The Sound Of The Waves

by Yukio Mishima

  The window, which faced the wall of the next-door neighbor’s storehouse, slowly turned gray. Shinji looked up at the pouring rain, beating upon the eaves and spreading wetly across the windowpanes. Before, he had hated days when there was no fishing, days that robbed him both of the pleasure of working and of income, but now the prospect of such a day seemed the most wonderful of festival days to him. It was a festival made glorious, not with blue skies and flags waving from poles topped with golden balls, but with a storm, raging seas, and a wind that shrieked as it came tearing through the prostrate treetops.

  Finding it unbearable to wait, the boy leaped from bed and jerked on a pair of trousers and a black, crew-neck sweater full of holes.

  A moment later his mother awakened to see the dark shadow of a man against the window, faintly lit with dawn.

  “Hey! Who’s there?” she shouted.

  “Me.”

  “Oh … don’t scare me so! Today, in weather like this, you’re going fishing?”

  “The boats won’t be going out, but …”

  “Well, then, why not sleep a little longer? Why, I thought it was some stranger at the window!”

  The mother was not far wrong in the first thought she had had upon opening her eyes: her son did indeed seem a stranger this morning. Here he was, this Shinji who almost never opened his mouth, singing at the top of his voice and making a show of gymnastics by swinging from the door-lintel.

  Not knowing the reason for her son’s strange behavior and fearing he would pull the house down, his mother grumbled:

  “If it’s a storm outside, what else is it we’ve got right here inside the house?”

  Countless times Shinji went to peer up at the sooty clock on the wall. With a heart unaccustomed to doubting, he never wondered for an instant whether the girl would brave such a storm to keep their rendezvous. He knew nothing of that melancholy and all-too-effective way of passing time by magnifying and complicating his feelings, whether of happiness or uneasiness, through the exercise of the imagination.

  When he could no longer bear the thought of waiting, Shinji flung on a rubber raincoat and went down to meet the sea. It seemed to him that only the sea would be kind enough to answer his wordless conversation.

  Raging waves rose high above the breakwater, set up a tremendous roar, and then rushed on down. Because of the previous evening’s storm-warning, every last boat had been pulled up much higher on the beach than usual. When the giant waves receded, the surface of the water tilted steeply; it almost seemed as if the bottom of the sea inside the harbor-works would be exposed to view.

  Spray from the waves, mixed with the driving rain, struck Shinji full in the face. The sharp, fresh saltiness ran down his flushed cheeks, down the lines of his nose, and Shinji recalled the taste of Hatsue’s lips.

  The clouds were moving at a gallop, and even in the dark sky there was a restless fluctuation between light and dark. Once in a while, still deeper in the sky, Shinji caught glimpses of clouds charged with an opaque light, like promises of clear skies to come. But these would be effaced almost instantly.

  Shinji was so intent upon the sky that a wave came right up to where he stood and wet the toe-thongs of his wooden clogs. At his feet there lay a beautiful small pink shell, apparently just washed up by the same wave.

  He picked the shell up and examined it. It was perfectly formed, without even the slightest chip on its paper-thin edge. Deciding it would make a good present, he put it in his pocket.

  Immediately after lunch Shinji began getting ready to go out again. Seeing him going out into the storm for a second time, the mother paused in her dishwashing to stare fixedly after him. But she did not venture to ask where he was going: there was something about her son’s back that warned her to keep silent. How she regretted she had not had at least one daughter, who would always have been at home to help with the housework. …

  Men go out fishing. They board their coasting ships and carry cargo to all sorts of ports. Women, not destined for that wide world, cook rice, draw water, gather seaweed, and when summer comes dive into the water, down to the sea’s deep bottom. Even for a mother who was a veteran among diving women this twilight world of the sea’s bottom was the world of women. …

  All this she knew. The interior of a house dark even at noon, the somber pangs of childbirth, the gloom at the bottom of the sea—these were the series of interrelated worlds in which she lived her life.

  The mother remembered one of the women of the summer before last, a widow like herself, a frail woman still carrying a nursing child. The woman had come up from diving for abalone, and had suddenly fallen unconscious as she stood before the drying-fire. She had turned up the whites of her eyes, bitten her blue lips, and dropped to die ground. When her remains were cremated at twilight in the pine grove, the other diving women had been filled with such grief that they could not stand, but squatted on the ground, weeping.

  A strange story had been told about that incident, and some of the women had become afraid to dive any more. It was said that the dead woman had been punished for having seen a fearful something at the bottom of the sea, a something that humans are not meant to see.

  Shinji’s mother had scoffed at the story and had dived to greater and greater depths to bring up the biggest catches of the season. She had never been one to worry about unknown things. …

  Even such recollections as these could not dent her natural cheerfulness: she felt boastful about her own good health, and the storm outside quickened her feeling of well-being, just as it had her son’s.

  Finishing the dishwashing, she opened wide the skirts of her kimono and sat down with her bare legs stretched out in front of her, gazing at them earnestly in the dim light from the creaking windows. There was not a single wrinkle on the sunburnt, well-ripened thighs, their wonderfully rounded flesh all but gleaming with the color of amber.

