East is East

But the drowning man didn’t want his arm grabbed. He stopped dead, flung the life buoy from him and shouted up at her, shouted in her face, shouted till she could see the glint of gold in his teeth. “Go ’way!” he cried. “Go ’way!” And then he vanished beneath the boat.

And then there was nothing. No sound, no movement. The motor sputtered, the boat drifted. Exhaust washed over them, bitter and metallic.

“He’s a nutcase,” Saxby said. “Must of broke out of Milledgeville or something.”

She didn’t respond. Her knuckles were drained of blood, her fingers seared into the pale chipped wood of the gunwale. She’d never seen anyone die before, never seen anyone dead, not even her grandmother, who’d had the good sense to pass on while she was in Europe. Something rose in her throat, a deep wad of sorrow and regret. The world was crazy. A moment ago she’d been wrapped in her lover’s arms, still and serene, the night spread over them like a blanket … and now someone was dead. “Sax,” she turned to him, pleading, “can’t you do something? Can’t you dive in and save him?”

Saxby’s face was inscrutable. She knew every fiber of him, knew where to hurt him and where to make him feel good, knew how to snip out his soul, wring it in her hands and hang it out like a hankie to dry. But this was something new. She’d never seen him like this before. “Shit,” he said finally, and he looked scared now, that was all right, that was a mode she recognized, “I can’t see a damn thing. How can I dive in if I can’t see him?”

She watched the beam of the flashlight play dully over the surface, and then she heard something, a faint splash, the sweet allision of breaking water. “Over there!” she shouted and Saxby swung the light. For a moment they saw nothing, and then the shore, with its close dark beard of Spartina grass, leaped into view like a slide clapped into a projector. “There!” she cried, and it was him, the swimmer, standing now, the sea lapping at his belt loops, a limp white shirt hanging from him like a rag.

“Hey!” Saxby bellowed, angry again, enraged. “Hey, you! I’m talking to you, you jackass. What are you trying—?”

“Hush,” Ruth warned him, but it was too late: the intruder was gone again, already enveloped in vegetation, thrashing through the reeds like a gutshot deer, already anonymous. The sea lay flat beneath the beam of the flashlight. The picture was empty. It was then that the life buoy drifted into view, just beyond her reach, in a wash of reeds and plastic refuse. “Let me—” she grunted, stretching for it, but Saxby anticipated her and powered the boat forward. And then she had it, a prize fished out of the water and dripping in her lap.

She turned it over and there they were, the bold red ideographs that spelled out the name of the Tokachi-maru. She couldn’t read them, of course, but they were a revelation nonetheless. Saxby hovered over her, peering down at the thing as if it were treasure. The light was in her lap, the breeze gave her a scent of the shore. “Yes,” she said finally, “Chinese.”

The Tokachi-maru

Hiro tanaka was no more chinese than she was. he was a Japanese, of the Yamato race—or at least on his mother’s side he was, no one would question that—and he’d left the Tokachi-maru amid strained circumstances. The fact is, he jumped ship. Literally. This wasn’t a case of cozying up to a barmaid or falling down dead drunk in some back alley while the ship weighed anchor; this was deliberate, death-defying, a leap into the infinite. Like his idol Yukio Mishima, and Mishima’s idol before him, Jocho Yamamoto, Hiro Tanaka was a man of decision. When be jumped ship, he didn’t entangle himself in verbal niceties: no, he just jumped.

On the day in question, the Tokachi-maru was steaming north along the coast of Georgia, bound for Savannah with a load of tractor parts, DAT recorders and microwave ovens. It was a day like any other, the wind brisk, the sun baked into the sky, the 12,000-ton freighter ironing the waves as if they were wrinkles in a shirt. All but six of the forty-member crew sat straight-backed over their western-style lunches (corned beef hash, sardines in oil, scrambled eggs and home fries, all wedded in a single pot and seasoned with A. 1. sauce and Gulden’s mustard). Captain Nishizawa was in his cabin, sleeping off his preprandial sake; Chief Mate Wakabayashi and Able Bodied Seaman Kuma were in the chart room and at the helm, respectively; Ordinaries Uetto and Dorai were on watch; and Hiro was in the brig.

