蟹工船 English

I

"Hey, we're bound straight for hell, we are!"

The two of them leaned against the deck rail, watching Hakodate, the town that seemed to stretch out on tiptoe like a snail, embracing the sea. ——

The fisherman spat out, together with his spittle, a cigarette smoked down to his very fingertips.

The cigarette went tumbling this way and that as though clowning, and dropped past the high side of the ship, grazing it as it fell.

He reeked of liquor from head to toe.

Steamers floated their broad red bellies wide upon the water; others, apparently in the midst of loading cargo, listed hard over to one side as though some hand beneath the sea had seized one sleeve and given it a hard wrench; there were fat yellow smokestacks, buoys big as great bells, launches threading busily between the ships like bedbugs, and waves — strewn with oil-smoke and bread crusts and rotting fruit, rippling coldly — like some strange woven cloth…….

Depending on the set of the wind, the smoke would bend low and skim the waves, sending across a stifling smell of coal.

The clatter of winches came rattling now and again, carried straight over the water.

Just ahead of this crab cannery ship, the Hakko Maru, a sailing ship with its paint peeling let down its anchor chain from what looked like a bull's nostril at the bow; on its deck two foreigners with sailor's pipes clenched in their teeth could be seen pacing the same stretch of planking back and forth, again and again, like clockwork dolls.

It looked to be a Russian ship.

It was surely, over Japan's "crab cannery ships,"

a watch-ship stationed there.

"I ain't got not one copper left. —— Damn it. Here."

So saying, he shifted his body closer.

Then he took hold of the other fisherman's hand and drew it in against his own waist.

He pressed it to the corduroy trouser pocket beneath his happi coat.

It seemed to be some small box.

The other said nothing, only looked at the fisherman's face.

"Heh-heh-heh-heh……"

he laughed, and said, "Hanafuda cards."

he said.

On the boat deck, the captain, got up like some "general,"

loafed about, smoking a cigarette.

The smoke he blew out bent sharply away from his nose and tore to pieces, scattering.

Dragging sandals with wood nailed to the soles, a crewman carrying a food bucket hurried in and out of the "forward"

cabins. ——

All the preparations were complete now; nothing remained but to put out to sea.

Peering down into the hatch where the deckhands stayed, one could see them, in the dim bunks down in the ship's hold, bobbing their faces in and out like birds poking their heads from a nest, scurrying about in a great commotion.

They were all boys of just fourteen or fifteen.

"Where are you from?"

"×× town."

They were all the same.

They were all children from the slums of Hakodate.

Such boys, on that account alone, formed a cluster of their own.

"What about that bunk over there?"

"Nanbu."

"And that one?"

"Akita."

Each group kept to its own separate bunk.

"Whereabouts in Akita?"

A boy with snot dribbling from his nose like pus, the rims of his eyes red and raw as though chafed,

"North Akita, that be."

he said.

"Farmer's boy?"

"Aye, that's so."

The air hung close and stifling, thick with some sour reek as of rotting fruit.

Since the room where dozens of tubs of pickles were kept lay right next door, a stench like "shit"

mingled in as well.

"Tonight I'll hug the old man and sleep with him, that I will."

—— The fisherman laughed on and on.

Off in a dim corner, a mother — evidently a day-laborer woman, dressed in a happi coat and leggings, a furoshiki cloth knotted in a triangle over her head — was peeling an apple and feeding it to her child, who lay sprawled on his belly on the bunk.

Watching the child eat, she herself ate the peel she had pared off in one long curling ribbon.

She chattered on about something, undoing and retying, again and again, the small cloth-wrapped bundle beside the child.

There were seven or eight such mothers.

The children who had come from the mainland with no one there to see them off would steal glances that way now and then.

A woman with her hair and body caked white with cement dust handed out caramels, two pieces or so apiece, to the children nearby, saying,

"Now you work nice and friendly with our Kenkichi, won't you."

she was saying.

Her hands were misshapen and huge, rough as a tree root.

Some wiped a child's nose for him, some rubbed a child's face with a hand towel, some murmured something low under their breath.

"Your boy there, he's got a sturdy build on him, hasn't he."

It was mother speaking to mother.

"Mm, well."

"Mine's terrible weak, though. I keep wondering what's to be done, but what with one thing and another……"

"That's the way of it everywhere, isn't it."

—— When the two fishermen poked their faces up from the hatch onto the deck, they felt relief.

Sullenly, and all at once fallen silent, they made their way back — further toward the bow than the deckhands' hole — to their own trapezoid-shaped "nest"

and returned to it.

Every time the anchor was raised or lowered, everyone had to leap up and collide against one another, as though flung about inside a concrete mixer.

In the dimness the fishermen lay sprawled about like pigs, and the place stank exactly like a pigsty, a stench that could bring the sickness straight up into one's throat.

"Stinks. God, it stinks."

"'Course it does, it's us, ain't it. Bound to stink like somethin' half-rotten, state we're in."

A fisherman with a head red and round as a millstone poured sake straight from the big bottle into a chipped teacup, and drank it down, munching noisily on dried squid.

Beside him another lay flopped on his back, eating an apple, looking over a pulp storytelling magazine with a cover worn to tatters.

Four of them had been drinking in a circle, and now one more, who had not yet had his fill, pushed his way in among them.

"……That's how it is. Four whole months out on the water. Figured a fella couldn't hardly stand it without this……"

The one with the sturdy build said this, narrowing his eyes, licking his thick lower lip now and then out of habit.

"So, here's what's in my purse."

He held up, at eye level, a flat, shriveled coin purse limp as a dried persimmon, and gave it a shake.

"That whore — tiny little thing she was — but damn if she weren't good at it!"

"Hey, quit it, quit it!"

"Aye, aye, go on then."

The other laughed, heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.

"Look there, see that, ain't that somethin'. Eh?"

He fixed his drunken eyes on the bunk just opposite, and jerked his chin, "Eh!"

one of them said.

A fisherman was just then handing money over to his wife.

"Look, look, see!"

On top of a small box they had laid out crumpled bills and silver coins, and the two of them were counting it together.

The man wet his pencil with his tongue again and again, writing something into a small notebook.

"Look at that. Eh!"

"I got a wife and kids too, ya know."

The fisherman who had been talking about the whore said this suddenly, as though angered.

A little way off, on another bunk, a young fisherman with a face puffy and pale-blue from a hangover, his forelock grown out long,

"I'd sworn to myself this time I weren't comin' back on the boat, but well——"

he was saying in a loud voice.

"Got dragged around by the labor broker till I hadn't a cent left. —— And now it's another long stretch of near dyin' for me."

A man who seemed to come from the same place, his back turned this way, was murmuring something to him in reply.

A man appeared at the hatchway, his bow legs showing first, shouldering a big, old-fashioned, lumpy drawstring bag, and climbed down the ladder.

He stood on the floor looking around uncertainly, but when he spotted an empty spot, climbed up onto a bunk.

"Afternoon."

he said, bowing his head to the man beside him.

His face was black and greasy, as though stained by something.

"Reckon you'll let me join in with you all?"

It was learned later that this man, right up until coming aboard the ship, had spent seven years as a miner at the Yubari coal pit.

But after the last gas explosion, in which he had narrowly escaped dying — as had happened to him several times before — a sudden terror of mining had come over him, and he had quit the mountain.

At the time of the explosion, he had been working inside that same pit, pushing a coal cart.

It happened just as he was pushing a cart loaded full of coal toward another man's work station.

He thought a hundred flashes of magnesium had gone off before his eyes in that instant.

And in that same instant, not a five-hundredth of a second off, he thought his own body had gone flying off somewhere like a scrap of paper.

Any number of coal carts, blown by the pressure of the gas, went hurtling past before his eyes, lighter than empty matchboxes.

After that he knew nothing more.

How much time had passed he could not say, but his eyes opened at the sound of his own groaning.

Foremen and workers were building a wall across the tunnel to keep the explosion from spreading further.

At that moment, from behind the wall, he heard — the voice of a miner who could have been saved, had someone saved him, a voice that once heard seemed to sew itself into the heart, never to be forgotten, crying out for help — "clearly"

he heard it. ——

He suddenly leapt to his feet, and as though gone mad,

"No good! No good!"

he cried, plunging in among them all, shouting it out.

(He himself had helped build that very wall once before.

That time it had come to nothing.)

"You damn fool! Let the fire spread here and it's a dead loss!"

But could he not tell — the voice was growing fainter and fainter!

Seized by some thought, he flailed his arms and screamed, and went tearing wildly down the tunnel.

He stumbled again and again, cracking his forehead against the pit timbers.

His whole body was smeared with mud and blood.

Partway along he tripped on a cart-track tie and was flung down onto the rails as if thrown in a wrestling hold, and lost consciousness once more.

The young fisherman who had been listening to this,

"Well, it ain't so different here, neither……"

he said.

He fixed on the fisherman that peculiar miner's stare — dazzled-looking, sallow, lusterless — and said nothing more.

Among the "farmer-fishermen" who had come from Akita, Aomori, and Iwate,

there were some sitting cross-legged with their arms thrust crosswise between their knees, glowering in silence, and others hugging their knees and leaning against a post, listening blankly while the rest drank and chattered on as they pleased. ——

They were men who had gone out to the fields while it was still dark each morning, and still could not eat by it, and so had been driven off the land.

Leaving only the eldest son behind — and even then there was not enough to eat — the daughters went off to be factory girls, and the second and third sons too had to go somewhere else to work.

Like beans being picked over in a pot, the surplus people were flung one after another off the land, and came flowing out into the cities.

All of them thought of "saving up money"

and going back home to the mainland.

But once they had worked and set foot on land again, they would flap about helplessly in Hakodate or Otaru, like a little bird caught on birdlime.

And so, with utter ease, they were stripped stark naked — exactly as "the day they were born"

— and tossed back out.

They could no longer go home to the mainland.

They, in order to "winter over"

in snowbound Hokkaido with no kin to rely on, "had to sell" their own bodies for next to nothing

—— and no matter how many times they went through it, like some dim-witted child, the next year they would, quite unconcerned (?)

go and do the very same thing all over again.

Women peddlers carrying boxes of sweets on their backs, medicine sellers, and merchants with daily goods came aboard.

In the space partitioned off in the middle like some isolated island, each spread out their wares.

Everyone leaned out from the bunks above and below, on every side, teasing them and cracking jokes.

"Got sweets, eh, missy?"

"Ah, cheeky thing!"

The peddler woman let out a startled shriek and leapt up.

"Puttin' his hand on a body's backside — nasty man, you!"

The man, cheeks still working over a mouthful of sweets, grew flustered at everyone's eyes turning on him, and burst out laughing.

"This gal's a cute one, ain't she."

A drunk, coming back from the toilet with one hand braced against the wall and his footing unsteady, poked at the woman's cheek — plump and flushed dark red — as he passed.

"What d'you think you're doing?"

"Don't get mad now. —— I'll hold this gal and sleep with her, I will."

So saying, he struck a clowning pose at the woman.

Everyone laughed.

"Hey, buns! Buns!"

Someone way off in the corner shouted it out loudly.

"Ye-es……"

She answered in a clear, carrying woman's voice, a rarity in a place like this.

"How much are they?"

"How much? If you had two of 'em you'd be a freak. —— Buns, buns!"

—— Suddenly a burst of laughter went up.

