Pathway to Japanese Literature

Sushi

Okamoto Kanoko

There existed a town, so to speak, on the border between Tokyo’s Shitamachi and Yamanote—a place riddled with steep slopes and crumbling cliffs.

To those who turned away from the bustle of the main street, it offered a sense of another realm.

In other words, a modest side street where people—weary from the bustling stimuli of main streets and new roads—occasionally slipped in to shed those stimuli and shift their mood—

Fukuzushi stood at the lowest point in this town—its two-story copper-clad facade had been renovated only at the front three or four years prior, while the rear, supported by pillars grafted at their bases into the cliff, retained its original structure as an old residence.

It was an ordinary sushi shop with a long history, but due to poor business, the previous owner had transferred both the building and its signboard to Tomoyo’s parents, after which the shop had gradually begun to prosper.

The new owner of Fukuzushi, having honed his skills at one of Tokyo’s foremost sushi establishments, had no difficulty assessing his surroundings and elevating the quality of his sushi.
Previously there had been scarcely any customers, but after the new owner took over—as more patrons began sitting at the sushi counter and on the earthen floor—what had initially been just the owner couple and their daughter Tomoyo soon required hiring artisans, along with a child helper and maid to manage.

The customers who came to the shop were as varied as ten people with ten different colors, yet there were common threads among them as a whole. Pressed from both front and back by life’s realities to the very brink, they wanted to slip free from that vise and shift their mood. Each whim could be indulged; modest luxuries savored; and while there, they could play the fool without consequence. They could bare themselves as much as they liked or disguise themselves as they pleased. Even if they did or said something vulgar there, no one would look down on them. A camaraderie bloomed among comrades hiding from reality—observing each other’s gestures of picking sushi or sipping tea through protective gazes. Yet just when you thought so, there were also customers who, more like wood or stone than humans, silently picked up a few pieces of sushi with utter indifference to others’ nerves and briskly headed home.

The diligent, meticulous atmosphere born of sushi—no matter how deeply people lost themselves in it, never grew disordered.
Everything passed by easily and without fuss.

The regular customers at Fukuzushi included a former owner of a hunting firearms shop; a department store’s external customer relations section chief; a dentist; the son of a tatami artisan; a telephone broker; a plaster model technician; a children’s goods salesman; a rabbit meat sales promoter; and a retiree who had once run a securities firm—alongside a theater-related entertainer who surely lived somewhere nearby in this town. When the theater was idle, this man seemed to take on side jobs, draping himself in grease-stained silks and deftly picking up sushi with pale hands as he ate his way through the meal.

The regulars who lived in the neighborhood and had time to spare would drop by when getting a haircut, and those who came from afar on errands would visit before or after their business.
Depending on the season, when the days grew longer, the time from around four in the afternoon until the lights came on would become the most crowded and bustling.
They would each take their preferred seats—some drinking sake with sashimi or vinegared dishes made from the accommodatingly prepared sushi ingredients, while others dove straight into the sushi.

Tomoyo’s father, the sushi shop owner, would occasionally come down from his workspace to the earthen floor area and place a plate of dark-hued pressed sushi on the regulars’ central table.

“What’s this? What’s this?”

Curious faces peered in from all directions.

“Well, try this—it’s my nightcap snack!”

The owner spoke to the customers like a friend.
“If this is kobudai, the flavor’s too rich—”
Someone picked up one and said.
“Maybe it’s horse mackerel?”

Then，the mistress of the house—Tomoyo’s mother—who had been sitting sideways at the base of a pillar in the tatami area watching，shook plump flesh with a “Ha ha ha ha” and laughed，“Everyone’s been fed by Dad!”

It was pressed sushi made with salt-cured Pacific saury, using soybean pulp to properly remove excess salt and fat, thus creating the pressed sushi.

“Old man, you’re sneaky—making such delicious stuff all by yourself in secret and eating it—”

“Hey, even saury tastes completely different when you eat it like this.”

