Later, lost far at sea, when you're trying to forget all you've left behind, the memory will bubble up unbidden: a village that once lay by the ocean.

Here are the neatly packed homes with gray-tiled roofs over which the mountains rise in rounded beneficence, towering over lush rice fields that feed a nation. Here are the boats that fish the sea, in all of its blue serenity, and the grass in all of its green. There is such peace in this picture of abundance: lumber from the mountain, rice from the field, fish from the deep ocean. People want for nothing here.

This village woven together by contentment is yours, Hiromitsu, and it is here, in the memory of it whole, that you know yourself best, the fourth-generation son of rice farmers. Here among a hundred wooden houses is the concrete one your family built. The house is made with metal pilings, which by your calculations will stand any high tide or errant wave. On your verdant plot a mile from the sea, a garden bursts with peonies, outbuildings sag, a koi pond teems. Here you live with your wife, Yuko, to whom you daily profess your love, and your parents, whom you still honor with the obedience of a child. In the barn are the pigeons you adore, for there's no more beautiful sight in the world than a flock mystically circling deep in the sky, then suddenly one breaking for home, wings aflutter, straining, as if to say, I'm here.

In this cage lie the chuckling pigeons, and in this barn of theirs, your happiness. Against the wall are full bags of rice seed—and from outside you can hear your wife's voice calling your name. Hiromitsu. Night falls—and in the bedroom you lie beside her. You will remember this later when trying to keep yourself alive: falling asleep one last time by the body of your wife in your house, beneath its roof of white tin, in the shadow of the sea.

Rise now, Hiromitsu, man of men, and accept your fate, this day in mid-March, a hint of sulfur in the salt air. Five thirty A.M. and frigid, the first priority is, of course, the pigeons in the barn. Fresh water, their corn-wheat-and-barley mix bought from the shop. The wire cage holds all thirty, iridescent heads bobbing as they hungrily peck. Out in that barn that holds your happiness, you often speak to them (How did you sleep?), call them by name, promise them their daily exercise (We'll fly this afternoon). When you were a child, they called you the Father of Pigeons as an insult, as if you would have no heir but these pea-brained winged things.

NOTES FROM A CASTAWAY

Adrift, alone, with little hope of rescue, Hiromitsu Shinkawa began scribbling messages with a marker he'd fished from the sea. In the order he wrote them, here are the words he thought would be his last.

On March 11, I was with my wife, Yuko. My name is Hiromitsu.

I just want to report that I am still alive on the twelfth and was with my wife, Yuko, yesterday. She was born January 12 of Showa 26.

SOS

I am sorry for being unfilial.

I'm in a lot of trouble. Sorry for dying before you. Please forgive me.

You hurry inside. Yuko this morning sleeps late, and so you eat alone at the little table: warm miso, green tea, rice, and barilla boiled in soy sauce. When your wife appears, she moves in fuzzy, nearly wordless proximity to you, beginning her household duties. Your 27-year-old daughter has recently made you grandparents, and now your wife has a new purpose, goes to Tokyo as often as she can to be with the little boy, to diaper and feed him. Though she is 60 years old like you, Hiromitsu, she has become young again with all this mothering, her hair bobbed the same earlobe length as when your daughter was a baby in her arms. She packs a lunch—one of her famous rice balls, made by frying the rice in a pan, mixing in pickled plum and salmon—while you put on a second pair of pants, the lined purple ones, to fight off the chill. You pull on your sneakers, slip into a purple fleece worn over your red-and-gray wool flannel, then the heavy green jacket. At 7:30 A.M. you say good-bye in a rather un-Japanese way, confessing again your love for her.

Down the driveway—past the koi pond and garden with the now bare apricot tree and dormant peonies, past the greenhouse in which the rice seedlings grow—you turn up the road, past your tightly packed neighbors, past the nearby shrine, an ancient wooden building, then along Route 6, the sea to your right, all the way to your job in the lumberyard, your small white compact zipping between the lines—and twenty minutes later you're through the gates.