"Last time, this fella Takeda, he dragged that peddler woman off by force to some spot with nobody around, so they say. And here's the funny part — no matter what he tried, it weren't no good, he says……"

It was a drunken young man speaking.

"……She had drawers on, see. Takeda went and ripped 'em clean off with all his might, but there she was, still wearin' more underneath — three layers of 'em, they say……"

The man hunched his neck down and burst out laughing.

During the winter this man worked as a hand at a rubber-shoe factory.

When spring came and the work dried up, he went off to Kamchatka to earn wages.

Both jobs were "seasonal labor"

(most work in Hokkaido was), and once night work began in earnest, it went on without a break.

"If I can live even three more years, I'll be grateful."

he used to say.

His skin had the dead color of crude, unrefined rubber.

Among the fishermen there were some who had once been sold as "octopuses"

to the reclamation camps deep in the Hokkaido interior or to the labor barracks of the railway construction gangs, and "drifters"

who had been starved out of one place after another, and others for whom, so long as they had liquor, nothing else mattered at all.

Mixed in among them too were honest farmers, picked out by some decent village headman from around Aomori, "who knew nothing"

"like a tree root"

honest, plain — such folk were mixed in among the rest. ——

And gathering together this whole hodgepodge of scattered, disconnected men was, for those who employed them, more convenient than anything else could be.

(The Hakodate labor union had been desperately trying to place organizers among the fishermen bound for Kamchatka on the crab cannery ships,

keeping in contact with the unions of Aomori and Akita as well. ——

This was the thing they feared more than anything.)

A steward in a stiffly starched white jacket, short in the skirt, hurried back and forth to the "stern"

salon, carrying beer, fruit, and glasses of foreign liquor.

In the salon were "the fearsome men of the Company, the captain, the superintendent, the top brass of the destroyer charged with guarding Kamchatka, the chief of the water police, and the briefcase-men of the seamen's union"

— all of them there.

"Damn it, the way they knock it back, there's no end to it."

—— The steward was fuming, cheeks puffed with resentment.

In the fishermen's "hole,"

a light came on, red as a rugosa rose.

With cigarette smoke and the fug of bodies the air hung thick and foul, and the whole hole was nothing but a "shit-hole"

through and through.

The men sprawled about in their partitioned bunks looked as though they were squirming like maggots. ——

Led by the fishing superintendent, the captain, the factory representative, and the deckhands' boss climbed down through the hatch and came in.

The captain, worried about his mustache with its upturned tips, kept smoothing his upper lip with a handkerchief the whole while.

In the passageway lay discarded apple and banana peels, sodden leggings, straw sandals, and thin rice-paper wrappers crusted with grains of rice.

It was a stagnant, muddy ditch, its flow gone still.

The superintendent gave it a sidelong glance and spat, without the least reserve. ——

All of them, it seemed, had been drinking, their faces flushed red.

"Let me say a word here."

The superintendent, built stout as a construction-gang foreman, set one foot up on the edge of a bunk partition, worked a toothpick around in his mouth, now and then flicking out bits caught between his teeth with a little spitting sound, and began.

"Some of you probably know this already, but needless to say, this crab-cannery enterprise isn't to be seen as some mere money-making job for one company — it's a great matter of international standing. It's a question of who's greater — us, the people of the Japanese Empire — or the Ruskies. It's a one-on-one fight to the finish. And if — if, mind you, though there's no way in hell it should ever come to that — if we should lose, then any Japanese man with balls hanging between his legs ought to cut his own belly open and pitch himself into the Kamchatka sea. Small as we are in body, there's no way we're going to lose to those dim-witted Ruskies."

"What's more, our fishery here in Kamchatka isn't just canned crab — together with salmon and trout, it holds, internationally speaking, a position of excellence no other country can match, and it carries a weighty mission besides, for our nation's own choked-up population problem and food problem back home. Talking like this, I don't suppose the likes of you can follow it, but in any case, you're to understand that for the sake of the great mission of the Japanese Empire, we're cutting through the rough seas of the north with our very lives on the line. That's precisely why, once we're out there, the Empire's warships stand watch over us the whole time. ……Now if there's anyone among you who's caught the fashionable habit of aping the Ruskies and goes stirring up some outrageous business, that man is nothing less than a traitor selling out the Japanese Empire. There's no reason there should be any such man here, but I want you to bear this well in mind all the same……"

The superintendent sneezed several times, the drink wearing off in him.

The drunken destroyer bigwig went down the gangway with the jerky, stiff-jointed gait of a spring-loaded doll, to board the launch that had been kept waiting.

Sailors held him up from above and below, handling the captain like stones stuffed in a canvas sack, and could barely manage him at all.

For the captain, flailing his arms, planting his feet, bawling out whatever came into his head, the sailors again and again had "spittle"

blown straight into their faces.

"Out front he goes on about this and that, all high and mighty, and look at the state of him now."

Once they had gotten the captain aboard, one of the sailors, unhitching the rope from the gangway landing, glanced at him and said in a low voice,

"Should we just do him in?……"

The two of them caught their breath for a moment — but then burst out laughing together.

II

The Shukutsu lighthouse, flashing bright each time it turned, could be seen far off to the right, out of a fog gray as the sea itself all around.

As the beam swept round to the far side, it drew out, mysteriously, a long silver-white shaft of light reaching for miles across the sea in a single sweeping stroke.

Somewhere off Rumoi a thin, soaking rain began to fall.

The fishermen and deckhands, their hands numbed stiff as crab claws, had to keep working while now and then thrusting them crosswise into their bosoms, or cupping both hands round their mouths and breathing a warm "haah" into them. ——

Rain fine as the sticky threads of natto fell without ceasing into a sea the same murky color as itself.

But as they drew nearer to Wakkanai, the rain began falling in fatter drops, and the broad face of the sea began to swell in long rollers like a flag rippling out, which then in turn grew choppy and quick. ——

When the wind struck the mast it moaned with an ominous sound.

Somewhere in the ship, as though its rivets had all come loose, a creaking groan sounded again and again.

By the time they entered the Soya Strait, this ship of nearly three thousand tons had begun to lurch and jerk as though seized by a fit of hiccups.

Some tremendous force would seize it and heave it upward.

For an instant the ship hung suspended in midair. ——

then sank back down with a groan to where it had been.

Each time, they felt that ticklish, unpleasant sensation, like the moment an elevator drops, when one feels almost as if one's water might let go.

The deckhands went limp and sallow, only their eyes seeming to sharpen with seasickness, retching over and over.

Through the round porthole, clouded over with sea spray, the hard line of Sakhalin's snow-capped mountain range flickered into view now and again.

But it was at once hidden again outside the glass by waves swelling up thick and heavy like icebergs of the Alps.

A cold, deep valley would form.

As it came rushing nearer before one's eyes, it slammed hard against the window, broke apart, and foamed up with a great rushing hiss.

Then it slid on backward, backward, past the window, streaming by like a panorama.

Now and then the ship rocked its whole body, the way a child does.

There came the sound of things falling from the bunks, a groaning creak of something bending, the dull thud of waves slamming against the ship's flank. ——

All the while, from the engine room the sound of the engine came through, carried directly along all manner of fittings with a faint tremor, pounding dot, dot, dot……

Now and then, riding up on the back of a wave, the screw would spin free in the air, its blades slapping down against the surface of the water.

The wind only grew stronger and stronger.

The two masts bent like fishing rods and began to wail, whistling in the wind.

The waves came crashing over, as carelessly as a man stepping over a log, rampaging across the ship from one side to the other like a gang of thugs, and then drained away again.

At that instant every outlet became a rushing waterfall.

There were times when, on the terrifyingly vast slope of a mountain that had swelled up before their eyes, the ship perched sideways, small as a toy boat.

Then, as though pitching forward, the ship would come crashing down, thud, thud, into the valley below.

It would sink now, surely!

But down in the trough another wave would at once come surging up and slam bodily into the ship's flank with a heavy thud.

Once out into the Sea of Okhotsk, the color of the water turned unmistakably more gray.

A shivering cold pierced straight through their clothes, and the deckhands all worked on with their lips gone the color of dried bonito.

The colder it grew, the harder a fine, dry snow like salt came howling and driving down.

It stung like tiny shards of glass into the faces and hands of the deckhands and fishermen crawling flat across the deck as they worked.

After each wave swept across the deck it froze at once, turning slick and glassy.

They had to string ropes from deck to deck and each man dangle from them like a baby's diaper hung out to dry, working as best they could. ——

The superintendent, gripping the club used for killing salmon, bellowed and cursed at the top of his voice.

The other crab cannery ships that had set sail from Hakodate at the same time had, before anyone noticed, scattered far apart.

Even so, at times, when the ship had ridden all the way up onto the very peak of an Alp-like wave, one could see far off, tossed and tossed about, only the two masts of another ship, looking like the waving arms of a drowning man.

Smoke no thicker than that of a cigarette went streaming and tearing away, skimming the waves……

From amid the roar of the waves and the shrieking wind, a whistle — surely blown by that same ship — could be heard now and then, hyuu, hyuu, at intervals.

But in the next instant, as though gasping for breath itself, this ship too went tumbling down into a trough.

The crab cannery ship carried eight Kawasaki boats aboard.

The crew and fishermen, to keep the boats from being torn away by waves that bared their white teeth like thousands of sharks, had to lash them down, and in doing so wager their own lives "cheap as anything"

— for next to nothing. ——

"What's it matter if one or two of you go? Just let one Kawasaki boat get taken, and see how that goes over."

—— The superintendent said this plainly, in Japanese.

The Kamchatka sea seemed to have been lying in wait, as if to say, so you dared to come, did you.

It came at them snarling and snapping, like a lion starved half to madness.

The ship was weaker even than a rabbit.

The blizzard filling the whole sky, depending on the wind, looked like some vast white flag rippling out.

Night was drawing near.

But the storm showed no sign of letting up.

When the work was done, they filed one by one into the "shit-hole"

and crawled inside.

Their hands and feet, cold as daikon radishes, hung numb and senseless on their bodies.

Once they had crawled, like silkworms, each into his own bunk, not one of them spoke a single word.

They lay flat on their sides, gripping the iron support posts.

The ship kept flinging its whole body about wildly, like a horse trying to shake off a horsefly biting into its back.

The fishermen let their eyes wander aimlessly, up to the ceiling where the white paint had gone smoky yellow, then to the blue-black porthole, all but sunk beneath the sea……among them some sat vacant-eyed, mouths hanging half open like fools.

None of them was thinking anything at all.

A vague, uneasy awareness held them all in a sullen silence.

One tilted his face back and swigged whiskey straight from the bottle.

In the murky reddish-yellow, dim electric light, the edge of the bottle flashed for a moment. ——

With a clatter, clatter, the empty whiskey bottle struck against two or three places in a zigzag path and was hurled with all his force from the bunk out into the passage.

They all turned only their heads that way, following the bottle with their eyes. ——

Someone in a corner let out an angry voice.

Broken up by the storm, it came through only in fragments.

"We're leavin' Japan behind, that's what."

He wiped the porthole with his elbow.

The stove in the "shit-hole"

did nothing but smolder and smoke.

As though mistaken for salmon or trout and tossed into a "cold-storage room,"

the men "living"

inside it shivered and shook, teeth chattering.

Waves came striding in great steps, sweeping over the canvas-covered hatch with a rushing hiss.

