The Seventh Man Summary

The story of The Seventh Man is about a young boy who lives in a small town in Japan on the coast of the pacific ocean. The boy’s name is never mentioned and he just goes by the seventh man. The boy has a friend who is named K and neither of them have many other friends so they do everything together. Where they live they can have a few typhoons every year. Typhoon is another name for a hurricane which is a huge storm with high winds, heavy rain, and gigantic waves. One day a typhoon hits the small city that the seventh man and K live in and at first everything is alright. After hours of waiting the eye of the hurricane (clear spot in the middle of a hurricane) hits and the two boys meet outside and they go down to the waterfront. Both boys are at the shore, but the seventh man sees a huge wave coming and starts to head back to shore while K doesn’t realize it. The seventh man tries to yell for K to come back, but he gets swept up in the wave, never to be seen again. He lived most of the rest of his life feeling guilty until the got over it by returning to his hometown. The seventh man believed he could have saved him if he tried harder, but there is no real way of knowing and he should forgive himself for K’s death.
“He can list many examples of people making their problems worse by not calling for help because they are worried about the cost, (The Cost of Survival, 127)”. In some situations people delay a call of someone to save them because of the cost. In K’s situation he didn’t even know he was in danger so he couldn’t ask anyone to save him. The seventh man might have had a chance to save K, but if he did they both might have lost their lives. If he saved K he wouldn’t have lived many years of his life feeling guilty, and he definitely wouldn’t have felt it if he died in the process of saving his