Pathway to Japanese Literature

Muttering this, Fukui threw the dish and magnifying glass onto the veranda and lay flat on his back with a thud, his face devoid of expression. Viewed from the veranda, the fresh greenery of this valley depression was now at its peak. With a splendor that could hardly be called mere foliage, the treetops brandished a five-color gradation of young leaves—ranging from fresh greenery with tea-brown undertones to hues slightly tinged with purple. When that swayed in the wind, the smooth surface of the cliff's red earth would flash like a golden screen. On the slopes of the fifty- or sixty-foot-high cliff, Kirishima azaleas bloomed here and there.

From the shade of bamboo groves reinforcing the cliff's base stretched a damp thicket where late-blooming primroses and early-flowering nasturtiums continued their patchy bloom all the way to the small stream's bank. The small stream was natural water welling up from the valley depression, and for goldfish breeders like Fukui, it served first and foremost as the foundation of their livelihood. They diverted the water into channels, creating seven or eight goldfish ponds. Some of the ponds had been covered with reed screens, while others remained exposed. With a booming water sound, the great ditch flowed beneath the stone wall of the road opposite the cliff. This collected the city’s wastewater and was turbid.

Six years ago, when Fukui left the regional fisheries laboratory and was welcomed back by his adoptive parents as heir to this goldfish business, it had still been that season when late spring flowers lingered in the valley depression.

Having been born and raised there until his youth when he left for the regional fisheries school, Fukui now belatedly realized, "So Tokyo's Yamanote district had such a peach-blossom utopia." And he rejoiced at becoming master of the goldfish business occupying this valley depression. But now, six years later, even when hearing this gentle scenery and the sound of water, he had come to receive instead the opposite effect—one that further parched his hardened heart. He raised expressionless eyes and looked up at the top of the cliff.

At one edge of the grand estate atop the cliff where the lawn's edge hung down stood a Romanesque semicircular shrine, each of its pillars casting vivid purple-rose shadows under the June sun, their intervals framing glimpses of the high azure sky. White clouds could be seen leisurely crossing the sky, using these pillars far below as their crossbeam.

Today too, on the bench at the center of the semicircular shrine, Masako—mistress of the cliff estate—sat imposingly with her ample figure basking in sunlight that pooled at her chest. On her lap lay what from afar resembled a tangle of half-knitted yarn, against which a girl leaned at an oblique angle in rapt absorption. It was an image of unadulterated bliss wholly alien to Fukui’s inner world. Though Masako’s considerable nearsight likely prevented her from discerning his form across this distance, Fukui’s daily vigil had rendered even this vista too familiar to stir his heart—yet he had become a man who must impose some sentiment upon this tableau, whether jealousy or longing or regret; who required such emotional provocation lest his heart lapse into stasis between pulse and arrest.

"Ah, must I look upon that scene again today? A woman living triumphantly, utterly detached from my existence. A woman I’m fated to be unable to relinquish—"

Fukui sat bolt upright and lit a cigarette.

In those days, Masako—who was called the young lady of the cliff estate—was a rather inconspicuous girl. She was quiet and prone to keeping her head bowed, with a habit of biting one lip. Having lost her mother early and been raised as an only child by her father, people might have instead perceived her as a lonely girl. Masako herself did not appear to be dwelling obsessively on any single matter, yet she showed an extremely delayed response to external stimuli. On her way back from visiting Fukui’s house alone with a small bucket to buy goldfish, if something like a puppy chased her, her body would move in flustered yet ineffective motions—yet when she did flee, she would run to an unnecessarily safe distance, and only after calming down there would terror surge anew in her eyes. From those artlessly round eyes and peculiar movements, Fukui’s adoptive father Sōjūrō—prefacing his remark with an apology that he couldn’t speak too loudly as she was the cherished daughter of their valued patron—

“Just like a Ranchu goldfish.” he laughed. The goldfish shop family at the foot of the cliff, harboring resentment toward the cliff mansion’s inhabitants from vague class consciousness, scarcely reprimanded Fukui when—as neighborhood children commuting to elementary school together—he would single out Masako for torment. When a maid from the cliff estate happened to come and lodge a complaint, they would put on a show of apologetically accepting it on the spot, but once the maid left, his parents acted as if nothing had occurred—not only refraining from scolding Fukui but not even glancing back in his direction.

Taking advantage of this situation, Fukui's perverse bullying gradually intensified. Precocious for a child, he would fabricate accusations criticizing feminine chastity to pester Masako.

“You had that male teacher put his hands under your arms during gym class to adjust your slipped underskirt, didn’t you? That male teacher—what a disgusting guy.”

“You ran over and gave two whole sheets of paper to that boy who had a nosebleed today! That’s suspicious!” “And finally—without fail—‘You’re finished! No man will ever marry you!’” Each time she was told this, Masako fell into irretrievable despair; with a pallid face she stared fixedly at Fukui. In her large eyes—downturned and tinged deep blue—there showed not the slightest hostility or defiance. Her gaze remained fixed as if steeping her soul in those barbed words until tears formed. Before long her facial spasms intensified—pearl-colored tears welled from her lower eyelids like moonrise. Masako pressed her sleeve to her face and whirled around. Her back—overgrown for her age—rippled soundlessly. Fukui felt his entire body’s pent-up adolescent frustrations sucked away all at once. In their place swelled a sweet melancholy so rich it made him want to smack his lips. Fukui play-acted adulthood despite having no further intent—

“Act more like a girl! You tomboy!” he barked. Nevertheless, Masako must have loved goldfish dearly—despite Fukui’s bullying, she kept returning to purchase them as though swiftly shrugging off each torment. When Masako visited the house where his parents resided, Fukui refrained from harassing her. Instead, he would brusquely turn away and whistle.

One evening. It was spring. Masako had come for a walk empty-handed outside Fukui’s house—an unusual occurrence. Fukui quickly spotted her and tormented Masako as usual. And while filled with sweet melancholy, he spat out his usual "Act more like a girl" at Masako's retreating back. Then, unexpectedly, Masako whirled around to face him again, and the two locked eyes in a glare. From within the girl's tear-streaked face, a cunning smile burst forth like the tip of a fig piercing through flesh-colored skin.

“How exactly am I supposed to act more like a girl?” The moment Fukui thought _Huh?_, a fist emerged from the girl’s sleeve and burst open, showering his entire face with a riot of cherry petals. Leaping back slightly, she cried “This is how you do it!” with a crystalline laugh before fleeing. Fukui had clamped his eyes and mouth shut—or so he believed—yet several faintly cool peony cherry petals slipped past his defenses into his mouth. He spat violently until his throat burned, but one final petal clung to the roof of his palate, merging with the quivering softness beneath his jaw. Neither tongue nor fingers could dislodge it. Convinced the petal would choke him to death, Fukui bolted home wailing to the well. There he gargled until the fragment came up—yet the true torment remained: an agonizing petal now lodged in some unreachable chamber of his heart, never to be extracted.

From the very next day onward, whenever Fukui encountered Masako, he would stiffen his shoulders even more to project an imposing demeanor while his heart filled with servility. He could no longer speak. Masako maintained an air of adulthood, offering deliberately polite nods. And then she had the maid come to buy goldfish. Masako from the mansion atop the cliff and Fukui from the goldfish house in the valley depression each began attending secondary education schools. The two came to have different friends and were drawn to separate interests, rarely meeting face to face anymore. Yet on those rare occasions when they happened to meet in places like movie theaters, Fukui found himself unable to suppress the hostility in his heart—so beautiful had Masako become. Her well-proportioned face, with its firm contours and softly rounded lower half, bore eyes that were somewhat large and downturned, smoldering in jet-black. When the corners of both lips were slightly turned upward, lips that seemed to tantalize people came vividly to life. From chest to shoulders, the voluptuous flesh of her burgeoning womanhood swelled upward while her limbs remained taut and stretched out freely. Masako maintained a ladylike posture with her chest upright as she gave a slight acknowledging nod. Fukui recoiled and involuntarily averted his gaze from Masako’s front to look sideways, yet his attention remained completely focused through his ears. Masako appeared to be fielding questions from her companion. In response, Masako said: “The goldfish vendor below our house and this person. “He does very well in school,” she said. Hearing how the tone of “does very well in school” carried nothing but a flat explanation, Fukui’s face flushed crimson with humiliation.

After World War I, rumors that Masako’s cliffside mansion had suffered a severe financial blow after being engulfed by economic turmoil reached Fukui’s house at the base of the cliff. However, when looking up at the mansion, they had instead added a Western-style building and renovated the garden. The amount of goldfish being purchased from Fukui’s house also increased. “The craftsmen’s labor fees have gotten cheaper, so Master says now’s the time for construction projects,” said the maid who came to collect goldfish feed. The Romanesque semicircular shrine-style rest area at the cliff edge was also built incidentally at that time.

“When there’s no fun in making money, you might as well at least enjoy life.” Kamezo—Masako’s father, a small-built, thin, dark-skinned man who had come down from the cliff and was unusually inspecting the goldfish ponds—said this. He was a fifty-year-old man wearing a subdued striped kimono worn casually, always carrying stomach medicine in his sleeve. After losing Masako’s mother—his beautiful beloved wife—in his youth, he kept only a modest mistress’s residence elsewhere and maintained no wife at his main home. He also possessed a disposition that took pleasure in personally overseeing such domestic arrangements.

At the veranda of Fukui's house, alongside the goldfish tubs propped up to dry, Kamezo sat down and began speaking with Sōjūrō, Fukui's adoptive father.

Sōjūrō’s family goldfish business was an old-established household in this Valley Depression, with roots stretching back generations. Kamezo’s cliffside mansion had been built by leveling the paulownia field atop the cliff the year before Masako’s birth, meaning it had stood for barely fifteen or sixteen years. Though a new resident, Kamezo knew the neighborhood affairs and even matters concerning goldfish to an astonishing degree. His grandfather too had lived in a hollow within Tokyo’s Yamanote district and been profoundly devoted to goldfish, so Kamezo’s childhood memories of goldfish breeding at his family home naturally resurfaced through the circumstances that led him to build his house above this Valley Depression goldfish merchant’s property. After losing his beautiful beloved wife, Kamezo developed a peculiar buoyancy of spirit and began taking particular interest in goldfish—creatures that were living yet possessed an inanimate beauty.

