East is East

In his extremity, he thought of food, day and night, dwelled on it, dreamed of it, apotheosized it. On the day of his escape, he dreamed of breakfast: miso soup with eggplant and bean curd, steamed white radishes, raw onions, mustard with rice. And lunch—not the western-style slop Chiba concocted to show off the fact that he’d once shipped on a freighter out of Tacoma, Washington—but the rice and egg dish—tamago meishi—his grandmother would make him when he came in from school, or the sweet bean and barley cakes she’d buy him at the confectioner’s or the delicate

sōmen noodles she stirred in great swirling mounds in her iron kettle. He was dreaming of those noodles, staring morosely at the mops lining the walls, when he heard the heavy footfall of his warder on the companionway steps.

They were approaching the Port of Savannah and Hiro knew he’d have to make his move soon. He’d read deeply in The Way of the Samurai

for days, getting Mishima’s and Jōchō’s words by heart, and now he was ready. The book—in its plastic womb and with the odd little green bills and his father’s picture nestled safely between its leaves—clung to him with tentacles of black electrician’s tape, the tape his friend Ajioka-san had slipped him in the night. In his hands he held a stout oaken mop, its head soaked heavy with the water they’d given him for washing.

The footsteps, the weary, dragging, footsore steps of Noboru Kuroda, the slug who mopped up the officers’ quarters and served them at table, halted outside the door. Hiro stood back, envisioning the slumped shoulders and concave chest, the hopeless hands and perpetually bewildered expression of old “Just-a-Minute” Kuroda, as they called him behind his back, and he waited breathlessly as the key turned in the lock. In a sort of fever he watched as the handle rotated and the door pulled back, and then he charged, the mop thrust before him like a lance. It was over in an instant. Kuroda’s tired old jowls seized with surprise, the wet mop speared him in the solar plexus and he went down on the worn linoleum, gasping and floundering like a yellowfin jerked from the somnolent depths. Hiro was briefly sorry for the loss of the rice balls, which were now mashed into Kuroda’s shirt, but this was no time for regrets. He stepped nimbly over the wheezing old man and darted up the companionway, his feet quick, liberty pounding in his veins.

Below him, on the second deck, the crew was at lunch, puzzling over their plates and struggling to pluck the odd bit of sardine out of the mélange of hash, eggs and potatoes Chiba had inflicted on them. Above him was the superstructure, and its ascending decks: the ship’s office and main electrical and gyroscope rooms on the fourth deck; the radio room on the fifth; the captain’s cabin, where even now Captain Nishizawa lay in a sake-induced stupor, on the sixth; and, finally, the bridge. From the bridge, high-flown and airy, a pair of observation decks protruded, hanging out over the water on either side of the ship like extended wings. They were catwalks, actually, supported from beneath by steel struts, and from them you could see ten miles on a clear day. It was for these that Hiro was heading.

He rattled up the steps past the ship’s office and on up past the radio room and the captain’s cabin, moving quickly but with resolution. He wasn’t fleeing blindly, not at all: he had a plan, as Mishima, in his gloss on Jōchō, had advised. One may choose a course of action,

Mishima said, but one may not always choose the time. The moment of decision looms in the distance and then overtakes you. Then is to live not to prepare for that moment of decision? It was. And he was prepared.

On up the steps he raced, past the chart room where Chief Mate Wakabayashi glared savagely at him and lurched out the door in pursuit, past the helm where Able Bodied Seaman Kuma stood fixed at the wheel, and out onto the port wingdeck, where OS Dorai gaped at his advancing form as if he’d never before seen a man moving upright on his own two legs. And then, with Wakabayashi raging behind him and Dorai immobile before him, Hiro paused to draw his penknife. Thoughts of all those American movies with their tattooed gangs and the feints and thrusts of their knife fights must have shot through Dorai’s head, and he stepped back a pace or two, but the knife wasn’t a weapon at all. It was a tool. In two quick strokes Hiro slashed the cord binding the white life ring to the rail, and while Wakabayashi thundered along the deck and Dorai cringed, Hiro became airborne.