Free Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura

grabbing one saury after another, and the majority of the boats were returning to shore loaded with more than a hundred fish.
    Eventually Isaku, too, seemed to learn the technique involved, and before long he was catching several saury a day. Occasionally there were even days when he would bring back as many as ten. His mother rationed them to one fish a day and preserved the others in salt.
    One night the rainy season came to a crescendo with peals of thunder and a furious downpour. After that the sun became stronger, and with it Isaku’s arms and legs turned a dark shade of brown. The women were hard at work collecting seaweed. The summer heat intensified, and at times the village was drenched by showers. The saury began moving north, growing scarcer by the day, until suddenly in early July they vanished altogether. Squid started to appear again, and the men worked hard to hook them, using little pieces of fish as bait.
    The women of the village carried salted saury on their backsto the next town. They had caught enough to store for their own needs and wanted to trade the surplus for grain. But this year all the coastal villages had experienced similarly large catches, and more than half the fish were being used as fertiliser for the fields, so they came back with very little grain to show for their efforts. Of course, Isaku’s family had been able to store away only a small amount of salted saury, so they had not gone to the next village.
    Those who made the trip came back telling of how a fever had killed many people in other villages that summer. But thanks to its isolation no one in Isaku’s village had suffered from the sickness. Other than the very young, most who had perished had been either old people or those whose brain or lungs had been fatally damaged by the disease.
    Worried about the risk of a contagious disease being brought in from outside, the village chief prohibited anyone from leaving the village. He ordered those who had returned from the next village to wash themselves in the sea, without fail, early each morning for two weeks.
    The time of the Bon festival came, and the fishing-season was brought to a halt.
    Family groups of villagers headed up the mountain path to clean the graves of their ancestors before returning to their houses to place offerings of grain or dried fish on their own Buddhist altars. In the evening they would burn a hemp stalk at their doorway, and flaming torches would be driven into the sandy part of the beach. It was said that the souls who had departed for a distant place across the ocean would rely on these torches to find their way back through the darkness as far as the beach; the light of the burning hemp stalks would guide them home. They believed that the spirits would wash their feet before entering the house, so the villagers prepared a washtub full of fresh water and placed it in the entrance.
    For Isaku’s mother this would be the first Bon since Teru had died in February of that year, so she tied a piece of white cloth to a thin bamboo rod she had cut herself, and stood this at the door. The pain of losing a child seemed to come back toher again as she stood there beside the bamboo rod for quite some time.
    Three days later, in the evening, a little boat made of bark and bamboo was taken down to the shore, while young children ran around the village shouting, ‘The boat’s about to go!’
    Carrying the offerings of food from the altar, Isaku followed his mother when she grabbed the bamboo rod and headed down to the beach. The little boat was set afloat down at the waterside, where Isaku and the other villagers loaded it with offerings of food. His mother stood her bamboo rod in the boat as well.
    On the village chief’s command, the bark and bamboo vessel was towed away from the shore by two boats and released about forty yards offshore. The two fishermen tossed their flaming torches into the little boat, which started to burn