Each time, it set off a terrific echo against the iron walls of the "shit-hole,"

which was like the inside of a drum.

Now and then, right beside where a fisherman lay, a heavy thud would land, as though shoved hard by some strong man's shoulder. ——

By now the ship was exactly like a whale in its death throes, writhing its body among the raging billows.

"Chow!"

The cook thrust the top half of his body out through the doorway and shouted, cupping both hands round his mouth.

"No soup, on account of the storm."

"What'd you say?"

"Rotten salt salmon!"

He pulled his face back in.

One by one, each in his own time, they hauled themselves up.

When it came to eating, they all had the same dogged tenacity as prisoners.

They wolfed it down.

Setting the plate of salt salmon between their crossed legs, steam still rising off it, they crammed their mouths full of the loose, hot rice, working it busily around from side to side on their tongues.

"For the first time"

in bringing something hot up near their noses, their runny noses kept dripping steadily, threatening any moment to plop right down into the rice.

As they were eating, the superintendent came in.

"Quit stuffin' yourselves like a pack of beggars, wolfin' it down. On a day you can't hardly do a lick of work, you think I'll let you eat your fill?"

Glaring up and down across the bunks, he went out, only his left shoulder swinging forward with each step.

"Just what right's that bastard got to say a thing like that, anyway?"

—— the ex-student, gaunt and hollowed out from seasickness and overwork, muttered.

"Asakawa, they call him — 'Shallow of the crab-cannery' or 'crab-cannery's Shallow,' eh."

"His Majesty the Emperor's up there above the clouds, so what's he to do with the likes of us — but when it comes to Shallow, now, that's a different story, no gettin' round him."

From another direction,

"Quit bein' so damn stingy. What's it to him, a bowl or two of rice! Sock him one!"

It was a voice with lips pursed tight.

"Big talk, big talk. If you can say that to Shallow's face, now that'd really be somethin'!"

They all ended up laughing, helplessly, even with their anger still standing.

Well into the night, the superintendent, wearing an oilskin raincoat, came in among where the fishermen lay sleeping.

Bracing himself against the rocking of the ship, gripping the frame of the bunks, he went about thrusting his lantern in close over each fisherman in turn.

He turned their heads, lolling about like pumpkins, roughly this way and that without the least hesitation, shining the lantern on them to look.

Not one of them would have woken even if trodden on.

When he had finished shining the light over all of them, he stopped a moment and clicked his tongue. ——

He seemed to be thinking, now what.

But he soon set off again, toward the cook's quarters next.

Each time the bluish light of the lantern, fanning wide, swayed, part of the cluttered bunks, tall-shafted rubber rain boots, oilskin coats and happi jackets hung on the posts, and bits of wicker trunks flashed briefly into light and vanished again. ——

The light trembled and pooled for an instant at his feet, and then cast, on the cook's door, a round ring of light like a magic-lantern slide. ——

By the next morning it was learned that one of the deckhands had gone missing.

Everyone, remembering the "reckless work"

of the day before, thought, "He must've been swept off by a wave."

That's what they thought.

It left them all with a bad feeling.

But the fishermen were driven about from before dawn, and so had no chance to talk it over among themselves.

"Who in hell would jump into water cold as this on his own say-so! He's hidin' somewhere, that's what. Once I find him, damn it, I'll beat him black and blue!"

The superintendent went about searching the ship, spinning his club round and round like some toy.

The storm had already passed its peak.

Even so, whenever the ship plunged into a wave that had swelled up ahead of it, over the "forward"

deck the water came pouring across as effortlessly as a man stepping over his own threshold.

As though it had taken wounds all over its body from a full day and night of struggle, the ship went on making, somewhere in itself, a lame, limping sound.

Clouds thin as smoke went blowing past overhead, close enough it seemed one might touch them, striking against the mast and swerving off at sharp angles.

A chilly rain had still not let up.

All around, as the waves came swelling up thick, one could see clearly the streaks of rain shooting down into the sea.

It was more uncanny even than being caught in the rain lost deep in a primeval forest.

The hemp ropes had frozen stiff and brittle, so that gripping them felt like gripping an iron pipe.

The ex-student, watching his footing on the slippery deck, made his way across gripping the rope, and met the steward coming up, leaping two steps of the gangway at a time on one foot.

"Hey, a second."

The steward pulled him into a corner sheltered from the wind.

"There's somethin' funny going on, you know."

he said, and told him about it.

—— It had been around two o'clock that morning.

Waves had leapt up as high as the boat deck, and at intervals came sluicing down like a waterfall, splashing and rushing.

In the darkness of night, the waves baring their teeth flashed now and then a pale bluish white.

Because of the storm, no one had slept.

It was just then.

The wireless operator came rushing breathlessly into the captain's cabin.

"Captain, it's terrible! An S.O.S.!"

"An S.O.S.? —— What ship?!"

"The Chichibu Maru. She was running alongside us."

"That old rust-bucket!"

—— Asakawa, still in his oilskin raincoat, sat sprawled in a chair in the corner, legs spread wide.

He jiggled the tip of one shoe back and forth, mockingly, and laughed.

"Though come to think of it, every ship out here's a rust-bucket."

"They say there's not a moment to lose."

"Yes, that's serious."

The captain, to hurry up to the wheelhouse, reached for the door without even bothering to dress properly.

But before he could open it —

Asakawa suddenly seized him by the right shoulder.

"Who gave the order to go off on some needless detour?"

Who gave the order?

"The captain"

— wasn't that himself? ——

But taken by surprise, the captain stood there more blankly dumbfounded than a fence post.

Yet he recovered his standing at once.

"As the captain, I —"

"As the captain, is it—aa?!"

The superintendent, planting himself squarely in front of the captain, cut him down with a mocking, rising sneer in his voice.

"Hey, whose ship is this in the first place, anyway? The Company's chartered it, payin' good money for it. The only ones with any say here are Suda-san, the company representative, and me. You go around actin' big just because they call you captain, but you ain't worth so much as a scrap of shit-house paper. You get that? —— Get mixed up in a business like that and it's a whole week shot to hell. No joking about it. Let it run even one day late! And besides, that Chichibu Maru's insured for way more than she's worth. She's a rust-bucket — if she sinks, we come out ahead."

The steward thought, "right now"

a terrible fight's about to break out!

he thought.

There was no way it could end at just that.

But (!)

Yet there stood the captain, frozen stiff, as though his throat had been stuffed with cotton wool.

The steward had never once, in a moment like this, seen the captain behave so.

The captain's word — not carrying weight?

Nonsense, such a thing couldn't be!

But it was happening, right there. ——

The steward simply could not understand it.

"Bringin' out some human kindness that don't even suit you — you think that's how you win a great sumo bout between nations?!"

He twisted his lips hard and spat.

In the wireless room, the receiver kept sending off small, pale blue sparks now and then, without pause.

In any case, to see how things were unfolding, everyone went to the wireless room.

"See, it's sending like this. —— It's getting faster and faster, isn't it."

The operator explained things to the captain and superintendent, who peered in over his shoulder. ——

Everyone, eyes stitched fast to the operator's fingertips as they moved deftly here and there over the switches and buttons of the various instruments, stood stock-still without meaning to, tension gathering in their shoulders and jaws.

With every roll of the ship, the electric light fixed to the wall like some swelling boil brightened and dimmed by turns.

The sound of waves slamming hard against the ship's flank, and the ominous whistle blowing without cease, could be heard through the iron door, now distant, now suddenly close overhead, shifting with the wind.

Zzzt——, zzzzt—— sparks scattered, trailing a long tail of sound.

And then, right there, the sound stopped dead.

In that instant it hit every one of them square in the chest.

The operator, flustered, twisted switches and worked the machine frantically.

But that was all.

It sent no more.

He twisted his body around, swiveling his chair full around.

"She's gone down!……"

pulling the headset off, he said in a low voice.

"Crew of four hundred twenty-five men. This is the end. No hope of rescue. S.O.S., S.O.S. — that repeated two or three times, and then it just cut off."

Hearing this, the captain thrust a hand between his neck and his collar, shaking his head as though short of breath, stretching out his neck.

With a vacant, restless gaze he looked all around, then turned his body toward the door.

and pressed a hand against the knot of his necktie. ——

It was unbearable to look at him.

……………………

The ex-student said, "Hm, is that so!"

he said.

He had been drawn right into the story. ——

But a dark feeling came over him, and he turned his eyes away to the sea.

The sea still heaved in great, rolling swells.

Just as the horizon seemed, in a moment, to sink beneath his very feet, within two or three minutes he found himself dragged down again, gazing up at a sky narrowed to a strip, as from the bottom of a valley.

"Did she really go down, I wonder."

The words escaped him unbidden, a mutter to himself.

He could not stop thinking about it. ——

The thought came to him that they themselves were riding on just such a rust-bucket.

—— Every crab cannery ship was a rust-bucket.

Whether laborers died in the northern Sea of Okhotsk or not mattered nothing at all to the executives sitting in the Marunouchi Building.

When capitalism runs up against a wall, profits from its usual old channels no longer enough, when interest rates fall and money piles up unused, then "literally"

it will do anything at all, and go seeking, in a desperate, life-or-death struggle, a way through, to any place whatever.

And on top of that, here was the crab cannery ship, where a single vessel could rake in some several hundred thousand yen, easy as anything — small wonder they went half mad for it.

The crab cannery ship was classed as a "factory ship"

(a floating factory), and not as a "sea-going vessel"

— not that.

And so the Maritime Navigation Act did not apply to it.

Ships left moored for twenty years straight, rickety wrecks fit for nothing now but sinking, like some staggering "syphilis patient,"

were shamelessly given a heavy coat of makeup on the surface alone, and sent round to Hakodate.

Hospital ships and transport vessels, "gloriously"

crippled in the Russo-Japanese War and left to rot like fish guts, showed themselves now, fainter of shadow than any ghost. ——

Push the steam pressure up even a little and a pipe would burst and blow.

When chased by a Russian patrol boat and forced to put on speed — and that happened more than once — every part of the ship groaned and cracked, as though each and every piece were about to come apart at once.

It shook all over, like a man palsied with stroke.

But even so, it made not the slightest difference.

For it was, after all, a "time"

when anything at all ought to rise up for the sake of the Japanese Empire. ——

What's more, the crab cannery ship was a pure and simple "factory"

— nothing else.

Yet the Factory Act did not apply to it either.

And so there was no place more convenient, none where a man could do just as he pleased, than this.

The clever executives had gone and tied this whole business to "the sake of the Japanese Empire"

and left it there.

And money — sums almost too absurd to believe — came pouring in wholesale into the executives' pockets.

And to make this all the more secure, he was thinking, as he drove along in his car, of running for "Diet member"

himself. ——

But surely, at that very same moment, not a minute's difference either way, the crew of the Chichibu Maru, thousands of miles off in the dark northern sea, was locked in a fight to the death against waves and wind as sharp as shattered glass!

……The ex-student, descending the gangway toward the "shit-hole,"

was thinking this over.

"This isn't somebody else's business."

The "shit-hole"

— go down the ladder, and right there facing you, full of misspellings,

"To whoever finds the deckhand Miyaguchi shall be given, as reward, two packs of Bat cigarettes and one hand towel."

Superintendent Asakawa.

— read a paper pasted up, its surface lumpy where grains of rice had been used in place of paste.

