Pathway to Japanese Literature

Muttering this, Fukui flung both dish and magnifying glass onto the veranda and collapsed onto his back with a thud, his face expressionless. Viewed from the veranda, this valley hollow’s fresh greenery now reached its zenith. With a brilliance surpassing mere foliage, treetops unfurled five-toned gradations of young leaves—from tea-stained hues to faintly purpled tints—all rooted in new verdure. When these swayed in wind gusts, reflections made smooth cliffside red earth flash like gilded folding screens. Fifteen to eighteen meters up its slope, Kirishima azaleas bloomed sporadically.

From the shade of the bamboo grove anchoring the cliff’s base stretched a damp thicket where late-blooming evening primroses and early-flowering nasturtiums continued to bloom in patches all along the small stream’s bank. The small stream was natural water welling up from the valley hollow, and for a goldfish breeder like Fukui, it served first and foremost as the very foundation of his trade. That water had been channeled into branches, creating seven or eight goldfish ponds. Some of the ponds were covered with reed screens, while others lay exposed. With a vigorous water sound, the large ditch flowed under the stone wall of the road opposite the cliff. This gathered the city’s wastewater and was murky.

When Fukui had left the regional fisheries laboratory six years prior and been welcomed back as the successor to this goldfish business by his foster parents, it had still been that time when the late spring flowers lingered in bloom across this valley hollow. Having been born and raised here until his youth when he left for the regional fisheries school, Fukui now belatedly realized, "So there was such a peach-blossom paradise in Tokyo's Yamanote area after all." And he rejoiced at becoming the master of the goldfish shop that occupied this valley hollow. But now, six years later, even when he took in this soft scenery and listened to the murmuring water, they only worked inversely to further parch his already hardened heart. He raised his expressionless eyes and looked up at the cliff.

At one end of the vast estate atop the cliff—where the edge of the lawn hung down—there stood a Romanesque semicircular pavilion; each column, bathed in June sunlight, cast vivid purple-rose shadows with sharp definition, and through every gap between them, the high azure sky could be glimpsed. White clouds could be seen leisurely traversing the sky, using these pillars far below as their framework.

Today as well, on the bench at the center of the semicircular pavilion, Masako—mistress of the cliffside mansion—sat with her lush figure poised erectly, receiving sunlight upon her chest. On her lap lay what appeared from a distance to be a tangle of half-knitted yarn, against which a girl leaned enraptured at an angle. It was a portrait of pure happiness, utterly divorced from anything Fukui felt. Masako was quite nearsighted—she likely couldn’t discern his figure from this distance—but having grown overly accustomed to observing her day after day, the sight no longer particularly stirred Fukui’s heart. Yet he had become a man who—whether through jealousy, envy, or lingering attachment—had to project some emotion onto this scene and agitate his spirit; otherwise, his heart would neither move nor cease.

“Ah, must I see that scene again today?” “A woman who continues to live triumphantly, completely unrelated to me.” “A woman I’m destined never to let go of—”

Fukui abruptly sat up and lit a cigarette.

At that time, Masako—who was called the young lady of the cliffside mansion—was a rather inconspicuous girl. She was quiet and prone to looking down, often biting one lip out of habit. Since she had lost her mother early and been raised as an only daughter by her father, people may have instead seen her as a lonely girl. As for Masako herself, she did not seem to be brooding obsessively over any single matter, yet she showed an extremely delayed reaction to external stimuli. When she had come alone to Fukui’s house carrying a small bucket to buy goldfish and found herself chased by something like a puppy on her way back, she would make flustered motions with her body that somehow never translated into actual escape—yet once she did start running, she would flee far beyond any necessary safe distance, only to finally calm down and then, as if belatedly, let terror gush forth in the color of her eyes. From her unaffected round eyes and peculiar movements, Fukui’s foster father Sōjūrō—prefacing it with an explanation that he couldn’t speak too loudly since she was the esteemed young lady of their important client—

“Just like a Ranchu goldfish.”

Sōjūrō laughed. The goldfish shop family beneath the cliff—who harbored resentment toward the mansion residents out of vague class consciousness—rarely chastised Fukui when he tormented Masako as a neighborhood playmate during his elementary school commutes. When a maid from the cliffside mansion occasionally came to complain, they would performatively apologize on the spot; yet once she left, his parents would act as though it were none of their concern—not only withholding reprimands but refusing to even glance Fukui’s way.

Taking advantage of this, Fukui’s aberrant bullying grew increasingly fierce. He would harass Masako with precocious, adult-like pretexts, accusing her of compromising her chastity.

“You had that male teacher reach under your arms during gym class today to fix your slipped sash, didn’t you? With a male teacher—how obscene!” “You rushed over and gave two whole sheets of paper to that boy with a nosebleed today. Suspicious behavior!” And inevitably, he would conclude with: “You’re ruined now. No one will ever marry you.” Each time these words struck her, Masako would stare at Fukui with a face drained of color—a visage plunged into irrevocable despair. Her large downturned eyes, deep blue like twilight waters, held nothing but confusion, devoid of any hostility or defiance. Those eyes remained fixed in a gaze that seemed to absorb every barbed word’s sting into her very soul until tears surfaced. Soon her face would twitch violently, pearlescent tears welling from her lower lids like moonlight breaking through clouds. Pressing her sleeve to her face, she spun away. Her back—unusually broad for her age—quivered silently. Fukui felt the seething sexual frustrations of his adolescence sucked violently from his body. In their place swelled a sweet melancholy so rich it made him want to smack his lips. Without any true intent beyond this sensation, he mimicked adult posturing—

“Act a bit more ladylike! Tomboy!” he shouted. Even so, Masako must have truly loved goldfish, for she continued coming to purchase them as if completely forgetting Fukui’s torments almost immediately. When Masako came to the house where his parents were, Fukui did not bully her. Instead, he curtly turned away and was whistling.

One evening. It was spring. Masako had come empty-handed for a walk near Fukui’s house—an unusual occurrence initiated from her side. Fukui quickly spotted her and bullied Masako as usual. And while filled with sweet melancholy, as usual, he spat “Act a bit more ladylike!” at Masako’s back. Then, unexpectedly, Masako whirled around and glared at Fukui once more. From within the girl’s tear-streaked face, a cunning smile split through like the flesh-colored tip of a fig.

“How exactly am I supposed to act more ladylike?” The moment Fukui thought *Huh?*, a fist emerged from the girl’s sleeve and flung open—instantly crowning his face with a riot of cherry blossom petals. She leapt back slightly. “This is how you do it!” The girl giggled brightly as she fled.

Fukui hurriedly closed his eyes and mouth, but several of the peony cherry blossom petals—cool and thin—slipped inside anyway. He spat with a *keh-keh* sound, yet the final petal clung stubbornly to the back of his upper palate, fusing with the quivering softness beneath his jaw into a single layer. Even when he scraped at it with his tongue or jabbed his fingers inside, it refused to budge. Panicking so severely he thought the petal stuck in his throat might kill him, Fukui ran home wailing to the wellside. There he gargled and finally spat out the petal—yet the agonizing petal that had lodged itself in some unknowable, unreachable corner of his heart could never be removed.

From the very next day onward, whenever Fukui encountered Masako, he would stiffen his shoulders and elbows to project an imposing demeanor, yet his heart remained filled with servile wretchedness. He could no longer bring himself to speak. Masako, affecting adult airs, deliberately greeted him with exaggerated politeness. And she had her maid come to buy goldfish.

Masako began attending secondary school from the mansion atop the cliff, while Fukui went from the goldfish house in the valley below. They made different friends and, pursuing separate interests, seldom met anymore. Yet on rare encounters in places like movie theaters, Fukui found himself unable to suppress the hostility rising within him—so breathtakingly beautiful had Masako grown. Her face with its well-defined contours and softly rounded chin held large, slightly downturned eyes smoldering jet-black. When she lifted the corners of her lips slightly, those teasing lips came vividly alive. The lush fullness of her figure—blossoming into womanhood—swelled from chest to shoulders, while her limbs stretched taut and graceful. Masako arched her chest ladylike and gave a slight acknowledging nod. Fukui flinched and turned sideways to avoid her direct gaze, yet his ears strained with attention. Masako seemed to be answering a question from her companion. “This person is from the goldfish vendor’s house below us,” she responded. “He does very well in school.” “He does very well in school,” she said. Hearing that utterly flat “he does very well in school”—a remark devoid of any warmth beyond bare explanation—Fukui’s face flushed crimson with shame.

After the World War, rumors reached Fukui’s house below the cliff that Masako’s cliffside mansion had suffered severe financial blows after being swept into the economic turmoil. Yet when one looked up at the mansion, they had instead expanded the Western-style buildings and redesigned the gardens. The quantity of goldfish purchased from Fukui’s household also grew. The maid who came to collect goldfish feed remarked, “Master says now’s the time for construction since craftsmen’s labor costs have fallen.” The Romanesque semicircular pavilion-style resting spot at the cliff’s edge was also built during this time.

“When there’s no fun in making money, you might as well at least enjoy life.”

Masako’s father Teizō—a small-built, thin man with a dark complexion who had come down from the cliff and was unusually observing the goldfish pond—said this. He was a man in his fifties who wore a subdued striped silk kimono draped loosely about him and habitually kept gastrointestinal medicine tucked in his sleeve. After losing his beautiful beloved wife—Masako’s mother—in his youth, he had only maintained a modest mistress’s residence separately and kept no wife at his home. He also possessed a disposition that took personal pleasure in upholding such arrangements as part of his lifestyle.

At the veranda of Fukui’s house, Teizō sat down alongside the goldfish tubs that had been propped up to dry and began speaking with Sōjūrō, Fukui’s foster father.

Sōjūrō’s family goldfish business was a long-established family in this valley hollow that had been in existence for generations. Teizō’s cliffside mansion had been built by leveling the paulownia field atop the cliff the year before Masako was born, so it had only been around for fifteen or sixteen years at most.

Though a new resident, Teizō knew this neighborhood and even goldfish matters with astonishing thoroughness. Because Teizō’s grandfather had similarly lived in a hollow of Tokyo’s Yamanote district and had a deep fondness for goldfish, memories of goldfish breeding at his childhood home naturally resurfaced due to the circumstances of building his house atop the cliff overlooking the goldfish business in this valley hollow. After losing his beautiful beloved wife, a peculiar buoyancy arose within Teizō, and he began taking an extraordinary interest in goldfish—those beautiful creatures that were living yet resembled inanimate objects.