“In the Edo period, goldfish breeding served as a respectable side job for impoverished hatamoto samurai. In Yamanote, they generally kept them in the depressions scattered along the boundary between the Azabu and Akasaka high grounds—places where water welled up. Your household must be one of them.”

When Kamezo said this to him on one occasion, it was Sōjūrō—the actual expert—who responded with an uncertain nod.

“Probably, that’s the case. “After all, it’s a household that’s continued for three or four generations.” It was no wonder Sōjūrō responded hesitantly while gazing up at the soot-stained ceiling. Though called Fukui’s adoptive parents, Sōjūrō and his wife were themselves a married couple adopted into the household—a young pair from retainer lineage whom the relatives had collectively appointed to raise Fukui (left as an infant when the original parents died of illness) while maintaining the family business. Before that, Sōjūrō and his wife had been instructors of the unfashionable Ogiebushi narrative singing style. "Truth be told, handling living creatures felt strangely frightening at first," Sōjūrō confessed honestly.

“Fukui is indeed the head of this goldfish shop.” “So continuing the goldfish business would be the natural course, but what will become of it? The young people these days must have their own ideas.”

Sōjūrō said calmly, looking at Fukui who was studying for exams in the corner of the tatami room.

“The goldfish situation is perfectly acceptable.” “By all means, let him continue.” “Ordinary goldfish may not amount to much, but improve them and vigorously produce new varieties—their prices will skyrocket without limit.” “Moreover, foreigners have recently begun demanding them quite significantly.” “In our nation, goldfish cultivation has already become a proper industry.”

"Businessmen sure know how to keep their ears to the ground," Fukui thought, turning around sharply in surprise. Kamezo continued. "Still—you’ll be left behind if you don’t apply scientific methods to everything from now on." "If you’ll pardon my forwardness—should you encounter difficulties enrolling Mr. Fukui in advanced schooling, I’d be willing to subsidize his tuition." This time Sōjūrō stared astonished at the wealthy man’s face delivering this abrupt offer with such nonchalance. Kamezo then smoothed over the strained atmosphere and pressed on.

“Well, to speak frankly, my household has only one female goldfish, you see.” “So whenever I see other males, they catch my eye—I can’t help but envy them and feel fondness.” Fukui felt irritated that he would express humans through the analogy of male and female goldfish—even as a joke, it went too far. However, he couldn’t help but think that if he abandoned this habit of resistance, a path to growing closer to Masako might open. By the poignant, nostalgic memory of the cherry blossom petal that Masako had thrown and which had stuck to the back of his upper jaw—Fukui kept working the tip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

“You must worry so, having your young lady as your only child.” As Sōjūrō’s wife said while serving tea, Kamezo responded in a somewhat stubborn tone, “In return, I can select a good-quality male from anywhere to take as a son-in-law.” “If it were my own, I couldn’t just replace the heir even with a good-for-nothing.” In the end, Fukui would attend a higher technical school to study goldfish husbandry as proposed by Kamezo and would also receive tuition assistance. Masako maintained a perfectly oblivious expression. However, when Fukui came to realize it, there were already at this time at least three young men around Masako—what Kamezo called “other males” who had received his favor—and their comings and goings in gold-buttoned uniforms became an obstruction to Fukui’s eyes. According to Fukui’s observations, Masako was associating with the three young men through a splendidly impartial attitude. Kamezo, being fundamentally a man hardened by life’s struggles, neither considered his financial support a right nor treated the youths as anything more than conversational companions. Meanwhile, the three young men—Tomoda, Hariya, and Yokochi—shared an unflappable composure, as if their primary selection criterion had been an absence of servile traits. They would casually strike the very daughter of their tuition-benefiting patron with tennis rackets, addressing her as simply “Masako” like some younger girl. They had completely camouflaged from both their own and others’ awareness that they were three male candidates vying for a single female goldfish. That may have made it even more convenient for Masako to treat the men with impartiality.

Whenever Fukui saw the young men and women of the cliffside mansion engaging in such smooth and carefree social interactions, he would reflect on his own nature and—though fully aware of its regrettable aspects—inevitably veer onto an opposing course. Who would ever associate with those spineless fellows? I can’t bring myself to engage in such half-hearted socializing. It’s either conquest or subjugation. Yet recently, the feminine beauty of Masako that I perceived had gradually begun rising to transcendent heights—it seemed this woman, before whom a young man of my disposition who must clash horns oppositionally with everything when it comes to matters like romance or love would be rendered powerless merely by approaching her, was now taking form. From around this time, Fukui—like the precocious youth he was—began dabbling in all sorts of morbid contemplations about life’s problems. In the end, without taking a single step up the cliff, I resolved to stand my ground with the stubbornness I excelled at, determined to see how Masako would fare. A person like me—devoid of luster or fragrance, relying solely on brute strength—would inevitably meet a discordant and disastrous defeat if I were to join those people on the cliff. Especially with a celestial beauty like Masako—I could never be an equal match. If I were to socialize, I’d either end up a cringing jester or put on a pompous front—it would inevitably be one or the other. Even if I persist in stubbornness, my true nature lies in nurturing resentment. In short, with the ordinary approach, Masako was from the start an opponent I could never match. The only path was through spiteful obstinacy—perhaps even now, that girl might still be drawn to me. Fukui gradually biased himself exclusively toward the sad, sweet reminiscences of his childhood years when he had perversely tormented Masako.

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 domestic fish. On a certain September evening when Fukui was due to depart in a week's time, Masako came down the cliff path with a flashlight in hand to deliver the travel funds from her father Kamezo and her own farewell gift to Fukui. After Sōjūrō and his wife thanked her, Masako said to Fukui.

“How about going to Ginza for some tea as a farewell?” As Masako said this while casually adjusting the overlap of her obi’s front panel, Fukui’s stubbornness—which he had intended to maintain so resolutely—immediately lost all its edge. But Fukui desperately persisted.

“Rather than some noisy place like Ginza, I’d be fine going somewhere around Enokimachi’s streets.” Fukui’s manner of speech toward Masako had already changed three or four years prior. As friends would consider it overly formal—a mode of address between men and women of slightly differing statuses—Fukui had unwittingly accustomed himself to this. “You do pick such peculiar places for a stroll.” “Then that will do.” “In Enokimachi.”

Neither the expansive bustle of Akasaka Sannō-shita nor the disciplined bustle between Roppongi and Aoi-chō—stitched diagonally through these two main avenues ran a night street’s path, its shops lacking grand facades yet brimming with a compact, settled liveliness. The storefronts were filled with goods, and moreover, there was a great variety of types. Retaining just enough of the road’s darkness, the shop lights reminiscent of early autumn glistened and flowed upon the water sprinkled on the ground. On the drainage boards of the fruit shops, leftover watermelons were piled in bluish-black heaps like discarded cannonballs, while in the display windows, newly arrived pears and grapes occupied their favored positions. A plump girl sat on a stool looking at a picture book. It was a compact street, neither bustling nor desolate.

Masako and Fukui walked leisurely side by side through the town center—where one-yen taxis posed little threat—without a trace of hesitation. It had been six or seven years since Fukui had been this close to Masako. At first, having grown so fully into adulthood—into a woman brimming with feminine vitality—Fukui felt a fear that even the slightest twist of her body might upend his sense of masculine independence; he armored his skin’s sensations and proceeded with guarded caution. Before long, something within Fukui began to melt, and by the time he noticed—*Hm?*—he had already released the armor around his skin’s sensations, coming to enjoy drifting into the sphere of Masako’s presence. Then the shop lights and the town’s foot traffic grew flirtatiously hazy, as if seen through perfumed steam, rendering his self-awareness increasingly unreliable.

But deep within Fukui still smoldered some restless resistance, which caused him to lag two or three steps behind Masako. Fukui had intended to observe Masako and himself as objectively as possible. In his eyes appeared Masako's slightly exposed collar edge—where Irish linen lace peeked demurely beneath her nun's habit-like garment—and during the visual shift toward the terracotta-like cylindrical neck with its hollow at the base, there emerged a beautiful mound of flesh swelling like freshly pounded rice cakes, suffused with tender softness.

"This woman had come to possess every last bit of physical feminine charm." "Ah..." Fukui let out a faint sigh. He was much taller than Masako. He felt contempt for himself as he persistently observed her; to distract from the sorrow of something unattainable, he turned his head aside and let his gaze flee to Sannō’s forest at the alley’s end, where shadows congealed.

“Mr. Fukui, are you truly determined to become a goldfish breeder?”

Masako, acting as though Fukui were beside her, nonchalantly turned toward the unoccupied side and posed her question. Fukui, who had been lagging a step behind, hurriedly advanced to this position and stood side by side. “I would like to become something more polished, but circumstances don’t seem to permit it.” “How uninspired of you to say that. If I were you, I’d gladly become a goldfish breeder.” Masako looked at Fukui with an ethereal expression—one that also marked her most earnest countenance.

“Though it may sound presumptuous of me to say this, the most freely and beautifully created living thing by humans isn’t goldfish—” Fukui felt something peculiar stir within him. Until now, he had believed that what he perceived as intellectual qualities in this woman were merely the cultivated traits of someone raised in an opulent and luxurious household—yet here he was hearing words tinged with philosophical critique about life’s value from this girl. Was this merely an offhand thought during their stroll, or words born of considered reflection?

