Fish of the Seto Inland Sea

She remembered how her husband was flurried and lost his usual dignified air of importance.

‘He is so naive!’ She kept on laughing. Shige, too, laughed.

‘Oh, men are all very naive.’

‘They think they are cleverer than us.’

‘What happened?’ Shige’s husband was bringing in wood from outside and, hearing the laughter, poked his head into the chanoma.

‘Go away. This is women’s talk.’ Shige waved her hand to chase him away. The two women continued to chat to each other, giving vent to feelings pent up by the strain of constant obedience.

As Kei hoped, Ayako was welcomed and treated like a real daughter by Shobei and his wife. Most of her trousseau was made up of the ‘presents of welcome’ from the Miwas. This did not shame the Shirais. On the contrary, people realised that Shobei esteemed the Shirais and their respect for the Shirais increased. At the same time, they appreciated Shobei’s generosity. Shintaro loved his young and lovely wife. Ayako adored him. For her, there was no one as handsome, intelligent and kind as he was. She looked up to her husband with respect and worshipped him as though he was a god. Her obedience to him was sincere.

For ten years, there was nothing but happiness in the Miwa family. The villagers said, ‘Even the sun shines brighter over their house.’

When Ayako produced a healthy first child, even though it was a girl, there was a celebration. She was named Takeko. Then, two years later, in the first year of a new century, 1900, Haruko was born. Slight disappointment was felt at the arrival of a second daughter, but the husband was thirty-five and the wife was only nineteen.

‘We’ll have more children,’ Shintaro said to Shobei.

‘Of course you will,’ he answered.

When a third daughter was born, Shintaro, who had been telling his wife that he was not at all worried whether it would be a boy or a girl, had to walk around the garden before he went to see her to make sure he looked cheerful and pleased. The third child was called Sachiko.

It was when Ayako was pregnant for the fourth time that, one frosty morning, Shobei went to inspect his charcoal-making lodge. Wearing his padded jerkin, he bent forward and walked on hurriedly. As he came to the foot of the steep stone steps leading up to a temple, he made out a pair of women’s footwear left neatly at the bottom. He was not surprised. The temple was famous for divine favours for childless women and women without sons. They would go to the temple every day and climb up and down the steps barefoot for their wishes to be fulfilled. During the day, there were always one or two women in the vicinity who had come from far away.

In the grey light, he saw Kei coming down the steps. Unaware that the passer-by was Shobei, Kei squatted once more in supplication when she reached the bottom of the steps. Kei must have been there every morning praying for Ayako to have a boy, before Tei-ichi got up. Tei-ichi’s dislike of what he called superstition was well known.

And a son, Shuichi, was born. Shobei opened kegs of saké and invited the villagers. He ordered pink and white rice cakes from the largest cake shop in town and distributed them. He also donated a large sum of money to the temple. It was in honour of the quiet figure who was praying barefoot in the icy morning for the sake of her daughter and her family. It was his way of thanking her without telling her.

All day, relatives and friends arrived. They brought a large red sea bream as a symbol of felicitation, silk, cakes and other presents. In the kitchen, sushi was prepared in quantity. Only one person did not participate in the party. In the quiet inner room, Ayako was fast asleep.

That was the happiest day for the Miwas.

2 (#ulink_65bbf6a7-581e-566b-8bd4-2d34960bcdb8)

The Russians (#ulink_65bbf6a7-581e-566b-8bd4-2d34960bcdb8)

At the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, the International Red Cross appointed Shintaro to be responsible for war casualties. He was one of the few doctors in the country qualified in European medicine. He was stationed on an island of Oki in the Japan Sea where the Red Cross Hospital was set up. Anticipating that the war would last more than a year, Shintaro took his wife and young family with him.

‘Haruko ojosama, there is a Russian man’s body washed up on the shore. Let’s go and see,’ a young servant said to Haruko.

He knew she would come. He was excited and itching to go, but thought that it would be prudent to take one of the children with him. It would look better than leaving work on his own. Of the four children in the Miwa family, the younger two were not old enough, while it was unthinkable to ask Haruko’s older sister, Takeko. At the age of seven, Takeko was a prim young lady. Haruko was different. When she heard the servant, she neither asked questions nor hesitated.

Haruko went out through the gate ahead of the servant. Once outside the garden, the servant rolled up his hakama (wide trousers). Haruko hitched up the skirt of her cotton kimono. Both of them took off their geta (wooden footwear) and, carrying them in their hands, ran along the dusty lane leading to the sea shore.

There was a crowd of some fifty people standing on the beach looking at the body, which was lying on the sand face up. It was late spring and the breeze felt pleasant to the people who were standing around.

‘Huge!’ a well-tanned and bow-legged man exclaimed, looking at the body.

‘If the country is big, it is natural that the people are big,’ someone else said. He meant to state a fact, but the villagers broke out into fits of laughter. ‘They may be big, but we defeated them.’

The Japanese navy had attacked a Russian task force and won an outright victory. Everybody was good-humoured, as though this success was a personal achievement. They forgot about the dead body for a moment. It lay as though it had never known life.

