By the Sea

I

...The rain was still falling. After we had finished lunch, we smoked one Shikishima cigarette after another down to ash and talked about our friends back in Tokyo.

The place where we were staying was a detached little building of two six-mat rooms, with a reed screen stretched out as a sunshade over a bare garden. Bare though the garden was, the seaside grass called kobo-mugi, so common along this coast, drooped here and there over the sand in sparse tufts. When we had first arrived, its ears had not yet fully emerged. Those that had were still mostly bright green. But now, before we knew it, every stalk had turned the same fox-brown color, each tip holding a bead of water.

“Well, I suppose I ought to do some work.”

M, still sprawling at full length, was wiping the lenses of his pince-nez on the stiffly starched sleeve of the inn’s summer yukata. By “work” he meant writing something for our magazine, as we had to do every month.

After M withdrew to the next room, I made a cushion my pillow and began reading The Tale of the Eight Dogs of Satomi. The place where I had left off the day before was where Shino, Genpachi, Kobungo, and the others were setting out to rescue Sosuke. “Then Terufumi of Amagasaki took from his breast the five packets of gold dust he had prepared. First he placed three packets upon his fan as they were... ‘Honored three dog warriors, each packet here contains thirty ryo. Though it is but a trifling sum, east and west alike, let it at least serve for your travel expenses on this journey. It is not a farewell gift from me in private, but a reward bestowed by Lord Satomi himself. Pray accept it without refusal.’”

Reading that passage, I remembered the payment for a manuscript that had arrived the day before yesterday: forty sen a page. Both M and I had graduated that July from the English department of the university. So the need to earn our living was pressing close before us. Little by little I forgot the Eight Dogs and began thinking about becoming a schoolteacher. But before long I must have fallen asleep, for I found myself having the following short dream.

...It seemed to be late at night. At any rate, I was lying alone in a room with the storm shutters closed. Then someone knocked on one of them and called to me, “Excuse me? Excuse me?” I knew there was a pond beyond that shutter. But I had no idea who it was that was calling me.

“Excuse me, excuse me, I have a favor to ask... ”

That was what the voice outside said. The moment I heard it, I thought, Ah, it’s K. K was a man a year behind us in the philosophy department, a hopeless fellow good for absolutely nothing. Still lying down, I shouted back in a rather loud voice.

“It’s no use putting on that pathetic tone. It’s about money again, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t about money. There’s just a woman I want to introduce to my friend... ”

That voice did not really sound like K’s. More than that, it seemed to belong to someone who was concerned about me. Suddenly excited, I sprang up to go and open the shutter. In fact, the garden had turned into a broad pond stretching all the way from the veranda. But there was no sign of K there, nor of anyone else.

For a while I gazed over the pond, where the moon was reflected. Seaweed drifting on it made it seem as if the tide had come in. Then I noticed small ripples glittering just before my eyes. As they came closer to my feet, the ripples gradually became a single crucian carp. In the clear water it moved its tail fin leisurely.

“Ah, so it was the carp that called to me.”

I thought this and felt reassured.

When I woke, the reed screen hanging from the eaves was already letting through the pale light of sun. Carrying my washbasin, I went down into the garden and around to the well in back to wash my face. But even after I had done so, the memory of the dream I had just seen clung to me strangely. “In other words, that crucian carp in the dream was the self beneath the threshold of consciousness.” Some such thought did occur to me.

II

...About an hour later, with towels wrapped around our heads, the two of us put on our bathing caps and the rented wooden clogs and went off to swim in the sea, about half a cho away. The path sloped gradually down past the garden and led straight to the beach.

“Do you think we’ll be able to swim?”

“It may be a little cold today.”

Avoiding clumps of kobo-mugi as we went, we talked like that. If you accidentally stepped into one of those wet patches of grass heavy with drops, the itch on your calves was unbearable. The weather was certainly too cool for going into the sea. And yet we still felt reluctant to leave the sea of Kazusa, or rather, reluctant to let the summer now drawing to its close slip away.

When we first arrived, of course, and even yesterday, there had still been seven or eight men and women trying the waves. But today there was not a soul in sight, and even the red flags marking the bathing area were gone. There was only the broad stretch of shore, with the waves toppling in one after another. Even the dressing shed enclosed in reed screens was empty. A brown dog there was chasing a swarm of tiny insects; but the moment it saw us, it ran off.