“In the Edo period, goldfish breeding was a respectable side job for impoverished hatamoto retainers, you know. “In Yamanote, they generally kept them in the hollows scattered here and there along the boundary between Azabu Hill and Akasaka Hill—places where water welled up naturally. “Your household must be one of them.” When Teizō said this to him on one occasion, it was Sōjūrō—the actual expert—who responded with hesitant agreement. “Probably so.” “After all, it’s a family that’s continued for three or four generations.”

It was no wonder that Sōjūrō looked up at the sooty ceiling while offering a hesitant greeting. Though called Fukui’s foster parents, Sōjūrō and his wife were themselves husband-and-wife adopted heirs of this household—a young retainer-class couple nominated by all relatives to raise Fukui (left an infant when his birth parents died of illness) while inheriting the family business. Sōjūrō and his wife had previously been obscure Ogiebushi instructors. “To be honest,” Sōjūrō confessed candidly, “I found handling living creatures strangely frightening at first.”

“Fukui is indeed the rightful head of this goldfish shop. So while continuing the business would be natural, who can say how it’ll unfold? These young ones must harbor their own notions.”

Sōjūrō said matter-of-factly, glancing at Fukui who was studying for exams in the corner of the tatami room.

“No, the goldfish are fine. By all means, let him do it. Ordinary goldfish may not amount to much, but if you improve them and create new varieties one after another, their prices will soar any number of times. Moreover, foreigners have recently come to demand them quite extensively. In our country, goldfish breeding has already become a respectable industry.” Businessmen sure were shrewd know-it-alls—Fukui turned around in surprise at the realization. Teizō went on to say, “Even so, from now on we must apply science to everything—otherwise it’s a loss. Forgive my presumption, but should you face any difficulties enrolling Mr. Fukui in a higher school, I could provide some financial assistance for his tuition.”

This time, Sōjūrō stared in astonishment at the wealthy man’s face as he uttered this abrupt proposal with such composure. Then Teizō suppressed the awkward atmosphere and continued speaking.

“No, to put it bluntly, there’s only one female goldfish in my household.” “So whenever I see other males, they catch my eye—I can’t help feeling envious and developing a liking for them.” Fukui felt irritated that he would liken humans to male and female goldfish—even as a joke, it went too far. However, he couldn’t help thinking that abandoning this habit of resistance might open a path to becoming closer to Masako. Because of the bittersweet memory of the cherry blossom petal Masako had thrown—the one that had stuck to the roof of his mouth—Fukui kept probing the back of his palate with his tongue tip.

“With your daughter being your only child, you must be concerned.” While serving tea, Sōjūrō’s wife said. Teizō replied in a somewhat obstinate tone: “Instead, I can select a prime specimen from anywhere to take as a son-in-law.” “If it were my own son, even a fool, I couldn’t displace the succession.”

In the end, Fukui ended up attending a higher technical school to study goldfish husbandry as Teizō had proposed, receiving financial assistance for his tuition. Masako maintained an air of complete unawareness. However, when Fukui came to notice, there were already at least three young men around Masako at this time—Teizō’s so-called “other males” who had earned his favor—and their comings and goings in gold-buttoned uniforms began obstructing Fukui’s view. According to Fukui’s observations, Masako interacted with the three young men with splendid impartiality. Teizō, inherently pragmatic, treated financial support not as an obligation but as casual patronage, engaging the youths merely as conversational companions; meanwhile, the three—Tomoda, Harigaya, and Yokochi—shared an unflappable composure, as though their lack of obsequiousness had been the chief criterion for their selection. With this easy confidence, they would tap their benefactor’s daughter with tennis rackets or call “Masako, Masako” as one might address a younger sister. They had thoroughly camouflaged from both themselves and others their status as three male suitors vying for one female. This arrangement may have been all the more convenient for Masako in maintaining her equitable treatment of the men.

Whenever Fukui saw the young men and women of the cliffside mansion conducting such smooth and carefree social interactions, he would reflect on his own nature—fully aware of its regrettable aspects—yet inevitably steer himself toward a contrary course. Who would ever associate with those spineless nobodies? I can’t engage in such half-hearted socializing. It’s either conquest or subjugation. Yet lately, the feminine beauty he perceived in Masako had begun rising to such transcendent heights that a young man of his disposition—one who could not rest unless clashing head-on with everything in opposition—now found himself rendered powerless merely by standing before a woman who seemed on the verge of becoming love’s very antithesis. Around this time, Fukui—like the precocious youth he was—began dipping a corner of his mind into all manner of morbid speculations about life’s problems. In the end, without taking a single step up the cliff, he resolved to confront how Masako would turn out by stubbornly persisting in the obstinacy he wielded most skillfully. Ultimately, someone like me—a man of mere strength without luster or fragrance—would surely meet with discordant, disastrous defeat if I were to join those people on the cliff. Especially with a celestial maiden-like woman such as Masako, someone like me could never be an equal match. If I were to socialize, I would either become an awkward flatterer or put on blustering bravado—it had to be one or the other. Even if I put on a show of obstinate endurance, it is in persisting in resentment that my true nature lies. In short, with ordinary approaches, Masako was from the start no match for someone like me. The only path was through spiteful obstinacy—perhaps even now, that girl might still be drawn to me. Fukui increasingly inclined himself solely toward the bittersweet recollections of his childhood years when he had tormented Masako with abnormal persistence.

Before long, Fukui graduated from a Tokyo middle school and became a research student at a fisheries institute on the shore of a lake in Kansai dedicated to studying domesticated fish. On a September evening just one week before his departure, Masako descended the cliff path with her flashlight beam cutting through the darkness, coming to deliver travel funds from her father Teizō and her own farewell gift to Fukui. After being thanked by Sōjūrō and his wife, Masako turned to Fukui and said:

“Why don’t we go somewhere like Ginza for tea as a farewell?” As Masako said this while casually adjusting the overlapping front of her obi, even Fukui—who had been so determined to maintain his stubbornness—felt its very essence drain away instantly. Yet Fukui pressed on with growing desperation. “Rather than a bustling place like Ginza, I wouldn’t mind going somewhere around Enokimachi’s streets.”

Fukui’s manner of speaking to Masako had already changed three or four years prior. Fukui was unconsciously acclimating himself to speech patterns too formal for friends—the kind used between men and women of slightly differing social standing. “You pick such an odd place for a stroll.” “Then that’s fine.” “At Enokimachi.” Neither the spacious bustle of Akasaka Sannōshita nor the restrained liveliness between Roppongi and Aoi-chō—diagonally threading between these two main avenues ran a nighttime thoroughfare with no particularly large storefronts, yet exuding a compact, settled vibrancy. The storefronts were well-stocked with goods, their variety ever-changing. Leaving just enough of the road’s darkness intact, shop lights characteristic of early autumn glittered and flowed upon sprinkled water. On gutter planks outside fruit shops, leftover watermelons lay piled in bluish-black heaps like discarded shot puts, while display windows showcased newly arrived pears and grapes claiming their rightful stations. A chubby girl sat studying a picture book on a bench. It was a small, tidy street—neither noisy nor lonely.

Masako and Fukui walked side by side with unhurried composure through the town center—where round-taxis seldom intruded—without any trace of timidity. It had been six or seven years since Fukui had stood this close to Masako. At first—she having matured into a woman radiating such efflorescence of womanhood—even the slightest twist of her body made Fukui fear his sense of sexual autonomy might be overthrown, forcing him to armor his skin’s sensitivity and proceed with caution. Then something within Fukui began dissolving, until one startled moment—*Huh?*—found he had voluntarily unfastened this carapace of tactile defense, now taking pleasure in drifting into the orbit of Masako’s aura. Now shop lights and passersby grew alluringly hazy as if viewed through perfumed vapor, his self-consciousness growing ever more unsteady.

But deep within Fukui, something still smoldered—a restless resistance that caused him to lag two or three steps behind Masako. Fukui had resolved to observe Masako and himself as objectively as possible. In his eyes, at the slightly raised collar of Masako’s *nukiemon* garment, the underlayer of Irish linen lace was glimpsed with pristine clarity; then, as his gaze shifted to the hollow at the base of her terracotta-shaped, perfectly cylindrical neck, he saw a beautiful mound of flesh—plump as freshly pounded rice cakes—radiating a gentle softness.

“This woman has come to possess every last vestige of physical feminine charm.” “Ah,” Fukui exhaled a faint sigh. He stood considerably taller than Masako. Disgusted by his own relentless scrutiny of her, he turned his face aside—seeking refuge from this sorrow of unattainability—and cast his gaze toward Sannō’s forest, where shadows coalesced at the alley’s terminus.

“Mr. Fukui—are you truly intent on becoming a goldfish breeder?”

Masako, assuming Fukui was beside her, casually turned toward the unoccupied side and inquired. Fukui, who had been lagging a step behind, hurried forward to take his place beside her. "I’d like to become something a bit more refined, but circumstances don’t seem to permit it." "What an unenthusiastic thing to say." "If I were you, I’d gladly become a goldfish breeder." Masako looked at Fukui with an ethereal expression—the very one that marked her most earnest moments.

“Though it may sound presumptuous of me to say, the creature humans can most freely create as beautiful isn’t the goldfish—”

Fukui felt a strange sensation. Until now, he had believed that what he perceived as spiritual in this woman stemmed solely from the refinement cultivated in her extravagant upbringing—yet here he was hearing this girl articulate intellectually substantial words related to life’s value. Was this merely a passing whim during their stroll, or had she given it some thought? “Well, that may certainly be true, but they’re still just goldfish after all.”

Then Masako, her ethereal countenance accentuating the smoldering depth of her eyes, said— “You’re the son of a goldfish breeder, yet you truly don’t grasp their worth.” “There have been instances where people lived and died for goldfish.”

Masako began to speak, saying it was a story she had heard from her father. That story was one Fukui—having grown up in a goldfish shop—actually knew in greater detail than Masako’s vague account. Yet when she spoke it to him, it paradoxically reinforced his own understanding of its value.

