Season of Violence by Shintaro Ishihara

Author:Shintaro Ishihara [Ishihara, Shintaro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781462912797
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 1966-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

THE YACHT AND THE BOY

THE YACHT AND THE BOY

(Yotto to Shōnen)

Solitude, récif, étoile

A n'importe ce qui valut

Le blanc souci de notre toile.

—Mallarmé

After the race around Oshima island on Mr. and Mrs. Higgins's yacht, the boy somehow knew that one day he would have a yacht of his own, no matter how small.

The boy's hazy premonition came true.

The scene the boy had witnessed the first night of the race had played on his emotions, bringing a feeling new to his experience.

What he had witnessed on the second night of the race, while on watch when the boat rounded the island and headed to the goal, had disturbed him even more, making him shiver at the thought of the unknown world's sweet-sadness that had suddenly broken upon him with awing severity and force. The boy had felt a strange rapture possess him as he gazed across the surface of the sea and up at the vast starlit sky. From that time on he was troubled by a sense of loneliness and desire swirling within him but which he could not fully comprehend.

He ran back to his home that night, declining Mr. Higgins's invitation to a party at his home to drink in celebration of the day's victory. Now not a moment was to be lost—the boy wanted to be alone in the quiet of his own home.

That night in bed the boy recalled the two moving scenes he had seen aboard the boat. The pleasant, thrilling feeling assaulted him again.

"What's the race? What's victory? They're nothing to what I saw. I've been left behind—I've been cheated!"

The boy couldn't sleep—his eyes stayed wide open in the darkness. He saw the scenes in succession: one while they were becalmed and the other near the goal. Their images pressed hard against him. Trying feverishly to get rid of the illusions, he tossed about in his bed. But he could not clear his mind, which was attracted to a bittersweet agony he did not understand; yet another self was possessed by anger and impatience. The boy could not tell what sentiment this was.

It might have been indignation towards unseen brutality that had been tormenting the boy, assaulting him with a sharp and thrilling blow against his sex impulses.

What the boy had gained during the great race was not the experience of a glorious challenge, the kind a yatchtsman usually would boast of; it was, instead, a new strange agony that he had experienced while at sea.

Tossing about on the bed, the boy cried out all of a sudden:

"Yes, that's it!"

Thrusting aside the quilt, he suddenly got up.

"I'll get a yacht of my own—even if it's just a small one! I'll buy one for myself! And aboard it I'll do just what they did!" he said firm in his decision.

The idea relaxed and satisfied him, and he went back to sleep and to dream. He imagined his yacht scudding across dark waters among the rocks of Sashikiji near Oshima Island; he saw the beautiful white limbs he had glimpsed in the cabin aboard the yacht.

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