powerful, and his body reeked of fish and engine oil. Behind him three tall men came hesitantly into the room, their skins coal black, their eyes staring wildly. Two of them wore what looked like ragged aloha shirts bleached by the sun, and the third, a torn undershirt darkened to a muddy brown. Their lips were thick, and the hair that covered their long, narrow heads spread out softly like the crest of a crane. The one who seemed to be the oldest had hair sprinkled with silver, and his face, chest, and upper arms were covered with blue tattooing.

  The squat man who had led them in took off his oil-stained work cap, gave a polite bow, and then stood there uncertain and ill at ease.

  “This is Mr. Yamamoto, whose fishing boat, the Suiten Mam 9, rescued the Polynesian fishermen,” the man from the Weather Service explained. “Since he can speak a bit of Polynesian, his captain was kind enough to send him to us with them.

  These men, who were on the island when it went under, are fishermen from Uragasu Island, he says.”

  “Let’s hear what you have to say,” said Tadokoro, indicating that they were to sit down. “I’m sure you’ve told the others already, but we would appreciate hearing it once again.”

  “Well,” said the fisherman, “the day before, our ship was somewhere north-northeast of Yamome Rock in the northeast part of the Ogasawara chain, and we were fishing. In the after noon a weather report came warning about a tropical storm, and we got ready to clear out fast, but our engine started to act up. We could make headway, as far as that went, but it was slow going. The storm wasn’t supposed to amount to much, but when you spun the wheel, it didn’t respond right. And so we were in a situation in which something had to be done, and so we started thinking about what island we could shelter at. We decided to make for this island without a name rather than try for Torishima. We reached it just about sunset. We dropped anchor about seven hundred yards off the north side, and every body but the engineers got some sleep. It was really a dark night, cloudy without a single star.”

  “What was the depth where you dropped anchor?” asked Yukinaga.

  “I think it was about fifty feet. The radio report we heard said that the storm had just grazed us and moved off to the east. So everybody felt good about that, and then we really went to sleep. Then ... well, let’s see. It started to get light before three o’clock, I know. Up by the bow there was this sudden jerking like the ship was being pulled down. I was awake since I’d got up to go to the toilet, and it was just as I was coming back. I heard the captain yell from up above: ‘What’s the matter?’ And then the watch yelled back: ‘Everything’s all right.’ And so I went back to sleep, and when I woke up the next time, it was after four o’clock. I heard shouting up on deck, and so I went up to have a look. Everybody was yelling about the island b
eing gone. The cloudiness had cleared up by now, and the surface of the ocean was fairly bright. And when you looked around, there wasn’t a thing to be seen, not a trace of the island, when, the night before, there it was looming up solid as could be right in front of your nose. The ship was floating there all by itself on the open sea as far as you could look in any direction. We were just drifting, with our engine off. The anchor line’s cut,’ somebody said. But in fact the anchor was hanging there, not touching the bottom. Then suddenly the watch yelled: ‘Somebody’s in the water.’ We looked and we saw some men swimming near the boat and yelling out something. We pulled them out right away, and it was this bunch here.”

  “I see,” said Tadokoro, taking a quick breath. “These men, then—they were on the island that night.”

  “So they say. They had their sails torn in a gale, and so they stopped off there at noon the day before.”

  “I suppose you’ve been asked this any number of times,” said Yukinaga, “but did you measure the water’s depth at the rescue point?”

  “Yes, sir. Right below the ship, it was two thousand feet. But, as we figured out later, we had been carried at least one and a half miles north from the spot where we had anchored. The captain said that it was the damnedest thing he’d ever heard of. And so, with the engine fixed, we got under way and headed south like a bat out of hell, taking depth soundings as we went. No more than fifteen minutes went by, before the mate yelled: ‘Captain! The water’s getting shallow all of a sudden. It’s 160 feet here.’ ‘You don’t often find anything so shallow in this area,’ the captain answered. ‘Come here,’ the mate said. Take a look at the depth chart. You see?’ Then the mate moved the compass bearing ten degrees to the west, and signaled for quarter-speed. Then he signaled for slow, and he kept a sharp watch as he moved the ship forward. The captain stood straight up in the prow—he had experience as a pilot, and with the sun finally out altogether, he kept his eyes fixed on the water in front of the ship, staring down into it. ‘Was there an island here or not?’ he muttered to himself. But then, all of a sudden, even I could see that there was a definite change in color coming over the water. ‘Watch it, it’s getting shallow,’ the captain yelled. ‘Captain, right now we’re over the island,’ the mate shouted. If we are, be careful,’ the captain yelled back, ‘it’s getting shallow fast.’ ‘We’re okay,’ said the mate, ‘we’ve already almost passed over the island. The deep part we went over just before must have been the inlet formed by the crater. One spot there was nearly three hundred feet deep. Right now we’re passing over the peak on the southern edge of the island. But even so, the depth is thirty feet. . . .’ ”

  Yamamoto closed his mouth, his story done. There was perfect silence in the wardroom.

  Finally the elderly man spoke, his manner quite composed. Onodera had by now recognized him as an eminent authority on oceanography. “And, gentlemen, while this nameless little island was going under, Torishima itself sank three feet.”

  “Well, let’s hear what these men have to say,” said Tadokoro, turning toward the three Polynesians. “Can you interpret well enough?”

  Yamamoto scratched his head and then set to work. Neither his Polynesian, however, nor the Japanese of the old man nor the English of the young one was of much help when it came to detailed questions. But rather the three natives, children of nature that they were, eloquently conveyed the circumstances of the sinking by skillful use of gestures and sounds.