The customers' talk swirled in a clamorous whirl for a time.

“After all, we can’t afford such costly luxuries.”

“Old man, why don’t you serve this at the shop?”

“Don’t go joking around—if we served this, our other sushi would get pushed aside and stop selling altogether.”
“For one thing, with saury, you can’t fetch much of a price anyway.”

“Old man, you’ve really got a knack for this business.”

In addition to these, skillfully prepared dishes like bonito scrap cuts, abalone intestines, and sea bream milt—leftover from sushi ingredients—were occasionally served exclusively to regulars.
Tomoyo saw this and wrinkled her nose. “I’m so sick of those awful things.”
But even when the regulars asked for them, he wouldn’t readily serve those dishes, only to suddenly bring them out at unexpected times.
Knowing the owner was stubborn and capricious only in this regard, they never pestered him.

When they really wanted something, they would secretly ask Tomoyo. Then Tomoyo would search it out and hand it over with an annoyed look.

Since childhood, Tomoyo had grown accustomed to seeing such men, and through them, she had come to perceive the world as something moderately unfussy and touched with a hint of childishness.

During her girls’ school days, Tomoyo had endured a kind of hardship—being the sushi shop owner’s daughter had felt somewhat shameful, and when coming and going from home, she had made it a point to keep friends at a distance as much as possible. Though this left her with a sense of loneliness, a certain degree of that solitude had also seeped into her from the relationship between her parents at home.
There had never been any fights between her father and mother, but their hearts remained wholly independent.
Out of sheer necessity for survival, they had exchanged a form of cooperation and care that was more instinctually rooted than merely transactional; this had developed to such a reflexive degree that to the outside world, they appeared to be a quiet, relatively harmonious couple.
The father, while harboring enthusiasm for opening a branch in some Shitamachi building, kept small birds as a pastime.
The mother never went sightseeing or on leisure trips, and instead of buying new clothes, she steadily built up her own monthly savings from the shop’s earnings.

When it came to their daughter alone, her parents were in agreement.
At any rate, they were determined she should at least receive an education.
Against the intellectual currents pressing in from all around, in this regard her parents—without intending to—coincided in harboring a competitive drive toward society.

"Since I was an artisan, at least my daughter should..."

But as for what should come after that—he was utterly at a loss.

Raised with innocence, superficially versed in worldly matters, lighthearted yet possessed of a solitary quality—
This was Tomoyo's character.
No one treated such a girl as an enemy or impediment.
Only when interacting with men did her blunt responses lack girlish shyness or affectation, which temporarily became an issue among her girls' school teachers. But once it was understood she'd naturally become this way through their trade, the suspicions faded unnoticed.

Tomoyo had once gone to the Tama riverside on a school excursion.
When peering into the still depths of an early spring stream, crucian carp would come swimming along one after another; in the fresh-tea green water, they would flash their tail fins, graze on the moss clinging to the pilings' roots, then drift away again.
Then more crucian carp would flow in and pool together, flashing their tail fins.
They flowed in and flowed away, but their replacement was a process so swift and subtle that the human conscious eye could scarcely perceive it, making it seem as though a certain number of the same fish were always playing there.
Occasionally, sluggish-looking catfish would come as well.

To Tomoyo，the renewal of customers at their shop felt like fish in a spring river．
(Even if there was a group called regulars，each individual within it would eventually change．) I feel like green moss on piling roots．
Everyone would lightly touch me and find comfort as they moved on．
Tomoyo did not consider serving at the shop an obligation or trial．
She wore a girlish cashmere uniform unfitted at chest or waist，clattering along in borrowed men’s clogs as she carried tea．
When customers teased with amorous remarks，Tomoyo would purse her lips slightly and hitch one shoulder up．

“I can’t handle this! I don’t know how to respond!” she said. Even so, a faint coquetry twisted through her voice before fading. The customers laughed, kindling faint brightness in their hearts. Tomoyo was, to that extent, Fukuzushi’s poster girl.