The facts were roughly as follows.

From around the time of the Meiji 27-28 Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), Japan’s enthusiasm for goldfish appreciation surged dramatically. On the experts’ side, they took this opportunity to establish a goldfish merchants’ association and attempted exports to America. Progressive goldfish merchants particularly sought to obtain novel new fish through crossbreeding of different species, aiming to expand ornamental demand. Akiyama, a renowned goldfish breeder from Sunamura in the Tokyo suburbs, took the Ranchu’s bold fleshy head protuberance and the Ryukin’s rounded body elegance and full, branching tail, then embarked on an effort akin to a miracle—repeated refinement upon refinement—to create a new species perfect in both head and tail. After eight years of labor, he reportedly achieved his goal. The birth of that celebrated fish, “Shukin,” belonged to the chaotic early era of its inception.

Numerous amateur enthusiasts also emerged. They held competitions to showcase their cultivated beautiful fish and created ranking lists for these beauties. With expenses for equipment, social obligations, and goldfish brokers who intermediated through cunning schemes—all for goldfish’s sake—there were by no means few wretched enthusiasts who ruined their family fortunes and fell into destitution over mere ornamental fish. This fish enthusiast embarked on an ambitious endeavor with large-scale facilities, aiming to create an ideal new species of goldfish—a project verging on delusion—by meticulously selecting every conceivable advantage from all existing varieties.

It possessed the Wakin's clean-cut facial features and the swelling of its dorsal flesh, while its chest and abdomen maintained the Ryukin's sense of abundant fullness.

The fins swayed as they enveloped its torso like a divine maiden’s robe; its body color adorned itself in vivid hues akin to freshly applied paint; above all, coquettishly spaced black speckles—resembling those on a Spanish dancing girl’s mantilla—had to be scattered across it.

The goldfish—exquisitely beautiful with their surreal allure—were not the dream fish Mr. G had envisioned in his mind. With each successive crossbreeding, they gradually gained a touch of reality. Yet it was Mr. G’s mind that had already begun descending into fantasy. He sank into idiocy as his financial resources dwindled, vanishing without a trace. “Kakuyahime!” Mr. G fled in disarray wearing beggar’s rags, crying out this name meant for the goldfish he would create. Only half-formed malformed goldfish and anecdotes remained among the breeding circles.

“If Mr. G hadn’t gone mad like that and had instead used his sound mind to pursue scientific research all the way through to create such an ideal goldfish, I believe he would have accomplished a heroic and courageous achievement worthy of a true visionary.”

“Unlike paintings or sculptures or architecture—to take life itself as your material and try to create something ecstatically beautiful within water—what a magnificent artistic miracle that would be!” Masako lavished praise on Fukui’s chosen path. She kept speaking encouragingly all the way from their arrival at Reinan-zaka until they entered the American Bakery there.

On the upper floor, one or two moths fluttered around the chandelier’s clear light, their wings emitting a faint, lonely sound akin to anguish. At the table directly below, the two of them drank tea quietly while Fukui, in turn, asked. “As for myself... “What about you, Ms. Masako?” “What are your thoughts about yourself?” “You’ve finished school, and you’ve become so beautiful…”

Even Fukui faltered mid-sentence. Then Masako, her ethereal white face tinged with a hint of shyness, gathered both sleeves together and spoke. “It’s me.” “I may be a somewhat beautiful girl, but I’m an ordinary woman.” “In time—within two or three years—I’ll likely marry ordinarily and become a mother in due course.” “...Marriage isn’t something to be undertaken so carelessly, is it?” “But you can’t exactly search the entire world, and a marriage that fits your ideals isn’t something you’ll just find anywhere.” “Things don’t go as you wish.” “After all, humans are bound by constraints, aren’t they?”

Her words might have superficially sounded like those of someone in despair, yet their resonance held neither a lament for life’s mundanity nor the curiosity or passion to rebound from that despair and turn the unknown pages of the future into known ones. “You, with your passive resignation toward life, have no right to goad a half-hearted youth like me into heroic courage.”

Fukui felt an anger he couldn’t quite place. Then Masako, in a rare display of her childhood habit of biting halfway into her quiet lips, “I may be like that, but when facing you, I somehow feel compelled to urge such things.” “It’s not my fault—perhaps it’s your concealed feelings somewhere... Not that some sort of dissatisfaction resonates through me, and not that it makes me say these things.”

A silence continued for a while. As Fukui sat silently facing Masako, he felt as though a reckless beauty within her life was ceaselessly burning itself out into empty space—a beauty consumed pointlessly. As tender affection permeated Fukui’s chest, a desire surged within him—an unavoidable urgency and care, like trying to hold back scattering petals—to clasp Masako tightly… but…

Fukui sighed. And

“It’s a quiet night.” Or rather, there was no helping it.

The fisheries laboratory that Fukui entered as a research student stood on the shore of a large lake in Kansai. The city of O—the prefectural capital—lay within an easy evening stroll’s distance. He began a technician’s austere student life: renting a small tatami room in an outbuilding of a house near the laboratory whose occupants crafted bentwood trays and folding boxes, commuting to the laboratory by day, then venturing into town after supper to drink beer or watch films. The research students—seniors included—numbered about ten and maintained close camaraderie. Their studies focused narrowly within freshwater fish specialties—aquaculture techniques, catch yields, product preservation—and most were sponsored trainees from fisheries-related ministries, companies, or associations; youths whose lives followed predetermined technical paths, appearing rustic yet temperamentally choleric. Many hailed from rural regions. By contrast—whether through comparison or inherent difference—Fukui struck them as preternaturally quick-witted and urbane. His specialization in goldfish as domesticated livestock species, combined with their misapprehension of his metropolitan sensibilities as artistic refinement, led his classmates to elevate him as exceptional—hailing him as artist, poet, genius. For Fukui himself—who both lacked and disdained such qualities—these accolades bred only dissonant unease.

The supervising professor in charge, finding Fukui useful, often assigned him to handle social interactions. In the course of his comings and goings to several lakeside households involved in aquatic industries for laboratory business, he became acquainted with two or three young women of marriageable age in those homes. They, who yearned for the air of the city, directed their fascinated gazes at Fukui as though he embodied the very image of a sophisticated urban youth. It gave him a viscerally tangible stimulation. In much the same way, he received treatment from the women in the city’s bars that went beyond what an ordinary customer would receive.

However, after leaving Tokyo, what Fukui had reassessed most deeply in his heart—or rather, what astonished him by evoking a bond surpassing even that—was Masako. Masako’s lack of character—she was merely a woman ceaselessly blooming like a beautiful butterfly, possessing an overflowing allure—yet one that could only be purely physiological. She might say things that were somewhat clever, but it was as though the very structure of vocalization were speaking through her—like a mechanical human. Otherwise, it was some unknowable, deeply unsettling entity from afar that was speaking. It could only be taken that way. As a woman whose soul should contain at least a hint of vulgarity and pungency, she did not fully manifest herself as one of those women imbued with such qualities. She was a woman born without a trace of passion. Perhaps because he had come to think of Masako solely in that way, Fukui felt oddly unburdened when leaving Tokyo. It’s time to bid farewell to Ms. Mannequin Doll. I bid farewell to that inhuman enchantress of beauty. Farewell!

That thought—to bid farewell—lasted only about a month or two, obscured by the novelty of relocation and new beginnings. As his lakeside student life settled into his being like air, during his habitual morning and evening routines, something profoundly lonely, something mournfully missed, something achingly painful would grip and wring his heart. Masako struck him as akin to the last bloom of a plant species doomed to perish without ever encountering a male stamen—a solitary pistil withering in isolation. She also seemed like a puppet girl moved with innocent vacancy by some vast, unseen force, oblivious to her own strings. Whenever he thought of her, pity itself took hold of him, and as a man, he felt unable to remain still. And to such an extent that he found it nearly impossible to devise any means of filling her hollow core with a real human essence, Fukui’s general outlook on life grew increasingly despairing, until that bluish chill of nihilism steeped the feverish essence of his youthful ambition in a lonely yet oddly soothing manner, compelling him to exhale quiet sighs drawn from the deepest reservoirs of his lungs. But Fukui gradually came to take pride in this mystique-laden romance.

Whether this was related or not remained unclear, but Fukui’s perception of goldfish had utterly transformed. He now saw them as beings both unreal yet quintessentially alive—sleek and languid, consuming infinity with impersonal voracity, appearing soft while shifting life’s focal points effortlessly wherever convenient, laboring onward with feigned ignorance of true resilience—a form he came to contemplate deeply through the goldfish. Fukui thought, *Huh?* He had grown up in a goldfish shop from childhood through adolescence, seeing them morning, noon, and night until he grew weary—yet he had never considered them more significant than motes of firefly dust. He had imagined goldfish as mere scatterings of fragile crimson cloth—bluntly pierced in their abdomens by water beetles and dragged through algae-choked waters. In seven or eight neglected ponds where they multiplied yearly until the water’s surface swelled like autumn leaves, these inferior fish sustained Fukui and his parents—three people barely clinging to survival—all while he regarded them as utilitarian foliage of sorts.

However, Fukui’s foster father, being middle-aged, could not breed very high-quality goldfish. The highest-priced items were at best five- or six-year-old scarlet crucian carps; it was entirely an inferior goldfish shop. After coming to this laboratory, Fukui came to know roughly the types of goldfish kept as artistic specimens. Ranchu, Dutch Lionheads, Demekin Ranchu, Chōten-gan, Shukin, Shubunkin, Zenranko, Calico, Azuma Nishiki—and even an esteemed American-born goldfish, the Comet Goldfish, which had emerged in eighteenth-century ponds at Washington’s Bureau of Fisheries and whose form was painstakingly fixed by scholars there—all were kept as specimens. This fish was more akin to a fighting fish than a goldfish in its liveliness. All these abundant specimen fish were placed under Fukui’s care and waited each day before noon for the feed he would provide.

When he changed their water, they excreted a long, rainbow-hued excrement that tinted the sunlight passing through, appearing quite comfortable.

As his research progressed, Fukui gradually became more reclusive, doing nothing but silently commuting between the laboratory’s research room and the outbuilding residence of the bentwood craftsman. As Fukui grew increasingly reclusive, the lakeside girl’s attempts to draw him out only intensified.