“That may certainly be so, but they’re still just goldfish in the end.” Then Masako—within her ethereal expression—darkened her smoldering eyes and said: “You’re the son of a goldfish breeder yet remain utterly ignorant of their worth.” “There are numerous instances of people who lived and died for goldfish.” Masako began recounting what she claimed was a story heard from her father. This tale—which Fukui, raised in a goldfish shop, actually knew more thoroughly than Masako’s vague telling—instead became reaffirmed in his valuation when voiced through her lips. The facts unfolded thus:

From around the time of the First Sino-Japanese War in the 27th and 28th years of the Meiji era (1894-1895), Japan’s enthusiasm for goldfish appreciation grew markedly vigorous. On the experts’ side, seizing this opportunity, they established goldfish dealers’ associations and attempted exports to America. Progressive goldfish dealers particularly sought to expand the market for ornamental appreciation by obtaining novel new fish varieties through crossbreeding different species. Akiyama, a renowned goldfish breeder from Sunamura in the capital’s suburbs, embarked on efforts nearly miraculous in nature—striving to create a new variety by taking the Ranchu’s masculine head wen and the Ryukin’s rounded body form and tufted tail, aiming for perfection in both head and tail. Through repeated refinements over eight years, he finally achieved his goal. The birth of that celebrated fish, the Shukin, belonged to the chaotic early days of the undertaking.

Many enthusiastic amateur breeders emerged. They held competitions for their cultivated prize fish and created ranking lists of beautiful specimens. With expenses for facilities, social obligations, and goldfish brokers who positioned themselves as intermediaries to employ cunning schemes, there were not a few wretched enthusiasts who ruined their family fortunes—all for goldfish, mere ornamental fish—meeting with destitution and ruin. This goldfish enthusiast at the time embarked on grandiose facilities to create an ideal new breed that would combine all merits from every goldfish variety—an endeavor bordering on delusional fancy.

Possessing the Wakin's refined facial features and bulging dorsal musculature, while retaining the Ryukin's impression of fecundity in its chest and abdomen. The fins enveloped its torso like a goddess's flowing robes, its body color adorned with vivid hues as if freshly painted, while essential black spots—resembling those on a Spanish dancer's voile—had to be scattered at coquettish intervals. The surreally beautiful and enchanting goldfish was not the dream fish Mr. G had envisioned in his mind. As crossbreeding continued, they gradually took on tangible form. However, Mr. G's mind had already begun growing increasingly phantasmal. When his financial resources were exhausted, he became like an idiot and disappeared without a trace. "Kakuyahime!" Mr. G departed in a panic, dressed like a beggar, all the while calling out this name he had intended for his creation. Only half-formed deformed goldfish and their anecdotes remained among the community of breeders.

“If Mr. G hadn’t gone mad like that—if he’d steadfastly pursued scientific research with a sound mind to create such an ideal goldfish—I think he would have been someone who did truly courageous and noble work, like a hero.” Unlike painting or sculpture or architecture—in any case, to seek to birth ecstatically beautiful creations within water using living beings as one’s material—Masako extolled what supremely wondrous divine artistry this was, praising Fukui’s intended path forward. Masako continued speaking encouragingly to Fukui until they reached Reigan-zaka and entered the American Bakery there.

Upstairs, one or two moths fluttered about the chandelier’s clear light with a faint, lonely fluttering like whispered sorrows. At the table directly below it, the two of them quietly drank their tea, and Fukui, in turn, posed a question. “As for myself.” “What about you, Ms. Masako?” “What are your thoughts about yourself?” “You’ve already finished school, and become so beautiful...” Fukui even hesitated mid-sentence. Then Masako, her ethereal white face tinged with a hint of shyness, said while gathering her sleeves together.

“It’s me.” “I may be a somewhat beautiful woman, but I’m an ordinary one.” “I suppose within two or three years I’ll marry normally and become a mother without trouble.”

“Marriage… it’s not something so haphazard, is it?” “But one can’t exactly search the entire world, and marriages that fit one’s exact ideals aren’t readily available everywhere.” “Things don’t go as one wishes.” “Humans are bound by constraints after all, aren’t we?” On the surface, it sounded like the words of someone in despair, yet its resonance held neither lament for life’s mundanity nor the curiosity or passion to rebound from despair and turn the unknown pages of the future into known ones.

“You with your passive attitude toward life have no right to stir up heroic courage in a half-hearted young man like me.”

Fukui felt a smoldering anger he couldn’t quite place. Then Masako displayed a childhood habit she rarely showed—biting her habitually silent lips halfway—before...

“I may be like that, but when facing you, I somehow feel compelled to encourage such things.” “It’s not my doing—perhaps your concealed feelings somewhere… It’s not that some dissatisfaction resonates through me, nor that I’m being compelled to say this.”

A silence lingered. As Fukui faced Masako without speaking, he felt the uncalculated beauty of her life ceaselessly burning away into the void—a futile consumption of radiance. When tender affection seeped through his chest—bearing an irrepressible urgency and solicitude like damming a cascade of falling petals—a turbulent longing to clasp Masako tightly welled turbulently within him…

Fukui let out a sigh.

And

"It's a quiet night."

It was less a quiet night than an inevitable one.

The fisheries laboratory that Fukui joined as a research student was located on the shore of a large lake in Kansai. The prefectural capital city of O lay within convenient walking distance for an after-dinner stroll. Renting a small detached room from an artisanal household near the laboratory that crafted bento boxes and other handicrafts, commuting to the facility by day, then venturing into town after supper to drink beer or watch movies—this marked the beginning of his uncomplicated student life steeped in a technician’s pragmatism. The research cohort, including senior members, numbered about ten and maintained considerable camaraderie. As their studies focused on an esoteric niche within freshwater fisheries—encompassing aquaculture, catch yields, and product preservation—most graduate students were sponsored trainees from fisheries-related government offices, companies, or associations where employment had already been secured; individuals whose trajectories as technical specialists were firmly charted, lending them all an air of rustic simplicity tinged with choleric intensity. Many hailed from provincial regions. Perhaps by contrast with these peers, Fukui struck others as preternaturally sharp and quick-witted. His specialization in ornamental goldfish husbandry—coupled with their misreading of his urban sophistication—led fellow students to accord him exceptional status, dubbing him artist, poet, genius. For Fukui himself, these epithets—which embodied qualities he both lacked and disdained—stirred an odd dissonance.

The chief professor in charge, deeming Fukui capable, frequently dispatched him to handle social engagements. Through his laboratory-related visits to several lakeside households involved in fisheries, he became acquainted with two or three young women of marriageable age at these homes. These women, yearning for metropolitan sophistication, fixed their captivated gazes upon Fukui as though he embodied the very ideal of an urbane city youth. This afforded him an intensely visceral stimulation. In similar fashion, he received preferential treatment beyond that of ordinary patrons from the women at urban drinking establishments.

However, after leaving Tokyo, what surprised Fukui—more than reassessing her in his heart—was discovering an even stronger bond with Masako. Masako’s lack of character—she was merely a woman blooming like some beautiful butterfly without restraint; while possessing overflowing charm, it could only ever be something purely physical. She did occasionally say clever things, but it was as if the very structure of speech was speaking through her like a machine. If not that, then something distant and eerily incomprehensible was speaking through her. It could only be interpreted that way. The soul of a woman that should contain some measure of suggestiveness and primal rawness—she never fully emerged as one of those women imbued with such qualities. She was a woman born devoid of amorous passion. Perhaps because he had viewed Masako in precisely that light, Fukui actually felt unburdened when leaving Tokyo. He was bidding farewell to the mannequin. To that inhuman siren of beauty—farewell at last. Farewell!

That he had thought so lasted only about a month or two, obscured by the novelty of relocation and new school life. As his lakeside student life settled into him like air itself, during the habitual rising and lying down of mornings and evenings, lonely things, regrettable things, painful things seized and wrung his heart with profound intensity. Masako seemed to him like the last bloom of a plant species perishing without ever encountering a male stamen—only female flowers remaining—and also like a puppet girl moving innocently under some great force’s control, unaware she was its marionette. When he thought of Masako, becoming pity incarnate, he as a man felt unable to remain still. And to such an extent that he found it difficult to conceive of any means to refill her interior with a real human being, Fukui’s general outlook on life grew increasingly despairing; that chill blue void now began tingeing the very nature of his feverish youthful ambition with a desolate yet strangely pleasant hue, compelling him to exhale quiet sighs that seemed to tilt the depths of his lung capacity. However, Fukui gradually came to take pride in this mystically tinged romance.

Whether this was related or not remained unclear, but Fukui’s conception of goldfish had utterly transformed. He now saw in them a languidly indifferent form—gobbling infinity wholeheartedly, appearing soft and weightless, effortlessly shifting life’s focal points wherever convenient while feigning ignorance of true robustness as they functioned—an unrealistic yet quintessentially living shape that was “life” itself. Fukui thought, “Hmm?” He had been raised in a goldfish shop from childhood through adolescence, seeing goldfish morning, noon, and night until he was sick of them, yet he had never thought of them as anything more than firefly specks. He had thought of goldfish as nothing more than fragile, disheveled scraps of red cloth—pierced bluntly in the belly by small water beetles, then dragged haphazardly through algae-filled waters. The inferior goldfish—kept almost neglected in seven or eight small ponds yet multiplying each year until the pond surfaces swelled like scattered autumn leaves, striving to continue their lineage while somehow sustaining Fukui’s family of three who seemed barely capable of surviving themselves through these surplus fish—he had thought of them as something practical, like fallen leaves.

Of course, Fukui’s adoptive father, being middle-aged, couldn’t raise very high-quality goldfish. At best, scarlet crucian carp of five or six years were their high-end products, and he was truly an inferior goldfish shop owner. After coming to this laboratory, Fukui came to know roughly the varieties of artistic goldfish kept as specimens. Ranchu and Dutch Lionheads went without saying, but there were also Demekin Ranchu, Tentengan, Shukin, Shubunkin, Zenranko, Calico, Azuma Nishiki—and even a pedigreed American-born goldfish called the Comet Goldfish, which had emerged in an 18th-century pond at the Washington Fisheries Bureau through scholars' painstaking efforts to fix its form. This fish was lively, resembling a fighting fish more than a goldfish. These abundant specimen fish were all placed under Fukui’s care, and each day before noon, they waited for the feed that Fukui provided.

When he changed their water, they defecated comfortably—long, rainbow-like excretions that colored through the sunlight.