Among the customers was one called Minato—a gentleman past fifty with thick eyebrows sloping from their inner corners, his face shadowed by melancholy. At times he appeared older still; on other occasions, he might pass for a passionate man in his prime. Yet a resignation born of keen intellect suffused his bearing with clarity, polishing his bitter features into gentleness.

He had thickly curled hair parted in a tousled yet orderly manner and sported a French mustache. At times he wore crimson ankle boots caked with dust paired with homespun; at others, he dressed in a slightly faded Yūki silk kimono draped casually. It was certain that he was unmarried, but his occupation was unknown to anyone, and at the shop, they had come to call him Sensei. He was skilled in the way he ate sushi, but there was nothing ostentatiously connoisseur-like about him.

He tapped Sabita’s cane on the floor, sat down in a chair, leaned diagonally toward the sushi counter, and languidly inspected the ingredients inside the glass case.

“Hmm.”
“There’s quite a selection today.”

With that, he received the tea Tomoyo had brought over.

“The amberjack is well-marbled, and today we also have clams—”

Tomoyo’s father, the master of Fukuzushi, had at some point come to recognize this customer’s fastidious nature; whenever Minato arrived, he would unconsciously begin diligently wiping down the cutting board and lacquer trays while speaking.

“Then I’ll make that for you.”

“Yes.”

The master of Fukuzushi naturally gave a different reply than he did to other customers. Minato’s sushi-eating course—Tomoyo’s father understood it without needing to be told. Starting with chutoro tuna, it would transition to simmered sushi with a thick glaze, then gradually progress to lighter blue-scaled fish. And it concluded with egg sushi and seaweed rolls. Therefore, the sushi chef could simply incorporate any special orders of the day into the course as he saw fit.

While drinking tea or savoring sushi, Minato would either press a hand to his cheek or lower his neck to rest his chin atop both hands placed on the head of his cane and gaze fixedly. What he gazed at was either the marshland hidden among trees in the rear valley that came into view through the open inner tatami room or the thicket of chinquapin leaves hanging from the opposite wall onto the water-sprinkled main street.

At first, Tomoyo had merely thought of him as a somewhat awkward customer, but as she grew accustomed to the enigmatic wandering of his eyes, she began to feel a sense of lack whenever—from the moment she brought him tea until he finished his sushi—he spent the entire time gazing elsewhere, never once turning his gaze toward her. However, whenever his eyes met hers directly and their gazes remained locked for too long, she felt as though the force sustaining her were blurring away, leaving her perilously unsteady.

When their eyes met as if by chance and he smiled at her with nothing more than ordinary goodwill, Tomoyo felt from this elderly customer a kind of warmly ambiguous stimulation that loosened something within her—something unlike what she received from her parents.
So whenever Minato kept his gaze fixed elsewhere, Tomoyo would pause her lacework by the kettle in the corner of the earthen floor and—whether by feigning a cough or producing some conspicuous noise—unconsciously perform gestures meant to redirect his attention toward herself.
Then Minato started, looked toward Tomoyo, and smiled.
His upper and lower teeth met neatly, the taut line of his mouth softening as one end of his French mustache lifted perceptibly—the father glanced up briefly while shaping sushi.
Thinking it was merely Tomoyo’s mischief, he turned back to his work with a sullen face.

Minato spoke without distinction to the regulars who frequented the shop.
Talk of horse racing, stocks, current affairs, Go, Shogi, bonsai—topics exchanged among customers in such a place rarely strayed beyond these. Yet Minato would let others speak eighty percent of the time, opening his mouth for only twenty. His reticence stemmed neither from contempt nor from enduring boredom.
As evidence of this, when even a single cup was offered,

“Oh, no—thank you. My health’s been poor, and I’ve completely sworn off alcohol. But since you’ve gone to the trouble… Well, perhaps I’ll indulge just this once.” With that, he waved his slender yet sturdy hand several times, then accepted the cup with a crisp motion that seemed to convey deep respect. He drank with evident pleasure before returning it.
And then he deftly lifted the sake bottle and poured for them.
In these gestures, his inherently sociable nature—one that felt compelled to repay others’ kindness several times over—manifested itself so clearly that among the regulars, Sensei had come to be regarded as a good man.

