Pathway to Japanese Literature

The Shanghaied Man

I

Once in the middle of the night, hearing the groans of the man sleeping next to him, Tamekichi—unable to sleep comfortably—seemed to have stepped out into the backyard, but likely returned to bed soon after due to daytime fatigue. The man had been in a foul mood all day, complaining that the spot where an unlicensed dentist had pulled his tooth the previous day was hurting. After Tamekichi had wandered through all the seamen's lodging houses in Kobe and ended up at this boarding house near the wharf yesterday, even when he first met the man in their shared room, the man had simply remained silent and shot him an irritated glance.

He was said to be a third-class oiler who had just disembarked from the coastal merchant ship Toyooka Maru. Since Tamekichi, a deckhand specializing in long voyages, had nothing in common to discuss with him, even when the man groaned through the night, Tamekichi paid it no particular mind.

When Tamekichi awoke that morning in his oil-fumed futon, the neighboring bedding lay empty. He thought nothing of it. More than anything, for Tamekichi—who had been ashore too long—the engine's vibrations and their thick bass tones felt achingly familiar. Especially upon morning waking, that emptiness cut deeper still.

Whether as a trainee sailor on the Australia route or a laborer on an America-bound ship, Tamekichi told himself he absolutely had to sign on with a crew today. Leaving breakfast half-eaten, he rushed out to the bulletin board.
The blackboard showed only one job opening—for a second-class cook on the Karafuto Regular Line’s Buragoe Maru. In front of it, the usual crowd had already squatted in a circle around the large table, flipping pots since morning.

“C’mon, place your bets! Place your bets!”

Sawaguchi, who'd been saddled with the Chin'yō Maru's grunt work, ran the gambling ring.

"If bettin's crooked, blame the boss's noggin—!"

"Hmph—how else ya gonna feed that lantern trap of yours?"

Tamekichi stood dumbstruck, watching the pot swell.
The *Kenpuku Maru* scooped it up single-handed.

“That’s enough now, you lot.”

And then the landlady Okina-baa appeared.
"There’s someone new here now—what’s all this first thing in the morning?"
"And then, Mr. Tame—come with me for a moment—"
Until they came out through the earthen-floored area to the front entrance that served as the office, Okina-baa continued whispering in a low voice.

“Just be honest—that’s the best way. Everyone has moments of weakness, so I’m sure it’s nothing serious—but just be honest, okay?”

While worrying about his injured finger, Tamekichi found himself wearing a sullen expression for some reason. He felt a strange sensation—as if he’d grasped something, yet understood nothing at all. The bright morning sun flooded the office, making his eyes ache for a while.

“So you’re the one they call Tame.”

A deep voice spoke. Before replying, Tamekichi blinked and looked up at its source—a man in his forties wearing Western clothes.

“You know Sakamoto Shintarō, don’t you?”

He fired off questions in rapid succession.
Sakamoto Shintarō was the name of the man from last night's shared room.
From the detective’s demeanor, Tamekichi intuitively sensed something ominous. He remained silent and nodded.

“You thick bastard!” The man grabbed Tamekichi’s wrist.
Several startled faces peered through the door gaps.

“I’m from Kannonzaki Police Station.”
“You’re coming with me.”

Tamekichi remained preternaturally calm.
Observing the surrounding commotion with detachment, he even wore a faint smile at his lips.
This made him appear thoroughly villainous.
The detective—who had handled things roughly merely to provoke—seemed to grow more confident from this reaction.

"Hurry up!" he said, working himself into a frenzy as he tried to drag Tamekichi toward the doorway.

“I’ll go. As long as I go, that should be fine.”
“Ah, they’ll figure it out quick enough.”

“Hurry up!”

The detective tried to shove Tamekichi.
Brushing off the hand, Tamekichi shouted.

"What the hell are you doing?! Damn you!"

The detective's right hand flew and struck Tamekichi's cheekbone.

"I won’t tolerate resistance!"

“Now, now, sir,” Afurika Maru, the ringleader, interjected as he rushed forward.
“Since he’s saying he’ll come along obediently—but what exactly are you saying happened here?”

“You stubborn bastard!” the detective panted.

“You lot still don’t know?
“Last night, Sakamoto Shintarō was murdered.”

Everyone was utterly astonished.
The most startled—or so it seemed—was Tamekichi.

“Is that true? Is that?”

“Don’t play dumb!” roared the detective.

“Before taking me to headquarters, you need to search for evidence. Step forward!”

Then a jackknife engraved with “SAKAMOTO” in Roman letters was extracted from the hidden pocket of Tamekichi’s navy-blue work trousers.