As his research progressed, Fukui increasingly became reclusive, doing nothing but silently commuting between the laboratory and the detached residence of the bento box craftsman’s workshop. When Fukui became reclusive, the lakeside girl’s attempts to draw him out only intensified.

The girl was the daughter of a fishing family whose white-walled storehouse—where drifting nets were perpetually hung out to dry—stood in the shadow of Dezaki with its castle, about two kilometers across the lake. Hidee, daughter of this large fishing family, possessed both a high-strung, tricksome nature that could be vexing and the tenacious strength of a woman who clung like Kansai-style silk floss. Although they had been commissioned by the laboratory, even when rare fish were caught from the lake, Fukui—the person in charge of collecting them—hadn’t been coming to Hidee’s house at all lately. And then a substitute student came. After all, Hidee had never thought of Fukui as a straightforward lover from start to finish. Was this finally the start of the man’s stubbornness, or was there some other reason? She repeated these judgments while probing in various ways. She tried persuading her brother—the event organizer—to nominate Fukui as a lecturer for the Youth Fisheries Training Seminar and summon him to Dezaki Village for two or three days, while also instigating her nephew to send Fukui an innocent postcard, attempting to indirectly gauge Fukui’s state of mind through his response manner. Even if she herself sent letters or made phone calls, her expectations of receiving a substantive reply from Fukui grew faint. She took on the role of housekeeper for her brother and sister-in-law's household and managed things quite skillfully. Rumors about her and Fukui had spread around the lakeside beyond the facts, so she couldn’t go near the laboratory vicinity.

"It was now his second autumn since leaving Tokyo."

Fukui untied the motorboat’s mooring rope as he surveyed the mirror-like calm of the lake surface before dusk. On the opposite shore’s flat sands, M Mountain rose abruptly in Mount Fuji’s form; even when stared at, the settled sunset—its light no longer painful to the eyes—hung distinctly and imposingly like a copper sliding-door pull. When he started the engine and slid the boat out onto the lake surface, it trailed a long wake like a wagtail’s tail, and the piston’s throbbing shattered the landscape’s tranquility with almost embarrassing intensity.

As Fukui’s boat approached the promontory of flat sand on the opposite shore where the seaside beach was located, the lake spread out before him in three diverging directions. The left side expanded like a sack, its waters growing paler toward the depths as a faintly crimson evening haze made the surface appear even more vast. To the right rose a plateau where fishing houses stood above a reed-covered shoal, separating the lake’s other branch from the source of the S River—its sole outlet. Over the S River, an iron railway bridge overlapped with a wooden bridge for people and horses, and when a train belched smoke while crossing the iron span, the entire landscape took on a toy-like quality.

Fukui steered the boat near the beach of Hirasano Point, but there—unusually for evening—the wind struck fiercely, diamond-shaped waves rose like those of the sea, and lotus fish darted about incessantly. Avoiding the wind and flowing into the lake’s branch, the castle keep of Dezaki Castle peered out from behind the pine grove. The shadows of Hidee’s village’s net-handlers rose into view. In the end, as usual, after pulling the boat back beneath the plateau at the boundary between the lake’s branch and the S River and mooring it at the familiar spot beyond the reed shoal, Fukui attempted to savor his solitude in the lakeside dusk.

Fukui lay down on his back in the boat. The sky’s complexion had imperceptibly cooled the sunset’s lingering embers into a burnished steel-bronze hue, growing keen. Reddish thin clouds—lightly rolled like wood shavings—lay scattered across the surface, and as if signaled by the moment when the sky’s complexion had sharpened entirely into a sword-steel hue, those very clouds instead took on a mica-like sheen. When Fukui suddenly raised his head, he saw that a perfectly round moon had risen over O City. In contrast, the rows of town lights in O City glowed a dull crimson, while the jagged screen-like mountain range spreading southward behind them stood sharply defined with crudely wrinkled folds in ink-black hues.

The sound of waves on the opposite shore’s beach subsided, and the splashy plops of water surging upward sounded nostalgically in Fukui’s ears. Here in the lake’s depths, spring water welled up from the abyss through some mysterious equilibrium, whirlpools ceaselessly churning upward to lift water toward the surface where they scattered in all directions. Because this spot was said to yield high-quality water drawn from within the lake itself, people called it “Mokumoku,” and Kyoto’s tea masters would specially dispatch automobiles to collect its waters. There had been a man and woman who threw themselves in to commit love suicide, yet found themselves unable to sink and perish. It had become a place renowned for these various distinctive traits.

The sediment-rich area around there was abundant with willows, and Fukui had discovered this place when he came to collect willow roots used to make goldfish lay their eggs. "The vitality goes to goldfish; love's sorrow to Masako; carnal familiarity to Hidee." "How remarkably my existence has split itself so skillfully."

Hearing the swirling water surge up at Mokumoku, Fukui's loneliness tightened into a sharper critical focus. Fukui lay on his back in a half-awake daze. Across the dim photographic-plate surface of his consciousness, Masako's pale face would materialize abruptly—eyes smoldering beneath heavy lids—while goldfish fins adorned with alluring black patterns whirled through empty space, and fragments of Hidee's flesh appeared as vividly as tantalizing delicacies. These visions flickered obstinately in alternation, their intervals filled with countless meaningless shapes, trivial thoughts driven to absurd extremes, and obsessive notions that stabbed his mind with such glaring intensity they occasionally made his eyes snap open—all rushing back and forth until Fukui's head grew comfortably weary.

Before he knew it, Fukui’s body had shifted sideways to the left. And from the very edge of the tilted boat, the dusk-colored lake surface—now darkened into an azure abyss—could be glimpsed. Upon the dusky beach of Hirasano under twilight, white waves that seemed to surge again as night deepened—transcending near and far—roared *zaa-zaaa* in crashing unison with Fukui’s consciousness wavering between wakefulness and slumber, settling him within that borderland of light and dark as yet another realm. Then, whether Fukui’s hazy photographic-plate-hued consciousness was the twilight ahead or whether the twilight-hued scenery ahead was Fukui’s consciousness became indistinct—and settling into this ambiguity, a joyous mood filled with the power to freely give birth to anything desired welled up there.

Fukui’s unfettered mind, in a dreamlike state, began to think—those half-god, half-human creatures that appeared in Greek myths were not merely ideas; they truly existed. They could even be said to still live in this world today. They were beings who had grown weary of dwelling in reality; who had become entangled in love and hate for reality's crude vulgarity; who, too delicate in the texture of their spirit, found themselves cast out from reality—yet still possessed too much vitality to die. Yet to become gods or heavenly beings, they retained a childishness and lingering attachments to life. Was it not possible that such creatures were leisurely roaming here and there throughout this world? Whether it was Masako or those dazzling goldfish—the homeland of life existed in such a world, and he wondered if they weren't showing only their faces in the real world. Otherwise, they couldn’t possibly have existed so serenely in this world with those beautiful faces that were neither real nor ideal. Come to think of it—whether it was Masako or the goldfish—those wide-open eyes and defenseless morning-after-waking expressions must have been masking a satirical simplicity that looked down on reality with superhuman critique… Once again, Fukui could no longer bear his desire to meet Masako.

As the sound of waves grew slightly louder, upon the lake surface where mist containing moonlight—now intensified at zenith—hung faintly white, the shadow of a boat floated out as if suspended in midair. The sound of the stern could be heard; this was no dream. As she rowed closer, the figure of a woman steering from the stern came into view. She finally drew near through determined strokes.

She could be seen raising one hand to brush back disheveled hair. As soon as she raised her face, she examined it under the moonlight. It was Hidee. Fukui hurriedly closed his eyes as though trying to avoid seeing something he must not see. The bow of the woman's boat scraped against the belly of Fukui's boat.

“Oh, are you asleep?” “……” “Are you asleep?”

The woman who had rowed closer held her breath for a while and watched Fukui's sleeping face.

“Our two or three boats came back, and they said you’d gone alone to Mokumoku by motorboat for moon viewing.” “That’s why I came barging in.”

“That’s good. I’ve been wanting to see you terribly.” The woman, suddenly addressed with such amiability, took it instead as sarcasm. “What nonsense are you spouting in your sleep, sir? Even if you say such hateful things, I won’t obediently go home. But if you’re pretending to talk in your sleep just to sweet-talk me, I’ll have you know I refuse outright—not that it matters anyway, since I’m… just some country fisherman’s daughter who could never compare to those refined Tokyo ladies…”

“Fool, be silent!” Fukui lay perfectly still and shouted without changing his supine position. The voice echoed harshly across the water, making the woman flinch. "I dislike women who wield sarcasm as deftly as you. If you came to spout such drivel, then get gone.”

The woman’s trembling form—shaking with humiliation and jealousy—reached Fukui’s awareness even through closed eyelids. Hidee’s presence—suppressing sobs, gulping down tears—subsided unexpectedly soon, followed by water-scooping sounds at the boat’s edge. Fukui deliberately unfocused his eyes to steal a glance at her condition before shutting them again. By moonlight’s aid, she quietly mended her tear-stained face with a hand mirror. Something scalding shot diagonally through Fukui’s chest like a winged serpent—but upon remembering Masako within his heart, beautiful hazy awareness wrapped him in crimson mist once more. Hidee rested her hand on the gunwale as if reconsidering things, then spoke softly—replacing her earlier thorny tone with a clinging smile:

“May I get into the boat?” “……Yeah…”

Suddenly, such an emotion welled up in Fukui—everyone was dissatisfied and sad. Even when they seemed to possess something, there was always something missing. All the things one desired—no one could possess them all. And everyone was lonely—Fukui felt unbearable pity toward everyone, even himself.

Harvest moon—seven Komachi traverse the lake Was this a Bashō verse—he couldn't be certain—but even as he muttered such things to himself, Fukui's arm stretched out and settled on Hidee's shoulder. Hidee, like some soft-bodied sea creature, endured whatever contorted postures Fukui favored and let herself be pulled closer.