Tomoyo disliked seeing Minato like this. She thought his demeanor seemed too lightweight for him. To reciprocate earnest affection toward customers’ fleeting whims—it felt like something essential within Minato was being drained away. Here was a man usually so somber, she thought, yet the instant attention turned his way, how pathetically he revealed himself as starved for human warmth. Even the silver ring with its ancient Egyptian scarab that Minato wore on his middle finger struck her as distasteful during these moments.

When Tomoyo saw that the customer—sent into raptures by Minato’s accommodating manner—kept refilling Minato’s cup, and that Minato himself, now drawn into the exchange, had begun passing cups back with soft laughter spilling from his lips, she marched straight over.

“You’re the one who said drinking too much is bad for your health—so cut it out already!”

Tomoyo snatched the cup from Minato’s hand.
And on Minato’s behalf, she thrust the cup back at the other customer and left without another word.
It was not out of concern for Minato’s health but rather a peculiar jealousy that drove Tomoyo to act this way.

“Quite the dutiful wife you are, Tomoyo.”

With that much from the other customer, the situation settled as it was.
Minato gave a wry smile, bowed slightly to the other customer, turned back to his seat, and placed his hands on the heavy teacup.

Tomoyo found herself increasingly preoccupied with Minato in an odd way, yet there were times she feigned ignorance and stayed silent. When Minato entered, she would sometimes briskly finish up and leave.
At times, when met with such behavior, Minato would respond with a bright, faint smile; yet when Tomoyo was nowhere to be seen, he would gaze all the more deeply—forlornly—at the main street and the valley behind.

One day, Tomoyo took a basket and went to the insect shop on the main street to buy kajika frogs.
Tomoyo’s father had a penchant for keeping such pets and was skilled at caring for them, but he occasionally made mistakes that reduced their numbers.
But this year too, it was already early summer—the season when kajika frogs sang out their cool calls.

When Tomoyo neared her destination on the main street, she saw Minato emerge from the shop carrying a glass bowl.
Unaware of Tomoyo, Minato walked slowly in the opposite direction while cradling his glass bowl with care.

Tomoyo entered the store, briskly ordered her purchases from the shop staff, and while they were being placed into her basket, she went out to the storefront and kept an eye on Minato’s path.

After having the kajika frogs put into her basket, Tomoyo took it and hurried to catch up with Minato.

“Sir, I’m talking to you!”

“Well, Tomoyo! How unusual—meeting you out here on the main street.”

As they walked, the two showed each other their purchases.
Minato had bought a Western ornamental skeleton fish.
Its bones showed through flesh translucent as agar, its intestines gathered small beneath the gills.
"Sir, is your house around here?"

“Now, I’m staying in an apartment up ahead.”
“But I don’t know when I’ll move again.”

Having unexpectedly met Tomoyo on the main street, Minato suggested treating her to tea and looked around the town a bit, but there were no suitable shops in this vicinity.

"Well, I can't exactly go carrying this around Ginza either."

"Nah, we don't need to go all the way to Ginza. Let's just find a vacant lot around here to rest."

Minato surveyed the season of burgeoning new growth as if only now noticing its fullness, then exhaled softly into the air.

"That's nice too."

Turning off the main street, there soon lay a vacant lot of burnt hospital ruins on the cliff edge, where one side of its brick wall resembled ancient Roman ruins. Tomoyo and Minato placed their belongings on the thicket and stretched out their legs. Tomoyo had wanted to ask Minato all sorts of things, but now that they sat side by side like this, such questions felt unnecessary—she simply sank into deep stillness, enveloped in a mist-like scent.

Minato, on the other hand, was oddly animated,

“Today, Tomoyo, you look quite grown-up.”

he said cheerfully.

