The Sound of Waves

by Yukio Mishima

mincingly

creel

Hooks

lamps there must be throwing flickering shadows from the girl’s tranquil eyebrows and long lashes down onto her cheeks.

“But mightn’t the gods punish me for such a selfish prayer?”

sakaki

City youths learn the ways of love early from novels, movies, and the like, but on Uta-jima there were practically no models to follow.

rice dumplings they made on the island to celebrate the Day of the Monkey,

Shinji had been too poor to go on school excursions when he was Hiroshi’s age, so he had been saving money out of his own wages for Hiroshi’s travel expenses.

The boy felt a consummate accord between himself and this opulence of nature that surrounded him.

It was doubtless because nature itself satisfied his need that Shinji felt no particular lack of music in his everyday life.

Solitude had divested him of any feeling that men could have base motives.

The children of the island got their first notions of the world outside from the pictures and words in their school-books rather than from the real things. How difficult, then, for them to conceive, by sheer force of imagination, such things as streetcars, tall buildings, movies, subways, But then, once they had seen reality, once the novelty of astonishment was gone, they perceived clearly how useless it had been for them to try to imagine such things, so much so that at the end of long lives spent on the island they would no longer even so much as remember the existence of such things as streetcars clanging back and forth along the streets of a city.

godown

There was something about the cheerful, slapdash way her dingy features were thrown together that might have appealed to some.

Influenced both by her natural disposition and by the movies seen and novels read in Tokyo, she was always wishing that she could have a man look at her at least once with eyes saying “I love you” instead of “You love me.”

Chiyoko thought how different his iron-like hand felt from the hands of men in Tokyo.

Yasuo very much wanted to drop a hint about how he had slipped off and bought himself a piece last night,

Young as he was, he had already learned to play the hypocrite.

He knew nothing of that melancholy and all-too-effective way of passing time by magnifying and complicating his feelings,

Spray from the waves, mixed with the driving rain, struck Shinji full in the face. The sharp, fresh saltiness ran down his flushed cheeks, down the lines of his nose, and Shinji recalled the taste of Hatsue’s lips.

All this she knew. The interior of a house dark even at noon, the somber pangs of childbirth, the gloom at the bottom of the sea—these were the series of interrelated worlds in which she lived her life.

The mother remembered one of the women of the summer before last, a widow like herself, a frail woman still carrying a nursing child. The woman had come up from diving for abalone, and had suddenly fallen unconscious as she stood before the drying-fire.

She had turned up the whites of her eyes, bitten her blue lips, and dropped to the ground. When her remains were cremated at twilight in the pine grove, the other diving women had been filled with such grief that ...

A strange story had been told about that incident, and some of the women had become afraid to dive any more. It was said that the dead woman had been punished for having seen a fearful something at the bottom ...

Shinji’s mother had scoffed at the story and had dived to greater and greater depths to bring up the biggest catches of the season. She had never...

Even such recollections as these could not dent her natural cheerfulness: she felt boastful about her own good health, and the storm outside quickened her feel...

Finishing the dishwashing, she opened wide the skirts of her kimono and sat down with her bare legs stretched out in front of her, gazing at them earnestly ...

There was not a single wrinkle on the sunburnt, well-ripened thighs, their wonderfully rounded flesh all but g...

“Like this, I could still have four or five children more.” But at the thought her virtuous heart became filled with contrition. Quickly tidying her clothing, sh...

Her skin, far from fair-complexioned, had been constantly bathed in sea-water and stretched smooth; and there, upon the wide expanse of a chest that had served for many long dives, two small, firm breasts turned their faces slightly away from each other, as though abashed, and lifted up two rose-colored buds.

Ever since he could remember, he had been used to seeing the women of this fishing village naked, but this was the first time he had ever seen the girl he loved naked.

Shinji had a sort of haphazard respect for moral things.

To Shinji it seemed as though this unceasing feeling of intoxication, and the confused booming of the sea outside, and the noise of the storm among the treetops were all beating with nature’s violent rhythm.

the girl mirrored the flames in the smooth face of the shell.

she found Hatsue’s rustic features even more beautiful than the islanders said they were.

There in the city almost all nature had been put into uniform, and the little power of nature that remained was an enemy. Here on the island, however, the islanders enthusiastically entered into an alliance with nature and gave it their full support.

the waves came as persistently as the garrulity of a drunk man.

Match?

In Yasuo’s opinion the mere ownership of such a wonderful watch made him by rights a favorite with the women.

blossoms half-open.

the cherry trees had been transplanted from the mountains.

Like Hatsue

The girl did not yet realize how very attractive she was.

until that moment Hatsue had not known what god it was who had come to her rescue.

she realized it was all the doing of a clever hornet.

Shinji was not yet home and his mother was alone, feeding brushwood into the cookstove. There was the sound of the crackling wood and the windlike sound of the fire inside the stove, and it was only at times like this that delicious smells erased the stench of the toilet.

The mother took a very tolerant view of young people’s amorous affairs.

But when it came to its being her own son’s affair that was the subject of malicious gossip, then there was a motherly duty that she would have to perform.

the Ape-god Society, the women’s one and only club,

But in any case he was an old man who, while still living, could act like a bronze statue erected to his own memory—and without appearing ridiculous.