I took off only my clogs, but I felt no desire whatever to swim. M, however, before I knew it had left his yukata and his glasses in the dressing shed and was already splashing into the shallows, his bathing cap tied over with a kerchief.

“Hey, you’re really going in?”

“Well, we’ve come all this way, haven’t we?”

Standing in water up to his knees, M bent his waist a little and turned back to show me his sunburnt grin.

“You come in too.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Hmph. If Yanzen were here, you would.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Yanzen” was the name we had given a certain middle-school boy of fifteen or sixteen with whom, while staying here, we had come to the point of exchanging greetings. He was not particularly handsome. But there was in him a freshness like that of a young tree. About ten days earlier, one afternoon, we had come up from the sea and were lying full length on the hot sand. Then he too, still wet with salt water, came striding along dragging a bodyboard. But when he suddenly noticed us lying at his feet, he flashed a bright smile. After he had passed, M gave me a wry little smile and said, “That fellow smiled with a yanzen grace.” Since then, that had been his name between us.

“So you definitely won’t go in?”

“Definitely not.”

“You egoist!”

Getting himself wetter and wetter, M began to head farther out. I paid no attention to him and went over to a low mound of sand a little apart from the dressing shed. There I sat down with my rented clogs under me and tried to smoke a Shikishima. But the wind was stronger than I had expected, and it was hard to get the match to catch the cigarette.

“Hey!”

M, who must have already turned back, was standing in the shallows calling something to me. But unfortunately his voice would not reach my ears clearly through the unbroken sound of the waves.

“What is it?”

By the time I called this back, he had already put on his yukata and sat down beside me.

“Nothing much. A jellyfish got me.”

During the last few days jellyfish seemed suddenly to have multiplied in the sea. Only the morning before yesterday, I myself had been marked from the left shoulder down over the upper arm with a row of stings.

“Where?”

“Around the neck. The moment I thought I’d been hit, I looked around and saw several of them floating in the water.”

“That’s why I didn’t go in.”

“Serve you right. Anyway, sea bathing’s over now, isn’t it?”

As far as the eye could reach, the shore was dim with whitish sunlight, broken only by masses of washed-up seaweed. Now and then the shadow of a cloud raced across it. Smoking our Shikishimas, we sat for a while in silence, watching the waves come rolling in over that beach.

“Have you settled that teaching job yet?”

M asked this abruptly.

“Not yet. What about you?”

“Me? As for me...”

Just as M was about to say something more, we were startled by laughter and the racket of hurried footsteps. It was two girls about our age, wearing bathing suits and bathing caps. They passed almost insolently close by us and ran straight down to the water. Watching their retreating figures, we found ourselves smiling as if by prior agreement. One wore a vivid scarlet bathing suit, the other a striped black-and-yellow one like a tiger’s.

“So they still haven’t gone home either.”

Even in its joking tone, there was a trace of feeling in M’s voice.

“Well? Why not go in once more?”

“If that one were alone, I might. But with ‘Jingeji’ there too...”

As with “Yanzen,” we had bestowed a nickname on one of these girls, the one in the black-and-yellow bathing suit. We called her “Jingeji.” It meant that her features were somehow fleshy, sensual. Neither of us felt quite comfortable with her. As for the other girl, M was rather more interested in her. He would even insist, conveniently enough, “You take Jingeji. I’ll take the other one.”

“Go in for her sake, then.”

“What, as a display of sacrificial spirit? Besides, she’s perfectly aware she’s being watched.”

“It doesn’t matter if she is.”

“No, somehow it annoys me a little.”

Still holding hands, they had already entered the shallows. Again and again the waves rushed at their feet, throwing up spray. Each time, as if afraid of getting wet, they leaped lightly. In the loneliness of that late-summer beach, their play looked so bright as to seem almost out of place. It was really closer to the beauty of butterflies than to that of human beings. Listening to their laughter carried over by the wind, we watched them for a while as they moved farther and farther from shore.

“They’re pretty brave, really.”

“They can still stand there.”

“Now... no, yes, they’re still standing.”

By now they had let go of hands and were moving separately farther out. One of them, the girl in scarlet, was going on especially boldly. Then she stopped in water up to her breasts and, calling to the other girl, cried out in a high voice. Even at a distance her face, framed in that large bathing cap, was visibly alive with laughter.

“Jellyfish, maybe?”

“Could be.”

But in single file they kept going farther out.

When we saw that the girls had become little more than bathing caps on the water, we finally rose from the sand. Then, hardly talking at all, and no doubt hungry as well, we sauntered back toward the inn.

