The Kosaka residence.
Inside Professor Kosaka's study.
The fragrance of tea drifted up with the steam.
Professor Kosaka sat on the sofa with his two old friends, Professor Takeuchi and Professor Matsushita.
The three of them had drawn into a circle, as if convening a book club.
Each held a copy of a novel titled The Sound of Waves.
This was Tsushima Kagami's The Sound of Waves, going on sale that very day.
By unspoken agreement all three opened their books and began to read, a little at a time.
Uta-jima was a small island of fourteen hundred people, less than four kilometers around.
The flounder already lay on a large white porcelain platter, its gills still faintly working.
Blood ran out of them and soaked into the smooth, pale flesh.
The prose style of the opening was beautiful — beautiful enough that there was even a touch of showmanship in it.
Barely a page in, and all three were already itching to praise the language.
But each of them held the urge down and read on.
As the story unfolded, Shinji fell in love with Hatsue, the daughter of a ship owner.
A rich young man who failed in his own pursuit of Hatsue spread rumors out of spite, and when her father heard them he flew into a rage and forbade Shinji to see his daughter.
Later, in the middle of a storm, Shinji saved one of her father's boats from the towering waves. His courage and stubborn endurance won the old man over, and in the end, with everyone's help, he got the girl.
In sum, it was a happy-ending story about a poor boy breaking through the barrier of class to win the woman he loved.
Read from beginning to end, it felt sweet, pure, sunlit, hopeful.
The plot was thin, with no real surprises or reversals — the kind of story whose ending you could guess at a glance.
And yet, for all its lack of novelty, the impact this book delivered was no smaller than that of The Setting Sun or No Longer Human.
In many places it was more surprising, more unexpected, than either of the earlier two.
It was the first time any of them had seen Tsushima Kagami write with such loveliness.
No — with such splendor. The prose glittered like woven brocade; this was a virtuoso performance.
In a book of some eighty thousand words, only half the passages moved the plot forward.
The other half were given over to the beauty of Uta-jima's scenery, its diligently laboring islanders, and the beauty of the human body.
There was even a passage in which the diving women stood stark naked, comparing their breasts, and not a line of it read as vulgar or obscene. It brimmed instead with unspoiled nature and physical beauty.
The most unforgettable scene in the whole book was the one where the hero and heroine sheltered from the storm inside an abandoned lighthouse.
Shinji and Hatsue looked at each other across the fire.
Every time the boy shifted his body, the girl shifted a little too, keeping out of reach, so that the bonfire always stood between their eyes.
So Shinji asked, "Why are you hiding?"
"Because I'm shy."
"Then what would make you stop being shy?"
Hatsue answered innocently, "If you take everything off too, I won't be shy anymore."
So Shinji stripped off his clothes as well and called out, "Hatsue!"
"Jump over the fire! Jump over the fire and come to me!" Hatsue said, breathing hard, her voice clear and strong.
The boy leapt over the bonfire without a moment's hesitation, and the two of them fell into each other's arms.
"This… Kagami's style has changed again," Professor Kosaka said with a sigh, rubbing the spot between his brows after reading straight through in one sitting.
"It has. And his command of language has sharpened, too."
"He's clearly worked Western technique into this one as well — the romantic pastoral spirit of ancient Greece, for instance."
"And fused it so perfectly with Japan's own culture," Professor Matsushita said, nodding in admiration.
Then the two of them turned to look at Professor Takeuchi, who was still sitting there with the book in his hands, lost in a daze.
Professor Takeuchi was murmuring to himself. "It's too beautiful…"
"The first stirring of first love. A love so lovely it leaps off the page."
"I would call this The Sound of Waves the finest work of pure-love literature in Japan!"
It was a verdict The Sound of Waves richly deserved.
Of all Yukio Mishima's works, this was the great anomaly, the one in which he did not write his signature beauty of destruction.
He wrote instead a pure and warm love story.