Fukui would occasionally attempt to send subtle inquiries to Masako. On picture postcards of the lake scenery, he wrote about washing linen undergarments in this beautiful water; on island postcards, he mentioned being two sen short for the ferry fare to this famous island and borrowing it from the inn. Then, about once every three or four attempts, a reply would come from Masako. They grew increasingly ethereal. “Lately I’ve had my poet friend Ms. Fujimura come over to study Baroque-era costumes,” or “Ms. Fujimura and I went to Nikko to see the Sleeping Cat sculpture by Hidari Jingorō—Japan’s Baroque-era genius sculptor. “Utterly adorable,” she might add.

At last she had begun to show unmistakable signs of detaching from reality. Fukui, not knowing what this "Baroque era" was, looked it up in an encyclopedia in the laboratory’s library. It appeared to be a seventeenth-century stylistic period where Renaissance humanism gradually detached from naturalness, achieved sublimation through human artifice alone, and pitiable artificial splendor bloomed like counterfeit flowers. When Fukui considered this alongside his piecemeal research into goldfish history, he realized the Genna era—when goldfish were first imported to Japan and began being kept as pets—coincided exactly with that period. So goldfish were Baroque-era creations—did this mean there existed some inseparable bond between her and goldfish after all?

While now feeling pity and contempt for her as an anachronistic idol-like woman, Fukui suddenly grew impatient again; his desire to shatter her transcendence, draw her back into reality, and bind her carnal passions to his own through blood seethed within him. This might have been a wish he had attempted countless times only to have it dissolve each instance, yet every resurgence filled Fukui with renewed fervor, leaving him powerless to resist.

“Physiologically speaking, and from the perspective of daily life, the physical form of the opposite sex is something that ought to be praised. Now, a woman by the lake reverently presents it to me and declares.”

Fukui found his own writing style gratingly sarcastic, but there was nothing to be done about it. And while writing letters that exaggerated how his relationship with Hidee—which he had in fact terminated some time ago—had now nearly ceased entirely, Fukui felt as though he had finally begun a serious battle against her and grew excited all by himself. Any feminine elements that Masako possessed—no matter what sort of reply she might write—could not possibly fail to be hinted at within it. If this were to become known to Masako’s father—even should his tuition support be cut off—testing Masako’s reactions had now become a matter more urgently pressing for Fukui than his goldfish research.

“The woman isn’t as beautiful as you, but…” he wrote, yet found himself unable to add “nor is she as heartless as you,” and Fukui smiled bitterly. Gradually intensifying his provocations, Fukui persistently laced each letter with increasingly suggestive allusions to his relationship with Hidee, yet Masako’s replies betrayed no trace of the feminine physicality he sought. Instead, they spoke solely of goldfish—how she and her father were cultivating an interest in them, her father’s motives blending industrial pragmatism while hers sprang from an oddly selfless fascination and affection. The tone implied that provided he didn’t neglect his goldfish research, she cared not what Fukui did or which women he consorted with. Just as Fukui—his feelings toward Masako perpetually parried—approached the limits of his endurance, a letter arrived from Masako that read as follows.

“I must apologize for remaining silent even as you’ve confided so much in me.” “I will soon give birth to a baby.” “And then I will marry.” “The order of things may be a bit reversed, but...” “Whichever way you look at it, it’s not such a passionate affair.” Fukui found himself utterly dumbfounded. In the end, she was a woman who had effortlessly soared above our course since birth. “The partner 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 more than enough for me.”

Fukui once again found his fussy, trick-laden intellectual disposition focused on useless things. That a woman could live by such a singular, uncomplicated principle in this modern age made him sense an unexpected modernity in her. "It’s nothing significant, but you really ought to marry that person too. When I’m getting married myself, I can’t help wanting to recommend it to others. But do keep working earnestly on the goldfish. Create something marvelous—a new breed so captivating one forgets everything while gazing at it. Somehow I find myself anticipating the new goldfish species born from your research almost more than my own baby, I must say. I’ve resolved to finally devote myself wholeheartedly to goldfish breeding at Father’s urging."

Around the same time, a letter from Kamezo reached Fukui. In it was calmly written an honest account of their household’s financial management since the economic panic; however, through decisive cuts they had managed to restructure into a compact formation, and therefore their policy of henceforth devoting all resources to goldfish cultivation and sales as a 100% promising export industry. “Therefore you shall no longer be a mere dilettante scholarship student, but work subordinated to the company’s objectives as an engineer-class technician—I will increase the remittance as your salary—”

Rather than his livelihood becoming stable, Fukui found himself consumed by an indiscriminate rebelliousness—those bastards at the cliff mansion had teamed up as parent and child to devour him.

Fukui sent no replies to Masako or her father, utterly abandoned his goldfish research for a time, and wandered aimlessly through Kyoto. But when he returned after about a month, resolve had already solidified in Fukui's heart. It was a resolve to create a new breed of goldfish—one of such rare and beautiful form as had never before existed in this world—and to make this his life’s work; to regard himself as a man harboring tragic happiness unknown to others, a nameless hero seized by mysterious destiny, staking his very life on seeing it through. Would this ultimately be exploited by the father and daughter of the cliff mansion? Be that as it may—if it were to become Masako’s joy, a joy he could never relinquish, then that very joy would bind Masako and him together… And yet, the strangeness and pathos of that ethereal beauty being drawn to an ethereal fish. Fukui gazed out the laboratory window at the spring lake viscous as melted candy while retracing with his tongue the memory of cherry blossom petals Masako had forced him to eat as a child—petals that still seemed to cling to the roof of his mouth.

As he called out Masako's name—"Masako, Masako"—Fukui shed tears so sentimental that even he found it absurd. Rumors grew that Fukui's neurasthenia had intensified and he had begun acting strangely. In truth, Fukui's figure—left alone in the deathly silent laboratory late at night preparing specimens—was terrifying. In the pitch-dark laboratory steeped in profound stillness, Fukui lit only the electric lamp above his desk. He split goldfish vertically one after another, sliced them into cross-sections, chopped them into pieces, and scattered their extracted organs across the surface—peering through his magnifying glass or manipulating forceps until deep into the night. His single-minded demeanor resembled a nocturnal raptor that had stumbled upon unexpected abundance, forgetting to devour its prey as it toyed with the bounty. The severed goldfish heads glowed translucently under the electric light, ruby-like eyes gaping wide, mouths occasionally opening and closing as if suddenly remembering.

For Fukui—a city-bred youth conditioned by stimuli to deploy his intellect across diverse domains—concentrating his talents into the smallest focal point through researching goldfish genetics and reproduction alone, a specialty within specialties requiring patience and endurance of monotony, demanded twice the effort of others. With sunken cheeks and eyes, Fukui—when believing his strength had finally given out—would slump to the window and lay a hand on the cover of one glass bowl among those arranged there. His fingertips ran cold as ice, yet pent-up excitement crackled through them, tangling his fingers into tremors. When he finally removed the cover, the prize Calico among the goldfish—which had been sleeping with eyes open atop pebbles—awakened its already open eyes under electric light, and the two fish clustered in one spot began swimming about with stately composure, now joining together, now separating. A tail fin three or four times larger than body length and width spread like sheer silk robes and skirts adorned with black-speckled stars, obscuring both body and head for a time. Soon from within emerged eyes and a mouth one might wish to depict with rounded bronze and moth-wing eyebrows—like a plump French beauty, as composed and majestic as a Tenpyō-era court lady—appearing abruptly.

Two or three years prior, there had been an aquatic products exhibition in O City, and this prize goldfish that won a gold medal at that event was donated to the laboratory, where it was being carefully raised. Having already reached seven or eight years of age—past middle age—its charm shed its youthful brashness. After staring intently for a while, Fukui covered the glass bowl as before, then as he returned to his seat, he repeatedly mimicked the same body twist that Calico had just performed. When asked by others, he would laugh and explain it as "Goldfish Exercise," extolling the merits of this health regimen. Yet in truth, whenever Fukui performed these motions, a more profound force—one he kept concealed—would begin restoring both mind and body. Fukui never explained it to anyone.

In any case, it was deeply unsettling how late at night he would contort his body in perfect synchronization with the fish's movements.

The night-duty janitor said. "When I enter the laboratory, please stop doing that. "It gives me such an uncanny feeling."

Fukui toured the Nara and Osaka prefectures in the Kansai region—areas famous for goldfish breeding grounds. Koriyama in Nara Prefecture had long been particularly prominent in goldfish cultivation due to its history as a small domain where impoverished samurai were granted exclusive breeding privileges to supplement their income, a practice protected and encouraged by authorities. In this small city of pristine beauty surrounded by rapeseed fields, Fukui stayed and gained various practical experiences useful for his specialized studies. What particularly struck him was how Koriyama's goldfish breeders had already begun developing new varieties during the Kan'ei era, with records suggesting repeated near-successes in producing exceptional specimens over subsequent years. Through deductive reasoning applied to measure the human ideals of beauty projected upon these goldfish, he conceived a design approximating the renowned specimens perfected by the Taisho era. Yet Fukui contemplated how people of old had desired such splendid complexity in these fish that modern goldfish still seemed imperfect by comparison. The world shifts; generations of people change. However, goldfish—these inedible ornamental creatures—while overcoming life's vicissitudes through their fragile beauty alone, had somehow drawn nearer to their goal of self-completion. Reflecting on this, it became conceivable that humans weren't creating goldfish, but rather that the fish's own purpose—luring and exploiting humanity's weakest instinct for beauty—was steadily advancing along its destined course. Sturdy goldfish—once Fukui realized this, even a desire for conquest took hold, intensifying his obsession.

Throughout summer's peak heat, Fukui walked his inspection routes; fifteen days after taking up residence at a lakeside inn, news of the Great Kanto Earthquake reached him. Initially, Fukui gave it little thought. Then came understanding of its terrible scale. Though Yamanote's high districts stood spared, relentless reports poured forth detailing Tokyo's smoldering ruins. Fukui tentatively inquired about returning. The return telegram—"NO NEED"—finally arrived after ten days' delay, letting Fukui breathe again.