III

A drizzling mist had not lifted for days on end.

Blurred by it, the Kamchatka coastline seemed to stretch out smooth and sinuous, like a lamprey eel.

Four nautical miles offshore, the Hakko Maru dropped anchor. ——

Since the waters within three nautical miles were Russian territorial waters, it was "supposed to be"

forbidden to enter within that line.

Once the nets had been sorted out, everything was ready for the crab fishing to begin at any moment.

Since dawn came to Kamchatka around two in the morning, the fishermen, fully dressed and still in their thigh-high rubber boots, climbed into their bunk-boxes and lay down to sleep just as they were.

The ex-student from Tokyo, who had been tricked by a labor broker into coming along, kept muttering that it wasn't supposed to be like this.

"'You'll sleep alone,' he says — slick talkin' bastard!"

"True 'nough, sleepin' alone it is. Just crammed-in sleepin', that's all."

There were seventeen or eighteen students who had come.

Having agreed to an advance of sixty yen, after train fare, lodging costs, blankets, bedding, and the broker's commission were all deducted, by the time they came aboard the ship each of them was, in the end, seven or eight yen (!)

in debt.

When this first came out, they were left more dumbfounded than a man who discovers that what he had been clutching, thinking it money, was only a dead leaf. ——

At first they huddled together in one clump among the fishermen, like the damned surrounded by blue and red demons.

From about the fourth day after leaving Hakodate, the students all began to sicken from the wretched daily rice and the same soup every single time.

Once in their bunks, they would draw up their knees and press each other's shins with their fingers.

Doing this again and again, each time arguing over whether the dent had sprung back or not, their spirits would brighten or darken in an instant.

When they rubbed their shins, two or three of them found a numbness, as though touching a weak electric current.

They dangled both legs off the edge of the bunk and struck their kneecaps with the edge of a hand, testing whether the leg would kick up.

And worse still, their "bowels"

had not moved in four or five days.

One of the students went to the doctor to get medicine for it.

The student came back with his face pale from agitation. ——

"He says there's no such fancy medicine aboard."

"'Course not. That's what a ship's doctor's like, that is."

said an old hand fisherman listening nearby.

"Every doctor's the same, wherever you go. The company doctor where I used to work was just the same."

He was a fisherman who had once worked in the mines.

While everyone lay sprawled about, the superintendent came in.

"You all asleep? —— Listen up a minute. A wireless came in saying the Chichibu Maru went down. They say the details on who's dead and who's alive aren't known."

He twisted his lips and spat with a click of his tongue.

It was a habit of his.

The story the student had heard from the steward sprang at once to his mind.

He thought: here's a man talking with a straight face about the lives of the four or five hundred laborers he himself had, in effect, killed with his own hands — even pitching him into the sea wouldn't be punishment enough.

Everyone raised their heads, one after another.

They all at once began talking among themselves in an excited murmur.

Having said just that much, Asakawa swung only his left shoulder forward and went out.

The deckhand whose whereabouts had been unknown was caught two days back, coming out from beside the boiler.

He had been hiding for two days, but he had grown so hungry, so terribly hungry, that he could bear it no longer and had come out.

The one who caught him was a fisherman past middle age.

A young fisherman flew into a rage, saying he'd give that fisherman a beating.

"Nosy bastard. You ain't even a smoker — what do you know about the taste of tobacco?"

The fisherman who had gotten his hands on two packs of Bat cigarettes sat smoking away with relish.

The deckhand was stripped down to just his shirt by the superintendent, shoved into one of the two toilets, and locked in from outside.

At first, everyone avoided going to the toilet.

The sound of him crying and wailing next door was more than anyone could bear to listen to.

By the second day the voice had gone hoarse, reduced to a thin wheezing.

And the wailing began to come only at intervals.

Toward the end of that day, a fisherman, finished with his work and uneasy, went straight to the toilet, but there was no longer even the sound of fists pounding against the door from inside.

Even when he called out from this side, no answer came back. ——

Later that night, Miyaguchi was brought out, found collapsed face-down with one hand braced against the privacy screen, his head thrust into the box of toilet paper.

His lips were the color of blue ink — he was unmistakably dead.

The morning was cold.

It had grown light already, but it was still only three o'clock.

They came climbing out of their bunks, backs hunched, hands thrust into their bosoms against the numbing cold.

The superintendent made his rounds even to the quarters of the deckhands, fishermen, sailors, and stokers, dragging out anyone with a cold or anyone sick, without exception.

There was no wind, but working out on deck, the tips of their hands and feet went numb as wooden pestles.

The deckhands' boss, cursing loudly, was driving fourteen or fifteen deckhands into the factory.

The bamboo rod he carried had a strip of leather fixed to its tip.

It was made so that even someone slacking off on the far side of the machine framework could be struck across it, from the other side.

"Miyaguchi, who's been out cold since last night, can't even talk, but he says he's gotta be made to work startin' this mornin' no matter what — was kickin' him with his foot just now."

A frail-bodied deckhand who had grown close with the ex-student told him this, glancing again and again at the deckhands' boss's face.

"He just wouldn't move no matter what, so looks like they finally gave it up, though."

Just then the superintendent came shoving a deckhand along from behind, a boy whose whole body was trembling violently, pushing him forward again and again.

That deckhand, made to work soaked through in the cold rain, had caught a chill and from it developed pleurisy.

Even when it was not cold, he trembled all the time.

He had a crease cut between his brows unlike any child's, his thin, bloodless lips twisted oddly, his eyes carrying a strange, nerve-frayed sharpness.

Unable to bear the cold any longer, he had been wandering about near the boiler room when he was found.

The fishermen, lowering the Kawasaki boats from the winches to go out fishing, watched the two of them go by, unable to say anything.

A fisherman of about forty, as though he could not bear to watch, turned his face away and shook his head slowly two or three times, the way a child does refusing something.

"I didn't pay good money to bring you lot out here just so you could catch cold or sulk around lyin' in bed. —— You fools, no need to go gawkin' at things that don't concern you!"

The superintendent struck the deck with his club.

"Even a prison, if it's worse than this, I'd like to see it!"

"Go back home and tell folks a thing like this, and no matter how much you tell it, they won't believe it."

"Aye, that's so. —— A thing like this — how could it even happen, first of all."

The winches began turning with a clatter, driven by steam.

The Kawasaki boats, their hulls swaying in the air, began to be lowered all at once.

The sailors and stokers, driven along as well, ran about the deck, watching their footing on the slick planking.

Through the midst of it all, the superintendent strutted about, watching everything like a rooster with its comb raised.

There came a lull in the work, and the ex-student sat down for a moment out of the wind, behind some cargo, when a fisherman who had come from the coal mines rounded the corner, cupping both hands round his mouth, breathing warm huffs into them.

"This here's life-or-death, this is!"

That — the sudden, heartfelt truth of it — struck the student in the chest before he knew it.

"Same as the coal mines after all, ain't it — can't hardly live without feelin' like you're gonna die. —— Gas is somethin' fearsome, but the waves are fearsome too."

From past midday, the look of the sky began to change somehow.

A thin sea fog spread across everything — though so faint that, told it wasn't there, one might well have believed it.

The waves rose up choppy in countless triangular points, as though someone were pinching up the corners of a cloth.

The wind suddenly picked up, blowing through and setting the mast humming.

The hem of the canvas covers thrown over the cargo flapped and slapped against the deck.

"Rabbits are jumpin'! —— Rabbits!"

Someone shouted it out loudly and went running along the starboard deck.

The voice was at once torn apart by the strong wind, and came through sounding like some meaningless cry.

By now the whole sea was covered, the crests of the triangular waves flinging up white spray, as though countless rabbits were leaping up across some vast plain. ——

This was the "advance warning"

of a Kamchatka squall.

Suddenly the undercurrent began to run swift.

The ship began to slide sideways.

Kamchatka, which until now had lain off the starboard side, had shifted to port before anyone quite noticed. ——

The fishermen and sailors who had stayed behind on the ship working suddenly grew flustered.

Right overhead, the whistle began to blow.

Everyone stopped where they were and looked up at the sky.

Perhaps because they stood right beneath it, the smokestack, jutting out at a slant behind them, thicker than one would have guessed, shaped like a wooden bathtub bucket, swayed slowly back and forth.

The whistle sounding from its side, shaped like a German army cap, rang out with something tragic in it amid the raging storm. ——

The Kawasaki boats, far off from the mother ship where they had gone out fishing, would find their way back through the storm relying on this whistle, sounded without pause.

At the dim entrance leading down to the engine room, fishermen and sailors had bunched together, making an uproar.

From an angle above, with every roll of the ship, thin shafts of light leaked through, flickering.

The excited faces of the fishermen, all different, rose up for an instant, then vanished, one after another.

"What's going on?"

The former miner pushed his way in among them.

"We're gonna beat that bastard Asakawa to death!"

A murderous air hung over them.

The superintendent had, in fact, received early that morning a "squall"

warning from the ×× Maru, anchored some ten miles off from the mother ship.

It had even added that, if any Kawasaki boats were out, they should be recalled at once.

At the time, he had said, "If you go gettin' jumpy over every little thing like this, how's a man supposed to get any work done, comin' all the way out here to Kamchatka?"

— word of what Asakawa had said leaked out from the wireless operator.

The first fisherman to hear it bellowed at the wireless operator as though he himself were Asakawa.

"What in hell does he think a man's life is worth!"

"A man's life?"

"That's right."

"Thing is, Asakawa don't even think of you lot as human beings to begin with."

The fisherman, trying to say something more, stammered and choked on his words.

He went bright red.

And that was how he had come running to where the others were.

They all stood rooted where they were, their faces dark, yet with an undeniable excitement rising slowly, inexorably, up from somewhere deep within.

A deckhand whose father was out on one of the Kawasaki boats hovered anxiously at the edge of the circle where the fishermen had gathered.

The stays kept singing in the wind without pause.

Listening to it sound overhead, the fishermen's hearts were ground and gnawed at, bit by bit.

Toward evening, a loud shout went up from the bridge.

Those below went bounding up the gangway steps, two at a time. ——

Two Kawasaki boats were coming in near.

The two boats had passed a rope between them and were lashed together.

They had drawn up close now.

But the great waves tossed the Kawasaki boat and the mother ship up and down in turn, violently, as though the two were set on opposite ends of a seesaw.

Wave after wave, a great swell rose between the two vessels, and they rolled.

It was right there before their eyes, yet it would not draw near.—

It was maddening.

A rope was thrown from the deck.

But it did not reach.

It scattered spray uselessly and fell into the sea.

Then the rope was hauled back in like a sea snake.

This was repeated again and again.

From this side, everyone called out together.

But there was no answer.

The fishermen's faces had turned to stone like masks, motionless.

Even their eyes, the instant they fixed on something, stayed frozen there, unmoving.—

That sight carved itself into the fishermen's hearts with a horror too terrible to watch.

The rope was thrown again.

At first it coiled like a spring—then, just as its tip seemed to stretch out like an eel, its end lashed sideways across the neck of a fisherman who had raised both hands to catch it.

Everyone cried out, "Ah!"

they shouted.

The fisherman was knocked flat sideways, just as he stood.

But he caught it!

—The rope drew taut with a creak, wringing off its dripping water, and stretched into a straight line.

The fishermen watching from this side let the tension fall from their shoulders without meaning to.

The stays sang on without pause, rising and fading as the wind shifted.

