And she did. Before, with the motor pushing her forward, she’d been a creature of straight lines. If the small waves were moving at an angle to her path, she’d just chopped through them. Not any more. Kenzo noted another essential difference: “She’s so quiet, too!”
Jiro had got used to the relentless pounding and throbbing of the diesel. Without it, the Oshima Maru might have been a ghost of her former self. All he heard were the waves and the distant squawks of sea birds and the breeze thrumming in the lines and bellying out the sails. The sampan also felt different underfoot. He’d always got the engine’s vibration through the soles of his feet. They’d told him as much about how it was running as his ears did. Now all he felt was the boat’s pure motion. He smiled. He couldn’t help himself. “I’m younger than you are,” he told his sons. “I’m with my father on the Inland Sea.”
Kenzo and Hiroshi looked at each other. They probably thought he was crazy. They often did. He didn’t care. He could see the rising sun on those crowded waters, the headlands that looked so different from the jungled slopes of Oahu, sometimes a flight of long-necked cranes overhead… He hadn’t thought about cranes in years, or realized how much he missed them.
He ran straight before the wind for a while, and talked his sons through adjusting the sails to compensate as it shifted slightly. He showed them how, if you wanted to swing to port, you had to swing the mainsail to starboard. It seemed backward, but they soon saw it was what needed doing.
“There’s a lot more to think about now,” Hiroshi said.
“Oh, yes,” Jiro agreed. “Of course, you are thinking about it now, and that makes it seem harder. After you’ve done it for a while, you won’t need to wonder what to do. You’ll just do it.” He wasn’t doing things automatically himself-no, not even close. Part of him might have been that fourteen-year-old out on the Inland Sea with his father. The rest was a middle-aged man trying to remember what went where, and why. His father’s boat had been rigged differently. He knew the principles here, but none of the details were the same. He didn’t want his sons seeing that.
Kenzo asked, “If the wind is still off the mountains when we come back to the basin, how do we get there?”
“We tack,” Jiro answered. “It means we slide in at an angle. You can’t sail straight against the wind, but you can go against it. I’ll show you.”
“All right.” Kenzo’s voice was uncommonly subdued. Jiro almost laughed in his son’s face. Yes, the old man still knew a few things the young one hadn’t imagined. That always came as a painful surprise to the younger generation.
A tern soared down and perched at the very tip of the mast. It stared at the Takahashis out of big black eyes that seemed all the bigger because the rest of it was so perfectly white. “That never would have happened when we had the diesel,” Hiroshi said.
“Of course not. There wouldn’t have been any place for it to land then,” Jiro said. Hiroshi stirred as if that wasn’t exactly what he’d meant, but he didn’t try to explain himself. As far as Jiro was concerned, that was fine.
Jiro had his sons practice setting the sails with the wind astern and at either quarter. They got the hang of it pretty fast. They knew the Oshima Maru and how she had handled; that helped them now. What Jiro didn’t let on was that he was learning almost as much as they were. No, he hadn’t handled sails in a lot of years himself.
But he did remember enough to send the sampan on two long, gliding reaches into the wind. “You see how we beat back toward the shore?” he said. Hiroshi and Kenzo both nodded. They seemed impressed. Jiro was impressed that he’d remembered enough to manage to do that, too. He had more sense than to show it, though.
However serene the sampan was under sail, she wasn’t swift. Jiro had come to take the noisy, smelly diesel for granted. It got him where he needed to go, and got him there pretty quick. Now she took a lot longer to reach likely fishing grounds. “We’ll probably have to spend the night in the boat,” Hiroshi said.
“Well, so what?” Kenzo answered. “It’s not like we’ve got anything much to come home to.” Jiro and Hiroshi both grimaced, not because he was wrong but because he was right.
They spilled minnows into the Pacific. They had fewer than usual. The boats that had caught the nehus were diesel-powered, too. All three Takahashis had netted these themselves, using chopped-up bits of rice from their own rations as bait. Then the fishing lines with their big, silvery hooks went into the sea. Jiro hoped for a good catch, to make up for the rice they’d lost.
“One more problem with the new sail,” Kenzo said. “People can see us for a long way.”
He was also right about that. Like most sampans, the Oshima Maru was painted a blue somewhere between sea and sky, not least because the color made it hard for competitors to find her. But what good did the camouflage do when the mast and sail stuck up there like a Christmas tree? It did work both ways. If three or four other boats could spy the sampan, Jiro could see them, too.
What he wanted to see was what he’d caught. He felt like shouting when the first few hooks yielded aku and ahi both. He and his sons worked like men inhabited by demons. They gutted fish and chucked them into storage one after another. Jiro noted that Hiroshi and Kenzo set aside a prime ahi, as he did. When they’d finished the lines, they all gorged on strip after strip of flavorful tuna. It was always delicious, and all the more so after days of the horrible slop the soup kitchens served.
Hiroshi and Kenzo ate with every bit as much gusto as Jiro. They might prefer hamburgers to sashimi, but anybody in his right mind would prefer sashimi to the bowls of rice and noodles and beans, all overcooked together, they’d been getting. That kind of food might keep you alive, but it made you wonder why you went on living. This… This was worth eating.
“Ahhh!” Jiro smiled and smacked his belly. “I’ve missed that.”
Kenzo nodded. Hiroshi was still chewing. “Me, too,” he said with his mouth full.
“We’ll use the guts and things for bait this time,” Jiro said. “That’ll draw more sharks, but nobody these days will turn up his nose at shark meat. We don’t sell just the fins now.”
“Food is food,” Hiroshi agreed. “Even the haoles aren’t so fussy now. Maybe they’ll call it something like ‘sea steak’ ”-he said the words in English, then translated them into Japanese-“so they don’t have to think about what they’re really eating, but they’ll eat it.”
When they drew in the lines this time, they did catch some sharks, but they also got one of the nicest ahi Jiro had ever seen, even better than the one he’d feasted on before. He started to cut more sashimi from it, but paused with his knife poised above its still-glittering side. “Go ahead, Father,” Kenzo said. “You took it off the hook, so it’s yours. It’ll be good.” He smacked his lips. He was eating more raw fish.
Jiro shook his head. “I’ll choose another. This one I think I’ll save for Kita-san.”
His sons looked at each other, the way they often did when he said something they didn’t like. He waited for them to start shouting at him for having anything to do with the Japanese consul. To his surprise, they kept quiet. He supposed it was because he’d sometimes brought fish to the consulate before the war started. They couldn’t say he was doing it to curry favor with Kita now.
Kenzo did sigh, but all he said was, “Have it your way. You will anyhow.”
“Arigato goziemasu.” Jiro made the thank-you as sarcastic as he could. Then he cut strips of tender, deep pink flesh from another ahi. Maybe that fish wasn’t quite so perfect as the one he’d set aside for the consul, but it was plenty good enough for him.