Tomoyo spent a while considering what to say but ended up voicing something that didn’t seem like much of an idea at all.

“You… do you really like sushi?”

“Well…”

“Then why do you come here to eat it?”

“It’s not that I dislike it, but even when I don’t particularly want to eat sushi, the act of doing so becomes my comfort.”

“Why?”

Why, even when Minato did not particularly want to eat sushi, the very act of doing so became his sole comfort—he began to explain.

“Is it that peculiar children are born into households crumbling with age? Or that when grand houses fall, children sense the dread sooner than adults? And when that dread strikes fiercely—perhaps from the womb itself—their very lives are gnawed away by such fear...” With these words, Minato began his tale.

That child did not like sweet things from a young age. For snacks, they hoped for nothing more than salted rice crackers. When eating, they would meticulously align their upper and lower teeth and bite off the edges of the round rice cracker in a regular pattern. If the crackers weren’t too moist, they generally made a pleasant sound. The child would thoroughly chew the bitten-off fragment, cleanly swallow it down their throat, then proceed to bite off the next edge. Aligning their teeth once more with care, they inserted the next edge between them—then, at the moment of biting through, would half-close their eyes and strain their ears.

Snap.

Even the same *snap* held different qualities.
The child, having grown accustomed to hearing them, learned to distinguish the types of sounds.

When the child discerned a sound of a certain fixed tone, their entire body trembled violently.
The child paused, the rice cracker in hand, and sank into thought for a while.
Tears faintly welled in their eyes.

The family was just parents, an older brother, an older sister, and a servant.
Throughout the household, the child was called peculiar.
The child’s food was still skewed toward the unconventional.
The child disliked fish.
The child didn’t care for many vegetables.
The child absolutely refused to go near meat.

The father—neurotic yet determined to project boldness—would occasionally peer at the child’s meals.

“How on earth are you even alive, boy?”

He came to inspect the child’s eating habits.
Part of it stemmed from the era’s hardships, but his timid nature masquerading as confidence made him watch their family’s decline inch by inch while muttering defiant denials—“No, not yet”—until everything crumbled.
On the child’s small tray lay the usual fare: a fried egg and Asakusa nori.
Whenever the father looked over, the mother would shield the tray with her sleeve.

“Please don’t make such a fuss from the sidelines—if you do, even this will make him too self-conscious to eat.”

For that child, meals were truly agonizing.
When they put a mass possessing color, scent, and taste into their body, it felt as though their very being were being defiled.
The child wondered if there wasn’t some food like air.
When they grew hungry, they fully felt the hunger—but never carelessly felt like eating.
They pressed their tongue against the cold, translucent crystal ornament in the alcove, pressed their cheek to it.
Hunger-stricken, their mind remaining perfectly clear, they gradually grew faint.
When gazing at the sunset sinking behind A Hill across the marshland pond—(Minato’s birthplace, too, lay in a corner of the city with similar topography)—the child even thought they wouldn’t mind collapsing right there and dying.
But in this case, forcing both hands into the tightly cinched obi around their sunken stomach, their body leaning forward while tilting only their head back—

“Mooom,”
the child called out.
The one being summoned was not their actual birth mother.
The child liked their current birth mother best in the family.
Yet they still felt there might be another woman somewhere who would answer to “Mother.”
They thought if that woman actually appeared before them now—responding with a “Yes”—they’d surely faint from shock.
But calling out remained a sad pleasure.

“Mooom… Mooom…”

The voice—trembling like thin paper in the wind—continued.

“Yeees?”

“Yeees?” responded the current birth mother as she emerged.

“Oh my, what are you doing in a place like this?”

With a shake of her shoulders, she peered into his face.
The child flushed crimson with shame toward the mother who’d misunderstood.

“So I’ve told you time and time again to eat properly—come now, I’m pleading with you here.”