The girl was from a fishing family that had settled beneath castle-crowned Desaki—a white-walled storehouse perpetually hung with drying nets at its shaded edge—located half a ri across the lake. This daughter of a prominent fishing family, Hidee, possessed both a high-strung, trick-prone irritability and the tenacious strength of a woman clinging like Kansai-style silk floss. Although commissioned by the laboratory, even when rare fish were caught from the lake, Fukui—tasked with collecting them—had lately ceased visiting Hidee’s house altogether. And then a substitute student would come. Hidee had never truly believed Fukui would remain a sincere lover to the end. Had the man’s obstinacy begun at last, or was there another circumstance? She weighed possibilities while probing discreetly. She urged her brother, the committee head, to nominate Fukui as lecturer for a youth fisheries workshop and summon him to Desaki village for days; she coaxed her brother’s child into sending Fukui an artless postcard, hoping to infer his state from his replies. Even when she wrote letters or called herself, prospects of meaningful response dwindled. She managed her brother’s household as de facto housekeeper with practiced efficiency. Rumors about her and Fukui had spread beyond truth around the lakeside, barring her from nearing the laboratory’s vicinity.

"It’s already my second autumn since leaving Tokyo."

Fukui untied the motorboat’s mooring rope while surveying the lake surface, calm as a mirror in the late afternoon. On the opposite shore’s flat sands, M Mountain rose abruptly in Fuji’s silhouette, and even when stared at directly, the sunset—its light now settled and no longer harsh—hung distinct and weighty like a copper sliding-door pull. When he started the engine and let the boat glide onto the lake surface, the wake trailed long like a wagtail’s tail while the piston’s throbbing shattered the landscape’s tranquility to an almost jarring degree.

As Fukui’s boat approached Hirasano Point on the opposite shore where the beach was located, the lake could be seen fanning out into three diverging directions. The leftmost expanse spread sack-like, its waters thinning toward the depths as the pale red evening mist further amplified the surface’s apparent vastness. To the right lay a plateau where fishing houses stood visible above reed-covered shallows, demarcating the lake’s other fork from the headwaters of S River—the sole drainage point for its waters. Over S River, the railway’s iron bridge and wooden bridge for pedestrians overlapped in perspective, and when trains trailed smoke across the iron span, the entire vista took on the semblance of a toy landscape.

Fukui steered the boat near the shore of Hirasano Point, but there, unusually for evening, the wind struck fiercely with waves rising like those of the sea while lotus fish leaped up repeatedly. When he steered clear of the wind and drifted into the lake’s fork, the main keep of Desaki Castle peered out from beneath the pine grove. The shadowy outlines of nets from Hidee’s village rose into view. In the end, as usual, he pulled the boat back beneath the plateau where the lake’s fork met the S River, moored it at the familiar spot beyond the reed-covered sandbar, and Fukui sought to savor his solitude in the lake’s twilight.

Fukui lay on his back in the boat. The sky’s complexion had cooled the embers of the sunset into a keen radiance, polished like copper-iron. Across the surface, reddish wisps of thin cloud—light as wood shavings—lay scattered in all directions. Then, as if signaled by the moment when the sky’s texture hardened entirely into a steel-blue luster, those very clouds instead began to gleam with a mother-of-pearl sheen. Fukui suddenly lifted his head and looked up to find a perfectly round moon hanging over O City. In contrast, the rows of town lights in O City glowed a dusky red, while the jagged screen-like mountain range spreading southward from its base stood stark, its ink-black surface etched with childlike wrinkles.

The sound of waves on the opposite shore’s shallows subsided, and the plip-plop of water welling up from below sounded nostalgic to Fukui’s ears. Here in the lake, clear water gushed forth from some confluence of factors at the abyssal depths, and whirlpools—water lifting water to the surface—ceaselessly spiraled up and scattered in all directions. The spot was called “Bubbling” because high-quality water could be drawn from within the lake, and tea masters from Kyoto would specifically send cars to collect this water. There was a man and woman who threw themselves into the water to commit love suicide, but they couldn’t sink and die, it was said. It had become a famous place due to its various distinctive features.

This area, rich in willows and silt, was where Fukui discovered the place when he came to collect the willow’s fibrous roots to have goldfish lay their eggs. "Life force to the goldfish, the sorrow of love to Masako, physical intimacy to Hidee. To think my existence has become so deftly divided." Listening to the bubbling sound of water surging upward in whirlpools, Fukui’s loneliness grew even more sharply focused as a target of criticism. Fukui lay on his back in a half-awake, half-asleep daze. On the plate-like surface of his consciousness—hazy as a photographic dry plate tint—Masako’s pale face would materialize abruptly, her eyes alone smoldering large and hollow; the fins of goldfish would flutter through the air, their alluring black mottling scattering in disarray; and fragments of Hidee’s body would appear luridly, like delicacies designed to tantalize the palate. These flickered alternately with obstinate persistence, but in between them swarmed countless meaningless shapes of objects, frivolous thoughts that needlessly probed deeper, and obsessive notions that thrust glowing things into his heart—so intensely they would suddenly make him open his eyes to the sky—all bustling back and forth, gradually wearing Fukui’s mind into a pleasant exhaustion.

Before he knew it, Fukui’s body shifted sideways to the left. And from the tilted edge of the boat, barely skimming past, the twilight-colored lake surface—darkened to a deep blue—came into view. Upon the pale sands of the twilight-colored shore, white waves that seemed to surge again as night deepened—transcending any sense of near or far—rushed with their crashing sounds, while Fukui’s consciousness, wavering between wakefulness and slumber, placed him within a world of kindred spirits at the boundary of light and dark. Then it became unclear whether Fukui’s hazy, dry plate-tinted consciousness was the twilight yonder, or whether the twilight-colored scenery was Fukui’s consciousness. In that lingering ambiguity, settling into stagnation, a joyful mood filled him—one pregnant with the power to freely give birth to any desired thing.

Fukui’s unbound heart, in that dreamlike state, began to ponder—those half-divine, half-human creatures from Greek myths were not mere concepts; they truly existed. It could be said they still dwell in this world even now. Beings who had grown weary of inhabiting reality, who became entangled in love and hate for its coarseness and vulgarity—their mental constitutions too delicate, thus driven out by reality—yet still possessing too much vitality to die. Yet to become gods or celestial beings, they remained too childlike and clung to earthly life. Could it be that such creatures were idly wandering here and there in this world? Both Masako and those resplendent goldfish—their true home lay in such a realm, I wonder if they merely showed their faces to our reality. Otherwise, they could never have existed so serenely in this world with countenances of such intermediate beauty—neither fully real nor ideal. Now that I thought of it—whether Masako or the goldfish—in those wide-open eyes and defenseless faces they perpetually wore, like one freshly roused from sleep—was there not a mask of satirical serenity, gazing down upon reality with some superhuman critique…? Fukui once again found himself unbearably wanting to meet Masako.

The sound of the waves grew slightly louder, and upon the lake surface where mist tinged faintly white with moonlight—now sharpening in midheavens—hung hazily, the shadow of a boat emerged as if suspended in midair. "I can hear the scull—this isn’t a dream," he thought. As she drew closer, the figure of a woman rowing the scull came into view. She rowed ever nearer. He saw her raise one hand to sweep back disheveled hair. The moment she lifted her face, she examined it in the moonlight’s glow. It was Hidee. As if refusing to see what shouldn’t be seen, Fukui hastily closed his eyes.

The bow of the woman’s boat rubbed against the belly of Fukui’s boat.

“Oh, are you asleep?”

“…” “Are you asleep?” The woman who rowed closer held her breath for a while, watching Fukui’s sleeping face. “Our two or three boats returned and said you’d gone alone to Bubbling with a motorboat for moon viewing.” “That’s why I came barging in.” “That’s fine.” “I wanted very much to meet you.”

The woman, suddenly addressed with kindness, took it instead as sarcasm. “What sleep-talking nonsense are you spouting? Even if you spout such spiteful words, I won’t obediently go home. But if you’re planning to deceive me by pretending to talk in your sleep, I’ll have you know I refuse outright. Not that it matters anyway—after all, I’m just…” “a country fisherman’s daughter who can’t possibly compare to those polished Tokyo young ladies…” “Fool, silence!”

Fukui did not even stir, shouting while remaining in his original supine position. The voice resounded harshly over the water, causing the woman to flinch.

“I dislike women who are as skilled in sarcasm as you. If you came here to talk about such things, then go home.” The sight of the woman trembling with shame and jealousy was palpable even to Fukui, who kept his eyes closed.

The presence of Hidee suppressing sobs and swallowing tears—unexpectedly, this quickly subsided—gave way to the sound of water being scooped at the boat's edge. Fukui deliberately unfocused his eyes while stealing a glance at her condition, then promptly shut them again. By moonlight, she quietly mended her tear-streaked face with a hand mirror. Something hot—like a winged dragon—streaked diagonally through Fukui's chest, but as he dwelled on Masako in his heart, a beautiful haze of consciousness enveloped him like crimson mist once more. Hidee placed her hand on the gunwale as though reconsidering, then spoke softly, replacing her earlier thorny tone with a clinging smile.

“May I come into the boat?” “…Yeah…”

Fukui was suddenly struck by this emotion—everyone was unfulfilled and sorrowful. Even when they seemed to have something, there was always something lacking. No one could possess everything they wanted. And everyone was lonely—Fukui felt an unbearable pity for everyone, even himself.

The harvest moon— / seven Komachi crossing the lake’s waters.

Was this a verse by Bashō?—he couldn’t be certain—but even as he muttered this, Fukui’s arm stretched out and came to rest on Hidee’s shoulder. Like a mollusk, Hidee endured whatever unnatural postures Fukui desired and was drawn closer.

Fukui would occasionally send discreet messages to Masako. On a picture postcard of the lake scenery, something about washing undergarments in this beautiful water; on a picture postcard of an island, how the ferry fare to this famous island fell two sen short and he had to borrow from the inn.