From Kamezo came frequent administrative commands and inquiries concerning goldfish, all directed to Fukui. When Fukui, worried that people would no longer pay attention to something as frivolous as goldfish during such a disaster, made inquiries, Kamezo sent back this response. “According to old-timers, since the days of the old shogunate, goldfish have always sold well after such disasters.” “In the ravaged scorched ruins, there is nothing but goldfish to bring solace to the makeshift huts.” “The entire Tokyo goldfish industry has resolved to stay and rebuild their business on a doubled scale.”

Fukui had harbored some doubts that this was merely a merchant's usual exaggeration in writing, but such was not the case. The goldfish, initially put on sale with a twenty percent price increase, soon became unable to meet demand even when prices were raised another twenty percent. The fish ponds in the low-lying districts were nearly annihilated, but the Yamanote area survived. As they could import from the Kansai region, there was no shortage of goldfish themselves, but the destruction of goldfish tubs proved catastrophic. They distributed what remained on hand among their associates and sent people everywhere to have replacements urgently manufactured.

Due to imports from the Kansai region, orders for tubs, and other such tasks, Fukui had to remain in Kansai for a while longer. Finally summoned back by Kamezo, Fukui returned to Tokyo after four years' absence. His thesis remained unfinished. Classmates who had completed simpler research within the allotted time saw their papers approved the previous autumn—half a year prior—received their laboratory researcher completion certificates, and departed for their assigned posts. Though he had asked Kamezo to delay his return and could have finished his thesis if pressed, Fukui scorned such tidy little successes as irrelevant to his current state. He wanted to create just one resplendent goldfish resembling Masako with his own hands in his own pond—to sound victory's fanfare. This alone remained his life's final hope—that initial resolve to create an unprecedented beautiful goldfish breed had been meant solely to fulfill Masako's desire. Yet as years passed and research progressed, his psychology shifted. Compensation for never obtaining the real Masako became this urge surpassing his original resolve—to craft a beautiful fish evoking her image. Masako's ethereal beauty—nothing but goldfish's resplendent beauty could mirror it. Now Fukui's research and its realization grew increasingly into his desperate life's work.

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

“You’re a fool,” said the professor. “If you’d just compile your research into a proper paper, it could serve as a reference for goldfish scholars worldwide—” After bidding farewell to the still-grumbling professor who persisted in making such resentful remarks, Fukui returned to Tokyo in what amounted to a mid-degree withdrawal. He had not been entirely free from thoughts of burning the unfinished drafts or sinking them into the lake, but even that theatrical flair had faded, and with nothing more than a slight reluctance to discard them as mere scrap paper, he placed the manuscripts into his bag and carried them home.

Since it was spring of the year following the earthquake, Tokyo’s low-lying districts remained devastated, but Yamanote stood unchanged from how it had always been. At the house in the valley depression, because the spring water’s outlet had shifted slightly, they had channeled the pond water through bamboo gutters bound with palm-fiber bandages.

To deliver a greeting that combined returning home and resuming his duties, Fukui climbed the cliff and visited the cliffside residence. After Fukui thanked him for transporting the goldfish from Kansai, Kamezo said: “Truth be told, I got carried away and started dabbling in carp and eel farming too, but entrusting it to others hasn’t worked out.” “They’re all freshwater creatures—can’t be that different.” “How about putting you in charge of that side?” “If this succeeds, unlike goldfish, it’s food—so the market potential’s enormous.”

Of course, Fukui refused point-blank.

“That won’t do.” “It’s like ordering a poet to till fields.” “Not only that—I must insist you let me devote myself exclusively to breeding the highest-grade goldfish.” “In this pursuit, I’ll stake my very life.”

“I neither need a wife nor have any intention of leaving descendants. To create an exquisitely resplendent new breed of goldfish—this is my lifelong wish. If you come to think you’ve poured money into a misguided venture, I can only offer my deepest sympathies.” Seeing Fukui’s fervor and realizing his immovability, Kamezo began strategizing again, concluding there must still be some means to exploit this fixation for business once more.

“Interesting.” “Proceed.” “Until you create something that satisfies you, I too shall wait without pressing.” Kamezo himself, seemingly having regained a heroic mood for the first time in ages from his own bold words, grew cheerful and expressed a desire to share supper together; yet upon declining with the excuse of unavoidable business, he had a maid summon Masako and her husband as substitutes before departing.

For Fukui, there came several stifling minutes; then, the parlor door opened halfway, and Masako—her face unexpectedly shy—angled her upper body into view.

“It’s been a while.” And she did not readily step inside. Fukui felt a relieved sigh—the kind that escapes when something one had thirsted after for ages becomes satisfying through mere sight—rise spontaneously within him; the loneliness of solitude surged up with an unconditional urge to exchange smiles, yet something would not allow it. If he were to do that, he would immediately be trampled beneath the knees of her charm; the premonition that his painstakingly maintained resolve might effortlessly drain away likely made him wary. His stubbornness instead seized upon her unexpectedly timid demeanor; he steeled his resolve to display maximum strength and aloofness. He strained to project the authority of an older man who had endured hardships. “Please come in. Why won’t you enter?”

With childish affectation, she once pulled her face back slightly behind the door. When she now formally opened it and entered, her chest swelled as of old, her neck held with unshakable poise. On lips of that face as ethereal as ever rested a one-sided smile sweet as honey, while she cast a haze over her large, slightly drooping eyes through a direct gaze. Only her eyebrows were thickly drawn in the contemporary style. Fukui had already grown downcast, felt his fighting spirit wane, and had no choice but to withdraw into a lonely shell of solitude.

“It’s been a while—you’ve become quite thin.” Yet she hadn’t actually scrutinized Fukui with the care her words implied. “Yes. I’ve endured considerable hardships.” “Indeed.” “But they say hardship makes the best medicine.”

After that, for a while, the conversation strayed to topics like the earthquake and the lake where Fukui had been.

“Did you create any decent goldfish?” For Fukui at that moment, responding proved difficult due to various circumstances. He gathered his courage and counterattacked. “How fares your husband?”

“Nothing in particular.”

She peered briefly from the window at the thicket of trees beyond the main house’s veranda. “He’s not here right now.” “He loves basketball and goes to the YMCA—never comes home until the very last moment before dinner, oh hoho.”

For Fukui, it was agonizingly painful that he couldn't conclude from her manner of speaking—which treated her husband like a child—that she didn't love him. He couldn't bring himself to ask about her child. "Even if I introduced you, you wouldn't care about that person anyway." That much was true, he thought. If her husband didn't shatter this woman who was his idol, then that outcome would have to suffice. If her husband remained that mediocre, perhaps he could find solace in her keeping such a man.

“Thank you for occasionally sending things.” “This is pottery made near the lake.”

Fukui placed the paper-wrapped package and stood up.

"Oh, how unfortunate for you. Mr. Fukui's return has made me feel so much more reassured, I must say." Fukui felt his strength drain away upon encountering her ordinariness. Why he should be influenced by such a woman for his entire life—he found it strange.

As he began descending the dimming cliffside path, an evening warbler sang while kerria petals scattered in soft drifts. Fukui recalled once more how Masako had let cherry blossoms fall beneath her chin during their childhood days and involuntarily touched that spot with his tongue's tip. No matter what—I love her. This love had grown too disoriented, left suspended midair. It could no longer be openly directed toward her nor remain confined within his chest. In the end, there was no choice but to shape her through the goldfish I'd mastered breeding.

Fukui looked down from that distant vantage point at the Valley Depression pond visible below and summoned a peculiar resolve.

In the garden of the Valley Depression house, a modest concrete laboratory was built and a new-style breeding pool completed; for Fukui, this wasn't entirely without its pleasures. He shut himself away single-mindedly, neither interacting with relatives nor friends. He had also tactfully informed the people of the cliff mansion that he would prefer they not visit until the day his research was complete.

“Buried in surfaces yet gnawing deeper into life’s essence.”

He was not entirely without that sense of substantial fulfillment.

To create his own lover with his own hands... That was also a new star beautifully born into this world... This truth was known to no one in all the world. He indulged in a desolate, constricted sentiment. He framed the "Divine Fish Floral Garland Scroll" he had found at an antique shop in Kōriyama, hung it on the wall, set out a chair on the veranda, and gazed at it from there. The early summer wind rustled gently against him. There was a volatile scent of fresh green leaves. Suddenly, he became concerned whether the new caretaker was properly caring for the middle-aged Calico beauty kept at the lakeside laboratory.

“Without courage enough to abandon such antiquated things to their fate, one could never complete this grand endeavor of creating something new.” Hidee’s form flickered through his mind as an afterthought.

He deliberately imagined the Calico afflicted with rough rot—its body covered in rust-colored lesions, unable even to gasp for breath—foully floating upon the water's surface. In addition, he imagined that it was also Hidee's form. Then something hot raced up both sides of his spine and painfully surged up to his throat. He bit his lip and clamped down on it near his jaw. "I'm fine," he said.

That year was somewhat late in the season for goldfish breeding, and since the pool’s lye had not yet fully dissipated, he decided against allowing spawning—Fukui turned his attention to investigating the parent fish. He thoroughly visited every commercial breeder and amateur goldfish keeper across Tokyo. The fish he inspected—their owners would not relinquish them. Then he would spew venomous words and denounce those goldfish.

“There’s no bastard as detestable as Fukui. “He’s a giant water bug.” Such rumors spread among the goldfish breeders’ community. Giant water bugs are ferocious pests that attack goldfish. Despite being spoken of in such terms, he managed by hook or by crook to obtain those sibling fish. According to the policy he had established with conviction, he intended to create his ideal fish by further accelerating crossbreeding between different varieties—adding another layer to already perfected cultured breeds like Calico and Shukin.

When the next spring breeding season arrived, the nuptial tubercles signaling mating season—centered around the male fishes' pectoral fins—opened like glistening eyes in a spring evening sky. Then the fishes' "sexuality" compelled them into behavior they themselves seemed unable to endure. They cruised in formations more majestic than fish ought to manage, like a naval fleet, only to peck sharply at each other the next instant like gamecocks. Their bodies twisted abnormally, twisting and twisting again, trying to scour away the burning slime with water. Fukui—who had become like a wooden puppet, his carnal desires nearly all diverted elsewhere by willpower's obstruction—upon seeing this, somehow grew faintly aware of his own existence in the world, and uncharacteristically began taking solitary strolls through Roppongi's night streets or ordering a single bottle of beer with his evening meals.