The novel showed love in its ideal form, and was hailed as a pure-love tale and a farewell to youth.
It has also been called the least Mishima-like of all Mishima's books.
In the seventy years since its publication it has been selected again and again for Japanese middle-school language textbooks, a permanent fixture on recommended reading lists for students.
It has been adapted many times for the screen, large and small.
Sure enough, a long line had formed that day outside the Maruzen Marunouchi flagship store.
It was longer, in fact, than the lines for any of Tsushima Kagami's previous releases.
That was precisely because the uproar over his identity as an adult manga artist had blown up so spectacularly that it burst out of the usual circles entirely.
And then, in his AERA interview, he had gone and announced that he was a healing-type writer.
Which pulled all sorts of ordinary people who had never touched literary fiction into the queue snaking along the pavement.
Plenty of them had read the doujinshi he drew but had no interest whatsoever in literary fiction.
Another portion read both the doujinshi he drew and the novels he wrote.
After his identity came out, no small number of people had groaned that manga stories this depressing were obviously designed to keep anybody from having a good time with them.
Only Dassai-ya, the man who wrote The Setting Sun and No Longer Human, works dedicated to wounding their readers, could have pulled off something like that.
The long line inched forward.
Bored with waiting, people fell into easy conversation with total strangers about Tsushima Kagami.
Everyone here had come to buy his book, after all, which made them fellow readers of a sort.
And fellow readers were hardly strangers.
So for a while strangers from all over stood chatting away with real enthusiasm.
"I read Dassai-ya's AERA interview. He said he's a healing-type writer — is that actually true?"
"Healing-type? Uh, hard to say."
"The Setting Sun and No Longer Human weren't the least bit healing…"
"But everybody says this one, The Sound of Waves, has a happy ending."
"Tsushima Kagami wouldn't lie to us on purpose, would he?"
"Either way, I've already bought mine."
"Everyone at school is talking about it. If I don't get a copy and read it, I won't know how to get a word in when it comes up…"
"My coworkers are discussing it too. I have to buy one just to fit in…"
"Right, right. I never read literary fiction, but everyone else says it's good, and I can hardly be the only one who hasn't read it, can I?"
Crowd after crowd of readers poured into the store and swept the shelves clean of every copy of The Sound of Waves the instant it was stocked.
The manager and his clerks hadn't seen a frenzy like this in years. New copies went onto the shelf and were gone in under a minute; all they could do was scramble to refill them, with no attention left for anything else.
Not since the bubble burst had Japanese publishing produced a bestseller that became a phenomenon like this.
No — to be precise, it had blown past the heat of Tsushima Kagami's own The Setting Sun and No Longer Human.
Back in The Setting Sun days, after all, he had been an unknown newcomer barely out of the gate.
And No Longer Human had needed several days of cold reception, slow ferment and reversal before sales abruptly shot upward.
The Hear the Wind Sing trilogy, driven by Kodansha's marketing machine, had also owned the moment for a while.
But even with professors and major novelists willing to stand up and vouch for him, plenty of specialists still insisted to this day that those three novels could not be classified as literary fiction.
So The Sound of Waves was, in a real sense, Tsushima Kagami's first genuine literary-fiction blockbuster in all this time.
To a publishing industry sunk in general malaise, Tsushima Kagami was nothing less than a superhero.
"Hey, hey, hey, stop shoving me! Ten copies of The Sound of Waves, quick!"
"You jerk! You're not a scalper, are you? Why does one person need ten copies?"
Arguments and startled shouts rose and fell while the clerks hauled stack after stack of The Sound of Waves out of the stockroom.
The book was selling so fast that the moment anyone's attention wandered the shelf would be bare. Someone had to stand watch and restock without pause.
Copies disappeared off the shelves as fast as the staff could put them back.
The same scene played out in bookstore after bookstore all across Japan.
In big cities like Tokyo and Osaka.
And in small ones like Saga and Tottori.
However much stock they had laid in, it was swept away to the last copy.
