absence, disliked having the islanders greet and speak to her.
Chiyoko never wore a trace of make-up and her face was made all the more inconspicuous by the plain, dark-brown suit she was wearing. There was something about the cheerful, slapdash way her dingy features were thrown together that might have appealed to some. But she always wore a gloomy expression and, in her constantly perverse way, insisted upon thinking of herself as unattractive. Until now this was the most noticeable result of the “refinements” she was learning at the university in Tokyo. But probably the way she brooded over her commonplace face as being so unlovely was just as presumptuous as if she had been convinced she was an utter beauty.
Chiyoko’s good-natured father had also contributed, unwittingly, to this gloomy conviction of hers. She was always complaining so openly that she had inherited her ugliness from him that, even when she was in the next room, the outspoken lighthouse-keeper would grumble to his guests:
“Well, there’s no doubt about this grown-up daughter of mine being homely. It really makes me sad. I’m so ugly myself that I guess I have to take the blame for it. But then, I suppose that’s fate.”
• • •
Someone clapped Chiyoko on the shoulder and she turned around. It was Yasuo Kawamoto, the president of the Young Men’s Association. He stood there laughing, his leather jacket glistening in the sun.
“Ho! Welcome home. Spring vacation, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Exams were over yesterday.”
“So now we’ve come back to have another drink of mother’s milk?”
The day before, Yasuo’s father had sent him to attend to some business for the Co-operative with the prefectural authorities at Tsu. He had spent the night at an inn in Toba run by relatives and now was taking the boat back to Uta-jima. He took great pride in showing this girl from a Tokyo university how well he could speak, without any trace of island dialect.
Chiyoko was conscious of the masculine joviality of this young man her own age; his worldly manner seemed to be saying: “There’s no doubt but what this girl has a fancy for me.” This feeling made her even more bad-tempered.
“Here it is again!” she told herself. 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.” But she had decided she would never have such an experience in all her life.
A loud, rough voice shouted from the Kamikaze-maru :
“Hey! Where the blazes is that load of quilts? Somebody find them!”
Soon a man came carrying a great bale of arabesque-patterned quilts on his shoulders. They had been lying on the quay, half hidden in the shadows of the godown.
“The boat’s about ready to leave,” Yasuo said.
As they jumped from the pier to the deck, Yasuo took Chiyoko’s hand and helped her across. Chiyoko thought how different his iron-like hand felt from the hands of men in Tokyo. But in her imagination it was Shinji’s hand she was feeling—a hand she had never even so much as shaken.
Peering down through the small hatchway into the murky passenger cabin, all the more darkly stagnant to their daylight-accustomed eyes, they could barely make out, from the white towels tied around their necks or the occasional flickering reflection from a pair of spectacles, the forms of people lolling on the straw matting.
“It’s better on deck. Even if it’s a bit cold, it’s still better.”
Yasuo and Chiyoko took shelter from the wind behind the wheelhouse and sat down, leaning against a coil of rope.
The captain’s snappish young helper came up and said:
“Hey! How’s about lifting your asses a minute?”
With that, he pulled a plank out from under them. They had sat down on the hatch used for closing the passenger cabin.
Up in the wheelhouse, where scruffy, peeling
Chiyoko never wore a trace of make-up and her face was made all the more inconspicuous by the plain, dark-brown suit she was wearing. There was something about the cheerful, slapdash way her dingy features were thrown together that might have appealed to some. But she always wore a gloomy expression and, in her constantly perverse way, insisted upon thinking of herself as unattractive. Until now this was the most noticeable result of the “refinements” she was learning at the university in Tokyo. But probably the way she brooded over her commonplace face as being so unlovely was just as presumptuous as if she had been convinced she was an utter beauty.
Chiyoko’s good-natured father had also contributed, unwittingly, to this gloomy conviction of hers. She was always complaining so openly that she had inherited her ugliness from him that, even when she was in the next room, the outspoken lighthouse-keeper would grumble to his guests:
“Well, there’s no doubt about this grown-up daughter of mine being homely. It really makes me sad. I’m so ugly myself that I guess I have to take the blame for it. But then, I suppose that’s fate.”
• • •
Someone clapped Chiyoko on the shoulder and she turned around. It was Yasuo Kawamoto, the president of the Young Men’s Association. He stood there laughing, his leather jacket glistening in the sun.
“Ho! Welcome home. Spring vacation, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Exams were over yesterday.”
“So now we’ve come back to have another drink of mother’s milk?”
The day before, Yasuo’s father had sent him to attend to some business for the Co-operative with the prefectural authorities at Tsu. He had spent the night at an inn in Toba run by relatives and now was taking the boat back to Uta-jima. He took great pride in showing this girl from a Tokyo university how well he could speak, without any trace of island dialect.
Chiyoko was conscious of the masculine joviality of this young man her own age; his worldly manner seemed to be saying: “There’s no doubt but what this girl has a fancy for me.” This feeling made her even more bad-tempered.
“Here it is again!” she told herself. 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.” But she had decided she would never have such an experience in all her life.
A loud, rough voice shouted from the Kamikaze-maru :
“Hey! Where the blazes is that load of quilts? Somebody find them!”
Soon a man came carrying a great bale of arabesque-patterned quilts on his shoulders. They had been lying on the quay, half hidden in the shadows of the godown.
“The boat’s about ready to leave,” Yasuo said.
As they jumped from the pier to the deck, Yasuo took Chiyoko’s hand and helped her across. Chiyoko thought how different his iron-like hand felt from the hands of men in Tokyo. But in her imagination it was Shinji’s hand she was feeling—a hand she had never even so much as shaken.
Peering down through the small hatchway into the murky passenger cabin, all the more darkly stagnant to their daylight-accustomed eyes, they could barely make out, from the white towels tied around their necks or the occasional flickering reflection from a pair of spectacles, the forms of people lolling on the straw matting.
“It’s better on deck. Even if it’s a bit cold, it’s still better.”
Yasuo and Chiyoko took shelter from the wind behind the wheelhouse and sat down, leaning against a coil of rope.
The captain’s snappish young helper came up and said:
“Hey! How’s about lifting your asses a minute?”
With that, he pulled a plank out from under them. They had sat down on the hatch used for closing the passenger cabin.
Up in the wheelhouse, where scruffy, peeling
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