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| The great wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai |
“Shipwrecks” introduced me to the work of
the Japanese grand master Akira Yoshimura (1927 - 2006) and I really enjoyed
his short novel which has all the characteristics of a parable or a moral fable.
“The Wreckers” tells the story of the
villagers of a tiny fishing community. Their village consists of a handful
wooden, thatched-roof, houses, clinging to the rocks between sea cliffs and a
mountain. The isolated hamlet can only be reached by a steep and windy path,
three walking days away from the nearest neighbouring village. Details and
descriptions hint that the setting is the northern Japanese coast, somewhere in
medieval times.
Not only are the villagers living at the
edge of the known world, they are also literally living on the edge. Actually,
they are more surviving than living. Hunger is their daily worry. It is not
that food is scarce, on the contrary there is enough food available in the
nearby shoals and reefs and the people are skilled fishers and indefatigable reapers
of seafood. It is just that the number of people has grown to a level which is
matching the available food supply. It is some kind of terrible equilibrium.
When there is more food, there is room for a few more mouths to feed and the
number of people grows. If the available food diminishes, the elders and children
die. While the people are free, in the sense that there are no wicked rulers or
invasive colonials, they still remain slaves, slaves of their human condition,
slaves of hunger and poverty.
Starvation, Yoshimura seems to underline,
is our true heritage.
Can the condition of the fishermen be
improved? Not really. While the villagers would not waste food on dying older or
sick family members, they do not kill their new-borns as they know is done in
other villages.
There are two ways how the villagers can
break their vicious existential circle and improve their condition, but both
come at a cost. A first one is to sell themselves into servitude for a number
of years to work as servants or labourers in a far away town. The money paid to
the families is used to buy grain, which adds to the daily staple but we
understand that the real benefit is that there is one less mouth to feed. It
comes at a cost for families are ripped apart, younger girls, we imagine, are
likely to be abused, couples separated. Few of the ones who leave come back to
their village and the ones who do are stigmatized by their years of absence and
shame.
A second way to improve their daily lives
is to collect and use what they find on the beach, the reef and the shoals: the
flotsam, the driftwood and sometimes a wreck with its load. When a wreck gets
stuck on the reefs in front of the village the positive effects of this are such
that the village greatly improves its daily life for a couple of years: wood
for construction, textile for clothing, ropes and even abundant food. This
bonus is such that the villagers have come to help chance a bit. They have
turned into wreckers. With fires they lighten on the beach, they lure ships to
the coast in the hope to get them stranded. Survivors are killed and the hulk
plundered.
The point of view, Yoshimura uses in his
book, is that of Isaku, a nine year old boy, in his transition years from boy
to man. He is the oldest of four and has been left behind with his mother. His
father, a strong fisherman, has sold himself into indenture service at the
birth of his youngest daughter. He hopes in this way to keep his family together.
Isaku should have been sold in stead of the father, but he is still too young and
too weak to catch any money. It is a risky gamble for the father to be away for
three years and his son Isaku has to grow up very fast to become the “man” in
house.
Yoshimura takes pains to build up his story
carefully. Using the point of view of an innocent child and immersing his
readers in the harsh daily life of the village, Yoshimura tries to instil in us
empathy for this small community. The novel is deliciously slow paced and
through repetitive use of descriptive details, it gains a soothing seasonal
pacing. Life is regulated by the cyclical repetition of seasons; death is
accepted through the cyclical logic of reincarnation and their religion highlights
only a few days: New Year, a ceremony which demands for bountiful fishing and
the mysterious ceremony of “O-fune-sama”, or ‘the blessing of a boat’. The
villagers actually pray for an accident to happen, they pray for a ship to run
into the reef.
By now, the reader is so immersed in the
life of this fishing community that we refrain from judging this vilest crime. When
a ship indeed gets stuck on the reef, we witness the scene from afar. Isaku has
been send away to the top of the cliff as a lookout and he sees the happenings only
from a distance. The reader however can easily fill in the blanks of the
narration: the villagers heading towards the derelict, like scavengers
surrounding an ailing animal, the killing of survivors begging and praying for help,
the disposing of the bodies. For Isaku and his people, killing the castaways is
as evident as spearing an octopus.
Yoshimura illustrates here a situation of
what you could name “contextual” morality. The existential conditions of the
villagers justify actions that would otherwise be condemned. An accident and
the ensuing criminal acts are lived as a blessing. For the villagers, the
stranding of a boat, this “O-fune-sama”, this ‘blessing of a boat’, is some
kind of gift of the gods.
But the blessing of the “O-fune-sama”, can and
does turn into a damnation. Not everything that washes up on the shore is a
blessing. Rather than giving his story a moral end, a retribution for a
community who has committed crimes, I think Yoshimura wants to say that
traditions and proven usages are inadequate when unforeseen or hitherto unknown
things happen.
In the end, it will be the failing of the collective
memory of the elders and deeds dictated by their religious beliefs that will
ultimately proof to be the greatest danger for this vulnerable community.