  “Like this, I could still have four or five children more.” But at the thought her virtuous heart became filled with contrition.

  Quickly tidying her clothing, she bowed before her husband’s memorial tablet.

  The path the boy followed up to the lighthouse had been turned into a mountain torrent by the rain, washing away his footprints. The tops of the pine trees howled. His rubber boots made walking difficult and, as he carried no umbrella, he could feel the rain running down his close-cropped hair and into his collar. But he kept on climbing, his face to the storm. He was not defying the storm; instead, in exactly the same way that he felt a quiet happiness when surrounded by the quietness of nature, his feelings now were in complete concord with nature’s present fury.

  He looked down through the pine thicket at the sea, where countless whitecaps were tearing in. From time to time even the high rocks at the tip of the promontory were covered by the waves.

  Passing Woman’s Slope, Shinji could see the one-storied lighthouse residence kneeling in the storm, all its windows closed, its curtains drawn fast. He climbed on up the stone steps toward the lighthouse.

  There was no sign of a watchman within the fast-shut watchhouse. Inside the glass doors, which streamed with driven rain and rattled ceaselessly, there stood the telescope, turned blankly toward the closed windows. There were papers scattered from the desk by the drafts, a pipe, a regulation Coast Guard cap, the calendar of a steamship company showing a gaudy painting of a new ship, and on the same wall with the calendar a pair of drafting triangles hanging nonchalantly from a nail.

  Shinji arrived at the observation tower drenched to the skin. The storm was all the more fearful at such a deserted place. Here, almost at the summit of the island, with nothing to intervene between naked sky and earth, the storm could be seen reigning in supreme dominion.

  The ruined building, its windows gaping wide in three directions, gave not the slightest protection against the wind. Rather, it seemed as though the tower were inviting the tempest into its rooms, and there abandoning it to the revel. The immense view of the Pacific from the se
cond-floor windows was reduced in sweep by the rain clouds, but the way the waves, raging and ripping out their white linings on every hand, faded off into the encircling black clouds made the turbulent expanse seem instead to be boundless.

  The boy went back down the outside staircase and peered into the room on the ground floor where he had come before to get his mother’s firewood. It had apparently been used originally as a storehouse, and its windows were so tiny that only one of them had been broken. He saw that it offered ideal shelter. The mountain of pine needles that had been there before had apparently been carried away bale by bale until now only four or five bales remained in a far corner.

  “It’s like a jail,” Shinji thought, noticing the moldy odor.

  No sooner had he taken shelter from the storm than he was suddenly conscious of a wet-cold feeling. He sneezed hugely. Taking off his raincoat, he felt in the pockets of his trousers for the matches that life at sea had taught him always to carry with him.

  Before he found the matches his fingers touched the shell he had picked up on the beach that morning. He took it out now and held it up toward the light of a window. The pink shell was gleaming lustrously, as though it might have been still wet with sea water. Satisfied, the boy returned the shell to his pocket.

  He gathered dried pine needles and brushwood from a broken bale, heaped them on the cement floor, and with much difficulty succeeded in lighting one of the damp matches. Then for a time the room was completely filled with smoke, until at last the dismal smoldering broke into a tiny flame and began to flicker.

  The boy took off his sodden trousers and hung them near the fire to dry. Then he sat down before the fire and clasped his knees. Now there was nothing to do but wait. …

  Shinji waited. Without the slightest uneasiness he whiled away the time by poking his fingers into the holes in his black sweater, making them still larger.

  He became lost in the sensations of his body as it gradually became warm, and in the voice of the storm outside; he surrendered himself to the euphoria created by his trusting devotion itself. The fact that he was lacking in the ability to imagine all sorts of things that might keep the girl from coming did not trouble him in the least.

  And thus it was that he laid his head on his knees and fell asleep.

  When Shinji opened his eyes, the blazing fire was there before him, burning as brightly as ever, as though he had only closed his eyes the moment before. But a strange, indistinct shadow was standing across the fire from him. He wondered if he were dreaming.

  It was a naked girl who stood there, her head bent low, holding a white chemise to dry at the fire. Standing as she was, the chemise held down toward the fire with both hands, she was revealing the whole upper half of her body.

  When he realized that this was certainly no dream, the idea occurred to Shinji that, by using just a little cunning and pretending to be still asleep, he could watch her through half-closed eyes. And yet, her body was almost too beautiful to be watched without moving at all.

  Diving women are accustomed to drying their entire bodies at a fire upon coming out of the water. Hence Hatsue had apparently not given the matter a second thought upon doing so now. When she arrived at the meeting place, there the fire was, and there the boy was—fast asleep. So, making up her mind as quickly as a child, she evidently had decided to waste no time in drying her wet clothes and her wet body while the boy slept. In short, the idea that she was undressing in front of a man had never crossed her mind. She was simply undressing before a fire—because this happened to be the only fire there was, because she was wet.

