As always, Hiroyuki woke up a little before three o'clock in the morning. He woke up instinctively and had not needed the prodding of an alarm clock for years now. Of course, there was no precise time laid down to go fishing. He fished for conger eels all alone. The earlier he set out, the earlier he could return. The sooner he got back, the sooner he could start drinking. He sat cross-legged on the futon and gazed into space. The rest of the family was asleep. His wife would have normally been sleeping on the futon next to his, but she was not there. When she was around, she got in the way; when she wasn't around, there were extra chores for him to do.
… Where on earth is she?
He had absolutely no idea how to go about searching for his missing wife. The only thing he could do was to go out fishing as usual and wait for his wife to return. He cursed and slammed his pillow against the tatami matting.
'Someone prepare my breakfast!'
His yell reverberated through the entire house, but there was no reply. They were all asleep in their own rooms: his son and daughter upstairs, his father in the Japanese-style room behind the living room. Not that any of them gave the impression of being alive at all even when they were awake.
Hiroyuki did not budge - not because he was averse to making his own breakfast, but because it just didn't feel right. On this particular morning, he was unable to motivate himself to go fishing. The only justifiable reason for not going out would have been poor weather. He did for a moment find himself wishing he could stay home thanks to some storm.
He'd rarely wished for bad weather before. In fact, Hiroyuki often went out on rough days when other fishermen took the day off. He was well-known in the Futtsu fishing community for his nerve. That was why the Hamakatsu boasted catches that far surpassed those of other boats. Hiroyuki was not engaged in fishing only for the money; he got a thrill from tracking conger eels as they moved from place to place, using his instincts to net bumper catches. Not only that, he enjoyed boasting to others about his successful hauls. It was as if he had no other way to prove his worth as a human being.
Hiroyuki heaved himself up. Even in the closed room, he could sense the conditions out in the open air. The weather was nowhere near as bad as to warrant calling off the day's fishing. Not feeling like it was no justification, but slacking off. And there was one more reason why he could not simply stay home that day. He felt he had to set out to sea, that day more than any other. His feelings were contradictory: he did not feel like going, but he felt he had to go.
He pulled open the shutters. It was still pitch-dark outside. It was the time of the year when the days were longest. In another hour the eastern skies would drain their darkness.
Two days earlier, Hiroyuki had netted a very creditable catch. Even his dragnet had caught many fry of conger eel. Another such profitable day awaited him. He tried to spur himself on with such positive thoughts.
He dressed in his usual style: a jacket over a T-shirt, the bottoms of his jogging pants tucked into rubber boots. His clothing that day was different in but one respect. He wore a different hat. He replaced his usual hunting cap with a straw hat given the growing heat of summer. Thus clad and with a sack of frozen sardines slung over his shoulder, he crossed the foot wide plank that linked the wharf with the stern of his boat.
For conger eel fishing, there was no set time for boats to leave the harbour. Some boats would go out at about the same time as Hiroyuki, while others set off as he returned to the harbour at around two in the afternoon.
The sputtering of engines starting up began to break the predawn silence of the harbour. Hiroyuki started his generator and joined the others in banishing the silence that had reigned. He then lit up the deck of the Hamakatsu with a searchlight. There was one job that remained to be done before he left. It involved throwing sardines into the tubes used to catch the conger eels. The synthetic resin tubes measured about six inches in diameter and were a little over two feet in length. A couple hundred of these tubes were stacked on the left side of the fore-deck. Hiroyuki began the process of putting a sardine in each tube and stuffing them with a cap fitted with rubber flaps. The eels would be enticed into the tubes by the smell of sardine. The rubber flaps at the mouth of each tube were arranged to trap the catch inside once it entered the tube. The two hundred tubes were attached with rope to a cable that stretched about three miles. This was the most common method of fishing for conger eels, and it involved letting the cable out at a uniform speed and allowing the tubes to sink to the seabed. Then all you had to do was wait, and later lift the tubes. Some of them would be empty, but more often than not a tube would contain more than one eel, sometimes as many as ten.