Then, at a rate of about once every three or four attempts, a reply came from Masako. They grew ever more profoundly elusive. “Lately, I’ve had my poet friend Ms. Fujimura come over to begin researching Baroque-era attire,” or “Ms. Fujimura and I went to Nikkō to see the Sleeping Cat sculpture by Hidari Jingorō, Japan’s Baroque-era genius sculptor.” “It’s so very lovely,” and so on.

Increasingly, she began to show unmistakable signs of detaching from reality.

Fukui did not know what this "Baroque period" was, so he looked it up in an encyclopedia in the laboratory’s library room. It appeared to be a seventeenth-century stylistic era in which humanism from the European Renaissance gradually detached from naturalness, sublimating only human endeavors while pitiable artificial splendor bloomed like fabricated flowers. And when he thought about it, in the history of goldfish that Fukui had begun sporadically researching, the Genna era—when goldfish were first imported into Japan and began to be kept as pets—coincided precisely with that period. So goldfish were a Baroque-period product—in any case, she and goldfish were inextricably linked.

While feeling belated pity and contempt for her as an anachronistic idol-like woman, Fukui suddenly grew impatient again. A desire surged within him—to shatter her transcendence, draw her into reality, and bind her carnal passions to his own with blood—flaring up in restless fervor. It might have been a wish he had attempted countless times only to leave unresolved each instance, yet every time it flared up, it filled Fukui with fresh passion, rendering him unable to halt its course.

“From both physiological and lifestyle perspectives, the body of the opposite sex is something worthy of veneration.” “Now, a woman by the lakeside humbly offers it to me.”

Fukui thought his own writing came off as sarcastic, but there was nothing to be done about it. As he wrote a letter exaggerating how his relationship with Hidee—in reality only briefly interrupted—now teetered on the verge of collapse, he felt as though he had truly embarked on a serious battle with her, growing agitated all alone. However Masako might phrase her reply, it couldn’t possibly avoid betraying whatever feminine qualities she possessed, however faint. Even should this reach Masako’s father’s ears and his tuition funds dry up as a result, testing Masako had now become a matter demanding greater urgency than goldfish research.

“That woman isn’t as beautiful as you, but…” he wrote, yet could not bring himself to add “she isn’t as heartless as you either”—Fukui gave a bitter smile. Gradually intensifying his provocations, Fukui persistently laced each letter with increasingly sentimental hints about his relationship with Hidee. Yet Masako’s replies held not the faintest trace of the feminine physicality he sought—instead, they spoke only of goldfish: how she and her father were developing a growing interest in them; how his motivations blended industrial pragmatism while hers arose from an almost mystically selfless fondness and affection. Her tone implied that so long as Fukui did not neglect his goldfish research, she cared little what he did or which women he consorted with. Just as Fukui found his feelings toward Masako increasingly dodged and his patience nearing its end, a letter arrived from her that read as follows.

“You’ve confided so much in me, yet I must apologize for staying silent.” “I will soon give birth to a baby.” “Then I will get married.” “The sequence may be somewhat reversed.” “Whichever way you consider it—it’s nothing so passionate.”

Fukui was rather dumbfounded. In the end, she was a woman innately destined to glide effortlessly above our course. “The man in question is none of the three young men you know.” “He seems a bit more straightforward and not the type of man to be unkind or cause harm.” “That is quite enough for me.” Fukui once again found his fussy, trick-laden intellectual nature being regarded as something futile. To think that a woman who could live by this single thick line still existed in the modern age—he even detected a modern quality in her.

“It’s nothing significant, but you would do better to marry that man too.” “When I’m about to marry, I find myself wanting to recommend it to others.” “But you must work earnestly on the goldfish.” “Create something marvelous—a new species so mesmerizing one forgets everything while gazing at it.” “Somehow I look forward to seeing the new goldfish born from your research more than my own baby.” “At Father’s urging, I’ve resolved at last to devote myself fully to goldfish.”

Around the same time, a letter from Teizō reached Fukui. In it, he candidly recounted his household’s financial management since the panic, but through decisive cutbacks, he had managed to reorganize into a compact formation; thus, he calmly outlined a policy of devoting all resources henceforth to cultivating and selling goldfish—an export industry with 100 percent prospects. Therefore, from now on, I want you to work not merely as a hobbyist scholarship student but in an official capacity as a technician subjugated to the enterprise’s objectives—your remittance as salary will be increased accordingly—

Rather than his livelihood prospects stabilizing, Fukui grew rebelliously resentful—those bastards from the cliff mansion, father and daughter working together, were trying to devour him. Fukui sent no replies to Masako or her father, completely abandoned his goldfish research for a time, and wandered aimlessly through Kyoto in a daze. But when he returned after about a month, a resolve had already solidified within Fukui’s heart. It was a resolve to create a new species of goldfish—one of unprecedented beauty never before seen in this world—and to make this his life’s work; to regard himself as a man harboring tragic happiness known to none, like an unnamed hero seized by a mysterious destiny, staking his very life to see it through. Would this ultimately be exploited by the father and daughter of the cliff mansion? But if that were indeed so—if this were to become Masako’s joy, a joy he himself could never relinquish—then that very joy would bind Masako and him together… And yet—the strangeness, the pathos of that ethereal beauty being drawn to ethereal fish. Fukui gazed out the laboratory window at the spring lake, viscous as melted candy, while his tongue probed a memory—as if cherry blossom petals forced into his mouth by Masako in childhood still adhered to the roof of his palate.

When he called out “Masako, Masako,” Fukui shed sentimental tears that even he himself found absurdly ridiculous. Rumors grew widespread that Fukui’s neurasthenia had intensified and he had become somewhat unhinged. In fact, the figure of Fukui—remaining alone in the laboratory deep in the night to create specimens—was terrifying. In the still and dark laboratory, Fukui—illuminating only his own desk with a lamp—split goldfish lengthwise, sliced them into rounds, minced them into pieces, scattered their extracted organs across the surface, peered through a magnifying glass, and prodded with tweezers until deep into the night; his single-mindedness oblivious to the night resembled a nocturnal raptor that had found an unexpected abundance of prey, forgetting even to eat as it toyed with them. The severed head of the goldfish, brightly illuminated by the electric light, stared with wide-open eyes that gleamed like rubies, its mouth occasionally opening and closing as if remembering.

For Fukui—a city-bred youth whose intellect had been conditioned to respond diversely to stimulation—the act of focusing solely on goldfish genetics and reproduction, the most specialized niche within his field requiring endurance of monotony and patience, demanded exceptional effort merely to funnel his talents into such a narrow focal point. Fukui, cheeks hollowed and eyes sunken, would slump toward the window whenever he felt his strength depleted, resting a hand on the cover of one glass bowl among those lined there. His fingertips ran cold as ice, yet pent-up excitement crackled through his fingers, making them quiver. When he finally removed the cover, the Calico—a celebrated specimen among the goldfish that had been resting with eyes open atop the pebbles—awakened its still-open eyes to the electric light, and the two that had clustered together began gliding about, now joining in leisurely tandem, now drifting apart. Their tail fins—three or four times longer and broader than their bodies—billowed like sheer silk veils and robes dusted with black starbursts, obscuring both form and head for a time. Then from within those undulations would emerge—plump as a French beauty, serene and majestic as a Tenpyō court lady—eyes and a mouth one might paint with rounded bronze and moth-wing brows, suddenly appearing.

Two or three years prior, there had been an aquatic exhibition in O City where this celebrated goldfish—a gold medal winner—was donated to the laboratory and had since been carefully cultivated. Having reached seven or eight years of age, it now carried the composure of one slightly past middle age, its charm having shed any lingering coarseness. After gazing intently for some time, Fukui replaced the glass bowl's cover exactly as before. As he returned to his seat, he began repeatedly contorting his body in precise imitation of the Calico's movements. When questioned by others, he would laughingly call them "goldfish exercises," extolling their health benefits—yet in truth, whenever Fukui performed them, a far more profound force he kept concealed restored both mind and body. He never explained this to anyone.

Anyway, late at night, the way the person writhed his body in perfect rhythm with the fish was profoundly unsettling. The night-duty janitor said.

“When I enter the room—please stop doing that.” “It makes me feel uneasy.”

Fukui toured the Nara and Osaka prefectures—renowned as goldfish breeding grounds in the Kansai region—on an inspection circuit. Kōriyama in Nara Prefecture had long been a particularly thriving area for goldfish cultivation, this being due to its history as a small domain that granted samurai retainers exclusive breeding privileges to supplement their meager incomes, thereby protecting and encouraging the practice. In this refined small city encircled by rapeseed flower plains, Fukui stayed and acquired various practical experiences relevant to his specialized studies. What particularly struck him was how historical records hinted that Kōriyama’s goldfish had already begun creating new varieties during the Kan’ei era, frequently producing exceptional specimens thereafter. By extending his reasoning to gauge the human ideals of beauty projected onto these locally bred fish, he envisioned forms nearly approaching those of the celebrated varieties perfected during the Taisho era. Yet Fukui came to realize that precisely because modern goldfish remained imperfect, people of antiquity had imposed upon them visions of dazzling splendor beyond measure. The world shifts; generations of people come and go. Yet goldfish—these inedible ornamental creatures—while weathering transformations through beauty’s fragile power alone, had somehow drawn nearer to their goal of self-perfection. Contemplating this, it seemed not that humans shaped goldfish, but rather that the fish’s own purpose—luring and exploiting humanity’s weakest instinct, its susceptibility to beauty—steadily advanced along its destined path. Formidable goldfish—this realization infused Fukui’s fixation with a conqueror’s zeal, binding him ever tighter to their pursuit.

Throughout the summer of conducting inspections, half a month after Fukui had taken up residence at the lakeside inn, news of the Great Kanto Earthquake reached him. At first, Fukui gave it little thought. Then he began to grasp the true scale of devastation. Though Yamanote district was confirmed safe, reports kept pouring in about Tokyo's catastrophic damage. Fukui tentatively made inquiries about returning to Tokyo.

A reply stating “THAT WILL NOT DO” finally arrived after some ten days, and Fukui was at last relieved. From Teizō, official commands and inquiries concerning goldfish began pouring in one after another to Fukui. When Fukui—worried that in such a time of disaster people would no longer pay heed to something as frivolous as goldfish—ventured an inquiry, Teizō sent back this reply.