  If Shinji had had more experience with women, as he looked at the naked Hatsue standing there across the fire, in the storm-encircled ruins, he would have seen unmistakably that hers was the body of a virgin. Her skin, far from fair-complexioned, had been constantly bathed in sea-water and stretched smooth; and there, upon the wide expanse of a chest that had served for many long dives, two small, firm breasts turned their faces slightly away from each other, as though abashed, and lifted up two rose-colored buds. Since Shinji, fearful of being discovered, had barely opened his eyes, the girl’s form remained a vague outline and, peered at through a fire that reached as high as the concrete ceiling, became almost indistinguishable from the wavering flames themselves.

  But then the boy happened to blink his eyes, and for an instant the shadow of his lashes, magnified by the firelight, moved across his cheeks.

  Quick as thought, the girl hid her breasts with the white chemise, not yet completely dry, and cried out:

  “Keep your eyes shut!”

  The honest boy immediately clamped his eyes tightly shut. Now that he thought about it, it had certainly been wrong of him to pretend to be still sleeping. … But then, was it his fault that he had waked up when he did? Taking courage from this just and fair reasoning, for a second time he opened wide his black, beautiful eyes.

  Completely at a loss as to what to do, the girl still had not even so much as started putting on her chemise. Again she cried out in a sharp, childlike voice:

  “Keep your eyes shut!”

  But the boy no longer made the slightest pretense at closing his eyes. Ever since he could remember, he had been used to seeing the women of this fishing village naked, but this was the first time he had ever seen the girl he loved naked. And yet he could not understand why, just because she was naked, a barrier should have risen between them, making difficult the everyday civilities, the matter-of-course familiarities. With the straightforwardness of youth, he rose to his feet.

  The boy and girl faced each other then, separated by the flames.

  The boy moved slightly to the right. The girl retreated a little to the right also. And there the fire was, between them, forever.

  “What are you running away for?”

  “Why, because I’m ashamed.”

  The boy did not say: “Then why don’t you put your clothes on?” If only for a little longer, he wanted to look at her. Then, feeling he must say something, he burst out with a childish question:

  “What would make you quit being ashamed?”

  To this the girl gave a truly naïve answer, though a startling one:

  “If you took your clothes off too, then I wouldn’t be ashamed.”

  Now Shinji was at a complete loss. But after an instant’s hesitation he began taking off his crew-neck sweater, saying not a word. Struck by the thought that Hatsue might run away while he was undressing, he kept a lookout that was scarcely broken even during the instant when the sweater passed over his face. Then his nimble hands had the sweater off and thrown aside, and there stood the naked figure of a young man—far handsomer than when dressed—wearing only a narrow loincloth, his thoughts turned so ardently upon the girl opposite him that for the moment his body had completely lost its sense of shame.

  “Now you’re not ashamed any more, are you?” He flung the question at her as though cross-examining a witness.

  Without realizing the enormity of what she was saying, the girl gave an amazing explanation:

  “Yes …”

  “Why?”

  “You—you still haven’t taken everything off.”

  Now the sense of shame returned, and in the firelight the boy’s body flushed crimson. He started to speak—and choked on the words. Then, drawing so near the fire that his fingertips were all but burned, and staring at the girl’s chemise, which the flames set swaying with shadows, Shinji finally managed to speak:

  “If—if you’ll take that away—I will too.”

  Hatsue broke into a spontaneous smile. But neither she nor Shinji had the slightest idea what the meaning of her smile might be.

  The white chemise in the girl’s hands had been half covering her body, from breast to thigh. Now she flung it away behind her.

  The boy saw her, and then, standing just as he was, like some piece of heroic sculpture, never taking his eyes from the girl’s, he untied his loincloth.

  At this moment the storm s
uddenly planted its feet wide and firmly outside the windows. All along, the wind and rain had been raging madly around the ruins with the same force as now, but in this instant the boy and girl realized the certainty of the storm’s existence, realized that directly beneath the high windows the wide Pacific was shaking with everlasting frenzy.

  The girl took a few steps backward. … There was no way out. The sooty concrete wall touched her back.

  “Hatsue!” the boy cried.

  “Jump across the fire to me. Come on! If you’ll jump across the fire to me …” The girl was breathing hard, but her voice came clearly, firmly.

  The naked boy did not hesitate an instant. He sprang from tiptoe and his body, shining in the flames, came flying at full speed into the fire. In the next instant he was directly in front of the girl. His chest lightly touched her breasts.

  “Firm softness—this is the firm softness that I imagined the other day under that red sweater,” he thought in a turmoil.

  They were in each other’s arms. The girl was the first to sink limply to the floor, pulling the boy after her.

  “Pine needles—they hurt,” the girl said.

  The boy reached out for the white chemise and tried to pull it under the girl’s body.

  She stopped him. Her arms were no longer embracing him. She drew her knees up, crushed the chemise into a ball in her hands, thrust it down below her waist, and exactly like a child who has just thrown cupped hands over an insect in the bushes, doggedly protected her body with it.