Otsune, his adoptive mother who had brought it,

“Since we’ve already retired, we’d like you to hurry up and find a wife so we can truly relax.” She urged him to marry in a conventional manner.

“My wife is a goldfish.”

Amidst his drunkenness—intending to drive a wedge into such personal matters—when Fukui said this, his adoptive mother “No way—you weren’t particularly fond of goldfish even as a child, were you?” she said. Sōjūrō, Fukui’s adoptive father, enticed by the rising trend of classical revivalism at the time, had wanted to return to being an Ogiebushi instructor. Taking up his shamisen plectrum after prefacing his reminiscences that it had been forty years, Ogiebushi

The pine endures hardship—people each say, “Ah, the root pine.” Oh, still so young—Ah, princess sapling pine. How many flowers bloom—plum, peach, cherry. A single tree in full bloom—double-flowered and single-flowered….

Fukui could not tell whether it was skillful or clumsy, but when he heard the resonant, hoarse voice coming from the main house beyond the forsythia blossoms, he felt profound pity for this single human being feebly poling against the current of obsession. His adoptive father continued churning out inferior goldfish like pasture grass as usual, but since Kamezo’s company purchased whatever he produced, he didn’t have to struggle with sales.

However,

“They price things so cheaply that amateur merchants can’t compete.” “Fukui, since Kamezo’s taken a liking to you, make sure to squeeze out plenty in return.” Sōjūrō muttered. And acting as Fukui’s proxy, he took substantial research funds from Kamezo and took great pleasure in it.

Fukui diligently changed the pool water while silently letting his parents' words wash over him. He carefully placed together the male and female fish that had been kept separately. Then he sank the sterilized willow root tendrils—which he had painstakingly gathered from the murky lake depths—clamped between ropes.

There was a morning when the sky hung clear yet stagnant in deep navy blue, small birds' wings and backs clinging to sunlight like syrup. Fukui, having tried sticking his hand out from the veranda into the air and thrusting out his cheeks, soon—

There was no wind. “All right—” he said. When he lifted a section of the reed screen covering the sun—about three hand-widths—creating a peephole to watch through as he waited, the three male fish formed a line and attacked in succession like naval rams, attempting to drive a single female fish into the cluster of willow roots. The female avoided them as much as she could, trying to escape. Why was this? Was it due to maidenly shame? Was it that 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 fish scattered her spawn—beautiful small pearls—among the willow root tendrils and fled. The male fish flashed their victorious bellies as they administered electric shocks to each spawning.

When he came to his senses, Fukui found himself with both elbows planted on his crouched knees, his clenched fingers pressed to his mouth as he bit down hard on their knuckles while praying fervently from the depths of his heart. No matter how insignificant, the act of bringing life into this world was not something that could be treated carelessly. For those afflicted with misanthropy like Fukui, the further removed the life-bearing creatures were from humanity, the more intensely this impulse gripped them. All the more so that these different varieties of goldfish he had been apprehensive about were cooperating to bring forth life for Fukui’s egoistic purposes—he felt that no amount of gratitude could suffice.

For their recuperation, he separated the female and male fish into different enclosures. As he cooked light white-fleshed fish to provide nourishment, Fukui—though a man—felt his emaciated body swelling with maternal tenderness. However, the fry that hatched that year proved more coquettish and vulgar than Fukui had desired. After failing thus for two consecutive years, Fukui began reconstructing his plan entirely from its foundation. He realized his error lay in the very framework of his parent fish. The beautiful fish he sought absolutely required a torso embodying a young girl’s innocence, to which he must then add splendor and coquettish hues. For this purpose, no goldfish possessed such a torso except one crafted from the original Ranchu breed. Within Fukui surfaced the innocent figure of Masako as a child, resembling her childhood Ranchu. In any case—being so frequently swayed by Masako—he found himself gripped anew by a frustration long unfelt. That very pain now felt almost nostalgic.

However, he roused his weakening heart—even if surrendering to Masako’s influence meant returning to the Ranchu’s simplicity—reasoning that if he could first craft a single goldfish to match her current aesthetic standard, make it a parent fish to spawn offspring upon offspring, then even if progressing beauty in his goldfish advanced but slowly hereafter, each step would mark his victory, and he could subjugate those triumphant beauties to himself—thus forcibly igniting his fighting spirit. Considering this point, Fukui concluded that he should endure for the time being. Fukui procured splendid Ranchu parent fish from the Kansai region and waited for the coming spring of spawning. The Ranchu had an innocently cute body. But its face was as fierce as a bulldog’s, and when crossbreeding with a goldfish of delicate beauty, first removing that ferocity became crucial.

Fukui, who rarely approached the cliff mansion either, seldom encountered Masako’s husband—but this man who was Masako’s husband had eyes that tapered with nervous intensity, a straight nose bridge, slightly prominent cheekbones, and the sharp vitality of masculinity, making him a handsome young gentleman. One Sunday morning, he brought Masako and a girl to the Romanesque tea arbor, where he read a foreign-language newspaper. At that moment, Fukui—who had been about to descend after collecting fish meal from a polluted water pool midway down the cliff below—suddenly glanced up toward them; but Fukui, feigning ignorance of what he saw, briskly continued down the cliff. While Masako was there with her husband, she somehow felt uneasy about the two of them being together.

“Why not? What’s wrong with it?” Her husband said casually. “But sitting here together like this—we’re visible from everywhere.” Masako stated flatly. “Why would it matter if people saw you and me here?” A tinge of sarcasm laced her husband’s words. “There’s nothing inherently wrong, but the Tanikubo house residents can see us. That man remains unmarried, after all.” “You mean Mr. Fukui, the goldfish technician?”

“Yes.”

Then, slightly excited and contemptuously, the husband said: “You should’ve married that man instead, I suppose.” Then Masako, straying from the target of his remarks, assumed her usual ethereal expression and said:

“I have an absolute preference for delicate refinement,” “When it comes to a husband—” “I couldn’t possibly share meals with someone lacking it.” “No competing with that,” “For you.” The husband—now beyond anger or laughter—said, “Shall we take to the baths then?” and carried their child indoors. Afterwards in the Romanesque pavilion, Masako sat smoldering with inscrutable thoughts, her gaze lingering on Azabu’s winter-barren plateau where pale sunlight clung to the earth’s curve.

“Since the carp and eel farming isn’t going well, Kamezo seems to be struggling quite a bit these days.” “If the fish farm starts eating up money, that’ll be a major problem, you know.” They built and built, yet the spring water kept buoying up the fence’s foundation. Kamezo had carelessly chosen the location on the brackish inlet’s sandbar shore within the prefecture. Moreover, with fish farms in Shizuoka Prefecture near urban areas developing and supplying carp and eels by leveraging transportation advantages, Kamezo’s company could not avoid fierce competition in selling its own farmed fish. However, the acute manifestation of this blow was undoubtedly the unprecedented financial panic that struck the business world this spring, with a moratorium being implemented toward the end of the blooming season. The bank that had been handling Kamezo’s financial maneuvers remained closed, with rumors circulating that reopening was unlikely.

“I wonder if we could somehow have Mr. Fukui’s research expenses reduced”—even Kamezo’s famously dark countenance betrayed a flicker of weakness as he said it. Despite having ultimately consented to Kamezo’s demand that Fukui’s research funds be cut to one-third, the old man recounted Kamezo’s financial desperation to Fukui with grim relish.

While listening as if it were someone else’s affair, Fukui prepared winter accommodations for the pair of Ranchu delivered from Kansai. In the pool thickly wrapped with rush mats, their stubby fins and tails wriggled busily under faint sunlight—warm golden light pierced his eyes from their ash-gray skin as their adorably rotund bodies, awkwardly plump, labored forward. Fukui sensed living essence in them and dead ashes within himself, finding it strangely amusing to imagine himself split in two. Fukui laughed aloud for the first time in years. Then Sōjūrō thumped his back and spoke.

“You scared me! Laughing like a madman like that—even someone as easygoing as me got a chill.”

As the year drew to a close with word that Masako had borne her second daughter, Fukui saw out the year without glimpsing her at the cliff-top shrine—not until plum blossoms bloomed did he first behold her figure. Having borne another child, her beauty—like algae hues after water renewal—grew ever more lucid and resplendent. She felt she had drawn near even to the aura of Fukui's framed sacred fish ornament displayed in his laboratory. That day found Masako at the Romanesque pavilion since afternoon with poet Ms.Fujimura. The two women conversed earnestly. Even Fukui—now skeletal and gaunt—ached to discern their topic. Under pretense of gathering red water fleas at dusk, he furtively climbed to a mid-cliff sewage pool and crouched there. Though not yet thirty, his physique and movements mirrored those of an aged man. Their discussion apparently concerned some longstanding matter. Yet words remained indistinct at Fukui's post. The exchange's essence emerged thus... When Masako proposed redecorating in Rococo style, Ms.Fujimura interposed what seemed a bitter pause—

“Even four or five years ago when you became obsessed with Baroque, I secretly thought it was too artificial and didn’t agree.” “All the more so with moving toward Rococo—it’s even more artificial.” “As a taste, it shouldn’t be about beauty teetering on the edge of ruin.” “But I simply can’t help wanting to do it that way.”

“Ms. Masako, you’re quite peculiar, aren’t you?” “I wonder... I suppose it’s that disposition you once spoke of regarding me—actually gazing at the azure sky and clouds and perceiving them as sea and islands.”

Fukui quietly descended into the garden and slipped into the laboratory along the eaves as dusk approached, careful not to draw attention. He settled by the crude chair there and closed his eyes. He had hardly met directly with Masako in recent days. Even when she visited the central shrine with friends today, or came with her children or husband, he could scarcely discern any of their conversations. Yet from afar he still sensed her presence—now he felt an ephemeral sorrow well up within him at how she might have forgotten even the goldfish entrusted to him, how she seemed to vaporize further into some unearthly beauty.