“That’s not it,” Tamekichi said, turning pale.

“Shut up!”
The detective noticed the injured finger.

“What’s this bandage? Bloodstained isn’t it?”
“Enough—get over here! Got something to say? File it at the detective bureau! Move!”

Ignoring the noisy clamor of the sailors in the lodging house, Tamekichi was led outside under escort.

A heat haze shimmered under the radiant Indian summer sky.
On the coastal avenue, Gonzo and other stevedores had formed a clamorous group shouting at each other.
Foreign sailors wandered about in scattered clusters.
Even he found it strange how composed he felt as he walked pressed close against the detective.
He no longer cared what became of him.
The faces of passersby looked absurdly foolish.
He found himself considering his own plight as if it were someone else's misfortune.
The only thing that truly gnawed at him was knowing he'd be kept from the sea for who knew how long.

A detective from Kannonzaki Police Station, who had been patrolling the coastal avenue at dawn, was shocked to discover a massive pool of blood on the sidewalk in front of Okina-baa’s sailors’ lodging house.
The bloodstains continued intermittently southward for about half a cho in droplet-like patterns, and from the shoe prints imprinted in the soil there and the scattered pieces of clothing around, the scene of a violent struggle could be vividly imagined.
It was the site where an oil tanker had been moored, where deep, oily water stretched endlessly from the rocky cliffs out to sea.
On top of that stone wall lay Sakamoto Shintarō’s seaman’s handbook and a single pawn ticket.

Immediately, the jurisdictional police station sprang into action.
With the motive remaining unclear, it was perhaps inevitable under these circumstances that the authorities would naturally focus their attention on Mori Tamekichi—his roommate—as the primary suspect.
But even when they dragged nets or sent down divers, not only did Sakamoto’s corpse fail to surface—not a single belonging was recovered.
They had arranged to wait for high tide and conduct a coordinated seabed sweep with the Water Police Station.

Considering the knife and the wound on his finger, even Tamekichi couldn’t help envisioning himself on the gallows, his feet refusing to move.
He could not abandon the sea above all else.

At the end of the road, a weathered stone police building waited for him.
A sea breeze carrying an exotic scent grazed Tamekichi's nose.
To the left spread blue water, and beyond it rose peaks of clouds.

The sea was calling him.

For Tamekichi, who had left Naoetsu Port at nine and spent over twenty years sailing the world on steamships of various nations, the sea was his hometown and a motherly bosom.

The sound of hoisting the anchor rang out.
On a foreign ship moored at the rocky cliff, a departure flag—black with a white square cut out—fluttered in the wind.
With a single glance, Tamekichi recognized it as the Norwegian PN Company’s cargo ship.
Three sailors, anxious not to miss departure, hurried past Tamekichi with their shopping bundles.
The pungent aroma of throat-searing tobacco assaulted his nostrils.
Then, a distant foreign port town appeared like a phantom in Tamekichi’s eyes and vanished.
He made up his mind.

“My feet are killing me from these blisters—”
In one swift motion while crouching, Tamekichi swept the detective’s leg with all his might.

He was frantic.
He thought he heard a shout behind him.
He seemed to have thrown about two passersby.
And he dashed toward the foreign sailor about to step onto the rope ladder.

“Take me on board!” he shouted.
The sailors, taken aback, cleared the path.

“Take me with you! I’m being chased by bad guys.”
“I’ll go anywhere! Do anything!”
“I’ve worked on a couple of Norwegian ships!”
Tamekichi’s fluency in the specialized English used exclusively among seafarers proved to be his greatest asset in this situation.

“Are you Branten?”

From above the ship’s side, the First Engineer asked.

“Aye, second-class deckhand,” Tamekichi answered.

After a moment’s consideration,

“Alright, I’ll take you on board.”

Like a monkey, Tamekichi scaled the high side and fled through the warehouse entrance in front of the kitchen into the side coal bunker.

“He’s a murderer!”
“Don’t you get it, you foreign devils? That bastard’s a murderer!”

The detective, arriving belatedly and out of breath, uttered these words.

“Don’t you get it? M-U-R-D-E-R! He’s a murderer!”
“Hand that man over quickly!”
“Hand him over!”

The sailors gathered at the ship’s rail and burst into laughter.

One of them mimicked, “S-s-s-s-s.”

The ladder was hauled up.

“Have all hands returned?” shouted the Boatswain from the bridge.
“Everyone’s aboard,” answered the Boatswain.