The clerks were too busy even to manage their professional smiles; each customer was elbowed aside by the next before they could try.
"Excuse me, one copy of The Sound of Waves, please!"
"I'm sorry, we're completely sold out! More is coming from the warehouse, please come back this afternoon!"
The clerk's shouted reply was swallowed whole by the surging crowd.
Facing that dense wall of people, the manager, who had come prepared, lifted a megaphone and announced loudly.
"The Sound of Waves is out of stock for the moment. Please come back this afternoon."
"For those who can't wait, we still have the May issue of Shincho, which carries the first two chapters of The Sound of Waves."
The famished readers turned on their heels and cleaned out every copy of Shincho as well.
Everyone who managed to get their hands on something piled into the reading area.
The seats had filled long ago; most people simply sat down on the floor with The Sound of Waves open in their hands.
Yukinoshita Shizuku walked into the reading area.
Before she could even look around, she spotted Sayuri already waving at her.
Besides Sayuri, Kosaka Akane, Machida Sonoko, Shizuka Hiratsuka, Shimizu Nayotake and Seika Ijichi were all seated at one long table.
Each of them had an open copy of The Sound of Waves in front of her; clearly they had been reading for quite a while.
Yukinoshita Shizuku smiled and walked over.
"Where's Kagami?" Kosaka Akane asked.
Yukinoshita Shizuku made her way to Shimizu Nayotake's side.
Shimizu Nayotake and Shizuka Hiratsuka and the others all squeezed over to make room.
Only then did Yukinoshita Shizuku sit down. She looked around at them all and smiled. "He was on his way here with me when Mr. Kobayashi called and dragged him off to another interview."
"Kagami really is getting busier and busier," Sayuri said, glancing around at the rest of them.
They all traded the same faint, knowing smile and left it at that.
Shimizu Nayotake pushed a copy of The Sound of Waves in front of Yukinoshita Shizuku.
Yukinoshita Shizuku opened the cover, then stopped and looked up at them.
"He didn't have one of his episodes with this one, did he?"
"He didn't even have me copy the manuscript out this time. He finished it and took it straight to Mr. Kobayashi for revisions."
"So I never got to read past the beginning."
Every face around the table said the same thing at once: we know exactly what you mean.
Machida Sonoko smiled as well. "We haven't finished it either."
"And it would spoil it if we told you."
"Better to read it yourself."
Yukinoshita Shizuku nodded and went back to turning the pages she had left off.
The very first thing in the book was a three-line epigraph.
[Malice can never travel as long a road as goodwill.]
[Only an innocent love and desire can make the flesh pure.]
[Cast off the decadence of material civilization, recover the plain and enduring virtues of the spirit, and become a true man of courage.]
Yukinoshita Shizuku blinked. Those three lines had not been in the draft she had seen.
She read them through again quickly, then turned the page.
Uta-jima was very, very small.
Its scenery was lush and lovely, its islanders lived contented, unaffected lives; it was a paradise far beyond the reach of the modern city.
Yukinoshita Shizuku's heart fell in an instant.
Without the faintest sign of resistance.
She forgot where she was. Her mind had already stepped onto that island paradise Tsushima Kagami had built.
There was none of the confusion and unease of city dwellers here, only bright sunlight, clamoring waves, a gleaming lighthouse, the salt reek of the tide filling your nose, fishing boats coming and going, men and women laughing…
Just as Shinji and Hatsue were falling for each other, Yasuo, the island's rich young man, failed in his own pursuit of Hatsue and, nursing the grudge, spread a rumor through the village that Shinji and Hatsue had lain together and enraged the gods into sending down disaster.
The rumor swept through the whole village in no time.
Hatsue's father exploded and forbade his daughter absolutely from ever seeing the poor boy again.
"This Yasuo, spreading rumors — he's just like those haters online!" someone breathed, reading on word by word in disbelief.
Faced with his lover's brutish, unreasonable father, Shinji burned with an anger that surprised even him, and there was nothing he could do about it. Every day was agony.
