Monkey

It was toward the end of my term as a “half-fledged officer”—the name we used aboard a warship for a cadet—after I had completed a long-distance cruise. Ship A, on which I served, had been in Yokosuka for three days. At about three one afternoon, the familiar bugle call ordering the shore-leave party to muster rang out briskly. I believe it was the starboard watch’s turn to go ashore. No sooner had they all formed up on the upper deck, however, than the call for all hands sounded without warning. Plainly, something was wrong. Knowing nothing of the circumstances, we climbed through the hatchways asking one another, “What can have happened?”

When the whole company had assembled, the executive officer spoke. “There have lately been two or three cases of theft aboard this ship. In particular, when a watchmaker from town visited us yesterday, two silver-cased pocket watches were reported missing. We shall therefore conduct a search of every man’s person today, together with an inspection of all possessions.” That, at least, was the substance of what he said. The incident with the watchmaker was news to us, though we already knew that men had been robbed. One petty officer and two sailors, as I recall, had all lost money.

A bodily search naturally meant that everyone had to strip. Fortunately it was early October, and with the sun blazing on the red buoys floating in the harbor, the weather still felt like summer; the nakedness itself seems not to have caused much hardship. The men in real trouble were those who had expected to go straight ashore in search of amusement. Out of one pocket came an erotic print, out of another a contraceptive sheath—what a commotion it made. Blushing and squirming did them no good. Two or three, I believe, were struck by officers.

With a complement of some six hundred men, even a single inspection took time. If ever there was an extraordinary spectacle, this was it: six hundred human beings, every one of them naked, drawn up across the whole upper deck. The engineers stood out among them, their faces and wrists black with grime. Because suspicion had earlier fallen on their branch, they were in a fearsome temper, stripping off even their loincloths and daring the searchers to examine them anywhere they pleased.

While this uproar was beginning on the upper deck, inspections of personal effects commenced on the middle and lower decks. Cadets had been posted at every hatchway, so none of the men above could take so much as one step below. I happened to be assigned to the middle and lower decks and went about with the other cadets searching the men’s kit bags and small lockers. I had never done such a thing since joining the ship, and it proved more troublesome than expected: we had to feel behind beams and rummage in the backs of shelves where the kit bags were stowed. At last a fellow cadet named Makita discovered the stolen property. The watches and money were together in the hatbox of a signalman named Narashima. There was also a knife with a mother-of-pearl handle that a steward had reported missing.

The dismissal was therefore followed at once by the order, “Signalmen, muster!” The other men could hardly contain their delight. The engineers especially, having previously been under suspicion, were jubilant. But when the signalmen assembled, Narashima was not among them.

I was still inexperienced and knew nothing of such matters, but I later learned that aboard warships the stolen goods are sometimes found while the culprit never is. The culprit, of course, has killed himself. In eight or nine cases out of ten he hangs himself in a coal bunker; scarcely anyone goes overboard. Once, on my ship, a man had reportedly cut open his belly with a knife, though he was found before he could die and his life was saved.

Because such things happened, the officers visibly started when Narashima failed to appear. What remains clearest in my memory is the executive officer’s agitation. They said he had won a formidable reputation for valor in the last war, yet the color left his face and he fretted so openly that an observer could almost have laughed at him. Watching him, we exchanged looks of contempt. For a man forever lecturing us about spiritual discipline and the like, we thought, what a disgraceful way to lose his head.

On his orders a search of the whole ship began immediately. Surely I was not alone in feeling a kind of pleasurable excitement. It was the sensation of a gawker hurrying to see a fire. A policeman setting out to arrest a criminal must fear that the man may resist, but aboard a warship there was not the remotest chance of that. Between us and the sailors, moreover, the distinction of rank stood so absolute—more absolute than anyone who has not been in the service can understand—that it gave us tremendous confidence. Almost exultant, I ran down a hatchway.

Makita happened to be among the men coming below with me. He too was enjoying himself immensely. Tapping me on the shoulder from behind, he said,

“This reminds me of the time we caught the monkey.”

“Yes. Today’s monkey isn’t nearly so nimble, so we’ll be all right.”

“If you take him that lightly, he’ll get away.”

“Let him try. A monkey is still a monkey.”

Trading jokes like these, we went below.

The monkey in question had been given to our gunnery officer by someone in Brisbane when our long cruise took us to Australia. During the voyage, two days before we entered Wilhelmshaven, it vanished somewhere with the captain’s watch and set the entire ship in an uproar. The long voyage had left us starved for diversion, which no doubt helped. Led by the gunnery officer himself, every one of us went searching in work clothes, from the engine room at the bottom to the gun turrets above. It was pandemonium. The men had brought aboard all manner of other animals, gifts or purchases, so as we ran about, dogs tangled around our legs, pelicans began to cry, and parrots in cages hung from ropes beat their wings like lunatics. The ship looked like a circus tent on fire. In the midst of it all, the wretched monkey suddenly emerged onto the upper deck, still clutching the watch, and made straight for the mast. Two or three sailors were working there, so escape was impossible. One promptly seized it by the nape and captured it without difficulty. Only the watch crystal was broken; no serious harm had been done. At the gunnery officer’s suggestion the monkey was sentenced to two full days without food. Amusingly enough, before the sentence had expired the officer himself broke his own rule and gave it carrots and potatoes. “Even if it is only a monkey,” he said, “I feel sorry for it when I see it looking so dejected.” This is a digression, but the truth is that as we hunted for Narashima our feelings closely resembled those we had felt while chasing that monkey.