Clang, clang went the signal to the engine room.
Churning up bubbles at the stern, the propulsion device began to spin.

Clang! “Report to your stations!” The sailors ran in all directions, throwing ropes and removing stanchions.
The Second Engineer stood at the stern.

“All right!”

With the clanking sound of chains being wound by the crane, the Norwegian ship Viktor Karerina pulled away from the rocky cliff.

"Sayōnara!"

One of the sailors called out to the detective stamping his feet on the pier.
The laughter on deck was drowned out by the departure whistle blaring into the clear blue sky.

Ⅱ

When signing the sham contract prepared by the First Engineer in front of the captain, Tamekichi found himself writing “Shintarō Sakamoto” almost without thinking.

Cleaning the officers’ mess and tending to the junior crew’s meals were assigned as Sakamoto’s daily duties.
He also had to assist with tasks such as applying coal tar to iron plates, repairing tarpaulins on the boat deck, and securing deck cargo with wire.

As Kobe began to haze like a mirage on the horizon, Tamekichi—feeling liberated for the first time—started settling into familiar work.
While listening to the sea whisper at the ship’s side beneath a radiant sun, nothing brought him greater joy than fitting a spanner to bolt heads after so long.
Far greater than relief at escaping Japanese police with their monstrous suspicions was his elation at finding himself where he belonged.

His long life of wandering had taught him to adopt this irresponsible attitude toward himself.

The sailors too called him affectionately as Sakky and found him indispensable.

The weather began to change in the afternoon, so Tamekichi went around driving wedges into the hold-down bars of the seven large hatch covers together with all the sailors.
Only Tamekichi could drive them in properly with a single strike.
While impressed, they all asked him various questions about his experience.
While responding in crisp London-style English, he was quite pleased with himself.
And no one asked why he had fled and come here.
For them, with their uncertain nationalities, such matters were of no concern whatsoever.
The one time Tamekichi was summoned by the captain, he answered that he had fled his uncle’s home due to family circumstances.
Viktor Karerina crew member, second-class sailor Shin Saakii—repeating this status and name in his head, Tamekichi couldn’t suppress a smile.

The starboard room facing the passageway came to be occupied by the cook, the officer’s boy Bowie, and Tamekichi.
While the junior crew members were working, Tamekichi’s only task was to carry their meals to the stern mess hall; since cleanup duty fell to the apprentices, he only encountered them during daytime work on deck.
Therefore, he rarely encountered the engine department staff.

A custom of contempt—whenever occasion arose—governed every deck crew member on any ship toward those writhing in the vessel’s depths, smeared with coal, ash, and oil.
Tamekichi too had believed since childhood that engine department roaches like those were nothing as spirited as proper sailors.
Though paying no particular mind, he took care to learn from his roommate Bowie that the deck crew counted seventeen junior hands against the engine department’s twenty-one, and that their course lay straight south to load guano at Thursday Island, swing past Hawaii, take on lumber at Grace Harbor along North America’s west coast, then await thaw season to ascend Alaska’s Yukon River toward Klondike.
This marked but the first phase of their deep-sea voyage; beyond that point, their path would depend wholly on charterers’ needs.
She was one of those tramp steamers that could alter course for any port worldwide with but a telegram’s notice.

Feeling some measure of emotion upon departure and arrival was standard for rough yet sentimental deep-sea sailors.
What felt strange was how in Tamekichi’s case this time, there had been nothing but relief and joy.
The greater that relief grew, the more he fell under a terrifying self-delusion without realizing it.

When Mori Tamekichi closed his eyes wrapped in a blanket inside the coffin-like bunk and thought of the suspicions hanging over him, he shuddered for the first time.
In the hidden place he clutched Sakamoto’s knife.
A cold sensation threatened his nerves.
He could do nothing.
Gradually he had sunk into a twisted psychological state where he himself became convinced of his own crime.
In such moments of weakness, merely by making groundless dreamlike confessions, many an “innocent” human must have been easily and bureaucratically disposed of in the name of the rule of law.

But in this situation, Tamekichi had neither the pride to assert his innocence—even if he were innocent—nor the stubbornness to do so.
There didn't even seem to be such evidence.
More than anything, he was filled with joy at having gone out to sea.
Still, he tried earnestly to reconsider the incident's details.
It proved futile.
The more he thought about it, the more ambiguous it became whether he himself had killed Sakamoto or not.

