7

In the old pond a good many famous-grade rejects had collected. Since Fukuichi absolutely refused to sell them, Sōjūrō and his wife, grumbling, fed them as one casts them away into the old pond at the cliff’s foot. Sōjūrō and his wife smiled wryly and called this pond the goldfish poorhouse — the place where the old are abandoned.

Then ten more years of failure went by. There had been some shifting, above the cliff and below. Teizō died, and the son-in-law became master of the cliff house, carrying it on with the enterprise pared right down. Though the master who became the husband had so beautiful a wife as Masako, the rumor spread that he had laid hands on a lapdog-faced little maidservant and was keeping her all but as a mistress. With the son-in-law’s generation, the research funds from atop the cliff were cut off, and Fukuichi became a wholly isolated, unaided researcher.

Sōjūrō died, and the little gate-board of the Ogie-bushi master with his one or two pupils was taken down from the door by the road.

Masako, as before, showed herself now and then in the Romanesque rest-pavilion. The shifting of reality served only to add charm to the somewhat-habitual way she knit her brows. As a beauty nearing middle age she grew, more and more, clear and brilliant again.

In the late autumn of Shōwa 7 — 1932 — a great storm struck the Tokyo-Yokohama region, and with a rainfall, by the old measure, of over three koku to the tsubo of ground, the great ditch of the valley hollow overflowed too, and washed away one half of a hard-won breeding-stock goldfish.

Likewise the heavy rains of mid-autumn of Shōwa 10 — 1935 — at over one koku three to per tsubo, all but washed them away this time as well.

For such reasons, from each following year, when autumn came Fukuichi was on edge in his nerves. The slightest low-pressure front set his temper on end, and at night he could not sleep, fretting. Having for a good while now been afflicted with insomnia, unable to drop off without taking a sleeping draught, he had to strengthen the drug, more and more, for the sake of sleep on the near-autumn nights.

That night there had been no forecast of a low-pressure front in particular, but from the middle of the night it began, little by little, to rain. Just because it was the start of autumn, Fukuichi, terrified in his bed — “There, it’s come” — tried again and again to get up, but his consciousness was dim, and his body felt all but numb. When the sound of the rain grew fierce he started, but the terror of his nerves was soothed by the power of the drug, and, on the contrary, just afterward it deepened his drowsiness. Lying on his back in bed, both elbows braced, in the very posture of one trying to rise, his mouth and eyes half open, Fukuichi snored a while. When at last the drug’s power faded and Fukuichi could get up, it was near daybreak.

The rain had stopped, and the clouds of the sky ran fast. In the leaden heaven and earth of the valley hollow the trees, heavy as wet umbrellas, wrung themselves out, dropping white drops in disarray. The cliff-face was black with damp, and within it the sand-stratum that seeped water made great horizontal stripes. The Romanesque rest-pavilion at the cliff’s edge had withdrawn from sight like an old castle-fort, and this one thing alone looked hard, out of key with all around it.

The seven or eight goldfish ponds lay hushed, and the water-plants and bulrushes were trodden flat in the wake of the wind’s violence. As a sound to catch the ear there was only the drip of water-drops falling; otherwise there seemed nothing amiss. The voice of a dull, heartless crow passed, ripping open the thin morning mist above the roof of a dwelling by the road.

The water of the great ditch had risen, but not so far as to overflow, and the usual purling, swollen now to a full, broad current, had on the contrary gone vacant and dull.

“At this rate, it’s nothing much,”

Fukuichi muttered, and to make sure, on his bare heels staggering down the red-clay path with the hem of his nightclothes plastered to them, he trod his sloping way down a little toward the pool.

When the pool came into view, Fukuichi went cold, and felt his heart take a shock like an electric stroke.

From the stratum of earth midway down the little path, the seep-water of the great ditch had leaked, and silently, on the level, had stroked down the pool’s reed-blind and torn the wire-net open in a great gaping mouth. The force of the water that had poured into the pool struck the bottom and sprang up from there, falling away on every side, brimming over the pool’s edge like the clear water of a natural welling-well.

When Fukuichi looked in, only the pebbles of the bottom and the torn-off roots of the water-plants showed clear; of the goldfish, not a shadow, not a shape was to be seen.

Fukuichi, flaring up, kicked away with an angry foot the wire-net whose binding barely held at one edge. With that, one of his bare feet slipped on the red clay, and as he toppled sideways the force of water that ran like a cataract down the sloping little path bore Fukuichi, gone all skin and bone, lightly away and dropped him as far as the bank of the old pond at the cliff’s foot. Fukuichi at last barely held his footing there, in the mire of leaf-mold.

When, to gain the ideal new breed he had longed for so many years, there still lay ahead a dark and dismal road of many a crossing and many a contrivance yet to be heaped up — and now, if on top of it all he were to lose the parent goldfish of the pool to this water, then fourteen years of painstaking effort would come to froth, and he would lose the all of it, root and seed. Spirit and strength spent at one stroke, Fukuichi collapsed, crumpling, beside the old pond that deepened black as a cavern, and for a while lost consciousness.

After a while, as Fukuichi’s consciousness came back to him, heaven and earth had broken open into a rose-color, and all the myriad things of the valley hollow breathed the breath of teeming life through the whole basin. The thin film of cloud overhead, as if straining out the shining blue sky even now, was peeling away before his very eyes.