I was the first to reach the lower deck. As you may know, a lower deck is always unpleasantly dim. Here and there polished fittings and painted iron plates glimmered faintly in the gloom. I felt strangely stifled. I had taken only two or three steps toward the coal bunkers when I nearly cried out. The upper half of a human body protruded from the loading hatch of one bunker. The man must have put his feet through first and been on the point of lowering himself into the narrow opening. From where I stood, his face was hidden by the shoulders of his dark-blue sailor’s uniform and by his cap; the light was too poor to reveal more than the black shape of his torso. Yet instinct told me it was Narashima. If so, he was plainly entering the bunker to kill himself.

An extraordinary excitement seized me, a delightful exhilaration beyond words, as though all the blood in my body had begun to leap. Perhaps it was the feeling of a hunter waiting with his gun who suddenly sees his quarry approach. Almost beside myself, I sprang upon the man. Quicker than a hunting dog, I gripped both his shoulders and bore down on him from above.

“Narashima!”

My voice, neither quite a rebuke nor quite a curse, rose strangely high and trembled. Needless to say, the man was indeed Narashima, the culprit.

“…”

Narashima did not try to shake off my hands. With his upper body still outside the loading hatch, he quietly raised his eyes to my face. Yet “quietly” is not enough. It was the quiet of a man exerting all the strength he possessed merely in order to remain still: a desperate stillness with no reserve behind it, like a yardarm half snapped by the wind, struggling after the gale has passed to return to its former position on the scant strength left to it. The resistance I had unconsciously expected did not come. I felt something like disappointment, and at the same time an even more fretful anger. In silence I looked down at the face lifted with that terrible quietness.

Never again have I seen such a face. It was a face that might have made even the Devil weep at a glance. But since you did not see it, nothing I say can enable you to imagine it. I can tell you about the tears standing in his eyes. Perhaps you can also picture the twitching muscles at the corners of his mouth, as if they had suddenly ceased to obey his will. His sweaty, sickly complexion would by itself be easy enough to describe. But no novelist could capture the dreadful expression created by all those things together. I can assert as much with confidence even before you, who write novels. I felt that expression shatter something within my heart like a bolt of lightning. Such was the force with which the signalman’s face struck me.

“What do you think you are doing?”

I spoke mechanically. Yet the words “you” seemed somehow to point at me. “What do you think you are doing?” If I had been asked that question, what could I have replied? “I am trying to make this man a criminal.” Who could answer so with an easy conscience? Who could look at that face and do such a thing? Written down, these thoughts seem to occupy a long interval, but in fact this self-accusation flashed through me in scarcely an instant. At that very moment, faint yet piercing, the words reached my ear: “I am deeply ashamed.”

You, perhaps, would describe it by saying that the words sounded as though my own heart had spoken them to me. I only know that they struck my nerves like a needle. At that moment I wanted to bow my head beside Narashima, repeating, “I am deeply ashamed,” before something greater than either of us. Without knowing it, I released the shoulders I had been pinning down and stood dazed before the coal bunker, like a culprit who had himself been caught.

You can probably imagine most of what followed without my telling you. Narashima was confined in the brig for the rest of that day and sent the next morning to the naval prison at Uraga. I do not much care to speak of it, but there the prisoners were often made to perform a task called “carrying cannonballs.” From one stand to another about eight feet away, they had to move an iron ball weighing roughly forty pounds, then carry it back again, over and over. Few things can be as painful to a prisoner as that. In Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, which I once borrowed, I believe there is a passage saying that if a man is repeatedly forced to perform useless labor—pouring water from bucket A into bucket B, then pouring it back into bucket A—he will inevitably kill himself. The prisoners there performed just such work in reality, and it is almost surprising that none of them committed suicide. That was where the signalman I had seized was sent: a short, freckled, gentle fellow who looked timid by nature…

That evening, as I leaned with the other cadets against the handrail and watched dusk gather over the harbor, Makita came up beside me. “Quite a feat, taking the monkey alive,” he said teasingly. He probably imagined that I was secretly proud of myself.

“Narashima is a human being. He isn’t a monkey.”

I answered curtly and abruptly left the rail. The others must have wondered at it. Makita and I had been close friends since the Naval Academy and had never once quarreled.

Walking alone along the upper deck from stern to bow, I recalled with affection the executive officer’s agitation over whether Narashima was alive or dead. Even while we treated the signalman like a monkey, the executive officer alone had felt sympathy for him as one human being for another. Our stupidity in despising him was beyond words. Overcome by an odd embarrassment, I lowered my head. Then I retraced my steps through the gathering darkness, from bow to stern, placing my feet as softly as I could. I felt guilty at the thought of letting Narashima, confined in the brig, hear the vigorous ring of our boots.

They said Narashima had stolen because of a woman, as one might expect. I do not know the length of his sentence. At any rate, he must have spent at least several months shut away in darkness. A monkey may be pardoned its punishment, but a human being is not.

—August, Year Five—