In short, such things no longer mattered. He had already completely left Japanese soil. And so, Sakamoto Shintarō was dead. As the criminal being hunted by Japanese police, Mori Tamekichi too no longer existed. Under his new identity as Sakamoto Shintarō, he would not disembark from this Norwegian ship for the time being; after changing ships two or three times in the interim, his nationality would surely become untraceable. As the youngest child, a single Bohemian, he could feel no attachment to Japan—that mere chain of islands on a nautical chart. The ship appeared to be nearing off Tosa, steaming at eleven and a quarter knots. At a pitch of about eighteen degrees, the spray from the waves appeared to shatter white against the glass window even to night-adapted eyes. The low thrum of the engine passed through his ears like a lullaby. After a while, Tamekichi’s Sakamoto Shintarō began to snore peacefully.

He didn’t know how many hours he’d slept.

When Tamekichi awoke, the storm had calmed, dawn was breaking, and the ship had anchored in the harbor. While thinking they must have taken refuge from the typhoon near Karatsu Port, what towered before his nose as he peered through the window, piercing the morning mist, was the smokestack of Kawasaki Shipyard.

“Kobe!”
“We turned back because of the storm!”

But that a six-thousand-ton ship would never return to its port of departure—no matter how wildly the barometer’s needle might swing—was something he, having grown up by the sea, should have known all along.

The First Engineer and the boatswain entered.

“Saakii, they say you’re a murderer!”
The boatswain bellowed.

“Don’t shout.”

Tamekichi answered.
His hand trembled violently as it searched for the knife in the hidden place.
The obsession with the sea was making him cowardly.

“Ha ha ha—” The First Engineer burst out laughing.
“The ship was recalled by wireless from the Maritime Police and the charter company, I tell you.”
“They say you were being escorted to the police, ha ha ha!”

In Tamekichi’s bewildered mind, the gallows became encircled by a whirl of his finger wound and the knife.
And on the other hand, there was the life of freedom on the sea that had begun to unfold there.

“The Maritime Police’s launch has just left the bridge, so officials will be here any moment now.”

Tamekichi turned deathly pale and prostrated himself on the bunk.
The First Engineer and the boatswain were discussing something in whispers.

“What should we do?” the boatswain’s voice said.
“Hide?” said the First Engineer.
Like a sprung trap, Tamekichi lunged at his chest.
His voice wouldn’t come out.

“Alright then, try running as far as you can.”
“It’ll work out,” the First Engineer roared with laughter again.
“Should we leave him with the engine room crew?” the boatswain asked.
“Right, go call Boston! Boston!”
The boatswain flew out like a flung rug and immediately bellowed from atop the steam drum in the forward engine room.
“Boston!
“Midnight, Boston!”

Before long, a black man nearly seven feet tall slipped in quietly, still holding an oilcloth.

“Hide this bastard. Take him away quick.”

The First Engineer pointed at Tamekichi with his chin.
Boston glanced at him briefly and silently took the lead.
Tamekichi was about to take a step outside the room when—

“First Engineer, the police are here!” Bowie came running in.
Against the starboard deck, the clamor of many Japanese voices could be heard.
Dashing under Boston’s arm, Tamekichi tumbled down the engine room’s iron staircase.
In the commotion, there was no one in the engine room or by the boilers.
He tried to escape into the water filter but slipped on oil and fell sideways into the shadow of Mr. Wire’s evaporator.

“That spot’s no good—they’ll find you right away!” the black man shouted.
“Get into the gap in the water tank from the top of the docking boiler. Hurry!”

Climbing from the low tunnel up to the docking boiler piled with an inch of ash, Tamekichi squeezed his body through a hole too narrow for both legs to enter at once, emerging into the space outside the boiler where water pipes converged.
The area outside the unlit boiler was as cold as an icehouse.
After hearing Boston’s footsteps closing the tunnel door and departing, Tamekichi—enveloped by air that seemed to solidify around him from all directions as he strained his ears in the eerie below-deck silence—did not even feel the pain from his unnatural posture.
But he hadn’t even considered why he was doing such a thing—because he himself didn’t understand.

Clink, clink, clink, screeeech—

Then, from somewhere, came a sound like scraping iron plates.
Oh? Tamekichi thought.

Clink, clink, clink, screeeech—

The sound seemed to come from inside the boiler, yet also appeared to leak from the ventilator in front of it.

Clink, clink, clink, screeeech— screeeech.

He suddenly realized.
It was the wireless telegraphy sailors often tapped out with their nails on tables and such—the International ABC code abbreviations—and it was unmistakably coming from inside the docking boiler!

No sooner had the clamorous footsteps resounded than—

“As you can see, there’s nobody here—wahaha!” came the First Engineer’s voice, followed by two or three exchanged remarks.