What fresh, rich-passioned breathing of grass and tree was this! Green and birch-brown and orange and yellow — each leafy thicket held, within its own swelling, one strong breast apiece, and seemed to gasp with overflowing life. The disheveled clumps of grass, shaking off the dew-drops with a shiver, were heaping their shapes anew into rounded bales, plump as a swelling, milk-full breast.

Everywhere he turned the attention of his ear, the sound of running water could be freely heard, and the murmur of those hastily-made little brooks set into rhythm, into a dynamic thing, the nature unfolding before his eyes, and made Fukuichi, who listened and listened, feel as though he were borne, earth and all, into infinite space, journeying eternally up above the white clouds.

When all the shadows had been brought under a deep lapis-lazuli, and all the bright places under a rapt amber — the two of them — a corner of the tiled roof on the roadside flared suddenly white-hot, flung open a spray of violet-white light, and cast the tape of glittering beams it spun out across all the things of the valley hollow that looked toward it.

The early-autumn sun, like a mirror-face washed clear, had risen. The cries of the little birds, livelier than ever, flew sewing this way and that across the fresh, distinct tapestry of space.

Having, at the height of his strain, fallen into a fit of cerebral anemia and lost consciousness once, then recovered it — Fukuichi’s body and mind had become a single transparent vessel of contemplation, remembering nothing, thinking nothing, only mirroring and holding the very bewitchment of nature as an image, transformed into rapture itself.

He felt the warped blue shapes of the seven goldfish ponds as the footprints of some vast primeval beast, and gazed vacantly, entranced, at those lovely speckled spots upon the ground. As the sun came mirroring in and his consciousness too grew clear, the old pond just before his eyes was perceived, for the first time, like some ancient grotto newly seen. It was the old pond where, for more than ten years, refusing to sell and unable to release them, he had kept his famous-grade rejects in cast-off keeping; the pond where, by Sōjūrō and his wife’s kindness, they had now and then been given feed; but after the couple’s death no one cared for them, and the pitiful fish had lived on long in the pond’s water-plants and blue scum. To look at the strange, malformed goldfish of this pond was like seeing again the scars of his failures, and Fukuichi all but never went near this old pond. Now and then he had felt an air of resentful living things, their life sealed and pent in gloom, smoldering up about this pond half-covered with its old straw matting; but Fukuichi had laid that to a delusion bred of his nervous breakdown.

Now, the storm having stripped the old matting away, in the morning sun pouring in he saw, vividly, for the first time in how many years, the surface of that old pond. The instant he did, before any emotion could rise in his heart, he fixed his eyes hard on the pond’s surface and drew a strong breath full into his lungs. …Behold — the pond was the deep water-color of blue scum. And in its very midst, in riotous profusion, scores of folds more membranous, more gossamer than white gauze, came writhing and twining out, swaying and tangling. Swaying and parting, they opened again. Its size — one might describe it as a white peony as large as a broad ring made of both thumbs and forefingers. That was a single goldfish. On the white-gauze fins of that white-peony thing there were besides flecks of violet, scarlet, wisteria, pale-blue, and ink-color and old-gold flecks mingled too, heaping a kaleidoscopic gorgeousness, a billowing, one upon another — bewitchingly, sumptuously, and yet demurely, modestly, innocently swaying and spreading, spreading and swaying, swaying again and spreading, and moving, besides, in a mysterious way, as if its life were worked from some infinitely far-off distance. Fukuichi’s breast swelled to bursting, and he came near unable to bear the shock of a slack, threadbare carnal feeling, between the real and the unreal, that made him want to rub his very flesh against tree-root and rock-edge.

“This — this is the ideal, the supreme fish, that I labored and agonized fourteen years to make and could not make. Which and which of the goldfish I cast off as rejects and never gave a glance — when, how, did they cross and hatch to make this?”

As Fukuichi’s consciousness ran over this again and again, his carnal feeling was, more and more, overpowered by a more-than-mighty bewitchment, sucked out, scattered abroad, until at last he could not stir for the single thread of fulfillment that had soaked, hushed, to the very bottom of his heart.

When “the strangeness of a life in which one does not gain what one seeks in the direction one consciously seeks it, but is given it abruptly, towering up, out of the past one has cast off and thrown away, out of some byway never looked for” flashed across the bottom of Fukuichi’s heart, the beautiful fish — which had once begun to sink and then floated up again to the surface — spread its bushy tail-fins once more to the full, and the round, pellet eyes that seemed to harbor a star, and the round little mouth too, turned full upon Fukuichi, clear and plain.

“Ah — it resembles neither Masako nor the Picture of the Divine-Fish Garland… more than that… more than that… it is a more beautiful goldfish, a goldfish!”

Was it disappointment? No — a joy beyond even that? Fukuichi, overcome with feeling, crumpled and sank down into the mire at the pond’s bank. On the water before him, where Fukuichi went on heaving his breath through his shoulders, his eyes shut, the beautiful fish, like a new-found star, now drawn forth into being by Fukuichi, leading its train of many a common goldfish, threw out its breast leisurely, and, its opulent, sumptuous tail-fins shining in the sunlight, cruised on, in riotous profusion.

(October 1937)