Shipwrecks

Yoshimura, A. (1996). Shipwrecks (Mark Ealey, Trans.). New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. ISBN: 0-15-100211-8

Why read this book

If you’ve wondered what life was like before the Internet, computers, television, and electricity, you might want to visit the world of Isaku, who lived in a village on the Japanese coast before the Industrial Revolution created the world we know today. Was life better when people lived closer to nature?

Plot summary

Isaku is a nine-year-old boy who lives in an isolated coastal village in pre-industrial Japan. The 17 families in the village support themselves by harvesting food from the sea and from the forests that cover the steep mountains that surround them. They farm a little, but the land doesn’t yield much, and they live in constant fear of starvation.

Isaku’s father has sold himself into three years of indentured labor outside the village to secure cash to buy grain from more prosperous villages several days walk away. “Don’t let the children starve” are his father’s parting words to his mother, who knows no joy as she struggles to keep Isaku, his younger brother, and his two younger sisters alive in his father’s absence.

At nine years old, Isaku is expected to labor like a man, going out to sea in his father’s small boat when there are fish, squid, or octopus to catch, foraging in the woods for bark from linden trees that his mother can work into thread and weave into cloth, and manning the fires all night under the caldrons where sea water is boiled away to produce salt for trade with outside villages.

Isaku soon learns the village’s dark secret about the salt caldrons. They boil at night because the night fires have the potential to confuse sailors on the boats that carry rice and other products along the coast. Especially when the weather is bad and the sailors are looking for a safe harbor, sailing toward the fires can land them on the reef just outside the breakers, and the villagers can pillage the ship for food they could never produce in their isolated coastal valley. They call a wrecked boat o-fune-sama, a blessing that can stay their hunger for two or three years and keep them from selling themselves into bondage outside the village. Is it a sin to lure sailors to their death to save their own lives?

Critical evaluation

Akira Yoshimura’s stark narrative reveals the beauties and the perils of living close to nature. His vivid descriptions of the changing seasons and the rhythm of the village economy as it shifts from one resource to another in search of sustenance cannot transcend the grimness of the villagers’ struggle to live. Isaku’s mother’s sorrow at the absence of her husband, Isaku’s struggle to provide as well as his father, and the villagers’ fear that their pillaging of a ship will be discovered by authorities from the outside create a mood of quiet desperation. And that’s before the real tragedy strikes. It’s hard not to imagine that Yoshimura’s goal in recreating life in a Japanese coastal village was a reaction against the romanticizing of pre-industrial life by authors like Yukio Mishima. And that’s why I would encourage young adults to read Shipwrecks. This short, simple novel transports readers to a world we will never know, a world of beauty and brutality that could be a useful measure by which we reflect on our own lives.

About the author

Akira Yoshimura was born in Japan in 1927 and died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Tokyo in July 2006. He wrote more than 20 novels that were best-sellers in Japan, as well as short fiction, non-fiction, essays, literary criticism, and lectures. His works that have been translated into English include:

· Build the Musashi: The Birth and Death of the World's Greatest Battleship, translated by Vincent Murphy (1991).

· Zero Fighter, translated by Retsu Kaiho and Michael Gregson (1996).

· Shipwrecks, translated by Mark Ealey (1996).

· On Parole, translated by Stephen Snyder (1999).

· One Man's Justice, translated by Mark Ealey (2001).

(Akira Yoshimura, 2001)

Genre: Life is hard, International, Crossover, Historical fiction

Curriculum ties

• World history — Shipwrecks paints a valuable picture of what life was like before the Industrial Revolution for a large percentage of the world’s population. Although many villages around the world were not as remote or desperate for food as the village described in Shipwrecks, selected excerpts from the novel could illustrate very well the directness of human dependence on nature for food and the way that most tools and household items were made by hand from local resources.

• Literature — The moral dilemma posed in Shipwrecks should provide rich material for analysis in literature classes. Is it wrong for desperately hungry people to lure ships onto their rocky shoals and kill the crews so they can eat the food the ships are transporting?

Book-talking ideas

• Read a passage that describes Isaku’s workday to make the point that the novel is a window into a past when most people relied directly on nature for all their food and material needs.

• Read from the description of the unloading of the first o-fune-sama that captures the villagers’ joy at receiving the food, explain briefly how the ship came to be wrecked, and pose the moral dilemma that is at the heart of the story.

Reading level/interest age

Given the length of the novel (180 pages), the simplicity of the plot and the vocabulary, and the centrality of the young protagonist, I think that students as young as 9th grade could handle it. Certainly 10th grade Modern World History students could read excerpts that describe pre-industrial life.

Challenge issues

Some Japanese Americans might feel that the desperation described in Shipwrecks is a misrepresentation of Japanese history.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Inform the challenger that the book was a best-seller in Japan.

• Direct the challenger to the favorable review in The New York Times, which indicates the importance of the book as a representative of Japanese culture on the world stage.

Why I chose to read this book

I read this book when it first appeared in English and thought it would be great to use in high school world history and literature courses. Re-reading it in the context of my expanding knowledge of young adult literature, I’m not so sure. It paints a desperate picture with only the slightest ray of hope at the end, and even that ray is an ambivalent one.

References

Yomiuri (2006, August 26). Novelist Yoshimura ‘sought death with dignity.’ The Daily Yomiuri, p. 3. Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.lexisnexis.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7585749614&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T7585749621&cisb=22_T7585749620&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=145202&docNo=25

Akira Yoshimura. (2001) Contemporary Authors Online. Retrieved October 14, 2009, from http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=sfpl_main