“According to the elders, since the days of the old shogunate, goldfish have always sold well after such disasters.” “In the temporary huts erected amidst the devastated burnt ruins, the only solace is goldfish.” “The entire Tokyo goldfish industry has resolved to stay and rebuild their business twofold.”

Fukui had somewhat doubted whether this was merely a merchant’s typical exaggeration in writing, but that wasn’t the case. The goldfish, initially sold with a twenty percent price increase, soon could not meet demand even when raised by another twenty percent. The fish ponds in the low-lying areas were almost completely destroyed, but Yamanote survived. Since they could import them from the Kansai region, they did not lack the goldfish themselves, but the loss of the goldfish tubs was a devastating blow. They distributed what they had on hand among their colleagues and dispatched people everywhere to have them urgently produced.

Due to such tasks as imports from the Kansai region and orders for tubs, Fukui still had to remain in Kansai a while longer.

Finally, recalled by Teizō, Fukui returned to Tokyo after four years. The thesis had never been completed. His peers—those who had finished simpler research within the allotted period—had seen their papers pass review the previous autumn, half a year prior. They had received their completion certificates as laboratory researchers and departed for their assigned posts. He had petitioned Teizō for a delay in returning to Tokyo; completing the thesis would not have been impossible, but he disdained what connection such a tidy, minor success could have to his present state of mind. I want to create even one dazzling goldfish resembling Masako in my own pond with my own hands—to sound a triumphant fanfare. This alone remained his sole hope in life now—that initial resolve to breed a beautiful new variety of goldfish unseen in the world had been undertaken purely to realize Masako’s desire. Yet as years passed and his research progressed, his psyche shifted. Compensating for his ultimate inability to obtain the real Masako, his urge to create a beautiful fish evoking her presence now outweighed his original resolve. Masako’s ethereal beauty—it could be conjured by nothing save the opulent beauty of goldfish. By now, Fukui’s research and its practical application had increasingly become his desperate lifework.

Whenever he thought of that, even as he lay exhausted in his midnight bed, he could not close his eyes that blazed in the darkness.

“You’re a fool,” “If you’d just compile your research into a thesis, it’d become a reference for goldfish scholars worldwide—” Bidding farewell to the still-grumbling professor who clung to such complaints, Fukui returned to Tokyo by withdrawing from his studies. Thoughts such as burning the unfinished manuscript or sinking it into the lake did cross his mind, but he no longer possessed the theatrical flair for such grand gestures. With nothing more than a faint reluctance to discard it as mere scrap, he placed the manuscript in his bag and carried it home.

As it was the spring following the earthquake, Tokyo’s Shitamachi district remained devastated, but Yamanote stood unchanged from former times. At the Tanikubo house, where the spring’s emergence point had shifted slightly, they had rerouted the pond water through a bamboo flume swathed in palm-fiber rope like a bandage. To offer greetings that combined homecoming with resumption of duties, Fukui climbed the cliff to visit the mansion. After Fukui expressed gratitude for Teizō’s efforts in transporting goldfish from Kansai, Teizō said: “Truth be told, I grew overambitious—tried branching into carp and eel farming too, but entrusting it to others hasn’t worked.” “They’re all freshwater species; can’t be that different.” “How about putting you in charge of that operation?” “If this succeeds—unlike goldfish, these are foodstuffs—the market potential would be tremendous.”

Of course, Fukui refused outright. “It’s no good.” “It’s like telling a poet to till fields.” “Not only that, but I must ask—please allow me to specialize in creating the highest-grade goldfish.” “With this, I’ll do it even if it means trading my life.” “I have no need for a wife nor any intention of leaving descendants.” “To create a splendidly opulent new species of goldfish—this is my lifelong wish.” “If you come to think that I have poured money into a mistaken prospect, then that would be most regrettable for you.”

Seeing Fukui’s fervor and realizing he could not be swayed, Teizō set his mind to working on the next matter, reconsidering that there must surely be a way to exploit this obsession for business once more.

“Fascinating.” “Go ahead and do it.” “Until you create something that satisfies you, I too shall wait without pressing.” Teizō himself, seemingly having attained a heroic mood for the first time in ages through his own bold-sounding words, grew quite cheerful and expressed a desire to share supper together; however, pleading unavoidable business matters, he excused himself and tried to have Masako and her husband stand in as hosts by dispatching a maid to summon them before departing.

For Fukui, there came a few suffocating minutes—then, the parlor door was half-opened, and Masako, with an unexpectedly bashful face, appeared diagonally, her upper body tilted forward. “It’s been a while.” And yet, she did not readily step inside. Fukui felt a sigh of relief escape him unbidden at the sight of what he had long thirsted for—something that could sate him through vision alone—and though the loneliness of solitude surged up, urging him to exchange smiles without condition, something within would not permit it. To do so would mean being instantly trampled beneath the knees of her allure; this premonition that his painstakingly maintained resolve might be effortlessly drained away must have put him on guard. His stubbornness seized instead upon her unexpectedly timid demeanor; steeling his resolve, he mustered every ounce of courage to project an air of unyielding strength and detachment. He forced out the authority of an older man tempered by hardship and said, “Please come in. Why won’t you come in?”

With childlike affectation, she first briefly withdrew her face behind the door. When she formally opened it anew and entered this time, her chest was thrust forward as of old, her neck poised with unshakable composure. Upon lips gracing that ethereal face—unchanged from years past—rested a half-smile as sweet as honey, while her large, slightly downturned eyes mistily fixed themselves in a direct frontal gaze. Only her eyebrows had been thickly drawn in the style of the times. Fukui grew downcast, felt his resolve crumbling, and had no choice but to retreat into his lonely shell of solitude.

“It’s been a while. You’ve grown quite thin.” However, she hadn’t observed Fukui as carefully as her words suggested. “Yes. I’ve had my share of hardships.”

“Yes. But they say hardship is good medicine.”

After that, their conversation strayed for a while to topics like the earthquake and the lake where Fukui had been. “Did you manage to create a good goldfish?”

Responding to this was currently difficult for Fukui due to various circumstances. Summoning his courage, Fukui counterattacked. "How is your husband?" "Not really." She peered briefly from the window at the thicket of trees beyond the veranda of the main house. "He’s not here now. He loves basketball and goes to the YMCA—he never comes home until right before dinner, hohoho."

For Fukui，it was excruciating to conclude from her childlike manner of speaking about her husband—as if regarding him playfully—that she did not love him. He couldn’t bring himself to ask about things like children. “Even if I introduced them，they’d likely be someone you have no interest in.”

He thought that was true. If her husband didn’t shatter this woman who was my idol, then I had to consider that sufficient. If her husband was of that caliber, then perhaps I could feel more at ease knowing she had him. “Thank you for sending me things from time to time.” “This is pottery made near the lake.”

Fukui placed the paper package and stood up.

“Oh, how pitiful.” “With Mr. Fukui having returned, I too feel heartened.” Fukui felt his strength drain away from her who turned out to be so ordinary upon meeting. Why am I being influenced by such a woman throughout my entire life? he wondered with bewilderment. As he began descending the dimming cliff path, a nightingale sang, and yellow kerria petals scattered down like flakes. Fukui once again recalled the cherry blossom petals that had been sprinkled beneath Masako’s chin during their childhood and involuntarily touched that spot with his tongue’s tip. No matter what—I love her. This love was too bewildered, left floating midair. It could no longer be blatantly directed at her now—yet neither could it remain hidden within my chest. After all, there was no choice but to shape her from those familiar creatures—goldfish. From there, Fukui gazed down at the sunken valley pool far below his eyes and mustered an eccentric courage.

When a modest concrete laboratory and state-of-the-art breeding pool were built in the sunken-valley house’s garden, Fukui found it not entirely without its pleasures. He shut himself away single-mindedly, avoiding interactions with relatives and friends. He had also indirectly informed the people of the cliffside mansion to refrain from visiting until the day his research was completed.

"Buried in the surface, biting into the marrow of life."

He wasn’t without that sense of substantiality. To create his own lover with his own hands… That too would be a new star born beautifully into this world… No one in the world knew of this. He sank into a lonely, constricted melancholy. He framed the "Divine Fish Floral Garland Scroll" he had found at a Kōriyama antique shop, hung it on the wall, set out a chair on the veranda, and gazed from there. The early summer wind rustled gently against him. A volatile scent of fresh greenery hung in the air. Suddenly, he grew concerned about whether the new caretaker was properly caring for the middle-aged beauty Calico kept at the lakeside laboratory.

"Without the courage to abandon such old things to their fate, the grand undertaking of creating something new cannot be brought to completion."

Incidentally, the image of Hidee flickered into his mind.

He deliberately imagined Calico afflicted with coarse rot disease, her body rust-covered and unable even to gasp for breath as she floated foully on the water’s surface. Incidentally, he imagined that this was also Hidee’s form. Then something hot raced up both sides of his spine and surged painfully into his throat. He bit his lip and clamped it down near his jaw.

“I’m fine,” he said. As that year was somewhat late in the season for goldfish breeding and the pool’s alkaline residue had not yet fully dissipated, spawning was abandoned; Fukui turned his attention to investigating the parent fish. He visited every breeding merchant and amateur breeder across Tokyo without exception. The owners would not relinquish the fish he inspected. Thereupon, he would spout venomous words and curse those goldfish.

“There’s no one as detestable as Fukui.” “That guy’s a water bug.”

Such rumors began circulating among goldfish breeding circles. Water bugs are harmful pests known for their ferocity when attacking goldfish. Even while being told such things, he somehow managed—by hook or by crook—to obtain those sister fish. According to the policy he had established and believed in, he intended to create his ideal fish by applying another round of crossbreeding between different species and the already perfected cultured varieties like Calico and Shukin. When the next year’s flowering season arrived, breeding tubercles signaling mating season appeared around the male fish’s pectoral fins, glistening like dewy eyes under a spring evening sky. Then their “sexual urges” drove them to behave in ways unbearable even to themselves. They cruised in formations more majestic than any ordinary fish, like a fleet, and pecked at each other with razor-sharp precision in an instant, like fighting cocks. Their bodies twisted, twisting, twisting abnormally as they tried to wash away the burning slickness with water. Fukui—whose carnal desires had been almost entirely redirected by his obstinate will, leaving him like a wooden figure—upon seeing this, felt a faint sense of vitality in the world and, uncharacteristically, took solitary strolls through Roppongi’s night streets or ordered a bottle of beer with his evening meal.

