argued.
This Hatayama was even more irresponsible than I am. He used to go around announcing his own grievances as if he’d heard them from someone else. As it happens, the Editor-in-Chief is quite sensitive to people bad-mouthing him. And he disliked me enough already as it was.
I did my best to stand up for him. “The Chief doesn’t have it easy, you know. If all five of the staff were away, he’d have to man the phones and receive visitors all by himself.”
Hatayama looked back towards the stern. “You’re sure to come for us after midday, aren’t you?” he said with some trepidation.
The old fisherman looked up at the ominously overcast sky. “Well, they say another typhoon’s coming.”
I had a rush of blood. “Come on! What are we going to do on an uninhabited island in the middle of a typhoon?! You’ve got to come back for us. We’d be in real trouble otherwise. Say you’ll come back, for pity’s sake!”
“Aah, you’ll be all right. There’s a hut where you can shelter from the rain. Besides, why else have you brought two lunch boxes each?”
“That’s just in case!”
Hatayama and I were on the verge of tears. We threw ourselves before him, our foreheads scraping the bottom of the heaving boat. “Please! Please!!” we begged.
“You like putting your lives at risk, don’t you,” he said grudgingly. He looked down at us with an expression of astonishment mixed with loathing. “All right, I’ll come. Unless something happens, that is.”
And that was about the best we could get out of him.
The fisherman headed for the beach opposite Shiokawa, and dropped us there. Then off he rowed briskly, back across the sea, where the waves were starting to swell. I stood with Hatayama at the shore’s edge, gazing forlornly at the boat as it receded into the distance.
“Right. Let’s give the place a quick once over,” I said at length. “We should be able to cover the island in two hours tops.”
It took three hours to cover the island. Contrary to our initial impression, it wasn’t completely surrounded by sandy beaches. On the far side facing out to sea, the shoreline mostly consisted of sheer precipices. To make matters worse, the wind picked up on our way round and it was starting to rain.
“I can’t take any more pictures in this,” announced Hatayama as he packed his camera back into its waterproof case.
We returned to the beach soon after midday, the appointed time. Just as we’d feared, there was no sign either of the fisherman or of his boat. The waves were even higher now. On the far shore, the white surf crashing on the rocks seemed to reach up into the ashen grey sky. Judging by the foul weather and the fisherman’s tone of voice earlier, there seemed little chance he would come. No, there was no way he would come. He must have heard the weather forecast, saying the typhoon would be severe. When things are going bad, they’re just bound to get worse. Or so we decided, as we weighed up our situation with pitiful faces.
“We’ll catch cold here,” I said, looking up at the terraced fields. “He said there was a hut up there, didn’t he. Let’s go and find it.”
“I’ve already caught a cold, mate,” said Hatayama. He let out an enormous sneeze, hurling nasal matter onto the ground as he did so.
We climbed for a while through fields planted with beans. Then, in the middle of the island’s mountainous terrain, we came across a long, thin strip of land that had been levelled over a length of several hundred yards. What was it for? At one end of it stood a tiny shack. Approaching the shack like bedraggled rats, we prised open the door, which was fashioned from logs tied together vertically. Then in we rushed.
There, on a raised platform at the back, we saw two farmers sitting face to face and drinking. One of them, a man in his forties, had horribly sticky eyes. The other was about thirty. The end of his nose was red – probably from an excess of alcohol.
“Sorry to intrude,” I said by way of apology. “Does this hut belong to you?”
“Ha! It don’t belong to no one,” answered the man with sticky eyes. “It’s for us folk from Shiokawa who farm the fields on the island. We use it to sleep in, or shelter from the rain.” He looked us up and down. “Have you got yourselves wet? Well, there’s some