The ferry departed from the port of Nishinoshima at eleven-fifteen at night, which was the last sailing of the day and the only overnight sailing, the ferry that connected the small island of Nishinoshima to the main island of Honshu, a crossing that took four hours and forty minutes in calm conditions and longer when the sea was rough, which it was not tonight, the sea being as calm as the Sea of Japan ever was in the late spring. The ferry was called the Shimane Maru, a vessel of perhaps eight hundred tonnes, built in the nineteen-eighties in a shipyard in Shimane Prefecture and refitted twice since, a working ferry that carried passengers and vehicles and cargo between the Oki Islands and the mainland, the only regular connection between the island group and Honshu for most of the year, the airline that had operated flights to the islands having ceased its service five years ago when the government subsidy had been withdrawn.
The Shimane Maru had been built at a time when the Japanese shipbuilding industry was at its peak, the nineteen-eighties being the decade when Japanese shipyards built more ships than any other nation and when the quality of Japanese shipbuilding was regarded as the best in the world. The ferry had been constructed at the Hitachi Zosen shipyard in Sakaiminato, the same shipyard that had built many of the vessels that served the ferry routes of the Sea of Japan coast, the shipyard being one of the smaller yards of the Hitachi group but one that specialised in the ferries and the coastal vessels that operated on the routes of the region. The construction of the Shimane Maru had taken eighteen months, from the laying of the keel in the spring of 1984 to the launching in the autumn of 1985, the vessel being built to the design specifications of the Oki Islands Ferry Company, the company that had operated the route since the nineteen-fifties and that had ordered the new ferry to replace the ageing vessel that had been in service since the nineteen-sixties.
The design of the Shimane Maru was a design that was common among Japanese ferries of the period, a design that had been developed to carry passengers and vehicles and cargo on the routes between the Japanese islands, a design that was practical and economical and that had been refined over the years of ferry operations on the Sea of Japan. The ferry's hull was a steel hull of the standard shape, a hull that was designed to be stable in the moderate seas that were typical of the Sea of Japan and to be manoeuvrable enough to enter and leave the small harbours of the Oki Islands. The superstructure was built of the same steel, painted white and blue in the colours of the ferry company, the white of the upper decks and the blue of the lower hull being the colours that the ferry had worn from its launching and that it still wore, the paint having been renewed several times over the years but the colours having remained the same.