  After spending the day in repairing their damaged craft, the Polynesians had gone to sleep in a cave in the cliff face that looked down upon the inlet. In the middle of the night, they had been awakened by the sound of waves, and they had found the sea already at the mouth of their cave.

  Had there been an earthquake? Had they heard any rumblings?

  They answered that they had been aware of nothing of the sort. And when someone asked how fast the island had sunk, the youngest of the three, by way of answer, bent over to touch the floor with his hands and then raised them steadily until they were level with his chest.

  “Like a submarine,” someone said.

  They had rushed up to the top of the cliff and thence to the island’s peak, the encroaching sea hard on their heels. The peak had soon been reduced to a bit of rock on the black surface of the sea, beset by hungry white waves. Soon this, too, had been overwhelmed, and the three of them had been swept away, whirlpools of all sizes swirling all around them. Stricken with terror, they had felt themselves dead already, but a large piece of driftwood had happened to come their way, and they had taken turns clinging to it until daybreak.

  “Well,” said Tadokoro after they had finished, “there have been accounts enough of islands sinking—but an island so large . . . and for it to sink so fast . . . Well, gentlemen, that’s not something you run into every day, now is it?”

  “And there’s more yet,” said the gray-haired oceanographer coolly. “The fishing boat dropped a buoy to mark the island’s highest point.”

  “You found it?”

  “We found it all right. And we definitely established that we were over the island. But by then the peak was three hundred feet below the surface. What do you think of that, Tadokoro? The entire ocean floor in this area, in a mere two and a half days, has sunk more than five hundred feet.”

  5

  At seven the next morning, after moving at a slow speed and taking repeated soundings, the Daito Maru stopped directly above the sunken island. The sea was peaceful. The tanker Tatsumi Maru, which belonged to Sea Floor Development, an chored some 300 meters from the Daito Maru. It functioned as a maintenance ship for the submarine, and now its decks were stirring with preparations. A derrick lifted the Wadatsumi from the deck and lowered it gently to the water. Onodera and Yuki went aboard, jumping onto the precariously rolling deck of the submarine. Onodera, going down through the passageway in side the conning tower, lowered himself into the gondola. Then, taking the directions that Yuki gave him through the open hatch, he guided the submarine over to the Tatsumi Maru.

  The red no-smoking flag flew from the Tatsumi Maru’s deck, and the smell of gasoline filled the air. The Wadatsumi, its white hull set off in striking fashion by four stripes, two red and two orange, slowly settled to its proper draft. Three dives were planned, each in a different spot. The first was to last two and a half hours or longer if advisable.

  The first passengers were Tadokoro and a young engineer from the Fisheries Bureau. After the two of them had preceded him down the hatch into the gondola, Onodera signaled with upraised thumb for the release of the mooring arm. Rattling loudly, the arm swung into action and pushed the Wadatsumi away from the side of the tanker. The submarine floated free upon the waves, its conning tower rocking from side to side.

  Onodera bent his index finger, thrust it between his teeth, and whistled sharply, to ward off ill luck. From the work deck of the Tatsumi Maru, Yuki gave an answering whistle. Onodera made his way down the long, narrow hatchway, thirteen feet in height, and lowered himself into the gondola, closing the hatch cover behind him.

  “Well, here we go,” said Onodera to the two men sitting tense behind him as he gave the VLF radio a routine final check. After Onodera had dimmed the interior lighting, he put his hand to the control stick and released the air from the front and rear flotation tanks. The water churned noisily about the Wadatsumi and rushed upward past its observation windows. As Yuki watched from the deck of the Tatsumi Maru, the white-and-orange conning tower of the Wadatsumi slipped silently away, sinking down into the waves as it trailed bubbles from its prow and stern.

  Onodera threw the power switch. The screw set in the stern at an upward slant began to turn over quietly.

  “We are making a power dive down close to the island. The depth will be two hundred feet. Please hold on.”

  Onodera pushed the control stick forward sharply and then cut it to the right. The Wadatsumi began its dive, spiraling downward, its bow set at an angle of about fifteen degrees. Tadokoro an
d the engineer took turns peering at the TV screen and looking out the window.

  “There it is,” muttered Tadokoro, his voice like a growl. “There it is, all right.”

  It was nine o’clock by now, but down here in the depths there was as yet little light. The water was clear, however, and, on the screen of the free-ranging TV camera, one could dimly see, looming up from the dark depths, the massive and still darker bulk of the undersea island. Its peak alone was faintly touched with light. Its sloping side faded from sight as it trailed down through a thousand fathoms of black water.

  “Point the nose right at it,” said Tadokoro, throwing the switch to activate the videotape recorder.

  Onodera cautiously, bit by bit, moved the control stick to straighten out the submarine’s course and direct it at the island. Gently he shifted into reverse, and the vessel’s forward motion stopped. He released a bit of the air used for stabilization, and after depressing the nose fifteen degrees, he gently edged the vessel into a dive. Like stage scenery rising into position, the crest of the nameless island loomed up from the bottom of the TV screen. The nose of the submarine was now about 300 yards distant from it. Professor Tadokoro pushed a button, and the compact videotape recorder began to spin with a faint whirring noise.

  Onodera turned on the ultrasonic-wave fathometer.

  “Turn it off whenever you think it’s time,” said Onodera, peering sharply at the trembling needle of the sonic depth-recorder and at the speed-of-descent needle. “We still have quite a distance remaining.”

  When the slope coming down from the crest was ten yards away, Onodera put the engine into fast reverse, and the Wadatsumi, its nose still tipped down at a fifteen-degree angle, darted backward like a killifish.