By evening, all the boats but two had managed to make it back.

Every fisherman, the moment his foot touched the mother ship's deck, nearly fainted on the spot.

One boat had swamped, so its crew threw out the anchor, transferred to another Kawasaki boat, and made it back.

The other boat, with its crew, had vanished entirely without a trace.

The superintendent was fuming.

He came down to the fishermen's quarters again and again, and went back up again.

Every time, everyone watched him go in silence, with a gaze so full of hatred it could have burned him alive.

The next day, the mother ship was to move on, both to search for the lost Kawasaki boat and to follow the crabs.

"Five or six men are nothing worth mentioning, but a Kawasaki boat—now that would be a pity"

—that was the thinking behind it.

From early morning, the engine room was in a bustle.

The shudder of the anchor being raised sent the fishermen bunked back-to-back with the anchor room bouncing like roasted beans.

The steel plating along the side had rusted to flakes, and crumbled away a little more each time.—

The Hakko Maru searched as far as 51°5' north latitude for Kawasaki Boat No. 1, which had cast its anchor there.

Fragments of ice drifted among the low swells like living things, bobbing their bodies into view again and again.

But here and there the broken ice formed great clusters as far as the eye could see, foaming as it went, and before they knew it the ship would find itself hemmed in at the very center.

The ice gave off a mist like steam.

Then, as if blown by some great fan, a "chill"

came sweeping over them.

Every part of the ship suddenly began to crackle and creak, and ice formed over the wet decks and railings.

The ship's hull glittered with crystals of frost, as though dusted with powder.

The sailors and fishermen ran across the deck clutching their cheeks.

The ship pressed on, leaving behind it a long track like a single road across a wilderness.

The Kawasaki boat was nowhere to be found.

Close to nine o'clock, someone on the bridge spotted a Kawasaki boat floating ahead.

When it was spotted, the superintendent said, "Damn it, finally found the bastard. Damn it!"

He ran about the deck, delighted.

A motorboat was lowered at once.

But it was not the No. 1 boat they had been searching for.

It was a newer one, stamped with the number 36.

It bore an iron marker buoy that clearly belonged to the ××× Maru.

From this it was clear that when the ××× Maru had moved off somewhere, it had left the boat behind, marked this way to know its original position.

Asakawa tapped the hull of the Kawasaki boat with his fingertips.

"Now how do we just knock this into shape?"

He grinned nastily.

"We're taking it with us."

And so Kawasaki Boat No. 36 was hoisted up by the winch to the Hakko Maru's bridge.

The Kawasaki boat shook its whole body in midair, spattering drops down onto the deck.

"Done a good day's work, this one."

Watching the boat rise with such an air of grand satisfaction, the superintendent said,

"What a fine thing. What a fine thing!"

he muttered to himself.

A fisherman, working the nets, watched it happen.

"Thievin' cat, that's what he is! Chain oughta snap and knock it right down on his damn head."

The superintendent walked past, looking down at each of them at their work with eyes that seemed to gouge something out of them.

Then he called for the carpenter in an impatient, brassy voice.

At that, the carpenter's face appeared from another hatch.

"What is it?"

The superintendent, who had been looking the wrong way, spun around and snapped irritably, "What is it? — Idiot. Plane off the number. A plane, get a plane."

The carpenter looked baffled.

"You dunce, get over here!"

Behind the broad-shouldered superintendent, the small carpenter, a saw handle stuck in his belt and a plane in hand, crossed the deck with an unsteady gait, as though limping.—

The "3" of Kawasaki Boat No. 36

was planed away, and it became "No. 6 Kawasaki Boat"

just like that.

"That'll do. That'll do. Ha! Take a good look, damn you!"

The superintendent twisted his mouth into a triangle and burst into a great guffaw, as if stretching himself upward.

Sailing further north offered no prospect of finding the Kawasaki boat.

The ship, which had been marking time while Kawasaki Boat No. 36 was hoisted aboard, began a slow, wide turn to return to its original position.

The sky had cleared, washed clean and transparent.

The mountain ranges of Kamchatka shone sharp and bright, like the peaks of Switzerland seen in a picture postcard.

The Kawasaki boat that had gone missing did not return.

From the bunk that now stood empty like a lone puddle, the fishermen went through the belongings the missing men had left behind, checking their families' addresses, gathering everything together so it could be dealt with at once if the worst came to pass.—

It was not a pleasant task.

As they did it, the fishermen felt a kind of pain, as though someone were peering into some raw wound of their own.

Parcels and letters turned up among their belongings, addressed to women bearing the same surnames, meant to be sent on by the transport ship when it next came.

From one man's belongings came a letter written in a mix of katakana and hiragana, in pencil the writer had licked again and again while writing.

It was passed from one rough fisherman's hand to another.

They read it the way one picks up beans, one by one, slowly, and yet hungrily, and when they finished, they shook their heads as if they had seen something they wished they hadn't, and passed it on.—

It was a letter from a child.

Sniffling, one man raised his face from the letter and said in a low, cracked voice, "It's because of Asakawa. If it turns out he's dead, we're settling the score for him."

he said.

He was a big man, said to have done all sorts of things out in the backcountry of Hokkaido.

In a still lower voice,

"Reckon we can take that bastard down, one on one."

said a young fisherman with heavy shoulders.

"Ah, this letter's no good. Brought it all back to me."

"Yeah."

said the first man.

"If we ain't careful, he'll do the same to us. Ain't none of it somebody else's business."

In the corner, a man sitting with one knee up, biting his thumbnail, listening to it all with upturned eyes, nodded his head, yes, yes.

"Leave it all to me, when the time comes! I'll do that bastard in myself, one good shove."

Everyone fell silent.—

Silent, and yet, relieved.

Three days after the Hakko Maru returned to its original position, suddenly (!)

the Kawasaki boat that had gone missing came back — and in fine spirits, too.

They went from the captain's cabin to the "shit-hole"

and the moment they returned, everyone swarmed around them like a whirlpool.

—They had run into a "great storm"

and lost all control of the boat in an instant.

Once that happened, they were as helpless as a child grabbed by the scruff of the neck.

They had gone out farthest of all, and on top of that the wind had been blowing dead against them.

They had all resigned themselves to dying.

The fishermen had always been "easily"

"trained" into readiness to die

—that was simply how it was.

But (!)

Such a thing rarely happened.

The next morning, the Kawasaki boat, half-swamped, had washed up on the shore of Kamchatka.

And they had all been rescued by Russians living nearby.

That Russian family numbered four.

To men who had gone starved for a "home" — a place with a woman in it, a child in it —

the place held a charm beyond words.

What's more, they were all kind people, who went out of their way to look after them.

But at first, all the same, it had felt eerie — foreigners speaking a language they couldn't understand, with different colored hair and eyes.

Yet it became clear to them at once: why, these were just people the same as themselves.

Once word of the wreck got out, a great many villagers gathered round.

The place was a good distance from where the Japanese fishing grounds lay.

They stayed there two days, recovering, and then came back.

"We didn't want to come back."

Who'd want to come back to a hell like this!

But their story did not end there.

"Something interesting"

lay hidden behind it.

It was on the very day they were to leave.

While they sat around the stove getting ready and talking, four or five Russians came in.—

Among them was one Chinese man.—

A man with a big face, a thick red beard, and a bit of a stoop suddenly began speaking loudly, waving his hands.

The boat's headman waved his hand in front of his face to signal that they didn't understand Russian.

Each time the Russian finished a phrase, the Chinese man, who had been watching his mouth, began speaking Japanese.

It was Japanese so out of order that it left the listeners' heads even more muddled than before.

Word staggered after word, scattering like a drunkard's steps.

"You all, money, sure not have."

"That's right."

"You all, poor man."

"That's right."

"So, you all, proletarian. — Understand?"

"Yeah."

The Russian, laughing, began walking about the room.

Now and then he stopped and looked their way.

"Rich man, do this to you all." (he made a strangling motion at his own throat) "Rich man, get bigger, bigger." (he mimed a swelling belly) "You all, no matter what, no good, become poor man. — Understand? — Japan country, no good. Man who works, this" (he screwed up his face, made himself look like a sick man) "man who doesn't work, this. Ahem, ahem." (he strutted about, putting on airs)

All this struck the young fishermen as funny.

"That's right, that's right!"

they said, and burst out laughing.

"Man who works, this. Man who doesn't work, this." (repeating the same as before) "That, no good. — Man who works, this" (now the other way round, he threw out his chest and strutted proudly) "man who doesn't work, this" (he made himself look like an old beggar) "this, good. — Understand? Russia country, this country. Only man who works. Only man who works, only, this" (strutting proudly) "Russia, no man who doesn't work. No sly man. No man who strangles other man. — Understand? Russia, not scary country at all. Everyone, everyone, walk around telling lies."

Vaguely, they sensed that this was the "terrifying"

"Bolshevization"

was that, they wondered.

But if this was "Bolshevization,"

then it struck them, at the same time, as awfully "ordinary"

a thing after all.

But more than anything, they found themselves drawn in, pulled steadily closer.

"Understand, truly, understand!"

Two or three of the Russians began chattering among themselves.

The Chinese man listened to them.

Then, stammering again, picking out Japanese words one by one, he spoke.

"Man who don't work, make money, there is. Proletarian, always, this." (he mimed being strangled) "— This, no good! Proletarian, you all, one man, two man, three man... hundred man, thousand man, fifty-thousand man, hundred-thousand man, all, all, this" (he mimed children joining hands) "get strong. All right." (he slapped his arm) "Lose, nobody. Understand?"

"Mm, mm!"

"Man who don't work, run away." (he mimed fleeing headlong) "All right, truly. Man who works, proletarian, put on airs." (he strutted about grandly) "Proletarian, most great of all. — No proletarian, no. Everybody, no bread. Everybody die. — Understand?"

"Mm, mm!"

"Japan, still, still no good. Man who works, this." (he stooped and shrank himself small) "Man who don't work, this." (he strutted, mimed knocking the other man down) "That, all no good! Man who works, this." (he rose up with a terrible look, mimed charging in, knocking the other man down and trampling on him) "Man who don't work, this." (he mimed running away) "— Japan, only man who works, good country. — Proletarian country! — Understand?"

"Mm, mm, understand!"

The Russian let out a strange cry and stamped his feet as if dancing.

"Japan, man who works, do it." (he rose up, mimed striking back) "Happy. Russia, everybody happy. Banzai. — You all, go back to ship. Your ship, man who don't work, this." (strutting) "You all, proletarian, this, do it!" (he mimed boxing — then joined hands like children, then mimed charging in again) "— All right, win! — Understand?"

"Understand!"

A young fisherman, who had grown excited without realizing it, suddenly seized the Chinese man's hand.

"We'll do it, we'll do it for sure!"

The boat's headman was thinking, this is "Bolshevization"

— that's what it was.

What an awfully frightening thing to be made to do.

This — this was the very trick by which Russia would completely deceive Japan, he thought.

When the Russians finished, they let out some kind of shout and gripped the fishermen's hands with all their strength.

They embraced them, rubbing their stubbly cheeks against theirs.

The bewildered Japanese, necks stiffened backward, had no idea what to do.…

.

Everyone, glancing now and then toward the entrance of the "shit-hole,"

urged him on to tell more and more of the story.

They went on to talk about all sorts of things concerning the Russians they had seen.