Several children tried to peep between the onlookers’ legs and were scolded and chased away, but someone noticed Haruko and said, ‘Ah, the doctor’s daughter,’ and let her get inside the circle of men.

Haruko thought that the colour of his hair was strange, like an ear of wheat. The face was unnaturally pallid. The eyes were closed. Haruko crouched down to take a closer look.

‘Aren’t you afraid, Haruko ojosama?’ a shop-keeper asked. She shook her head. There was hardly anything that made her afraid, she thought. She was not like Takeko, who was scared of almost everything and squeamish as well.

‘Look at this.’ Someone standing behind Haruko pointed at the chest of the body. A gold chain with a green enamelled ball about one centimetre in diameter hung from the neck. She had noticed it but was not sure if she was allowed to touch it. Tiny diamonds encircled a small piece of glass at the top of the green ball, and threw little rainbow-coloured lights in the sun.

The man bent over the body and picked up the pendant, turning it around. Standing up, he told Haruko to look through the top. It was a small magnifying glass. When she managed to focus, she gasped. There was a foreign lady inside the small green ball. She was sitting sideways with one elbow lightly resting on a cushion. She had long reddish golden hair and blue eyes. Her shoulders were bare. She had something red and gold around her neck and on her ear.

‘Haruko ojosama,’ the servant whispered, and poked at her. She turned around indignantly and realised that her father was coming with several people, among whom were the head of the village and the chief of police.

Her father was busy talking to the others about identifying the body and taking it to the temple.

‘Do not touch him. You must respect the dead, enemy or not,’ she heard him say to the villagers. He was also saying to the police chief, ‘There may be more bodies drifting this way.’

Two days before, Haruko had been to the beach with the same servant and they had seen many columns of black smoke on the horizon.

‘There are fifty Russian warships.’ Someone was knowledgeable. ‘They came all the way from the North Sea, taking eight months.’

‘Eight months!’ a fisherman repeated in surprise. ‘Ships like that cannot be in the sea for long without supplies. Barnacles and seaweed grow on the hull. If they are not cleaned off they will slow down the ship. Even our little boat ...’

‘Yes, yes.’ The first man interrupted the chatter impatiently.

The world knew the difficulties of the task force and watched its heroic progress through the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the South China Sea, the East China Sea and, finally, the Sea of Japan. Anchorages en route were mainly hostile. The long suffering of the sailors was nearly over. The year was 1905.

The motive for this extraordinary expedition by the Russians was to secure command of the Sea of Japan by reinforcing the First Pacific Fleet based at Port Arthur. The Russians had leased this port at the southern tip of Manchuria from the Chinese. But Port Arthur had fallen and the entire First Fleet had been destroyed by the Japanese navy. The new objective of the Russian Commander Rozhdestvensky, was to carry as many of his warships as possible safely into Vladivostok, north of the Sea of Japan. The last thing he wanted was to meet the Japanese en route.

For the Japanese the confrontation with the Russian fleet was the culmination of half a century of struggle and preparation. Technology was behind. The nation was poor. Most people had only millet and dried fish to eat. And yet the Japanese had invested heavily in the navy. Those in power were conscious of the vulnerability of an island nation that lacked the natural resources to modernise. A nearby land empire in China would be a lifeline. If they lost the sea battle against the Russians, the Japanese army, which was narrowly winning in Manchuria, would be isolated. It would not take long for them to be ousted.

As the Russian ships neared their destination they had to decide whether to take the direct and shorter route to Vladivostok through the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan or sail along the east of the Japanese archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese did not have enough warships to meet them in two places. Which route would the Russians choose? This was the question in everyone’s mind. The nervousness of naval headquarters permeated down to the streets. Rumour had it that a samurai in white clothes had appeared in a dream to the Empress and said, ‘Don’t worry. They will come to the Sea of Japan.’

Standing on the beach, Haruko saw the columns of black smoke far away above the horizon, and heard a man mutter, ‘Thank God, they came this way.’

The news that Haruko and the servant had been down to the beach to see the dead body had already reached home by the time they entered the house.

‘What have you been up!’ Ayako sighed and smiled at the same time. ‘Can’t you behave like a girl?’

‘How can you go and see a body!’ Takeko made a show of shuddering and covered her mouth with both hands in a gesture of horror.

Haruko ignored her sister. She did not dislike Takeko, who was two years older, but she could not respect her.

In the morning, Takeko often said, ‘I don’t feel well,’ before setting off for school. ‘In that case, you had better stay at home,’ her Miwa grandmother, would say and Takeko would stay at home. After all, she was a girl; she did not need an education. As a girl of a well-to-do and long-established family she would have good marriage prospects if she was pretty, and that was all that mattered. Even at school, Takeko often said she felt ill and went home, leaving her books and other belongings for Haruko to bring back later.

For Haruko, school was important. Besides, she enjoyed it. The work was easy for her. She could dominate the village rascals in the classroom. She was given prizes. And she always finished her homework before the lesson was over.