The mother’s voice trembled uncertainly.
After all this fretting, they finally discovered that eggs and Asakusa nori were what best suited this child’s constitution.
With these foods, the child only felt a heavy sensation in their stomach—something that wouldn’t defile them.

At times, the child would again feel an aching emotion—unable to tell where in their body it came from—welling up through their entire being. At such times, they would chew anything soft and sour. They would pluck unripe plums and tachibana oranges and gnaw at them. When the early summer rains came, the child knew the locations of those fruits in the city’s hills and valleys as well as the crows that came to peck at them.

The child excelled in elementary school. Whatever they read or heard once imprinted itself on the folds of their brain like a photographic plate. To them, the ease of their schoolwork held no appeal. This very indifference paradoxically sharpened their academic performance.

At home and at school alike, everyone treated this child as something apart.

After the father and mother had argued in a room, the mother came to the child and spoke in a voice heavy with sincerity.

“Look here—since you’ve been getting so thin, the schoolteachers and board members started saying it’s because we’re neglecting hygiene at home.”
“When Dad heard that—well, you know how he is—he took it out on me in that spiteful way of his.”

At that, the mother placed her hands on the tatami mat and bowed her head deeply toward the child.

“Please, I beg you—eat more food and gain some weight. If you don’t, I feel I can’t bear it morning or night.”

The child felt as though he had already committed the sin he had anticipated committing someday due to his own warped nature.
Wrong.
He had made his mother place her hands on the floor and perform a deep bow.
His face flushed, and a shudder ran through his body.
But strangely, his heart was instead calm.
Already, he had committed such an unfilial act and become a villain.
If someone like this were to perish, he himself wouldn’t even consider it a loss.
Fine—I’ll try eating anything. Even if my body trembles from unfamiliar food, even if I vomit it back up, even if my entire body turns putrid and rots until I die—let it happen.
Wouldn’t that be better than staying alive constantly being picky about food, tormenting both others and myself—

The child feigned nonchalance and ate the same meal as the family.
They immediately vomited.
They had tried their utmost to numb their mouth and throat into insensibility, but the moment they thought of the swallowed food being touched by a woman’s hand other than their mother’s, their stomach abruptly convulsed in reverse—the impression of the maid’s frayed red underrobe peeking from her hem and the rice-cooking woman’s profile traced with painted black sideburns churned violently in their chest.

The brother and sister made faces of disgust.
The father, having glanced sidelong at the child, continued to feign ignorance as he tilted back his evening sake cup.
While cleaning up the child’s vomit, the mother looked at the father’s face resentfully.

“Look at this.”
“It’s not all my fault.”
“This child was born this way.”

she sighed.
However, toward the father, the mother remained timid.

It was the next day.
The mother spread a new goza mat on the engawa veranda where fresh leaves cast deep dappled shadows, and brought out a cutting board, kitchen knife, water bucket, fly net, and such.
And they were all newly purchased and pristine.

The mother seated the child across from herself and the cutting board.
Before the child, she placed a single plate on the tray.

The mother rolled up her sleeves, extended her rose-colored palms like a magician, and turned her hands over to show the child both sides.
Then, while rubbing her hands in rhythm with her words, she said.

“Look carefully—your mom’s tools are all new.”
“And the one preparing it is your mom.”
“My hands have been washed so thoroughly and cleanly.”
“Do you understand?”
“If you understand, well, then there—”

The mother mixed vinegar into the cooked rice in the bowl.
Both she and the child coughed hoarsely.
Then she pulled the bowl closer, scooped out a portion of rice from it, and shaped it into a small rectangle with both hands.

Inside the fly-proof net, the sushi toppings had already been prepared.
The mother swiftly took a piece from within, pressed it lightly, and placed it atop the rectangular-shaped rice.
She placed it on the plate atop the tray before the child.
It was egg omelet sushi.

“Look—it’s sushi, real sushi.”
“You can pick it right up with your hands and eat it like this.”

