Novel: The Big Wave

Overview
Pearl S. Buck’s The Big Wave (1948) is a brief, luminous novel for young readers that unfolds on the coast of Japan. Through the intertwined lives of two boys, Kino, a farmer’s son who lives on a terraced hillside, and Jiya, a fisherman’s son from the village by the sea, the story meditates on beauty and danger, loss and renewal. A catastrophic tsunami, the big wave of the title, becomes both an event and a metaphor, forcing the characters to confront death directly and to decide how to live afterward.

Setting and Characters
The narrative’s geography is elemental. A quiet cove with a small fishing village faces an often-glittering, sometimes-threatening sea; above it rises a hillside of rice fields and, farther inland, a smoking volcano that occasionally reminds everyone of the earth’s volatility. Kino lives with his wise, steady father and his sister Setsu on the hillside farm. Jiya inhabits the shore, bound to the sea that feeds and endangers his family. Presiding over the landscape is the Old Gentleman, a wealthy landowner in a walled estate who believes security can be purchased and danger shut out.

Plot Summary
Kino and Jiya grow up as close friends, visiting each other’s homes and learning to read the landscape’s signs, the sparkle of calm water, the volcano’s smoke, the patterns of tides. Despite warnings that the sea which gives life can also take it, their days carry a sense of continuity until subtle tremors and a strange withdrawal of the water foretell disaster. The big wave surges over the shore and obliterates the fishing village. Kino’s family, high on the terraces, survives; Jiya, who happened to be on the hillside, watches helplessly as his home and family vanish.

Taken in by Kino’s parents, Jiya descends into grief so deep it feels like silence. Kino’s father guides both boys through the simple, difficult truths he holds: that death belongs to life as shadow does to light, and that love and work are the human answers to fear. The Old Gentleman, offering absolute safety within his fortified estate, asks to adopt Jiya and to spare him all sights and sounds of the sea. Craving refuge, Jiya goes to live with him for a time and experiences the comfort of walls that promise protection.

As Jiya grows, the comfort proves stifling. He realizes that life behind barriers is a kind of living death if it is built on fear. Returning to the shore, he chooses to be a fisherman as his father was. He asks to marry Setsu, and together they build a small house by the rebuilt village where the sea can be seen and heard. The decision is deliberate: to embrace the beauty that also carries risk, to start a family within sight of the element that once took their loved ones. When a child is born to Jiya and Setsu, the story’s arc closes on a note of renewal; the baby’s cry is the human reply to the ocean’s roar.

Themes and Significance
The novel’s central theme is acceptance: death is part of life, and fear cannot be the foundation of a meaningful existence. Buck contrasts two visions of safety, the Old Gentleman’s walls versus the fishermen’s open horizon, and suggests that courage is not denial of danger but a committed return to love, work, and community. Nature appears as a double-edged presence: generous and destructive, never tame, always to be respected. By giving these large ideas to children in clear, musical prose and concrete images, Buck crafts a parable of resilience that honors grief while insisting on the possibility of joy.