The one who brought it was his foster mother Otsune. “Since we’ve already retired, we’d like you to quickly take a wife so we can truly relax,” she urged marriage in line with societal norms. “My wife is a goldfish.” Amidst his drunkenness—intending to drive a wedge into such human affairs—when Fukui said this, his foster mother retorted: “Surely not! You, of all people, shouldn’t have been that fond of goldfish since childhood!”

Sōjūrō, his foster father, incited by the rising trend of classical revival that had gained momentum around this time, wanted to return to being an Ogiebushi instructor and, as a prelude to his reminiscences of it being forty years since he last did so, took up his shamisen plectrum.

Ogiebushi They say the pine’s life is harsh—each claims to be a deep-rooted pine. Oh, still so young—ah, delicate young pine. Countless flowers—plum, peach, cherry. A single tree in full bloom—double-petaled, single-petaled… To Fukui, it was unclear whether the singing was skillful or inept, but hearing the resonant hoarse voice carry from the main house beyond the weigela blossoms, he felt profound pity for this man feebly plying his pole against the current of obsession. His foster father continued producing mediocre goldfish as routinely as one harvested hay, but since Teizō’s company bought up everything he made, selling them required no particular effort. But,

“They price things so dirt cheap that an amateur merchant like me can’t possibly compete,” grumbled Sōjūrō. “Fukui, since Teizō favors you, make sure to squeeze plenty out of him in return.” And acting as Fukui’s proxy, he extracted substantial research funds from Teizō and took great pleasure in it.

Fukui diligently changed the pool water, silently letting his parents’ words wash over him no matter what they said. He carefully placed the male and female fish that had been kept separately into the same space. Then, he carefully secured the disinfected willow roots—which he had laboriously gathered from the depths of the lake—with rope and sank them.

The sky had settled into a deep navy-blue clarity, a morning when small birds clung to sunlight coating their wings and backs like viscous syrup. From the veranda, Fukui tentatively extended his hand into the air and thrust out his cheek. Before long—

“There’s no wind. Alright—” he said.

When he lifted about three centimeters of the reed screen serving as a sunshade and waited with a prepared peephole, the three male fish formed a line and began driving a single female into the cluster of willow roots, each taking turns like warships ramming in battle. The female avoided what she could, struggling to break free. Why was this? Was it due to a virgin’s shame? Did living beings inherently cherish their sexual independence? Or was it instead coquetry meant to entice the males? Finally unable to escape any longer, the female scattered her spawn—beautiful, pearl-like eggs—among the willow roots and fled. The males flashed their victorious bellies and delivered an electric charge to each egg.

When he came to his senses, Fukui found himself propping both elbows on his hunched knees, hands clenched so tightly that his knuckles whitened—fingers clamped between his teeth—as he prayed with every fiber of his being. However humble, the emergence of life in this world could not be treated carelessly. For those like Fukui, afflicted with misanthropy, the more the act of creation belonged to a creature far removed from humans, the more profoundly they were compelled. All the more reason that when the two breeds of goldfish he had feared would clash—goldfish he had bred for his own egoistic aims—cooperated to produce new life, Fukui felt no gratitude could ever suffice.

For their recuperation, he separated the female and male fish. And as he simmered a light white-fleshed dish to nourish them, Fukui—though a man—felt his gaunt frame swell with maternal tenderness. Yet the fry that hatched that year proved more garish and vulgar than he had ever envisioned.

After continuing this for two years and failing, Fukui began overhauling his plan entirely from its foundation. He realized the error lay in the parent fish’s very skeletal structure from the outset. The beautiful fish he sought absolutely required a torso imbued with maidenly innocence as its base, upon which resplendence and coquettish hues must be layered. For this, no goldfish possessed such a form unless sculpted from the primordial Ranchu species. Fukui recalled Masako’s childhood self—her innocent figure resembling a Ranchu goldfish. Confronted anew with how thoroughly Masako influenced him, he found himself repeatedly chafing at his own susceptibility. That very anguish had now transformed into something cherished.

Yet he roused his flagging spirit: even if surrendering to Masako’s influence and returning to the simplicity of Ranchu, if he could craft a single goldfish to match her current aesthetic standard—make it a parent fish to spawn generation upon generation—then henceforth, even if progressing his goldfish’s beauty by a single faltering step, each step would mark his victory. And once he could subjugate that triumphant beauty to himself—this conviction forcibly ignited his fighting spirit. Having considered this point, Fukui resolved that he must endure for a while. Fukui ordered splendid parent Ranchu goldfish from Kansai and awaited the coming spring for breeding. The Ranchu’s body was innocent and utterly adorable. But its face was as ferocious as a bulldog’s, and when breeding a goldfish of beautiful delicacy, it was crucial to first eliminate that ferocity.

Fukui, who rarely approached the cliff mansion, seldom encountered Masako’s husband either; the man had eyes that slanted upward with nervous intensity, a straight nose, slightly prominent cheekbones, and the sharp electric vitality of a handsome young gentleman. One Sunday morning, he brought Masako and a young girl to the Romanesque tea pavilion where they read foreign-language newspapers. At that moment, Fukui—who had been about to descend after gathering fish food residue from a stagnant pool midway down the cliff—suddenly glanced upward toward them. But he then feigned ignorance and briskly climbed down. Having seen this, Masako—though there with her husband—felt somehow uneasy about the two of them being together.

“What’s wrong with that? Why then?” her husband said offhandedly. “But if we sit here together side by side like this, anyone could see us from anywhere, couldn’t they?” Masako insisted flatly. “Why on earth would it be bad for people to see you and me sitting here together?”

Her husband’s words seemed to carry a hint of sarcasm. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong, but the people from the Tanikubo house can see us here.” “He’s still unmarried, you know.” “Are you talking about Fukui-kun, the goldfish technician?” “Yes.”

Then her husband grew somewhat agitated and said contemptuously—

“You should’ve married him instead, then.” Then Masako, veering away from her husband’s point, adopted that ethereal expression of hers and said— “I am very much a lover of delicate beauty. “As for someone like my husband... “Otherwise, I couldn’t bear to share meals with you.” “I can’t win. “...Against you.” Her husband, now unable to either get angry or laugh, said, “Well, shall we go take a bath or something?” and carried the child inside.

Afterward, seated in the Romanesque tea pavilion, Masako—her gaze smoldering with thoughts almost impossible for ordinary people to fathom—continued gazing at the Azabu plateau bathed in the desolate winter sunlight.

“Teizō’s been in a real bind lately—the carp and eel breeding’s gone sour,” “If that fish farm starts eating through funds, it’ll be trouble.” No matter how much they built up the banks, the spring water kept lifting the fence foundations. Teizō had carelessly chosen a site on a brackish inlet’s sandbar within the prefecture. To make matters worse, fish farms in Shizuoka Prefecture near cities had expanded—using their transportation networks to supply carp and eels—leaving Teizō’s company struggling to compete in selling its own stock. But the true blow came with that spring’s unprecedented financial panic sweeping through business circles, bringing a moratorium by the season’s end. The bank Teizō had relied on for financial maneuvers stayed shuttered, rumors swirling that reopening remained doubtful.

“I wonder if we could somehow have Mr. Fukui economize on his research expenses”—even Teizō’s typically stern dark face had shown a flicker of vulnerability.

Despite having ultimately agreed to Teizō’s demand to slash Fukui’s research funds to a third, the old man recounted Teizō’s predicament to Fukui with almost spiteful relish. While listening to this as if it were someone else’s affair, Fukui prepared the Ranchu goldfish delivered from Kansai for winter. Into the pool he had thickly wrapped with straw mats, the faint sunlight filtering through stirred their short fins and tails into busy motion—from their ash-gray skin emanated a warm golden radiance that pierced his eyes—as their adorably rotund bodies, so plump they verged on ungainly, moved ponderously forward. Fukui perceived the living vitality in the object before him and felt within himself the desolate ashes of death; somehow, it seemed as though he had split into two, and he found this sensation strangely fascinating. Fukui laughed out loud for the first time in ages. Then Sōjūrō tapped his back and said.

“You startled me! Laughing like a madman like that—even someone as easygoing as me felt a chill down my spine.”

As the year drew to a close with news that Masako had given birth to her second daughter, Fukui spent the year's end without glimpsing her figure at the mid-cliff pavilion—it was only when plum blossoms bloomed that he first saw her form again. Having borne another child, her beauty had intensified in lucidity and splendor like algae hues after water renewal. Even compared to the divine fish ornament Fukui had framed in his laboratory, she now seemed nearer. That day, Masako had come to the Romanesque resting pavilion with poetess Ms. Fujimura since noon. The two women conversed fervently.

Even Fukui—now reduced to a desiccated skeleton—found himself compelled to discover what they were discussing. As evening approached, under the pretense of gathering red clay, Fukui stealthily climbed to a filthy water pool midway up the cliff and crouched there. Though not yet thirty, he had acquired the physique and movements of a man far advanced in years. The matter appeared to be one the two women had been discussing at length. Yet their voices failed to carry clearly to where Fukui lurked. The essence of the conversation between Ms. Fujimura and Masako unfolded thus—when Masako proposed redecorating her room in Rococo style, Ms. Fujimura inserted what seemed like a bitterly resentful pause,

“Even when you became obsessed with Baroque four or five years ago, I privately thought it was too artificial and didn’t agree.” “And moving on to Rococo would be even more artificial.” “It’s not just a taste for beauty on the brink of ruin—” “But I simply can’t help wanting to do it no matter what.” “You’re quite unusual, aren’t you, Ms. Masako?”

“I wonder…” “As you once said about me, I suppose it’s that quality of gazing at the azure sky and clouds and perceiving them as sea and islands.”

Fukui quietly descended into the garden and slipped along the eaves into the approaching-evening laboratory without drawing notice. Fukui sat down by the crude chair there and closed his eyes motionlessly. He had hardly met directly with Masako of late. Even on days like today when Masako came accompanied by friends to the central pavilion or arrived with her children and husband，he could scarcely discern their conversations there. But sensing Masako’s recent aura even from afar—now she might have forgotten even about those goldfish entrusted to him—Fukui felt a transient sorrow seep through him as her form seemed increasingly vaporized into some unearthly beauty.