Actually, Hiro was in a storage closet on the third deck. It was sixty-four feet square, or about the size of the apartment he had occupied with his grandmother prior to signing on the Tokachi-maru, and it was illuminated by a single jittery 40-watt bulb. Hiro had been given a wooden bowl and a pair of chopsticks for his alimentary needs, a bucket in which to relieve himself and a futon to spread on the cold steel floor. There was no ventilation, and the little room stank of fumigant and the Bunker C fuel the huge steam turbines burned day and night. Twenty mops, twenty buckets and sixteen flat-headed brooms hung from hooks screwed into the walls. A scatter of odds and ends—paint scrapers, empty Sapporo boxes, a single Nike tennis shoe spattered with tar—lay where the last storm had strewn them. The door locked from the outside.

Though he was conscientious, well mannered and inoffensive, and so silent and circumspect as to be nearly invisible among his shipmates, Hiro found himself confined to this hateful steel room, his diet limited to two balls of white rice and one tin cup of water daily, because of an uncharacteristic act of defiance: he had disobeyed the direct order of an officer. The officer was Chief Mate Wakabayashi, a survivor of the Battle of Rarotonga who carried shrapnel in his lower back, legs, arms, feet and at the base of his skull, and whose temper consequently tended to be short. He had issued a direct order to Hiro to cease and desist constricting the windpipe of First Cook Hideo Chiba, who at the time lay thrashing on the galley floor beneath Hiro’s full and outraged weight. And that was a good deal of weight: at five foot ten, Hiro, who was inordinately fond of eating, weighed close to two hundred pounds. Chiba, who was inordinately fond of drinking, weighed less than a wet mop.

The moment was chaotic. Second Cook Moronobu Unagi, who had once parboiled the face of an OS in a dispute over a bottle of Suntory, was screeching like a parrot: “He’s killing him! Murder, murder, murder!”; the Chief Engineer, an intense silent man in his seventies, with bad feet and ill-fitting dentures, tugged ineffectively at Hiro’s shoulders; and half a dozen deckhands stood around jeering. Chief Mate Wakabayashi, in his pristine white uniform, scurried up to where the combatants lay entangled on the galley floor, delivered his stentorian order, and was immediately flung into a pot of clear broth as the ship chose that moment to plunge into a trough. Soup—it was a twenty-gallon pot—cascaded onto the floor, searing Hiro’s back and permeating Chiba, who already stank enough for three men, with the essence of reduced fish. Through it all, Hiro held his grip.

And what had driven so mild a man to so desperate a pass?

The immediate cause was a pan of hard-cooked eggs. Hiro, who’d signed on the Tokachi- maru as Third Cook, beneath the drunken and foul-smelling Chiba and the drunken, leering and unctuous Unagi, was preparing a dish of nishiki tamago as an appetizer for the evening meal. The task consisted of shelling a hundred hard-boiled eggs, carefully separating the yolks from the whites, very finely chopping and seasoning each, and finally reuniting them—tenderly—in half-inch layers in a succession of stainless-steel pans. Hiro had learned the recipe from his grandmother—and he knew some thirty others by heart —and yet this was the first time in the six weeks since the ship had left Yokohama that he’d been allowed to prepare the dish himself. More usually, he acted as sous chef, errand boy and galley slave, scrubbing pans, polishing the gas ranges, cleaning mountains of defrosted squid, cuttlefish and bonito, chopping seaweed and peeling grapes till his fingers went numb. On this particular afternoon, however, Chiba and Unagi were indisposed. They had been drinking sake since breakfast in celebration of O-bon, the Buddhist festival of ancestral spirits, and Hiro had been left to himself while they strove to commune with the shades of the departed. He worked hard. Worked with pride and concentration. Eight trays lay before him, exquisitely prepared. As a finishing touch, he sprinkled the dishes with black sesame seed, just as his grandmother had taught him.

It was a mistake. Because at that moment, just as he held the shaker inverted over the last tray, Chiba and Unagi staggered into the galley. “Idiot!” Chiba screeched, slapping the shaker from his hand. The shaker clattered off the gas range. Hiro averted his face and hung his head. Through his sandals, deep in the soles of his feet, he could feel the ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum of the screws churning through the sour green waves beneath them. “Never,” Chiba seethed, his sunken chest and fleshless arms trembling, “never use black sesame on nishiki tamago.” He turned to Unagi. “Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

Unagi’s eyes were slits. He rubbed his hands together as if in anticipation of some rare treat, and he bowed