After everyone had left, Tamekichi lay like a dead man, pressing his cheek against the water pipe.

Clink, clink, screech—

It rang out even more clearly than before.
Unconsciously, his head deciphered it.
SOS!
Could this be a distress signal from a shipwreck?!

Tamekichi jolted.
He took out a knife from hiding and knocked on the water pipe.
“What’s going on—”

Clink, screech, clink, clink, clink, screeeech.

“Shanghai—” came the reply.

Shanghai'd?
With “What’s going on—,” he scraped the water pipe again.

“I was Shanghai’d.”

Shanghai'd!
They would abduct passersby with violence onto ships, wait until all communication with land was completely severed after departure, and then force them into extreme labor—this practice was known as *Shanghaiing*, an open secret among tramp steamers worldwide.
They never allowed those they had Shanghai’d—people who might expose their crimes—to set foot on land again.
Life in the ship’s sunless depths, ceaseless labor in coal bunkers regardless of day or night, abuse regarding food and other necessities—rare were those who survived more than half a year under such conditions.

Like a madman, Tamekichi climbed down from the boiler and stood before the furnace door where the sound had come from.
From the outside, it could be opened easily with just a single handle.

The acrid stench of excrement and human bodies assaulted his nostrils.
From between a thin layer and breadcrumbs in the pitch-dark depths,

“Ah! It’s you—Tame!” came the voice.

“Cover your eyes!
“Don’t look at the light!”

In an instant, Tamekichi barked.
The one who crawled out like a half-dead man, tightly covering his eyes, was none other than Sakamoto Shintarō—the man who should have been killed.

"You were alive?"

“Yeah.
“My tooth was aching and bleeding so bad I couldn’t stand it, so I went out to get a doctor—that’s when they grabbed me and Shanghai’d me.”
“The hell—we’re stopped? Where is this port?”
“Dairen? Urajio? Where the hell are we?”

“Kobe.”

“What, Kobe?”
“I thought the engines had been running for four or five days—”

“See, there was this whole commotion about me supposedly killing you, so I ended up boarding this ship,” he said. “Then, get this—a wireless message comes from land, and the ship gets recalled. Goddamn it—I hate this knife I borrowed from you when peeling that pear! Plus, I went and cut my finger with the damn thing!”

Holding the knife in a reverse grip, Tamekichi sat on the iron ladder in front of the rear coal bunker and grinned like an idiot. He had clearly heard the call of the sea. He couldn’t stand the dissatisfaction of having to leave this ship—which he’d gone through such trouble to board just to save that half-dead Sakamoto rather than enjoy proving his own innocence—abandoning this prime position he could never hope to obtain again, especially now when work was so hard to come by.

First of all—even if there was resentment—where was any obligation to save this bastard? Isn’t this man supposed to have been killed by me? he thought.

No—just as the Detective had said, I really had killed him. And why the hell did he have to show up now, standing here all weak and shaky? This infuriated Tamekichi beyond reason.

If only this bastard had died as planned—then what? Then I could sail on this ship to that dear, distant overseas—no—wait! Even now it’s not too late! What’s the problem—he’s so weakened he might as well be dead. No—he’s already dead in fact.

Isn’t this proof that I’m being framed as the culprit? And what’s more—isn’t this place the boiler room of a cargo ship beyond the law’s reach? Yes—now’s the perfect opportunity—but what kind of opportunity am I even talking about? No—after all, this life was supposed to be Mori Tamekichi’s to take! That’s all there is to how I ended up aboard this ship.

Overseas... foreign lands... yes—with this cursed knife—yes—just as I was instructed—just as that detective implied—

Tamekichi stood up.

“Before we escape—I need water... water—”
Sakamoto groaned.

Ⅲ

The police’s speculation had been correct.
Sakamoto Shintarō had died.
And at the same time, the man known as Mori Tamekichi had also ceased to exist on the surface of the Earth.

Not long after the Norwegian ship Viktor Karenina, having once again weighed anchor from Kobe, set out into the open sea, a large object wrapped in canvas and weighted down with a fire rod was cast overboard from the gunwale into the churning fury of the waves.

On that deck, whistling and smiling, Sakamoto Shintarō was bidding a permanent farewell to the land of Japan.

In accordance with sailors' unwritten laws observed worldwide since ancient times, Sakamoto Shintarō—the man who had been Shanghai'd—and Sakamoto Shintarō—who had Shanghai'd himself—together became those who would never again set foot on land from that moment onward.

(Published in Shin Seinen, April 1925 Issue)