THE WHALE THAT FELL IN LOVE WITH A SUBMARINE

The 15th of August 1945

South-south-east of the Izu Islands, off the coast of a small islet, there was a whale.

He wasn't swimming or blowing water through his spout, just floating on the swell as if everything else was too much bother, now and then closing his small eyes as if all he wanted to do was sleep.

Shoals of tuna and bonito and sardines — the whale's favourite — dashed past and crowded boisterously around the surface, but he pretended to ignore them and simply floated there like a log, although really he was rather too big for a log.

He was a sardine whale, so named for their snack of choice. Sardine whales average about sixteen metres long, but our whale floating here so terribly listlessly was uncommonly large at twenty metres, and weighed in at thirty tons — and to make matters worse, he was a male.

Unlike humans, female whales are bigger than males, and the bigger they are, the more splendid they are thought to be. And not just by the humans who hunt them for their meat and their oil, but by their very own fellow whales.

For the males, it wasn't so much a case of the smaller the better, but if like our whale they were bigger than the females, beyond what was acceptable, so to speak, then the females seemed to find them repulsive and refused to have anything to do with them.

Upon reaching adulthood, whales find a mate and travel the oceans together, giving birth to a baby whale once every two years. But this male was too big, and however hard he tried to attract a mate, emitting subsonic signals to alert the young females to a passing shoal of sardines or giving them gifts of shrimp, they simply ate their fill and then quickly swam away as if repelled at the mere sight of his enormous body.

In other words, our whale was a complete flop with the ladies. It wouldn't have been so bad if he'd just been bad-tempered or ugly — after all, there was some chance of finding a quirky female who was attracted to ill-natured males or odd looks. But being too big was a no-no. They were all scared of him.

He considered various possibilities, like maybe he ate too much and that was why he'd grown so big, or how he might join the larger finback whales in Antarctica — but when he tried to shrink himself by eating smaller quantities of shrimps and sardines he just got dizzy, and he couldn't bear the thought of living in such icy waters.

Whenever he happened to be near the pod he always felt anxious, so most of the time he stayed alone, eating and sleeping, then waking and spending the entire day rocked by the waves. At times it suddenly occurred to him that somewhere in the ocean there must be a female bigger than him, his perfect mate must be feeling lonesome waiting for him, and so he would rouse himself and swim off in a random direction.

Overhead a never-ending stream of aeroplanes flew northwards and then returned southwards, sometimes belching thin trails of smoke from their engines or flying so low and unsteadily that it seemed they would crash at any moment. These were the American bombers conducting air raids on the Japanese archipelago far to the north, although of course the whale didn't know this. There were also numerous ships, big and small, ploughing through the waves in a great hurry.

When the whale was little his mother had taught him that, if he ever saw a ship, he had to quickly dive into the depths and stay down as long as his breath lasted, swimming as far away from it as he could. Even if the ship was smaller than him, aboard there was an extremely cruel type of animal called a human. Upon catching sight of a whale, these humans immediately took it for an enemy and gave chase, firing harpoons at it. She herself had twice barely escaped with her life, and the horror of those memories still brought tears to her eyes as she told him about them.

"Had you done anything nasty to them?" he'd asked, unable to comprehend why the humans would hate whales that much. "Of course not! On the contrary, we are the most intelligent animals in the sea and quite capable of befriending humans," she replied, adding with a sigh, "If they were just a little kinder, we could even save them when they get into trouble."

This was true. Whales have the biggest brains of all animals, and are very intelligent. Long ago, dogs had become man's best friend by helping hunters, and whales could have done the same for humans at sea. But the humans just carried on killing them, and it was even said that whales would be extinct within twenty or thirty years unless they stopped.

Our whale, too, upon sighting a ship would hurriedly dive down and hold his breath, just as his mother had taught him, but there had been times when he wasn't paying attention and only noticed the ship when he was almost right by it. At such times he had closed his eyes tight waiting for the stab of the fearsome harpoon, but the humans had never shown him any violence, instead just calling, "Look at that whale — it's taking a nap!" as they sailed on by, waving at him.

"Maybe humans aren't such a terrible animal after all," he thought, and had once ventured to swim alongside a ship about the same size as himself. But then the humans had shouted, "Hey, don't come so close! If we're hit by something as big as you, we'll sink." Then there was the time he'd seen a single human inside a clumsy round yellow boat that looked a bit like a sunfish. When that human, who appeared to have been injured, caught sight of the whale, he'd said, "You gonna tow me to America, my friend?"

The whale had come of age in the winter spanning 1944 to 1945, when the war between Japan and America was drawing ever closer to the Japanese mainland. The humans who'd waved at him were Japanese soldiers on their way to defend Iwo Jima against the Americans and, aware of their impending death, they'd been envious of the peacefully napping whale. The small ship he'd swum alongside was a fishing boat there to detect the American planes as they headed for Japan, while the man in the clumsy little yellow boat was an American pilot who'd been shot down and was hoping against hope that he might be rescued. Far from wanting to kill the whale, they knew they themselves might die at any time and so they were friendly towards him.

By around mid-August, although he was fairly far south, the whale began to feel the first signs of autumn, and now and then he was rocked by an unexpectedly large swell whipped up by the baby typhoons forming even farther to the south of where he was napping.

"There aren't any planes flying today, either," he thought to himself. The sky that had been so busy was now completely still. Aeroplanes and whales had really nothing in common, but he had enjoyed watching the flocks of planes high in the sky as they headed north trailing white smoke, and in his solitude had even called out to...