Fukui, who had begun fundamental crossbreeding from Ranchu, took three years to create the basic skeletal framework of the goldfish. Then he set out anew on his annual failures.

"The sun sets while the path remains long." When goldfish that deviated from his objectives were created, Fukui would say this. Yet he merely uttered it without any emotion. Feeling himself gradually turning into a living skeleton—This won’t do—he would forcibly gaze at Masako even from afar, summoning hostility, jealousy, and hatred to inject resilience into his willpower. The old pond had amassed a considerable number of failed prize goldfish. As Fukui absolutely refused to sell them, Sōjūrō and his wife ended up discarding the fish into the Old Pond below the cliff while grumbling. With wry smiles, they called this pond the dumping ground for unwanted goldfish.

And so another ten years of failure passed. Some changes occurred above and below the cliff. Kamezo died, the adopted son-in-law became master of the cliff mansion, and he drastically scaled back operations while maintaining their continuation. Despite having Masako as his beautiful wife, rumors spread that the husband who became master took up with a Chin-like maid, treating her as his mistress. When the husband took over, the research funds from above the cliff were discontinued, and thus Fukui became a completely isolated and helpless researcher.

After Sōjūrō’s death, even the sign at the small gate by the roadside of the Ogiebushi instructor’s residence—now with only one or two disciples—was taken down. Masako still occasionally appeared at the Romanesque pavilion. The passage of reality had only served to enhance the charm of her habitually furrowed brows. As she neared middle age, her beauty grew ever more refined. In late autumn of 1932, a major storm struck the Keihin region, drenching Tokyo with rainfall measuring 3 koku and 1 to per tsubo. The large ditches in the valley overflowed, washing away the carefully bred parent goldfish.

Similarly, the torrential rain of mid-autumn 1935 measured 1 koku and 3 to per tsubo—this time too it nearly washed everything away.

Because of this, from the following years onward whenever autumn arrived, Fukui’s nerves grew increasingly frayed. Even slight low-pressure systems aggravated his nervous irritability, leaving him tossing and turning through sleepless nights. He had long suffered from insomnia and needed sleeping pills to combat his worsening inability to fall asleep—as autumn nights drew near, he found himself compelled to increase his dosage. That night had shown no particular warning of a low-pressure system, but from midnight onward it began drizzling intermittently. With autumn’s arrival, Fukui trembled in bed muttering “This is it,” attempting repeatedly to rise only for his consciousness to remain hazy and his body utterly numb. When the rain’s sound intensified he would startle, yet the drug’s power soothed this nervous agitation, instead deepening his drowsiness afterward. Propped on both elbows in a half-risen posture, mouth and eyes half-open, Fukui lay snoring for some time. By the time the drug’s effects finally wore off and he managed to rise, dawn was nearing.

The rain stopped, and swift clouds raced across the sky. In the leaden valley between earth and heavens, trees stood crushed like sodden umbrellas, wantonly dripping white droplets from their leaves. The cliff face glistened darkly with moisture, its sand layers bleeding water into broad horizontal stripes. Atop the precipice, the Romanesque pavilion withdrew from sight like some ancient fortress—this solitary structure appearing unnaturally rigid against its surroundings. Seven or eight goldfish lay motionless while algae and bulrushes lay trampled underfoot from last night's windstorm. Only water droplets pattering on leaves reached his ears; nothing else seemed amiss in this stillness. A crow's dull cry tore through dawn's gauzy mist above roadside rooftops as it passed.

The water in the large ditch had risen but not enough to overflow; what was usually a murmuring stream now swelled into a broad current brimming with rushing water that somehow felt anticlimactic. "This isn't so bad." Muttering this to himself, Fukui staggered barefoot along the red clay path toward the pool for good measure, the hem of his nightgown clinging to his heels as he lumbered sluggishly downward. When the pool came into view, a chill ran through him - his heart seized by an electric jolt of panic.

From the soil layer along the path's midpoint, seepage water from the large ditch leaked out soundlessly, smoothly stripping away the pool's reed screen and tearing open the wire mesh with gaping jaws. The water current that had surged into the pool struck the bottom, rebounded upward, spilled outward in all directions, then overflowed from the pool's edge like crystalline springwater gushing from a natural well. When Fukui peered inside, only pebbles lining the bottom and torn algal roots stood vivid; no shadow or trace of goldfish remained visible. Fukui erupted in fury and kicked at the wire mesh—its edge barely clinging by residual fastenings—with an enraged foot. In that instant, his bare foot slipped on red clay, and as he fell sideways, the waterfall-like torrent coursing down the sloped path effortlessly swept up Fukui—now reduced to skin and bones—carrying him all the way to the old pond's brink beneath the cliff. Fukui barely managed to arrest his motion at last in the decaying leaf-mold mire there.

Even now, after years of striving to obtain his ideal new species—a path still requiring countless crossbreedings and innovations with bleak prospects ahead—if he were to lose the parent goldfish in the pool to these waters, fourteen years of painstaking effort would vanish like bubbles, leaving him with nothing at all. Fukui, utterly spent in both body and spirit, collapsed in a heap beside the Old Pond—now dark and cavernous as a cavern—and remained unconscious for some time.

After some time, when Fukui regained consciousness, the world had dawned in a rose hue, and the valley basin brimmed with the vibrant breath of all living things. The thin film of clouds overhead was rapidly peeling away, as if straining out the shining blue sky now. What a fresh and fervent breath from the grasses and trees! Green, birch, orange, yellow—each cluster of leaves cradled within its swelling a vital core, appearing to gasp with the strain of overflowing life. The disheveled thicket, tremblingly shaking off dewdrops, expanded into a breast-shaped straw-bale form, mounding itself into a rounded contour.

Wherever Fukui turned his attentive ear, the murmur of flowing water freely reached him; the sound of this makeshift stream rhythmically animated the natural scene unfolding before his eyes, making him feel as though he—along with the very earth—were being transported into infinite space, journeying eternally upon white clouds. As all shadows deepened into lapis lazuli and all bright areas coalesced into two entrancing hues of amber, a section of tiled roof by the roadside suddenly blazed white-hot, splitting open violet-white radiance to cast forth twisted ribbons of light toward those gazing upon the valley hollow.

The early autumn sun rose clear as a polished mirror. Birdsong now flew bustlingly through space's tapestry, vivid threads stitching here and there. When Fukui regained consciousness—having lost it to cerebral anemia from extreme tension—his mind and body had become a single transparent vessel of pure observation: recalling nothing, contemplating nothing, merely reflecting nature's unadulterated beauty as images while transforming into ecstatic trance itself.

He perceived the blue warped shapes of the seven goldfish ponds as if they were footprints of ancient giant beasts, gazing vacantly at their beautiful speckled patterns on the ground. As sunlight began filtering through and his consciousness grew clearer, what appeared before his eyes was the Old Pond—now perceived like some primordial grotto witnessed for the first time. This was where he had kept his failed masterpieces—those prized fish he could neither sell nor release—abandoned for over a decade. Out of compassion, Sōjūrō and his wife had occasionally fed them, but after their deaths, no one tended to these pitiful creatures that survived long on algae and duckweed in the pond. To see this pond's bizarre malformed goldfish meant confronting his failures anew, so Fukui had scarcely approached it. At times he'd sensed a resentful presence smoldering around this half-overgrown pool—a cloying aura of trapped vitality—but dismissed it as delusions born of neurasthenia.

Now, with the old reed cover stripped away by the storm and the morning sun streaming in, he saw the surface of that old pond vividly—for what felt like the first time in years. Just as some emotion was about to arise in his heart, he fixed his eyes on the pond’s surface and drew a deep breath into his lungs. The pond was a dense blue-green, its water thick with algae. In its very center, dozens of creases—more membranous than white gauze—undulated softly, tangling and untangling as they rippled outward. They rippled apart only to spread open once more. Their size might have been likened to a white peony broadly encircled by the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. That was a single goldfish. The white gauze-like fins resembling white peonies bore violet, vermilion, wisteria, pale blue, and other colored spots, intermingled with ink-black and antique-gold speckles, creating kaleidoscopic splendor and undulating layers of allure—opulent yet gracefully elegant, bashfully innocent—rippling and expanding, expanding and rippling, then rippling and expanding once more, moving with such mystical grace as though their very existence were being orchestrated from some infinite distance. Fukui’s chest swelled until he could no longer endure the frayed, visceral shock straddling reality and unreality—a shock so intense it made him want to press his flesh against tree roots and jagged rocks.

“This—this very thing—is the ideal supreme fish I tried but failed to create through over a decade of grueling effort.” “Which of the goldfish I had discarded and neglected as failures had mated when and how, hatching into this?” As Fukui’s consciousness repeated these thoughts, his carnal passions were utterly overwhelmed by an immense allure—sucked out, scattered—until finally, immobilized by a single thread of fulfillment that had seeped deep into the very core of his heart.

“Consciously seeking yet failing to obtain what one desires through intended means, while life’s wonders are abruptly bestowed from discarded pasts and unforeseen crossroads”—as this realization flashed through Fukui’s mind, the beautiful fish that had once sunk only to resurface now fully spread its tufted tail fins once more, its starry round eyes and globular mouth turning unmistakably to face him directly. “Ah… It resembles neither Masako… nor the Divine Fish and Floral Canopy Painting… More than that… more than that… It’s a more beautiful goldfish… a goldfish!”

Was it disappointment? No—something beyond joy? Overwhelmed, Fukui’s body collapsed limply into the muddy banks of the pond. Before Fukui—who remained as he was, breathing heavily through his shoulders with eyes shut tight—upon the water’s surface, the beautiful fish like a new star discovered by Fukui paraded majestically with a retinue of many lesser goldfish, its chest puffed out proudly, its opulent and resplendent tail fins shimmering in the sunlight as it glided in dazzling splendor.

(October 1937)