shouting: “Look! Look! A big dog pulling a privy!”
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.
Before each school excursion Yashiro Shrine did a thriving business in talismans. In their everyday lives the island women committed their own bodies, as a matter of course, to the danger and the death that lurked in the sea, but when it came to excursions setting forth for gigantic cities they themselves had never seen, the mothers felt their children were embarking on great, death-defying adventures.
Hiroshi’s mother had bought two precious eggs and made him a lunch of terribly salty fried eggs. And deep in his satchel, where he would not quickly find them, she had tucked away some caramels and fruit.
On that day alone the island’s ferryboat, the Kamikaze-maru , left Uta-jima at the unusual hour of one in the afternoon. Formerly the stubborn old-timer who captained this putt-putt launch of something under twenty tons had refused as an abomination any departure from the established schedule. But then had come the year when his own son went on the excursion. Ever since then he had understood what they meant by saying the children would squander their money if the boat got to Toba too much ahead of time for their train to leave, and had grudgingly agreed to let the school authorities have their own way with the schedule.
The cabin and the deck of the Kamikaze-maru wereoverflowing with schoolboys, satchels and canteens hanging across their breasts. The teachers in charge were terror-stricken by the swarm of mothers on the jetty. On Uta-jima a teacher’s position depended upon the disposition of the mothers. One teacher had been branded a Communist by the mothers and driven off the island, while another, who was popular with the mothers, had even gotten one of the women teachers pregnant—and still been promoted to be acting assistant-principal.
It was the early afternoon of a truly springlike day, and as the boat set sail every mother was screaming the name of her own child. The boys, with the straps of their student-caps fixed under their chins, waited until they were sure their faces could no longer be distinguished from the shore and then began to yell back in high-spirited fun:
“Good-by, stupid!… Hooray! you old goose!… To hell with you!…”
The boat, jam-packed with black student-uniforms, kept throwing reflections of metal cap-badges and polished buttons back to shore until it was far out at sea.…
Once Hiroshi’s mother was back, sitting on the straw mats of her own house, gloomy and deadly quiet even in the daytime, she began weeping, thinking of the day when both her sons would finally leave her for good and take to the sea.
The Kamikaze-maru had just discharged its load of students at the Toba pier opposite Mikimoto’s “Pearl Island” and, regaining its usual happy-go-lucky, countrified air, was preparing for the return crossing to Uta-jima. There was a bucket atop the ancient smokestack, andwater reflections were playing over the underside of the prow and over the great creels hanging from under the pier. A gray godown stood looking out across the sea, with the large white character for “Ice” painted on its side.
Chiyoko, the daughter of the lighthouse-keeper, was standing at the far end of the pier, holding a Boston bag. This unsociable girl, returning to the island after a long
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.
Before each school excursion Yashiro Shrine did a thriving business in talismans. In their everyday lives the island women committed their own bodies, as a matter of course, to the danger and the death that lurked in the sea, but when it came to excursions setting forth for gigantic cities they themselves had never seen, the mothers felt their children were embarking on great, death-defying adventures.
Hiroshi’s mother had bought two precious eggs and made him a lunch of terribly salty fried eggs. And deep in his satchel, where he would not quickly find them, she had tucked away some caramels and fruit.
On that day alone the island’s ferryboat, the Kamikaze-maru , left Uta-jima at the unusual hour of one in the afternoon. Formerly the stubborn old-timer who captained this putt-putt launch of something under twenty tons had refused as an abomination any departure from the established schedule. But then had come the year when his own son went on the excursion. Ever since then he had understood what they meant by saying the children would squander their money if the boat got to Toba too much ahead of time for their train to leave, and had grudgingly agreed to let the school authorities have their own way with the schedule.
The cabin and the deck of the Kamikaze-maru wereoverflowing with schoolboys, satchels and canteens hanging across their breasts. The teachers in charge were terror-stricken by the swarm of mothers on the jetty. On Uta-jima a teacher’s position depended upon the disposition of the mothers. One teacher had been branded a Communist by the mothers and driven off the island, while another, who was popular with the mothers, had even gotten one of the women teachers pregnant—and still been promoted to be acting assistant-principal.
It was the early afternoon of a truly springlike day, and as the boat set sail every mother was screaming the name of her own child. The boys, with the straps of their student-caps fixed under their chins, waited until they were sure their faces could no longer be distinguished from the shore and then began to yell back in high-spirited fun:
“Good-by, stupid!… Hooray! you old goose!… To hell with you!…”
The boat, jam-packed with black student-uniforms, kept throwing reflections of metal cap-badges and polished buttons back to shore until it was far out at sea.…
Once Hiroshi’s mother was back, sitting on the straw mats of her own house, gloomy and deadly quiet even in the daytime, she began weeping, thinking of the day when both her sons would finally leave her for good and take to the sea.
The Kamikaze-maru had just discharged its load of students at the Toba pier opposite Mikimoto’s “Pearl Island” and, regaining its usual happy-go-lucky, countrified air, was preparing for the return crossing to Uta-jima. There was a bucket atop the ancient smokestack, andwater reflections were playing over the underside of the prow and over the great creels hanging from under the pier. A gray godown stood looking out across the sea, with the large white character for “Ice” painted on its side.
Chiyoko, the daughter of the lighthouse-keeper, was standing at the far end of the pier, holding a Boston bag. This unsociable girl, returning to the island after a long
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