Then, on a day when he was about to put out to sea, sunk in despair, he received a letter and a protective charm that Hatsue had secretly had delivered to him.
The words on the page were steeped in a young girl's devotion.
[From now on I will go to the shrine every day and pray that you come to no harm. My heart belongs to you. Please come back to me healthy and whole! I am sending a photograph of myself and a charm, and I hope they can sail out with you…]
The girl's love lent Shinji courage, and life was full of hope again.
But on the voyage home, a storm caught them.
The steel cables shrieked as an enormous wave flung the ship high into the air.
One of the safety lines snapped. It had to be reattached to the buoy on the far side, or the ship risked capsizing.
"Is anyone willing to do it?" the captain shouted.
The wind howled, and the crew fell silent.
"No one? Nothing but a pack of cowards!" the captain swore.
Yasuo, the one who had spread the rumor about him, hunched his neck down, lips trembling — and Shinji shouted out in a bright, ringing voice: "I'll go!"
The young man's heroic figure rose out of the darkness of the storm.
Every reader's heart hung suspended.
Watching him struggle forward through the wind and rain, Kiyono Yuko felt her heart climb into her throat.
As though she stood there herself, she felt how one slip would smash him to pieces, and broke into a cold sweat on his behalf.
In the end he made it through the storm and saved every soul on board.
"Incredible!"
"Unreal! The man's amazing!"
"That's magnificent. Now that's a man!"
Other readers in the reading area who had reached the same page voiced their admiration one after another, cheering Shinji's bravery.
That display of courage finally won over Hatsue's father, and Shinji got the girl at last.
Some time afterward, the young lovers spoke about that storm.
"This — do you still remember it?"
"I remember."
Shinji took the photograph out of his pocket and showed it to his fiancee.
[Pride rose in the girl's eyes. She believed it was her photograph that had protected Shinji. But just then the young man raised his eyebrows. He knew that what had carried him out of that danger was his own strength.]
[The End.]
"How does someone even write this…"
"They're like the ideal lovers in Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea."
"So a romance written with the tools of literary fiction can be this beautiful…"
Above all when they reached the part where Shinji and Hatsue looked at each other across the fire.
And a fair number of readers who had already read Tsushima Kagami's manga chuckled under their breath.
"I always thought Xuanyaye's art was great to get off to, but the stories made it impossible."
"And now here are Shinji and Hatsue, the two of them described stark naked."
"Not a trace of carnal heat in it either. It reads as sacred, chaste, even. How does that work?"
"What else would you expect from a doujinshi artist."
"He really knows exactly how far to take that kind of thing."
Most of the other readers present felt much the same.
So literary fiction could tell a story of young love after all.
It didn't take a heavy plot to move a reader's heart!
Consider the people living in today's big cities, busy and worn to the bone.
For them, the beautiful little island The Sound of Waves painted was like a shot of life pushed straight into the vein, bringing their exhausted bodies and numbed souls back around.
Japan right now was in terrible shape.
A limp economy, a numb populace, not a shred of hope for the future…
A Japan like that needed a savior.
It needed someone to find it something to believe in again.
In this book, Tsushima Kagami showed everyone a beautiful paradise.
For his readers, it was a lovely and far-off… heaven of the spirit.
It washed away all their listlessness, washed away the pressure that had been choking the breath out of them, and let them feel a bright, surging hope and a vitality that climbed and climbed.
Just as the reading public's fervor reached its peak, the voices of the professionals began to arrive one after another.
The first to speak was another professor in the University of Tokyo's literature department, the foremost authority on modern Japanese literature: Sasaki Junichi.
Professor Sasaki was sixty-seven this year, and his standing in academia was every bit as unshakable as Professor Kosaka's.
He almost never commented on the work of living writers, holding that "contemporary work needs the test of time."
This time, however, he published a long essay.
The title: "On The Sound of Waves: What Exactly Is Dassai-ya's 'Pure Love'?"
