Attached to one window was a desk with a view on the three sides. Facing south was a thirty-power telescope, facing the harbor facilities to the east were fifteen-power binoculars, and at the southeast corner, for night signals, was a one-kilowatt beam. Two telephones on the desk at the southwest corner, a book shelf, maps, signal flags arranged on high shelves, and to the northwest a kitchen with a closet and a cot completed the furnishings. In front of the eastern window was a steel electric pylon, its porcelain insulators repeating the color of the clouds. The power line ran down to the beach, where it was caught by a second pylon. A turn to the northeast took it to a third, and so around the coast, a diminishing curve of silver towers, to Shimizu Harbor. The third pylon was, from this vantage point, a good marker. A ship came into the harbor, and one knew as it passed the third pylon that it was approaching Basin 3-G, which included the piers.
Even now identification was by naked eye. So long as vagaries in cargoes and currents ruled the movements of ships, they would continue to come in too soon or too late, and a certain nineteenth-century romanticism would not disappear from welcoming parties. There was a need for more precise observations to tell the customs and quarantine officials and the stevedores and pilots and laundries and provisioners when to put out their welcoming flags. There was a still greater need for a just arbiter to decide which was to take precedence when two ships came in together and competed for the last berth.
That was Tōru’s work.
A fairly large ship had appeared. The horizon was already obscure, and it took a quick and well-trained eye to determine a ship’s origins. Tōru went to the telescope.
In the clear atmosphere of midsummer or midwinter, there would be an instant when a ship would move rudely in over the high threshold of the horizon; but in the mists of early summer such an appearance was a gradual separation from the inchoate. The horizon was like a long, white, soggy pillow.
The size of the black cargo ship seemed right for the 4,780-ton Tenrō-maru, and the stern bridge also corresponded to what the registry had told Tōru. The wake was white and clean, as was the bridge. There were three yellow derricks. What was the round red mark on the black funnels? Tōru strained his eyes. He made out the character for tai, “large,” in a red circle. Taishō Shipping, no mistake about it. All the while the ship kept up a speed of twelve and a half knots, and threatened to outrun the telescope. It was like a fly crossing a round window screen.
He could still not make out the name. He was sure that there were three characters, and foreknowledge told him that the first was ten, “heaven.”
He returned to the desk and telephoned the agent.
“Hello. This is Teikoku Signal. You should be ready for the Tenrō-maru. It’s just coming past the pylon. The cargo?” Tōru conjured up an image of the waterline dividing the ship into red and black. “I’d think about half full. When will the stevedores be out? At five?”
That would give them an hour. The number of places that must be informed had grown.
Tōru moved busily back and forth between the desk and the telescope, and made some fifteen calls.
The pilot station. The tugboat Shunyō-maru. The pilot’s house. Various provisioners. The Port Service Patrol. Customs. The agency once more. The Harbor Management Section of the Harbor Control Office. The Office of Statistics for weighing the cargo. Shipping offices.
“The Tenrō-maru is coming in. Hinodé four-five. If you will, please.”
The Tenrō-maru was already at the third pylon. As the image moved past land it was distorted by heat shimmerings.
“Hello. The Tenrō-maru is coming into three-G.”
“Hello. This is Teikoku Signal. The Tenrō-maru is in three-G.”
“Hello. Customs? The police, please. The Tenrō-maru has come into three-G.”
“Hello. The Tenrō-maru is in three-G. Sixteen fifteen.”
“Hello. The Tenrō-maru came in five minutes ago.”
Ships not from abroad but from Nagoya or Yokohama were more frequent at the end of the month than at the beginning. Yokohama was one hundred fifteen nautical miles away, nine and a half hours at twelve knots. Tōru had no duties except to be on watch for an hour or so before a projected arrival. There were no other arrivals today save the Nitchō-maru at nine in the evening, from Keelung.
Tōru always felt a little dejected when he had finished a round of calls. The harbor would be suddenly alive. He would light a cigarette as he watched the stir from remote isolation.
Actually he should not be smoking. The superintendent had had a sharp word or two when he had first noticed a boy of sixteen with a cigarette in his mouth. Afterward he had said nothing. No doubt he had concluded that inattention was the more profitable policy.
Tōru’s pale, finely carved face was like ice. It conveyed no emotion, no affection or tears.
But he knew the happiness of watching. Nature had told him of it. No eye could be clearer or brighter than the eye that had nothing to create, nothing to do but gaze. The invisible horizon beyond which the conscious eye could not penetrate was far more remote than the visible horizon. And all manner of entities appeared in regions visible and accessible to consciousness. Sea, ships, clouds, peninsulas, lightning, the sun, the moon, the myriads of stars. If seeing is a meeting between eye and being, which is to say between being and being, then it must be the facing mirrors of two beings. No, it was more. Seeing went beyond being, to take wings like a bird. It transported Tōru to a realm visible to no one. Even beauty there was a rotted, tattered skirt. That had to be a sea never defiled by being, a sea upon which ships never appeared. There had to be a realm where at the limit of all the layers of clarity it was definite that nothing at all made an appearance, a realm of solid, definite indigo, where seeing cast off the shackles of consciousness and itself became transparent, where phenomena and consciousness dissolved like plumbic oxide in acetic acid.
Happiness for Tōru was sending his eyes into such distances. There was for him no more complete a throwing off of the self than in seeing. Only the eyes brought forgetfulness—save for the image in the mirror.
Tōru himself?
A sixteen-year-old who was quite certain that he did not belong to this world. Only half of him was in it. The other was in that realm of indigo. There were consequently no laws and no regulations that governed him. He but pretended that he was bound by the laws of this world. Where are there laws regulating an angel?
Life was strangely simple. Poverty and deprivation, the contradictions of society and politics, troubled him not in the least. Occasionally he would let a soft smile float to his lips, but it had in it nothing of sympathy. It was the final sign rejecting humanity, an invisible arrow released from the bow of his lips.
When he tired of looking at the sea, he would take a hand mirror from the desk and look at himself. In the pale, well-shaped face there were beautiful eyes, always brimming with midnight. The eyebrows were thin but proud, the lips were smooth and firm. But the eyes were the most beautiful feature. There was irony in the fact that his eyes should be the most beautiful part of his physical being, the fact that the organ for establishing his own beauty should be the most beautiful.
The eyelashes were long, and the eyes, utterly cruel, seemed at first sight to be lost in a dream.
This orphan, one of the elect, different from other men, had complete confidence in his own immaculateness, whatever evil he might work. His father, captain of a cargo ship, had died at sea, and his mother had died soon afterward, and he had been taken in by an impoverished uncle. A year in a prefectural training center upon his graduation from middle school and he was licensed as a third-class signalman and hired by Teikoku Signal.