Since the rubber flaps prevented the conger eels from escaping, they would squirm around in the dark slippery tube. Hiroyuki was definitely not one for metaphors, but he thought the slippery squirming interior of the tube and the struggling eel resembled nothing so much as sexual intercourse. What pitiful creatures men were to be lured by a scent into a trap from which they could not escape! It was Hiroyuki's own story, too. He'd fallen into a trap set by a woman, when he was just twenty-two, that period of life when he was most set on having a good time. Trapped, unable to escape, he had set up home and started a family. The woman had become pregnant with his son Katsumi, and the inevitable obligation, marriage, had followed. He had not married for love. The love he had thought would bloom in time never did. Nothing changed. If he were asked whether he felt any affection for his wife, or children, he would have had to shake his head. It had all transpired beyond his control. Hiroyuki had never once liked another human being.
By the time he finished loading the tubes, the eastern sky was already light. Hiroyuki sat down on the cover of the ship's well for a smoke. As he smoked, he gazed at the movement of clouds above Mt Kano. Upon waking he would first look at the dawn sky, then later, before leaving the harbour, check the clouds over the surrounding mountains. Fishermen always turned to the mountains for clues as to how the weather would turn out that day, whether it was likely to be windy or rainy. Any fisherman who did not know how to accurately read the winds and skies in and around the fishing grounds risked losing his life at sea.
The sky immediately above was more or less clear, although fine cloud cover could be seen in the direction of Mt Kano and Mt Nokogiri. Moreover, the mountains themselves appeared to be capped in lower clouds. The few patches of cloud in the sky right above him were drifting inland, indicating to Hiroyuki that southerly winds were already blowing inshore. It was very likely that these would be full gusts before the morning was out. Hiroyuki's instincts, honed over many years, told him that things didn't look good.
The sky told him that even if he did leave the harbour, he was not likely to get very far out. He would have to check the conditions out at sea and make a speedy retreat back to the harbour if the winds got too strong.
Today, Hiroyuki was going to fish off the south side of Breakwater No. 2. The debris floating in Tokyo Bay was said to make a round tour of the bay before washing up either on the north beach of Cape Futtsu or at the tip of the Miura Peninsula. Debris floating south of the line between Cape Kannon and Cape Futtsu, however, could flow out into the open sea instead of ever being washed ashore. That day, Hiroyuki wanted to fish in an area south of that line. There was no special reason for this hankering, he simply felt compelled to make his way as far as that patch of ocean.
Some ashes from the cigarette in his mouth fell onto his knee. He brushed them off with his hand and they scattered on the well cover. The cover was painted a dull green, but the paint was peeling off in many places. That was the first time Hiroyuki noticed that he was sitting atop the boat's well, and suddenly every downy hair on his body stood on end. A chill ran from his buttocks up his spine and a massive shiver rippled across his body.
Its top sticking up at roughly the centre of the boat, the well was about as deep as the height of an average man and measured about six feet by nine. Its central location was ideal for a tank of its kind, for it was here that the boat's bottom was deepest. The boat's well was intended to hold the conger eels after a catch. When not in use, however, the well was covered by two planks to prevent accidents. Something unearthly ascended into the air from that covered hold filled with seawater. Even a veteran of the sea like Hiroyuki was affected enough by the eeriness that he jumped to his feet without thinking.
As he stood he caught sight of a black crevice between his legs. The planks had parted slightly. Hiroyuki dealt a light kick to force them back together and closed up the crack. As he did so, his body was shaking.
The wind grew stronger, and the boat rocked with a chopping motion, causing seawater in the well to splash inside the tank. The sound was a little different than usual, as if the water was splashing against something else.
Hiroyuki looked up at the sky again. The clouds were scudding faster. The southerlies were promising to whip up strong. But that wasn't enough reason to pack up and go home. Before the wind got any stronger, Hiroyuki had to get some work done.
Jumping back onto the wharf, Hiroyuki untied the boat's mooring rope and carried the loose end back onboard with him. The boat gradually began to move away from the quay under its own inertia.