The child did as instructed.
The sourness—balanced like bare skin being smoothly caressed—blended with the crumbling sweetness of rice and egg, the flavor spreading perfectly across their tongue. After eating just one piece, a warmth of deliciousness and intimacy welled up inside them like scented bathwater, so intense that they wanted to press their body against their mother.

Feeling awkward about calling it delicious, the child simply grinned stiffly and looked up at her mother’s face.

“There, how about another one?”

The mother, again like a magician, showed the backs and fronts of her hands, then shaped the rice, took out a piece of topping from the fly net and pressed it on, and placed it on the child’s plate.

The child peered uneasily at the white rectangular slice atop the shaped rice.
Then the mother assumed an air of authority that wasn’t frightening and

“It’s nothing. Just think of it as white egg omelet and eat it,” she said.

And so, for the first time in their life, the child ate squid. It had an ivory-like smoothness and a much cleaner bite than raw mochi. In the midst of that adventure of eating squid sushi, the child—with a sudden gasp—relaxed the tension in their face, releasing the breath they’d been holding. The deliciousness could only be expressed through a smile.

The mother this time placed a white translucent slice atop the rice.
The child, upon bringing it to their mouth, was assailed by an intimidating smell but, plugging their nose, resolutely put it into their mouth.

The white translucent slice, broken down by chewing into refined umami and mingling with a balanced savory depth, passed through the child’s slender throat.

“That one just now was undoubtedly real fish. I had eaten fish—”

When they realized this, the child felt—for the first time—a sense of conquest and freshness as if they had killed something living by biting into it, and experienced a joy that made them want to survey their surroundings.
With the same joy, the child clawed at both itchy sides with fingers that couldn’t stay still.

“Hee hee hee hee hee”

The child laughed shrilly and without restraint.
Perceiving that victory was hers, the mother brushed off the rice grains clinging to her fingers one by one, then—feigning composure—peered into the fly net so the child wouldn’t see inside and spoke.

“Well now, what should I make next… Let me see… I wonder if there’s still some left…”

The child screamed impatiently.

“Sushi! Sushi!”

The mother, suppressing her joy with a slightly vacant look—an expression the child loved most in a mother, a face so beautiful they would never forget it—

“Now then, in accordance with the dear customer’s preference, I shall present the next piece.”

Just as she had done initially, she brought her rose-colored hands close to the child’s eyes and—like a magician once more—turned them palm-up and palm-down before beginning to shape the sushi. Another piece of sushi using a similar white-fleshed fish was formed.

The mother seemed to have carefully selected fish meat without color or odor for her first attempt.
It was sea bream and flounder.

The child kept eating.
It became a race between the mother shaping and placing sushi on the plate and the child’s hand snatching them up.
That absorption pulled mother and child into a world where they thought of nothing—a numbed realm of unconscious feeling.
Five or six pieces of sushi were shaped，grabbed，and eaten—the rhythm of this exchange began to take on an amusing tempo.
The sushi shaped by the amateur mother varied in size from piece to piece and was clumsy in form.
Some of the sushi toppled over on the plate，dropping their toppings to the side.
The child，on the contrary，felt affection toward those very things，and when they adjusted the shapes themselves before eating，it felt even more delicious.
The child suddenly felt that the mother they privately invoked in their fantasies and the mother now shaping sushi before their eyes were blurring into a single figure—whether through visual perception or in their mind，they couldn’t tell.
They wanted them to align more perfectly，yet they also felt it would be terrifying if they matched too closely.

The child wondered: Had the mother they'd always privately invoked—the one they called upon in secret—truly been this mother all along? If this woman who fed them such delicious things was indeed her, then perhaps it had been wrong to secretly shift their heart toward that other mother.

"There, there—let's call it a day for today. You ate so well today, didn't you?"

The mother before their eyes clapped her rose-colored hands—still dotted with rice grains—briskly and contentedly in front of the child.

After that, five or six more times, the child was gradually accustomed to their mother’s handmade sushi.