Every bit of it soaked into the men's hearts like ink into blotting paper.

"Hey, that's enough now."

The boat's headman, seeing everyone strangely swept up in the story, nudged the shoulder of the young fisherman who was talking so earnestly.

IV

Mist had settled down.

The ventilation pipes, the smokestack, the winch arms, the Kawasaki boats hanging suspended, the deck railings — all of them, ordinarily fitted together with such strict, mechanical precision — now had their outlines softened and blurred, and looked, for once, strangely gentle and familiar.

A soft, tepid air drifted by, brushing against their cheeks.—

Such a night was a rare thing.

Near the stern hatch, the smell of crab brains came in a thick wave.

Amid the nets piled up like a mountain, two shadows of unequal height stood still.

A fisherman whose heart had gone bad from overwork, his body sallow and swollen, unable to sleep for the pounding of his own heart, had come up onto the deck.

Leaning on the railing, he gazed vacantly at the sea, thick and sluggish as though starch had been dissolved into it.

With a body like this, the superintendent would kill him.

But even so, to die out here in this far-off Kamchatka, without so much as setting foot on land, was too lonely to bear.—

He fell at once into brooding.

Just then, the fisherman noticed someone was there, between the nets.

There came a sound, as of someone stepping on scraps of crab shell.

A hushed voice could be heard.

As the fisherman's eyes grew used to the dark, he made it out.

A fisherman was saying something to a deckhand of fourteen or fifteen.

What was being said, he could not tell.

The deckhand, turned away, kept shifting his stance now and then, like a child saying no, no, sulking.

And each time, the fisherman turned the same way after him.

This went on for a little while.

The fisherman, unable to help it (or so it seemed), raised his voice.

But at once he said something low and quick.

Then, all at once, he pulled the deckhand into a crushing embrace.

A fight, he thought.

Only the breath, muffled by a garment pressed over the mouth — "mmf, mmf..."

could be heard for a moment.

Then, just like that, it went still.—

It was at that moment.

In the soft mist, the deckhand's two legs rose up, pale as candles.

The lower half of him had been stripped entirely bare.

Then the deckhand crouched down, just as he was.

And over him, the fisherman loomed like a toad.

That much happened right "before his eyes"

— brief, in an instant that caught hard in the throat.

The fisherman who had been watching turned his eyes away without meaning to.

He felt a quivering excitement, as though drugged, as though struck.

The fishermen had gradually begun to be tormented by a desire that swelled up from within them.

For four months, five months on end, against nature, these sturdy men had been kept apart from "women"

—torn away from them.—

Talk of women bought in Hakodate, and crude talk of women's private parts, always came up once night fell.

A single erotic picture was passed round and round, again and again, until the paper grew fuzzy and frayed at the edges.

…………

"Lay the bedding down, now,"

"turn this way, now,"

"put your mouth to it, now,"

"twine your legs round mine, now,"

"let go, now,"

Truly, this work is a hard, hard thing.

Someone sang it.

And at once, as if soaked up by a sponge, everyone had learned the song.

Whenever anything happened, they broke into it at once.

And once they finished singing it, "Eh, damn it!"

they'd cry out in desperation, only their eyes gleaming.

After the fishermen had gone to bed,

"Damn it, this is bad! Can't sleep no matter what."

they said, tossing and turning.

"No good, my cock's standing up!"

"What am I supposed to do!"

—at last, saying so, he got up naked, gripping his stiffened balls.

Watching a big-bodied fisherman do this, one felt one's own body tighten, something almost gruesome about it.

The student, utterly taken aback, watched it all with just his eyes, from a corner.

There were several who had wet dreams.

When no one was around, some, unable to bear it any longer, would masturbate.—

In the corner of the bunks, dirty undershorts and loincloths, stiff with stains, lay balled up, damp and giving off a sour smell.

The student would sometimes step on them as though they were dung in a field.

—And then, toward the deckhands, "night crawling"

began.

Trading Bat cigarettes for caramels, tucking two or three into his pocket, he went out through the hatch.

When the cook opened the storeroom, reeking of the toilet, stacked with pickle barrels, a shout came out at him from the dim, stuffy dark within, like a slap across the face.

"Shut it! Come in now and I'll beat you to death, you bastard!"

× × ×

The wireless operator listened in on the radio traffic exchanged between other ships and reported their catches to the superintendent one by one.

From this it became clear that their own ship was, without question, falling behind.

The superintendent began to panic.

And at once, this came crashing down on the fishermen and deckhands with several times the force.—

Always, and for everything, the last place it all landed was "them"

and them alone.

The superintendent and the deckhands' boss deliberately made it so that between the "crew"

and the "fishermen and deckhands"

there would be competition over the work.

Even though they were doing the same crab-crushing work, once it came to "losing to the crew,"

(even though it was no work that profited them at all) the fishermen and deckhands would feel a burst of "damn it all!"

welling up in them.

The superintendent "clapped his hands"

with delight.

Won today, lost today, never again, not this time — days that seemed to bleed dripped on in wild disorder.

Within that same day, output had risen fifty or sixty percent over what it had been.

But by the fifth or sixth day, both sides, as though the spirit had gone out of them, saw their output sink, steadily, heavily.

As they worked, their heads would sometimes drop forward with a jerk.

The superintendent struck them without a word.

Caught off guard, they let out a shriek even they hadn't expected — "Yeow!"

—that kind of cry.—

Everyone worked in dead silence with one another, like enemies, or like men who had forgotten how to speak.

There wasn't even the luxury of "spare strength"

left to say a word with.

The superintendent, though, this time began handing out "prizes"

to whichever team won.

The smoldering wood caught flame again.

"Simple-minded creatures, really."

The superintendent was drinking beer with the captain in the captain's cabin.

The captain, like a plump woman, had dimples on the backs of his hands.

He tapped the gold tip of his cigarette deftly against the table and answered with an unreadable smile.—

The captain found it unbearably irritating that the superintendent was always there before his eyes, fussing about and getting in his way.

He found himself thinking: wouldn't it be something if the fishermen rose up all at once and knocked this fellow straight into the Kamchatka sea.

The superintendent, besides the "prizes,"

posted a notice that, conversely, whoever worked least would be given a "branding"

as well.

This meant heating an iron rod red-hot and pressing it straight against the body.

They worked with the "branding" — inescapable no matter how far they fled, like their own shadow —

forever at their heels.

Their output climbed higher and higher, notch by notch.

How far a human body could be pushed — that, better than the men themselves, the superintendent knew.—

When the work was done and they fell sideways into their bunks like felled logs, "without meaning to"

they groaned, uh, uh—

One of the students remembered a picture of "hell" he had once seen as a child, taken by his grandmother into the dim hall of a temple,

and how this was exactly that, unchanged.

To him as a child it had called to mind some creature like a giant serpent, slithering, slithering through a swamp.

It was the very image of that, exactly.—

Their exhaustion, strangely enough, kept them from sleep.

Past midnight, sudden fits of teeth-grinding would break out, eerie as a nail dragged hard across glass, and here and there in the dim "shit-hole"

came sleep-talk, and sudden jagged cries from men caught in nightmares.

When they lay awake unable to sleep, they would sometimes murmur, unbidden, "Well now, still alive, are you..."

whispering it back to their own living flesh.

Well now, still alive.—

So they said, to their own bodies!

The ex-student was hit "hardest"

of all.

"Dostoevsky's House of the Dead — seen from here, even that starts to feel like it wasn't such a big deal."

—That student had been constipated for days on end, and couldn't sleep unless he bound his head tight with a hand towel.

"That's probably right."

His companion was licking, little by little, at whiskey he'd brought from Hakodate, the way one takes medicine.

"After all, it's a great enterprise. Developing the wealth of a land no man's ever set foot on — that's no small thing. Even this crab cannery ship, they say, is better off now than it used to be. In the early days, when they couldn't even observe the weather or the currents properly, when the geography hadn't really been mastered yet, who knows how many ships went down. Sunk by Russian ships, taken prisoner, killed — and still, not giving in, rising up again and again, fighting on through it — that's exactly how this great wealth came to be ours. ...Well, it can't be helped."

"…………"

—As history is always written, it did seem as though that might well be so.

But the sullen feeling coiled in the bottom of his heart did not seem to clear the least bit for it.

In silence he stroked his own belly, which had gone stiff as a sheet of plywood.

A faint tingling ran through his thumb, as though he had touched a weak electric current.

It left an unpleasant feeling.

He held his thumb up to eye level and rubbed it with his other hand.—

After supper was over, everyone had gathered around the one "shit-hole"

stove, rattling and cracked all over like a map, fixed in the middle of the room.

As their bodies warmed a little against one another, steam began to rise.

The raw, fishy smell of crab grew close and thick, striking hard at the nose.

"Don't know the reasoning of it, but I don't wanna be killed, is all."

"That's right!"

A heavy, gloomy feeling came sliding down on them all, like an avalanche, everyone leaning into it together.

They were being killed off, bit by bit!

Everyone had grown irritable, with no clear target for it.

"I-it ain't even g-gonna be ours, an' still, d-damn it, like hell I'm gonna let 'em kill me for it!"

Stutters, flushed red and straining, frustrated even with himself, suddenly burst out loud.

For a moment, everyone fell silent.

They felt something reach up and jolt their hearts "without warning"

—that was what it felt like.

"Don't wanna die in Kamchatka..."

"…………"

"Transport ship's left Hakodate, they say. — Wireless fella told me."

"Wanna go home."

"Like hell we're going home."

"Heard tell some fellas escape on the transport ship."

"That so?! ...Lucky bastards."

"Some fellas pretend to go out fishing, run off to land in Kamchatka, and go do Red propaganda together with the Ruskies, so they say."

"…………"

"For the Japanese Empire, is it — they sure do come up with fine names for things."

The student undid the buttons of his shirt, baring a chest with hollows carved into it step by step like a staircase, and scratched hard at it while yawning.

The dried grime flaked off him like thin sheets of mica.

"Y-yeah, an' the c-comp'ny just keeps r-rakin' it all in for themselves, dammit."

A fisherman past middle age, his sagging eyelids ridged like an oyster shell, cast a weak, clouded gaze vacantly onto the stove, and spat.

It landed on the stove, rolled itself round and round into a perfect ball, hissed and sizzled, jumped about like a bean, shrank before their eyes, and vanished, leaving behind only a speck of residue no bigger than a grain of soot.

Everyone cast a vacant glance at it.

"That might just be true."

But the boat's headman, holding out the red-blanket lining of his rubber-soled tabi toward the stove, said, "Now, now, don't go and rebel on me."

he said.

"…………"

"That's our business, ain't it. Damn."

Stutters thrust out his lips like an octopus.

There was a nasty smell of rubber starting to scorch.

"Hey, old man, your rubber!"

"Huh? Ah, it's burning!"

The waves seemed to be picking up, and the ship's side began to give a faint groan.

The ship, too, rocked gently, like a lullaby.

Under the five-candle bulb, dim as a rotting paper lantern, the shadows the men cast behind them as they sat around the stove tangled together every which way, locking into one another.—

It was a quiet night.

Red flame from the stove's mouth flickered, reflected on their shins below the knee.

One's own unhappy life came suddenly into view — quite suddenly, and only for an instant — it was a strangely quiet night for that.

"Ain't got a smoke?"

"Nope..."

"None, huh?..."

"Guess not."

