Free The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima Page B

six; and thanks to four days and nights of perfect weather, loading had proceeded on schedule. The freighter was bound for Santos, her meandering course to be determined by consignors in ports along the way.
    Fusako came home at three, changed into a cotton yukata so that Ryuji might have a last look at a woman in kimono, and left for the pier with Noboru. Traffic was light: it was just minutes after four when they arrived. A few trucks and a crane were still clustered around one of the concrete sheds, the boom on the Rakuyo ’s foredeck still wobbled between her hatches and the pier. Fusako decided to wait in the air-conditioned car until Ryuji came down to meet them.
    But Noboru couldn’t sit still. He bolted out of the car and raced up and down the bustling pier, inspecting the barges moored below and exploring unlocked sheds.
    Inside the largest, reaching almost to the crisscross of green steel beams at the ceiling, were stacks of new white wooden crates with black metal clasps at the corners and stamping in English on the side slats. Noboru, watching a siding fade to nothing amid the towering freight, felt a thrill of joy at having come to the end of the dream that railroads wake in children, and mild disappointment: it was like tracing the course of a familiar river and discovering its tiny source.
    “Mom! Hey, Mom!” Racing back to the car, Noboru drummed on the window: he had spotted Ryuji standing near the windlass in the ship’s prow.
    Fusako got out of the car and they waved at the high distant figure in a dirty khaki shirt. Ryuji raised one hand in reply, then moved busily out of sight. Noboru thought of the sailor toiling now, and soon to sail away; and he was flushed with pride.
    Fusako could only wait for Ryuji to appear again. Unfurling a parasol with a silver handle, she watched the Rakuyo’s swaying hawsers cut thick gashes across the harbor’s face. The dock was broiling under the western sun, light-washed and overbright; and eating into all the steel and concrete, like the salt in a sea wind, was a strong, smarting grief. The same grief was diffused through the bright air, its force imparting to the occasional clatter of deck plates and the crash of hurled cables a long, hollow reverberation.
    The concrete pier trapped the heat and hurled it back as a scorching glare; the light breeze blowing off the water brought no relief.
    They squatted at the edge of the sea wall with their backs to the ferocious sun, and stared at the wavelets mincing in to break and foam against the white-flecked stone. Rocking slightly like a rough-hewn cradle, one of the barges moored below edged toward the wall, then slipped back while another sidled in. A sea gull skimmed over the wash that flapped on the open decks; a shiny log floating amid other garbage on the dirty water rode around and around on the eddying swell. The waves advanced in tiers, flank blending subtly with azure flank until it seemed that this endlessly repeated pattern was all they could see as they gazed at the water.
    Noboru read off the draft numbers painted on the Rakuyo’s side; 60 was just above the water, 84 and 86 bracketed the water line, 90 was almost as high as the haweshole.
    “Do you think the water ever gets that high? Boy, it must be really something if it does.”
    Noboru had guessed his mother’s mood and she was reminding him as she stared out to sea of that lonely, naked figure in front of the mirror: the question was as boyish as he could make it, but Fusako didn’t answer.
    Across the harbor basin, pale gray smoke hovered above the streets of Naka Ward; the red-and-white-striped beacon tower aspired to clearer sky. The offing was a dense forest of white masts and, still farther out, a bank of clouds luminous in the late afternoon sunlight heaped and twisted above the water.
    A steam launch towing an unloaded barge pulled away from the far side of the Rakuyo and chugged out of sight.
    It was just after five when Ryuji came off the