The Sound of Waves in 10 Minutes: Mishima's Love Letter to the Sea

First meetings: falling in love under the whole village's eyes

Shinji and Hatsue keep running into each other without either of them arranging it — the island is simply too small. They pass on the shrine steps; she surfaces from the water while the nets are being pulled in; she sits alone at dusk on the rocks, watching the sea. Once, twice, three times, and the island starts to talk: why is the Miyata girl always with that poor boy? Shinji doesn't think about any of it. He doesn't even realize he has become the subject of gossip.

There is no grand declaration between the two of them. Shinji carries her basket of seaweed; Hatsue shares the best shellfish she has pulled up with him. What they talk about, when they are together, is the tides, the days the women divers are forbidden to go in the water, which season brings the fish in close. Set against a novel written today, this kind of lovers' talk would probably read as flat, but flat is exactly what Mishima is after. He would rather carry the romance forward through a basket of seaweed and a shared shellfish than write a single line of passionate confession. Two young people confirm each other through work, and nothing else.

The abandoned lookout: how they held the line

A storm blows up without warning, and with nowhere else to go, the two of them duck into an abandoned wartime bunker on the island. The rain drowns out everything else; they are soaked through, sitting naked around a fire to get warm. Both of them know where a scene like this is supposed to go, but Mishima refuses to take it there. Hatsue makes Shinji swear that he won't cross that line before marriage. Then the two of them jump over the fire, side by side, letting the flames pass between them as a kind of proof. The force of the scene is exactly that nothing happens in it.

I stopped short when I first read this scene — a Japanese novel from 1954 handling a chastity this opposed to physical desire. It reads less like a rule imposed from outside than a belief two young people raised on sea wind have arrived at on their own: that the body deserves a more solemn moment than this one. The cruelest rumor on the whole island later lands on exactly this scene, and that is precisely what turns it into a real moral event.

The rumor arrives: a rich man's daughter, nearly ruined by a few idle words

Once the storm has passed, a story starts going around the island: Shinji and Hatsue had already crossed the line, back in the bunker. Yasuo is the one who says it; he was Terukichi's chosen son-in-law until Shinji showed up out of nowhere, and he is not pleased. The rumor could never survive a real inquiry, but it doesn't need one — it only needs enough people repeating it over dinner. Chiyoko, the lighthouse keeper's daughter, means no harm. She has come home from the city to find Shinji's heart already taken, and in the middle of her own hurt, she passes along something she overheard, without registering what she has just done. She later goes alone to Shinji's mother and lays out the whole story, and that is what finally makes clearing his name possible.

This part of the book is written without mercy. There is almost no anonymity on the island; a rumor takes root the moment it lands. Terukichi hears it and turns on Shinji at once, crossing him off the list. What makes the whole episode frightening isn't that someone lied. It's that a story with no evidence behind it at all can crush two young people inside a closed community.

The trial at sea: not a contest of money, but of life

Terukichi is rougher than he looks, but he isn't careless. Rather than deciding on the spot, he takes up old Captain Jukichi's proposal: put Shinji and Yasuo on his cargo ship together as apprentices. Officially it is meant to show two young men the world of business; in fact it is a way of using real work at sea to put them both on the same scale. Shinji grew up a fisherman, and the sea is home ground for him. Yasuo grew up on land, and the sea is just scenery to him. Mishima makes the point plainly: this trial isn't about who is more capable. It's about whether a man moves forward or backward when his life is actually on the line.

On the day the storm hits, the cargo ship runs into trouble, and someone has to swim a line across to secure the hull. Shinji unties the rope and dives into the water; Yasuo shrinks back on deck. The scene needs no more words than that. In the moment Shinji is fighting for his life in the water, whether or not he is the poor boy the Miyatas looked down on stops mattering at all.

The ending: a rare clear sky in Mishima

Mishima could write darkness easily enough; in The Sound of Waves he chooses to hand the pen to the sea instead.

What it's about: labor, courage, chastity

The real protagonist of The Sound of Waves is the island itself, not Shinji, not Hatsue. Time on the island comes from the tides; relationships between people come from labor. A man's character isn't proved by who his father is or how many boats his family owns, but by whether he can swim a line across open water, by what he can hold onto in a storm besides just a ship — a promise, too. Writing this book, Mishima deliberately set aside the decadence and the aesthetics of death he was best known for, and wrote instead about plain people earning recognition by plain means. That choice is itself a kind of statement.

Read it today and the section on rumor stands out with particular sharpness. In an isolated little society, evidence doesn't matter and motive doesn't matter. What matters is who speaks first and who repeats it most. Chiyoko's confession isn't heroism; it's her finally taking responsibility for one careless remark. It is, if anything, the most modern thread in the entire novel.

Why read the text itself

This guide gives you the map; the text is the actual ground. Mishima doesn't write the sea as scenery. He writes what it feels like when the pressure of the water closes on a diving woman's chest, whether Shinji can still tell which way is up after swallowing seawater in the middle of a wave, the rhythm of fishing lights coming on one by one across the night sea — and none of that reaches you until you turn to the page and read it yourself. The dialogue between the characters is short, almost like a fisherman's chant, and reading it on the page is a completely different experience from hearing it summarized. One more time: the ending isn't really what makes this book land. What makes it land is that for one year, Mishima truly believed in something clean, and that belief is something you have to go find for yourself.