"Damn."

"Hey, pass that whiskey over here too, huh."

His companion turned the square bottle upside down and shook it to show him.

"Whoa now, don't go wasting it."

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha."

"What an awful place to end up — but here I am, all the same..."

That fisherman had once worked at a factory in Shibaura.

Talk of that place came up from there.

To the laborers from Hokkaido, it seemed like no "factory"

they could ever have imagined — a "splendid place"

entirely.

"Just a hundredth of what happens here, and over there they'd be out on strike."

he said.

From that — with that as the spark — all sorts of things each of them had done up to now came tumbling out, one after another, into the talk.

"Highway construction work."

"Irrigation work."

"Railway laying."

"Harbor construction, land reclamation."

"New mine digging."

"Land clearing."

"Cargo-loading labor."

"Herring fishing."

—nearly every one of them had done some kind of that work.

—On the mainland, once the laborers grew "insolent"

and could no longer be pushed around, and the markets had been more or less exhausted and things ground to a halt, the capitalists cried, "To Hokkaido, to Sakhalin!"

and stretched out their claws.

There, just as in the colonies of Korea and Taiwan, they could carry out a "brutal exploitation"

so extreme it was almost amusing.

But something no one could quite put into words, the capitalists understood perfectly well.

"Highway construction,"

"railway laying"

in the navvies' work-huts, laborers were beaten to death more carelessly than one would kill a louse.

Unable to bear the cruelty, they would run off.

If caught, they'd be tied to a post and made to be kicked by a horse's hind legs, or set upon by Tosa fighting dogs in the back yard and torn to death.

And this, moreover, was done as a show, right before everyone's eyes.

At the thud, the muffled crack of ribs breaking inside a man's chest,

even navvies who had long since stopped being "human" would sometimes clap their hands over their faces without meaning to.

If the man fainted, they'd throw water on him to revive him, and do it all over again, again and again.

In the end he would die, swung about like a bundled cloth in the powerful jaws of the Tosa dog's neck.

Even after he had been flung, limp, into the corner of the yard and left there, some part of his body would still twitch.

Pressing a red-hot fire poker suddenly to a man's backside, or beating him with a hexagonal club until he could no longer stand — these were "daily"

occurrences.

While they were eating, a sharp scream would suddenly go up out back.

And then the raw, sickening smell of burning human flesh would come drifting in.

"Forget it, forget it. — Can't eat a bite after that."

He'd throw down his chopsticks.

But they only exchanged dark looks with one another.

Several died of beriberi.

It was because they were worked past all reason.

Even when a man died, there was "no time to spare"

and so he'd be left lying there for days on end.

In the darkness out back, from beneath the edge of a straw mat thrown carelessly over him, only his two feet could be seen — oddly small, like a child's, sallow-black and without any luster.

"Face is just covered in flies. Walk past it, and the whole lot of 'em go up at once with a buzz, y'know!"

someone said, coming in and tapping tap-tap at his own forehead with his hand.

Every morning they were sent out to the work site while it was still dark.

And they were made to work until the tips of their picks glimmered pale in flashes and they could no longer see their own hands.

They found themselves, if anything, envying the convicts working at the nearby prison.

Koreans in particular were treated with something like being "trampled underfoot"

by the foremen, the gang bosses, and by their fellow laborers — the Japanese ones — alike.

A policeman stationed in a village four or five ri away would still come trudging out now and then, notebook in hand, to investigate.

He would stay until evening, or even overnight.

But he never once showed his face to the laborers.

And when he left, his face flushed red, he'd walk down the middle of the road, spraying piss in every direction as though playing at being a fireman, muttering incomprehensible things to himself, and go home.

In Hokkaido, quite literally, every single railway tie was, as it stood, one more laborer's bloated, blue-white "corpse"

laid end to end.

In the harbor landfill, navvies stricken with beriberi were buried alive, like "human pillars"

offered up to the work.—

In Hokkaido, laborers of that kind were called "tako" (octopus)

— that was the word for them.

An octopus, to go on living, will eat its own arms and legs.

And wasn't that exactly it, to a hair!

There, exploitation could be carried out "primitive,"

unashamed before anyone.

"Profit"

came heaving up out of the ground, shovelful after shovelful.

And moreover, they skillfully tied all this to talk of "national"

development of resources, and rationalized it away neatly.

They left nothing to chance.

For the sake of the "nation,"

the laborers "went hungry"

and were "beaten to death"

one after another.

"Comin' back alive from a place like that — that's the god's own mercy, that is. Lucky, weren't it! But get killed on this ship instead, an' it's all the same anyhow. — What the hell's the difference!"

And he burst out laughing, loud and out of nowhere.

But once he'd finished laughing, the fisherman's brow darkened visibly, and he turned his face away.

It was the same at the mines, too.—

A shaft would be dug into a new mountain.

To find out what kind of gas might come up there, what kind of terrible upheaval might occur, and to get a firm reading on it, the capitalists used "laborers"

who could be bought cheaper than "guinea pigs,"

cycling them through and discarding them without a second thought, by the very same method the war-god Nogi had once used.

More carelessly than tissue paper!

Shreds of laborers' flesh, like slices of "tuna"

sashimi, went to reinforce the tunnel walls, layer upon layer.

Taking advantage of the distance from any city, here too they carried out things that made one's skin "crawl"

with horror.

Sometimes, in the coal hauled out by the trolley cars, a thumb or a little finger would turn up, torn loose and sticky, mixed in among the lumps.

But the women and children were not to so much as raise an eyebrow at such things.

"Trained" that way,

they pushed it on to the next station, expressionless.—

That coal turned the great machines,

all for the capitalists' "profit."

Every miner wore the face of a man long confined to prison — dull, sallow, puffy, and perpetually vacant.

From lack of sunlight, coal dust, air laced with poisonous gas, and abnormal heat and pressure, their bodies visibly went wrong before one's eyes.

"Work as a miner seven, eight years, and you'll have spent about four, five years of it straight through at the bottom of pitch darkness, never once laying eyes on the sun — four, five years of it!"

—But whatever happened, to capitalists who could always stock up on plenty of replacement laborers, none of it mattered in the least.

When winter came, "just the same,"

the laborers went streaming into that mine again.

Then there were the "settler farmers"

— in Hokkaido there were "immigrant farmers"

too.

"Opening up Hokkaido,"

"solving the population and food problem, encouraging emigration,"

and "emigrants striking it rich" tales straight out of a boys' adventure story —

using moving pictures strung together with nothing but such sweet talk, they stirred up the poor farmers of the mainland who were on the verge of losing their fields, egging them on to emigrate, only to turn them loose on land where, dig down four or five inches, there was nothing underneath but clay.

The fertile land already had signposts staked into it, claimed.

Buried in snow, unable even to eat potatoes, a whole family might starve to death by the following spring.

That was a "fact"

that happened again and again.

Only when the snow melted did the "neighbor,"

a full ri away, come by, and only then would it come to light.

Half-swallowed scraps of straw would sometimes be found still in the dead man's mouth.

Even on the rare occasion someone escaped starvation, and after ten years spent breaking that wild land, just when it seemed at last to have become an ordinary field,

it turned out, all along, to have been quietly arranged to belong to "someone else."

The capitalists — the moneylenders, the banks, the peerage, the great fortunes — needed only lend out sums of money so absurd they seemed thrown away, and the wasteland, tended for them, would turn into soil as rich as the sleek coat of a fat black cat, and come, without fail, to belong to them.

Sharp-eyed men, aping this trick, out to grab a quick fortune with wet hands, came pouring into Hokkaido too.—

The farmers had what was theirs bitten away from them, from this side and that.

And in the end they had been turned into "tenant farmers"

just as they had been on the mainland.

Only then did the farmers finally understand.—

"We've been had!"

They had crossed the Tsugaru Strait and come to snowbound Hokkaido meaning to make even a little money and go home again to their native villages.—

On the crab cannery ship there were plenty of men like that, driven off their own land by "strangers"

who had taken it from them.

The cargo-loading laborers were much like the fishermen of the crab cannery ship.

Lying idle in a watched boarding house in Otaru, they'd be hauled off by ship to Sakhalin or the far reaches of Hokkaido.

Let a foot slip "an inch,"

and you'd end up under a squared timber come rumbling down with a groan that shook the ground, flattened thinner than a Nanbu rice cracker.

When timber, its bark peeled soggy from the water, went rattling up by winch and caught someone off balance, dealt one blow, the man, his skull crushed, was knocked into the sea as lightly as a flea's offspring.

—On the mainland, laborers who had not, after all this time, silently "let themselves be killed"

banded together in one mass, in defiance of the capitalists.

But laborers in the "colonies"

were completely "cut off"

from any such circumstances.

It was hard, unbearably hard.

Yet the more they stumbled forward, the more suffering piled onto their bodies, like a snowball rolling and growing.

"What'll become of us...?"

"We'll be killed, that's plain enough."

"…………"

Everyone looked as though they wanted to say something, but the words caught fast in their throats, and they all fell silent.

"B-before they k-kill us, we kill 'em first."

Stutters flung it out, blunt and rough.

Thud, thud, the waves struck slowly against the ship's flank.

Up on the top deck, steam seemed to be leaking from some pipe, and there came, without let-up, a soft, hissing sound, shhh, shhh, like a kettle coming to a boil.

Before sleeping, the fishermen would strip off their knit or flannel shirts, gone stiff and warped with grime like dried squid, and spread them out on the stove.

Those gathered round, each holding an edge of it like a kotatsu blanket, would heat it through and then snap it out, flapping it hard.

When lice and bedbugs dropped onto the stove, they made a little popping sound, one after another, and gave off a raw, sickening smell, like a person burning.

As the heat rose, the lice, no longer able to bear it, came pouring out of the seams of the shirts, their countless thin legs working frantically.

Pinched up between the fingers, their little bodies, greasy and plump against the skin, gave one a shudder of revulsion.

Some had heads so bloated and grotesque, mantis-like, that you could tell them apart at a glance.

"Hey, hold the end of this."

Having someone hold one end of his loincloth, he stretched it out and picked off the lice.

Some fishermen would pop the lice into their mouths and crush them audibly between their front teeth, or squash them between both thumbnails until the nails ran red.

Wiping the mess on the hem of his short coat, the way a child wipes a dirty hand straight on his clothes, he'd start in again.—

Even so, sleep would not come.

Who knew where they all came from — all night long, lice and fleas and bedbugs tormented them.

No matter what they did, the vermin could never be wiped out entirely.

Stand for a moment in the dim, damp bunks, and dozens of fleas would come wriggling straight up one's shins.

In the end, one began to wonder whether some part of one's own body wasn't rotting away.

Wasn't he already a rotting "corpse,"

crawling with maggots and flies? — that was the horror he felt.

At first they were let into the bath every other day.

Their bodies had gotten filthy and rank beyond bearing.

But after a week it became every third day, and after about a month, once a week.

And in the end it was cut down to twice a month.

This was to prevent the wasteful use of water.

But the captain and the superintendent bathed every day.

That, apparently, did not count as waste.

(!)—

Their bodies grew filthy with crab juice, and stayed that way for days on end — there was no "way"

lice and bedbugs wouldn't breed under those conditions.

When a man untied his loincloth, little black grains would spill out.

Where the loincloth had been bound tight, a red mark remained, ringing the belly.

That spot itched unbearably.