Fukui, who had begun fundamental crossbreeding with Ranchu goldfish, took three years to establish the basic skeletal structure of his fish. Then once more, he embarked upon years of failure. “The sun sets while the road remains long.”

When goldfish diverging from his purpose emerged, Fukui would say this. However, he merely uttered it without a hint of sentiment. Yet, feeling himself increasingly becoming a living skeleton, he knew this wouldn’t do—and so, even from afar, he forced himself to gaze at Masako, wringing out hostility, jealousy, and hatred to inject resilience into his willpower. The Old Pond had accumulated a considerable number of failed specimens of prized goldfish. Because Fukui absolutely detested selling them, Sōjūrō and his wife would grumble as they tossed them into the Old Pond beneath the cliff to feed them. Sōjūrō and his wife wryly called this pond a goldfish graveyard.

And so another ten years of failure passed. There were some changes above and below the cliff. Teizō had died, and the adopted son became master of the Cliff Mansion, drastically scaling back yet continuing the business operations. Rumors spread that the husband who became master, despite having a beautiful wife in Masako, had taken up with a spaniel-like maid and was treating her as his mistress. When the adopted son’s generation came, the research funds from the Cliff Mansion were terminated, so Fukui became a completely isolated researcher.

Sōjūrō had died, and even the sign at the small gate of the Ogieshū instructor’s residence—who now had only one or two disciples—had been removed.

Masako still appeared from time to time at the Romanesque tea pavilion. The passage of reality only served to enhance the charm of her somewhat habitual way of furrowing her brows. She was growing ever more radiant as a beauty approaching middle age.

In late autumn of Showa 7 [1932], a violent storm struck the Keihin region, bringing rainfall measuring three koku one to per tsubo across Tokyo’s city area. The great ditch in the valley overflowed, sweeping away the carefully cultivated broodstock goldfish. The mid-autumn torrential rain of the tenth year measured one koku three to per tsubo, and this time too it nearly swept everything away. Because of this, from the following years onward, whenever autumn arrived, Fukui became nervously agitated. Even minor low-pressure systems exacerbated his nerves, leaving him tossing and turning through sleepless nights. He, who had long suffered from insomnia and required sleeping pills to combat his worsening ability to fall asleep, now found himself compelled to increase his dosage as autumn nights drew near.

That night had brought no warning of a low-pressure system, yet starting around midnight, a drizzle began to fall. Perhaps because it was early autumn, Fukui lay trembling in bed, muttering “This is it,” and tried repeatedly to rise—but his consciousness stayed foggy, his body utterly numb. When the rain’s sound intensified, he would jolt awake; yet the medication’s power soothed his nervous quivering, only to deepen his drowsiness moments later. Propped on both elbows in a half-risen posture, Fukui lay on his back with mouth and eyes half-open, snoring intermittently. The drug’s effects had finally waned enough for him to sit up as dawn approached.

The rain stopped, and clouds raced across the sky. In the leaden valley hollow, trees stood weighed down like sodden umbrellas, their branches spilling white droplets in careless streams. The cliff face lay dark and damp, its sand layers oozing moisture to form broad horizontal stripes. At the precipice edge, the Romanesque tea pavilion withdrew from sight like some fortress keep, standing rigid and discordant against its surroundings. Seven or eight goldfish hung motionless amidst algae and reeds crushed by the wind's rampage. Only the dripping of water reached his ears - no other sound disturbed the stillness. A crow's dull cry tore through the dawn mist above roadside roofs as it passed.

The water in the great ditch had risen, though not enough to overflow; the usual babbling stream, now swollen with water, had become a rough current that oddly lacked its usual vigor.

"This isn’t so bad after all." Muttering this to himself, Fukui staggered barefoot along the red clay path toward the pool just in case, the hem of his sleepwear clinging to his heels as he began to trudge sluggishly down.

When the pool came into view, Fukui felt a chill—his heart was struck by an impulse like an electric shock. From a layer of soil midway along the path, seepage from the great ditch had leaked out—soundlessly and smoothly brushing down the pool’s reed screen and tearing open the wire mesh into a gaping maw. The water that had flowed into the pool struck the bottom, rebounded upward, cascaded in all directions, and was spilling over the pool’s edge like the pure water of a natural artesian spring. When Fukui peered in, only the pebbles at the bottom and the torn roots of algae stood out vividly—the goldfish were nowhere to be seen.

Fukui snapped and kicked away the wire mesh—its bindings barely intact at the edges—with a furious foot. As he did so, his bare foot slipped on the red clay, and when he fell sideways, the torrential current cascading down the sloping path like a waterfall swept Fukui—now little more than skin and bones—effortlessly along, depositing him at the edge of the old pond beneath the cliff. Fukui finally managed to halt his slide in the mire of rotting leaves there, barely keeping his footing. Even now, when the path ahead remained bleak—demanding countless more crossbreedings and refinements to attain the ideal new species he had pursued for years—if he were to lose the parent fish in the pool to these waters now, then fourteen years of painstaking effort would vanish like foam on water, leaving him with nothing at all. Fukui, exhausted both physically and mentally all at once, collapsed limply beside the Old Pond—now dark and cave-like in its depth—and remained unconscious for some time.

When Fukui gradually regained consciousness, the heavens and earth dawned in a rose hue, with all things in the valley basin suffusing the valley hollow with vital energy. The thin film of clouds overhead was rapidly peeling away, as if straining out the radiant blue sky.

What a fresh, lush exhalation from the grass and trees! Green, birch, orange, yellow—each cluster of leaves seemed to harbor a powerful chest within its swelling form, panting with overflowing life. The disheveled thicket, shivering off dewdrops, had reshaped itself into plump, barrel-shaped mounds reminiscent of swelling breasts.

Wherever he turned his attentive ear, the murmur of flowing water freely made itself heard. The sound of that makeshift streamlet transformed the nature unfolding before his eyes into something dynamic and rhythmic, making Fukui—who listened with rapt attention—feel as though he, along with the very earth itself, were being transported into infinite space, journeying eternally upon white clouds. As all shadows deepened into lapis lazuli and all brightness coalesced into two entrancing amber hues, a corner of the tiled roof along the road suddenly blazed white-hot, parting violet-white rays to cast twisted ribbons of light toward those gazing upon the valley basin.

The early autumn sun, polished to mirror-like clarity, had risen. The birds’ cries now flew busily back and forth, stitching through the vivid tapestry of space with their song. Having lost consciousness once from cerebral anemia caused by extreme tension, when Fukui’s mind and body recovered once more, they had become a single transparent vessel of perception—recalling nothing, contemplating nothing, merely reflecting nature’s sublime beauty as pure imagery, transforming into ecstasy itself.

He perceived the blue distortions of the seven goldfish ponds as if they were the footprints of ancient behemoths, gazing absently at their beautiful speckles upon the ground. As sunlight streamed in and his consciousness grew clearer, the old pond before his eyes now appeared like an ancient cave he was seeing for the first time. This was the old pond where he had kept his failed prize fish for over ten years—unwilling to sell them yet unable to release them, left to be reared in neglect. Out of kindness, Sōjūrō and his wife had occasionally fed them, but after the couple’s death, with no one left to care for them, the pitiful fish had long survived on the pond’s waterweed and blue-green algae. To see the bizarre, malformed goldfish in this pond was akin to witnessing the scars of his failures anew; thus, Fukui had scarcely approached this old pond. At times, he had sensed a resentful, life-suffocating presence smoldering around this half-rotted reed-covered pond—a gloomy aura of trapped vitality—but Fukui had dismissed it as delusion born of his neurasthenia.

Now, with the old reeds stripped away by the storm and the morning sun streaming in, he saw—vividly, as if for the first time in years—the surface of that Old Pond. At that very moment, before any emotion could arise in his heart, he fixed his eyes firmly on the pond's surface and drew a deep breath into his lungs. ...Behold—the pond's water was a deep hue, thick with blue-green algae. At its very center, dozens of supple ripples—more membranous than white gauze—began to undulate, twisting and coiling in dazzling entanglement. They undulated apart, then opened anew. Its size might be likened to a white peony generously encircled by the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. It was a single goldfish. Upon its white peony-like gauzy fins lay violet, vermilion, wisteria, and pale blue mottling, further mingled with ink-black and antique gold speckles—layering kaleidoscopic brilliance through undulations that swayed and spread: now coquettishly opulent, now demurely refined, now shyly childlike. Again it rippled outward, then rippled once more—a mysterious movement as though its very life were being manipulated from some infinite distance. Fukui's chest swelled until he could no longer endure the shock of tattered carnal desire suspended between reality and unreality—as if he wanted to press his flesh against tree roots and jagged rocks.

"This—this was the ideal supreme fish I had struggled to create through ten years of bitter toil yet never achieved. Which of the goldfish I'd cast aside as failures—which ones had coupled, when and how, to spawn this?" As Fukui's consciousness churned through these thoughts, his physical passions were overwhelmed—siphoned away and scattered—by a colossal fascination, until finally he lay motionless, pierced through by a single strand of fulfillment that had permeated his heart's deepest recesses.

When “the wonder of life—how we fail to obtain what we consciously seek, yet receive it abruptly from abandoned pasts or unforeseen crossroads” flashed through Fukui’s innermost being, the beautiful fish—having sunk once more only to resurface—fully unfurled its plumed tail fin. Then its round eyes that seemed to cradle stars and its globular mouth turned unmistakably toward him. "Ah... It resembles neither Masako nor the Sacred Fish and Floral Garland Illustration... Even more than that... even more than that... It’s a more beautiful goldfish—a goldfish!"

Was it disappointment? No—or a joy surpassing even that? Overwhelmed, Fukui’s body crumpled limply into the muddy banks of the pond. Before Fukui—who remained slumped with shoulders rising and fallen breaths, eyes shut tight—on the water’s surface lay the beautiful fish he had discovered, radiant as a new star. With regal bearing, it led a host of lesser goldfish, its opulent tail fin shimmering in sunlight as it glided majestically through rippling waters. (October 1937)