Read Online The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima - Free Book Online

Finally, two days after Hiroshi left on the school excursion, the island was struck by such a storm that no boats could put out. It seemed that not one of the island’s meager cherry blossoms, just then beginning to open, could escape destruction.
    On the previous day an unseasonably damp wind had enveloped and clung to the sails, and at sunset a strange light had spread over the sky. A ground swell set in; the beach was aroar with incoming waves; the sea-lice and dango bugs scurried for high ground. During the night a high wind came blowing, mixed with rain, and the heavens and the sea were filled with sounds like human shrieks and shrilling fifes.…
•    •    •
    Shinji listened to the voice of the storm from his pallet. It was enough to tell him the boats would not put out today. This would be too much even for braiding rope or repairing fishing tackle, perhaps too much even for the Young Men’s Association’s rat-catching project.
    Not wanting to waken his mother, whose breathing from the next pallet told him she was still asleep, Shinji thoughtfully kept still, waiting eagerly for the first grayness at the window. The house was shaking violently and the windows were rattling. Somewhere a sheet of tin fell with a great clatter. The houses on Uta-jima, the big rich houses as well as the tiny one-story houses such as Shinji’s, were all built alike, with the entrance into a dirt-floored work-room, flanked by the toilet-room on the left and the kitchen on the right; and amid the wind’s fury, in the pre-dawn blackness, there was a single odor that dominated the entire house, hanging quietly on the air inside—that darkish, cold, meditative odor of the toilet-room.
    The window, which faced the wall of the next-door neighbor’s storehouse, slowly turned gray. Shinji looked up at the pouring rain, beating upon the eaves and spreading wetly across the windowpanes. Before, he had hated days when there was no fishing, days that robbed him both of the pleasure of working and of income, but now the prospect of such a day seemed the most wonderful of festival days to him. It was a festival made glorious, not with blue skies and flags waving from poles topped with golden balls, but with a storm, raging seas, and a wind that shrieked as it came tearing through the prostrate treetops.
    Finding it unbearable to wait, the boy leaped from bed and jerked on a pair of trousers and a black, crew-neck sweater full of holes.
    A moment later his mother awakened to see the dark shadow of a man against the window, faintly lit with dawn.
    “Hey! Who’s there?” she shouted.
    “Me.”
    “Oh … don’t scare me so! Today, in weather like this, you’re going fishing?”
    “The boats won’t be going out, but …”
    “Well, then, why not sleep a little longer? Why, I thought it was some stranger at the window!”
    The mother was not far wrong in the first thought she had had upon opening her eyes: her son did indeed seem a stranger this morning. Here he was, this Shinji who almost never opened his mouth, singing at the top of his voice and making a show of gymnastics by swinging from the door-lintel.
    Not knowing the reason for her son’s strange behavior and fearing he would pull the house down, his mother grumbled:
    “If it’s a storm outside, what else is it we’ve got right here inside the house?”
    Countless times Shinji went to peer up at the sooty clock on the wall. With a heart unaccustomed to doubting, he never wondered for an instant whether the girl would brave such a storm to keep their rendezvous. He knew nothing of that melancholy and all-too-effective way of passing time by magnifying and complicating his feelings, whether of happiness or uneasiness, through the exercise of the imagination.
    When he could no longer bear the thought of waiting, Shinji flung on a rubber raincoat and went down to meetthe sea. It seemed to him that only the sea would be kind enough to answer his wordless