Rating: 8.0/10.
A coming-of-age romance novel set in 1950s Japan, on a rural island sooo after WW2. The main character is a boy Shinji, around 18 years old who works as a fisherman, who quickly falls in love with Hatsue, a girl who actually came to the island. They both like each other, but her father disapproves of the marriage because Shinji is poor (even though physically strong). After rumors spread around the island about the two of them, they are stopped from seeing each other. The climax of the story is when Shinji and Yasuo (the other male character), go on a fishing trip, and Shinji proves his worth in a daring feat in a typhoon, proving his superiority, and the couple is allowed to marry.
The story is fairly straightforward; a few scenes were memorable. The first is how quickly he accidentally sees her naked after she’s drying her clothes after hiding from the rain at an observation tower, and it ended with a kiss, but they stopped short of sex since they were not yet married. There is also another scene where Yasuo tries to force himself onto Hatsue, but he is chased around by a hornet, not sure if it’s meant as some kind of divine intervention, but it is told in a matter-of-fact way in the novel.
Some other minor characters include Shinji’s mother feeling for her son’s heartbreak and trying to get them to marry by pleading with the girl’s father. There is also another girl, Chiyoko, who was jealous of the couple and thus spread rumors, but then was overwhelmed by guilt and eventually also got her mother to plead with Hatsue’s father as well.
Life on the island is divided by gender – the men (Shinji and friends) go out onto the sea in a small boat, fishing for seafood like octopus, and the women (including Hatsue and Shinji’s mother) dive for shellfish; there is a system of women taking turns with allocations according to the hour of day to get water from a limited source. All of them are realistic depictions of life in that era.
Overall, a reasonably short read at around 180 pages; the characters are quite one-dimensional, as Shinji is mostly just strong and a poor young man, and Hatsue is portrayed as pretty and kind; Yasuo is the rich and lazy boy with no redeeming qualities, and as far as characters go they are as black-and-white as it gets. But the depictions of daily life makes it worth reading, also since the island is based off Kami-Shima, a real island near Nagoya that you can visit.
