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Akira Yoshimura's Shipwrecks is a stark little novel. In some ways it echoes a book I reviewed a few months back -- Stewart O'Nan's A Prayer for the Dying.
O'Nan's novel is a fire and brimstone tale -- set in post-Civil War Wisconsin. It's a story of testing and challenging, and Jacob Hansen's duties as sheriff, undertaker, and pastor all come into play as he must try and maintain order and community as both a diphtheria epidemic ravages his family and his town, and a wildfire advances. It is the personal story of one man struggling with the unexpected descent of a cruel and rapid destruction.
Shipwrecks' story is also the tale of a town's destruction told though one character's eyes. But there are notable differences: the witness in Yoshimura's novel is Isaku, a nine year old boy when the story begins. His village balances precariously on the margin between a meager life and death by starvation; family by family, they stave off total collapse by selling individual kin into indentured servitude in the town across the mountain.
Isaku, his father gone in such an arrangement, lives with his mother and younger brother and sister, Isokichi and Kane. The story is in some ways the story of his loss of innocence as he attempts to fulfill the duties of a head of household -- fishing for saury and sardines, octopus and squid, and most importantly, tending the salt cauldrons. For Isaku this is a confirmation of maturation -- a Bar Mitzvah of sorts.
Starting as a naïve boy, Isaku comes to learn that, in addition to boiling salt out of sea water to sell, the fires on shore serve another purpose -- luring unsuspecting trading ships onto the reef. The village calls it O-fune-sama and sees it -- the destruction of those ships, the murder of those sailors -- as a gift from the gods, no different than any other harvest. Rice and pottery, cloth and utensils. Not a crime, it nourishes the village and keeps it from dying.
Even as Isaku learns about the risks -- specifically of luring clan ships to ruin instead of trading ships -- O-fune-sama is not questioned: it is a necessity and a customary part of the yearly cycle; there is no moral question ... other than the town's quiet acknowledgment that no one beyond the village must know.
Unlike in O'Nan's novel, in which the fire rages and the plague decimates, in Yoshimura's novel, time unfolds slowly. There is a passing of seasons. Of time: Couples wed. Isaku's father is not due to return for years. Then a year. Then a season. It is time to fish saury. Then squid. Then octopus. And then, when the trade ships are running again, time for O-fune-sama É but there is retribution for the town's crimes this year.
Although I previously described O'Nan's book as controlled, it still bellows and sweats like a bible-belt preacher. Where it can barely contain the rage and madness of its war-ravaged main character, Shipwrecks unfolds so slowly and deliberately.
The village situation is grim and its needs are clear. Isaku's grasp of the situation is understandable; the reader can sympathize. And that is what makes the inevitable punishment so personally sad while also being so morally justified.
--Brad Katz