III

...At dusk the air was as cool as autumn. After supper, we went out to the beach once more, this time with a friend named H, who was home in this town for the holidays, and with N, the young master of the inn. The four of us had not gone out exactly to take a walk together. H was on his way to visit an uncle in S Village, and N was going to the same village to order a cage from a basketmaker for trapping his garden birds.

The path along the shore to S Village wound around the foot of a high sand hill and headed in the opposite direction from the bathing beach. The sea, of course, was hidden by the hill, and even the sound of the waves came only faintly. But the grass that had grown tall in scattered clumps, bearing dark heads of seed, trembled ceaselessly in the salt wind.

“The grass growing around here isn’t kobo-mugi, is it? N, what do you call this?”

I pulled up some grass at my feet and handed it to N, who was wearing only a light summer jacket and trousers.

“Well now, it’s not smartweed... what do they call it, I wonder? H would know. He’s a local, unlike me.”

We too had heard that N had come from Tokyo as an adopted son-in-law. More than that, we had heard that his wife, who belonged to the house, had run away the previous summer with another man.

“H knows much more about fish than I do, too.”

“Oh really? So H is such a scholar? I had imagined the only thing he knew was swordsmanship.”

Though M said this, H, dragging along a broken bow for a walking stick, merely grinned.

“M, you practice something too, don’t you?”

“Me? Swimming, more or less.”

After lighting his Bat cigarette, N told us about a Tokyo stockbroker who, while swimming the year before, had been stung by a stonefish. No matter what anyone said, the man stubbornly insisted that stonefish could not sting like that, and that it had definitely been a sea snake.

“Do sea snakes really exist?”

But the one who answered this was H alone, tall and wearing a bathing cap.

“Sea snakes? Sure, there are sea snakes in this sea too.”

“Even at this time of year?”

“Oh, you hardly ever see them.”

All four of us laughed. Then two men gathering nagarami came toward us. Nagarami are a kind of sea snail. They carried fish baskets slung down, and both of them wore red loincloths. Their bodies were strongly built. Yet glistening wet with seawater, they looked less pathetic than shabby. As N passed them, he answered their greeting and even called out, “Come to the bath later.”

“That sort of work really is miserable.”

I suddenly felt that I myself might all too easily end up as a gatherer of nagarami.

“Yes, it really is. They swim way out, you see, and then they have to dive to the bottom again and again.”

“And if they get caught in a current, nine times out of ten they’re done for.”

Brandishing his broken bow-stick, H told us all sorts of stories about the currents. Some of the larger ones, he said, ran a full league and a half offshore from the beach.

“By the way, H, when was it that they said the ghost of a nagarami diver appeared?”

“Last year... no, the autumn before.”

“Did it really appear?”

Before answering M, H had already let out a laugh.

“It wasn’t really a ghost. But the place where people said a ghost appeared was the graveyard in the shadow of that sea-smelling hill, and besides, when the dead body of that nagarami diver washed ashore it was covered with shrimp. So even if people didn’t quite believe it at first, it’s true they found it eerie. At last a man who’d once been a petty naval officer staked out the graveyard from early evening and finally caught sight of the ghost. When he seized it, it turned out to be nothing at all, just a woman from the Daruma teahouse in this town, a woman who had promised herself to that diver. Even so, for a while there was a huge uproar: people said a voice had called, flames were burning, and so on.”

“So she hadn’t come there intending to frighten people?”

“No. She just came every night around midnight to stand vacant-eyed in front of the diver’s grave.”

N’s story was a little comedy perfectly suited to the seaside. But no one laughed. Indeed, without knowing why, we all walked on in silence.

“Well, shall we turn back around here?”

When M said this, we had already come onto a deserted stretch of shore where even the wind had died. The broad sand was still bright enough that you could just make out the tracks of plovers here and there. But the sea alone, far as one could see, was darkening into blackness, leaving only a single line of foam along the distant curve of the shore.

“Well then, goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

After parting from H and N, we turned back over the chilled beach, not hurrying in the least. Besides the sound of the waves washing in, we could now and then hear the clear cry of evening cicadas. They were singing in a pine grove at least three cho away.

“Hey, M!”

At some point I had fallen five or six paces behind him.

“What is it?”

“Shall we head back to Tokyo too?”

“Yes. Going back wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

Then M, in a lighthearted mood, began to whistle “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

(August 7, 1925)