“Noboru couldn’t believe he was looking at his mother’s bedroom; it might have belonged to a stranger. But there was no doubt that a woman lived there: femininity trembled in every corner, a faint scent lingered in the air.”
“Never had he observed a woman’s body so closely. Her shoulders, like the shorelines, sloped gently downward. Her neck and arms were lightly tanned, but at her chest, as if an inner lamp were burning, began a zone of warm, fleshy white…”
“Whereas most men choose to become sailors because they like the sea, Ryuji had been guided by an antipathy to land.”
“And he had been certain the woman before him was the woman in the dream. If only he had found the words to say it.”
“To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman.”
“’Your ideas about people are still pretty naïve,’ the thirteen-year-old chief said coldly. ‘No adult is going to be able to do something we couldn’t do…..’”
Read these two-three pages to get the real image…
“After hunting for an hour, they found a stray cat small enough to ride in the palm of Noboru’s hand, a mottled mewing kitten with lackluster eyes…………What Noboru lifted between two fingers now was no longer a kitten……….Seizing the kitten by the neck, the chief pierced the skin at the chest with the point of the blade and scissored a long smooth cut to the throat. Then he pushed the skin to the sides with both hands: the glossy layer of fat beneath was like a peeled spring onion. The skinned neck, draped gracefully on the floor, seemed to be wearing a cat mask. The cat was only an exterior, life had posed as a cat…………Noboru tried comparing the corpse confronting the world so nakedly with the unsurpassably naked figures of his mother and the sailor. But compared to this they weren’t naked enough….……..The kitten bled very little. The chief tore through the surrounding membrane and exposed a large, red-black liver………..The kitten’s dead pupils were purple flecked with white; the gaping mouth was stuffed with congealed blood, the twisted tongue visible between the fangs…”
“For Ryuji the kiss was death, the very death in love he always dreamed of. The softness of her lips, her mouth so crimson in the darkness he could see it with closed eyes, so infinitely moist, a tepid coral sea, her restless tongue quivering like sea grass…in the dark rapture of all this was something directly linked to death. He was perfectly aware that he would leave her in a day, yet he was ready to die happily for her sake. Death roused inside him, stirred.”
“Noboru had hoped to take advantage of this one-in-a-thousand chance by sneaking over to the chief’s house and waking him with a password whispered outside his window. Now this last, fervent hope was dashed to bits. He despised all mankind. And he wrote a long entry in his diary, not forgetting to set down Ryuji’s crime.”
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