"After finishing this work, I thought about it for a long time."
"How, precisely, does Dassai-ya accomplish the healing he speaks of?"
"The conclusion I reached in the end is this: by stripping away every social impurity, he has restored a human relationship in its purest form."
"The character of Shinji is simplification carried to its absolute limit."
"He has no complicated background, no tangled romantic history, none of the so-called trauma of growing up."
"He is a fisherman. A simple, honest fisherman who feeds his family with the labor of his own two hands."
"His world is small. Small enough to hold only the sea, a fishing boat, and Hatsue."
"Yet under Dassai-ya's pen, these few limited elements are granted infinite depth."
"The same is true of Hatsue. She is a rich man's daughter, but Dassai-ya makes nothing of that fact."
"The gap in their circumstances breeds neither shame nor arrogance in her. She simply likes Shinji."
"And that liking is untainted by money, by status, by prospects, by any social calculation at all."
"This is what Dassai-ya means by pure love. Not the life-and-death partings of a soap opera, not the fated destiny of a shojo manga, but the extraordinarily plain fact of two people liking each other. Nothing more than that."
"And precisely because it is nothing more, it becomes uncommonly precious."
"Because love in reality can almost never be that pure."
"There are always impurities of one kind or another: material considerations, family interference, the wear of time."
"The reason Dassai-ya's Shinji and Hatsue can bring us to tears is not that they endure some earth-shaking trial. It is that they remind us of the self we were before the impurities got in."
"Or of the self that never existed at all, and that we have longed for all our lives."
Professor Sasaki's essay set off an enormous reaction in academic circles and among lovers of literature.
Countless people quoted it and argued over it, and the essay itself became a widely circulated, phenomenon-level piece of criticism.
Hard on its heels, the celebrated literary critic and Bungei Shunju advisor Matsumoto Seiei published a short review in The Yomiuri Shimbun.
"Dassai-ya has achieved what most writers cannot achieve in an entire lifetime. He has founded a new genre."
"The phrase 'pure love' is nothing new in Japanese literature. From The Tale of Genji through the modern and contemporary eras, we have never lacked love stories. But Dassai-ya's pure love is unlike any of them."
"The love stories of the past, however romantic, all carried to some degree an undertone of sorrowful beauty."
"Love is beautiful, but the essence of beauty is that it is brief and doomed to vanish."
"The Sound of Waves is different. Its undertone is not sorrow but hope."
"That is an extraordinarily rebellious stance for a writer to take."
"In the Japanese literary tradition, writing an ending in which two people are happily together is usually dismissed as childish, immature, devoid of literary depth."
"Dassai-ya ignored that prejudice entirely and, in a manner bordering on brute force, wrote a pure, unadulterated story that closes on happiness."
"And that brute force is exactly the proof of his genius!"
If the verdicts of critics and professors still carried a certain distance about them, the voices of his fellow novelists were more direct, more visceral.
Miyabe Miyuki, sixty-three years old, a novelist who had won the Akutagawa Prize, the Junichiro Tanizaki Prize and several other major Japanese literary awards, said this in an interview with The Asahi Shimbun.
"Finishing The Sound of Waves brought back how I felt at twenty, reading the ancient Greek love story Daphnis and Chloe."
"That was the first time I thought: so a novel can be written like this."
"But what The Sound of Waves gave me was something a little different."
"It made me feel that love can be this beautiful."
"I had not felt anything like that in a very, very long time."
"I am sixty-three. I have been through a great deal and let go of a great deal, and I assumed I could no longer be moved by a thing like pure love."
"But Dassai-ya managed it. With Shinji's hands, roughened by the sea wind and blistered raw by the fishing nets, he took hold of something inside me that I believed had died long ago."
That day, once every reader who had managed to buy a copy finished The Sound of Waves within those first twenty-four hours.
The first thought in every single mind was the same: The Sound of Waves is the greatest pure love of our age!
____
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