The child grew accustomed to things like the pomegranate-flower-colored flesh of ark shells and the two silver sauries with vertical stripes on their silvery base.
The child, from then on, gradually became able to eat fish even in their regular meals’ side dishes.
Their body also became unrecognizably healthy.
By the time he entered junior high school, he became a handsome and robust boy who turned heads.

Then, strangely enough, the father—who had been cold until now—suddenly began taking an interest in the boy. He had the child sit before his evening drink’s tray to try making them a drinking companion, took them to play billiards, and even let them drink teahouse sake.

In the meantime, the house gradually crumbled away. The father became entranced watching his beautiful son, clad in an indigo-patterned kimono, hold a sake cup between his lips. Seeing his son being pampered by other women, the father felt a sense of accomplishment. By the time the son was around sixteen or seventeen, he had ultimately become a fine playboy.

The mother, precisely because she had gone to such lengths to raise her son, raged with near-madness that the father had ruined the boy.
In response to the mother’s desperate fury, the father merely offered a faint, bitter smirk devoid of any resistance.
The son felt profoundly hollow as he realized his parents were venting their pent-up resentment over the household’s decline through these marital squabbles.

Even when attending school, everything about the lessons seemed entirely foreseeable and clear to him.
He excelled in junior high without studying.
He advanced from high school to university effortlessly.
Yet there remained something undeniably poignant within him—something he felt could never be dispelled no matter how urgently he sought a remedy.
After long years of melancholy and idle diversions, he graduated university and secured employment.

The house completely collapsed, and his parents and older brother and sister died one after another.
The son himself was bright and was valued wherever he went, but for some reason, he felt no inclination toward either family occupations or career advancement.
When his second wife died and he neared fifty, he made a considerable profit from a small speculation and, upon determining that a solitary life would suffice, abandoned his profession.
After that began his life of transience—this apartment, that rental house—moving from one temporary dwelling to another.

“The child in that story—the one who grew up and became the son we spoke of—is me,” Minato said to Tomoyo after his long discourse.

“Ah, I get it. So that’s why you like sushi, Mr.”

“No—once I became an adult, I didn’t really care for it anymore. But lately—perhaps because I’ve aged—I keep remembering my mother.” “Even sushi makes me nostalgic now.”

Where they sat among the hospital ruins stood a decaying wisteria trellis—its vines cascading from midair like unkempt hair yet still bearing clusters of young leaves at their tips and gaunt lavender blossoms dripping like dewdrops between them.
The Yashio azalea that once anchored a garden stone now stood by its empty socket—half charred black from fire’s lick while white flowers bloomed on its surviving side.

At the edge of the garden, the base of the cliff was a train line, and only the occasional roaring sound of passing trains could be heard.

The purple of Japanese iris flowers amidst the liriope swayed in the evening breeze, while the shadow of a thick palm tree standing near where the two sat gradually slanted across the grassy thicket.
The kajika frogs in the basket Tomoyo had bought and placed there began letting out two or three calls.

The two exchanged faces holding traces of laughter.

“Well, it’s gotten quite late.”
“Tomoyo, it wouldn’t be good if you don’t head back now.”

Tomoyo stood up, holding the basket of kajika frogs.
Then, Minato gave Tomoyo the translucent skeleton fish he had bought, just as it was, and left.
After that, Minato ceased appearing at Fukuzushi altogether.

“Sir hasn’t been showing up at all lately, has he?”

Some among the regulars grew suspicious, but before long he was completely forgotten.

When Tomoyo parted with Minato, she regretted having failed to ask which apartment he was staying at.
And so she would attempt to visit him herself but fail to reach him, linger awhile at the hospital ruins, sit on a stone while surveying the surroundings and thinking of Minato—at times even her eyes pooling with faint tears—before returning dazedly to the shop; but eventually even these acts of Tomoyo’s ceased altogether.

Nowadays, every time Tomoyo thought of Minato,

"Mr. Minato must have moved somewhere and gone to another sushi shop—after all, sushi shops are everywhere—"

such thoughts became nothing more than vague musings.