Lying in bed, the sound of furious scratching would rise from every corner.

Something like a tiny wriggling spring would seem to run along the underside of the body — then bite.

Each time, the fisherman would writhe and turn over.

But at once it was the same again.

This went on until morning.

Their skin turned rough and scabby, like scabies.

"Must be lice dying off."

"Yeah, good riddance."

There was nothing for it but to laugh.

V

Two or three flustered fishermen went running across the deck.

At the corner they couldn't turn sharply enough, stumbled, and grabbed the railing.

The carpenter, mending something on the saloon deck, stretched up and looked toward where the fishermen had run.

The cold wind blowing straight at him brought tears to his eyes, and at first he couldn't see well.

The carpenter turned aside and blew his nose hard — a grab-and-blow,

with his bare fingers.

The mucus, caught by the wind, flew off in a crooked, warped line.

The winch at the port side of the stern was rattling away.

With everyone out fishing now, there was no reason for it to be running.

And something was hanging from the winch.

It was swaying.

The suspended wire swung in a loose circle around its vertical line.

"What's that, then?"

—At that moment, his heart gave a jolt.

The carpenter, as though flustered, turned aside again and blew his nose,

grabbing at it once more.

With the way the wind was blowing, it caught on his trousers.

It was thin, runny mucus.

"Doin' it again, are they."

The carpenter, wiping his eyes again and again with his arm, fixed his gaze steady.

Seen from here, against a sea the silver-gray of a sky just after rain, the winch's jutting arm stood out, and against it, a deckhand — his whole body bound fast and hoisted up — showed clear and black.

He rose into the sky, up to the very tip of the winch.

And then, as though he were nothing more than a snagged rag, he was left hanging there for a while — a full twenty minutes, just like that.

After that, he was lowered down.

His body writhed as if he were struggling, and both his legs moved like a fly caught in a spider's web.

Presently he passed into the shadow of the near saloon and went out of sight.

Only the wire, stretched taut in a straight line, swung now and then like a swing.

Tears seemed to be trickling into his nose, and it ran continually.

The carpenter again did the

"pinch-and-blow."

Then he took the hammer that dangled loosely in his side pocket and set to work.

The carpenter suddenly pricked up his ears—and turned to look.

The wire rope was swaying as though someone below were shaking it, and a dull, ominous thudding—bokun, bokun—was coming from there.

The deckhand hanging from the winch had changed color in the face.

Foam was coming from his lips, clenched as rigidly as a corpse's.

When the carpenter climbed down, the deckhands' boss, a stick of firewood tucked under his arm, was pissing off the deck into the sea, one shoulder hitched up in a cramped, awkward posture.

So that's what he beat him with, the carpenter thought, glancing at the firewood.

Every time the wind gusted, the piss sprayed—shaa, shaa—against the edge of the deck, scattering droplets.

Day after day of unrelenting overwork left the fishermen less and less able to rise in the morning.

The superintendent went around banging an empty oil can right by the ears of the men still lying down.

He banged the can furiously until they opened their eyes and got up.

A man with beriberi half raised his head and said something.

But the superintendent pretended not to see, and did not stop banging the can.

His voice could not be heard, so his mouth only moved open and shut, like a goldfish that had come up to the surface to gulp air.

After banging it enough,

"What's the matter with you—want me to beat you awake?!"

he bellowed.

"So long as the work serves the nation, it's the same as war. Work like you're ready to die! You idiots!"

Every sick man had his bedding stripped off him and was shoved out onto the deck.

The men with beriberi caught their toes on the steps of the stairs.

Clinging to the handrail, bodies tilted sideways, they climbed by lifting their own feet with their own hands.

With every step their hearts gave an uncanny lurch, kicking and leaping.

Both the superintendent and the deckhands' boss treated the sick men with a slow, needling malice, as though they were unwanted stepchildren.

"Meat-packing"

—if he was set to that, he'd be driven off it and put out on deck to do

"claw-tapping" instead.

If he did that for only a little while, he'd be shifted over to

"paper-wrapping."

In the chill that seeped up from below, standing rooted in the dim factory and watching his footing on the slippery floor, a man's legs would go numb from the knee down—more numb than a wooden leg—and now and then the knee joint would feel as if its hinge had come loose, and before he knew it he would sway, ready to collapse limply to the floor.

The student tapped lightly at his forehead with the back of a hand dirtied from crushing crab.

A moment later he toppled straight over backward.

At that instant the stack of empty cans piled up beside him came crashing down with a tremendous clatter, right on top of the fallen student.

They rolled off, gleaming, in circles along the ship's tilt, under the machines and among the cargo.

His comrades scrambled in a panic to carry the student to the hatch.

That was just when the superintendent, whistling, came down into the factory and ran into them.

He took it in at a glance,

"Who's left his post!"

"Who—?!……"

One man, stung despite himself, choked the words out, shoulders squared as if to shove back.

"Who, you say—? You bastard, say that again!"

The superintendent pulled a pistol from his pocket and toyed with it like a plaything.

Then all at once he burst out laughing loudly, his mouth twisted into a triangle, his body rocking as though he were stretching.

"Bring water!"

The superintendent took a bucket brimming with water and, without warning—all at once—dashed it over the face of the student, who lay abandoned on the floor like a discarded railway tie.

"That'll do. —No need to look at something worthless like that. Get back to work, damn you!"

The next morning, when the deckhands went down into the factory, they saw the student tied to an iron post of the lathe, just as he had been the day before.

Like a chicken with its neck wrung, his head had lolled down onto his chest, and at the top of his spine one large vertebra jutted out, bare and exposed.

And on his chest, like a child's bib, hung a piece of cardboard, clearly written in the superintendent's own hand,

"THIS MAN, BEING A DISLOYAL MALINGERER, IS FORBIDDEN TO HAVE HIS HEMPEN ROPE UNTIED."

bearing that inscription.

When someone put a hand to his forehead, it was colder than touching ice-cold iron.

The deckhands had been chattering noisily all the way until they entered the factory.

Now not one of them said a word.

When they heard the deckhands' boss's voice coming down behind them, they split into two and drifted away from the machine where the student was tied, each to his own post.

When the crab fishing grew busy, the abuse turned savage.

Men had their front teeth knocked out and spat

"bloody spit" all night long, or collapsed from overwork in the middle of the job, or bled from the eyes, or were slapped again and again with open hands until they went deaf.

When exhaustion grew too much, everyone became more helpless than if they were drunk.

When the hour finally came and they thought,

"That's enough," and let themselves relax for an instant, they went dizzy on the spot.

Just as everyone was about to knock off,

"Today it's till nine."

the superintendent would shout, walking through.

"You bastards, the only time you speed up is when it's time to quit!"

Everyone rose again sluggishly, like figures in a slow-motion picture.

That was all the will they had left.

"Listen. This isn't a place you can come back to two or three times over. And there's no telling that you can always catch crab whenever you please. If you stopped dead just because your day's work came to ten hours, or thirteen hours, it would be a disaster. —The nature of this work is different. Listen, and in exchange, when the crab aren't running, I let you loaf around more than you deserve."

The superintendent came down into the

"shit-hole" and said things like that.

"Ruskies, now—no matter how the fish come swarming right in front of them, the moment the hour comes they chuck the work aside, not a minute off. That's why—it's because of that kind of attitude that Russia ended up the way it did. It's something a true son of Japan must never, ever imitate!"

What the hell is he talking about, the swindler!

—some of them listened thinking just that, and paid him no mind.

But most of them, hearing the superintendent say so, were made to feel that the Japanese were indeed a great people after all.

And their own daily brutal suffering came to seem, somehow, something "heroic"

seemed something of the sort, and that alone gave everyone some comfort.

While they worked on deck, a destroyer often crossed the horizon, heading south.

They could see the Japanese flag fluttering at its stern.

Stirred with excitement, the fishermen, eyes brimming with tears, snatched off their caps and waved them.—

That's all there is.

That's the only friend we've got, they thought.

"Damn it, seeing that thing makes the tears come."

They watched it go until it dwindled smaller and smaller and vanished, wrapped in its own smoke.

When they came back limp and worn out like a rag, everyone, as though by some shared thought, would shout at no one in particular, "Damn it!"

—just shout it.

In the darkness it sounded like the hate-filled bellow of a bull.

They themselves did not know at whom it was directed, but day after day, shut up together in the same

"shit-hole," with close to two hundred men grumbling curtly at one another, imperceptibly—at a pace as slow as a slug crawling over the ground—their thoughts, their words, their actions all began to grow the same.—

Within that same current, of course, there were some who stagnated, marking time as if in a backwater, and middle-aged fishermen who drifted off in some other direction.

But every one of them came to be so without noticing it themselves, and before they knew it, they had split off, clearly, into separate groups.

It was morning.

Climbing the gangway slowly, a man who had come from the coal mines said,

"I can't keep this up much longer."

he said.

The day before they had worked until nearly ten o'clock, and his body creaked like a machine on the verge of breaking down.

Climbing the gangway, every so often he would drift off to sleep.

From behind, "Hey"

someone called out, and he would jerk his hands and feet without meaning to.

Then he missed his footing and pitched forward, sprawling flat on his stomach.

Before starting work, everyone went down to the factory and gathered in a corner.

Every face looked like a clay doll's.

"I'm gonna shirk the work. Can't do it."

—It was the coal-miner.

The others, still silent, turned their faces toward him.

After a moment,

"'Cause you'll get a good roasting for it..."

someone said.

"I ain't shirking to be lazy. It's 'cause I can't work no more."

The coal-miner rolled his sleeve up to the upper arm and held it up before his eyes, as if peering through it.

"Ain't gonna be long now.—I ain't shirking to be lazy, I tell you."

"If that's so, then that's so."

"..............."

That day the superintendent stalked around the factory like a fighting cock with its comb standing stiff.

"What's this, what's this?!"

he roared, ranting at everyone.

were dawdling at their work — not just one or two of them, but here and there, almost every one of them — so that all he could do was pace back and forth in irritation.

Neither the fishermen nor the sailors had ever seen the superintendent like that before.

Up on the deck, countless crabs freed from the nets made a rustling, skittering sound as they crawled about.

Like a clogged drain, the work backed up more and more.

But "the superintendent's club"

was no use at all!

When the work was over, wiping their necks with towels boiled soft with sweat, they all trooped back, straggling, to the

"shit-hole."

When they looked at each other's faces, they burst out laughing without meaning to.

They did not know why, but it struck them as unbearably, helplessly funny.

It spread to the sailors as well.

Once they realized they had been pitted against the fishermen, worked half to death, and made fools of the whole time, they too, now and then, started to

"slack off."

"We worked way too hard yesterday, so today we're slacking."

When someone said that as they went out to work, everyone fell in with it.

But "slacking"

amounted to nothing more than sparing their bodies a little.

Every one of them had something wrong with his body by now.

If it came down to it, "there was nothing for it"

—they'd do the work.

"Being worked to death"

came to the same thing either way.

That was the feeling in all of them.——

It was simply, by now, unbearable.

×　　　　　×　　　　　×

"The transport ship! The transport ship!"

The shout on the upper deck carried all the way down below.

Each man, just as he was, leapt down from his bunk in the

"shit-hole," still in his ragged clothes.

The transport ship drove the fishermen and sailors wilder than

any "woman" could.

This ship alone did not smell of salt—it smelled of Hakodate.