Child Peering into Goldfish Bowl (Part 2)

The sky grew steadily darker, but the light in the tatami room would not turn on. I tried the light in the dining room, only to be met with the same results.

I was struck by how oddly unused the dining room seemed to be. Perhaps as a single man living alone he simply ate out every day, but it was strange indeed that there wasn’t even anything to drink in the refrigerator. Where had the barley tea he had served me earlier come from? I glanced into the trash can, but even that was empty, and the watermelon rinds were nowhere to be seen. I certainly hadn’t hallucinated myself eating the watermelon, and I’d definitely heard the sound of him throwing the rinds away. It didn’t seem very plausible that the long creatures had snuck in while I was in a daze and polished them off.

I returned to the tatami room, but the darkness only continued to close in. Eventually I’d be reduced to sitting there alone helplessly, trying not to breathe too loudly. The sound from beneath the floorboards was back, and it seemed to be louder than before. I supposed it was the darkness that was heightening my senses.

Normally I wouldn’t just wait around so patiently in such an eerie place, but I couldn’t leave without my clothes. Thankfully my wallet was inside my suitcase, but I could hardly make an appearance at home clad only in this yukata.

While I paced back and forth, I began to hear a scraping noise coming from the second floor. I assumed the creature must have burrowed in somehow and gotten upstairs, but the noise soon died away. I imagined a lithe shadow threading through the darkness. Unable to suppress my curiosity I decided to go up and take a look.

I made my way back to the front hall, where a dark staircase stretched up to the second floor. I fearfully tread up the stairs, but I was only halfway up when a mask-like face suddenly loomed from the darkness.

“Whoa!” I flinched, before my fear was replaced by indignation. “Don’t scare me like that, dammit!”

It was my friend who, despite supposedly having gone out to buy dinner, was now coming down from the second floor. A smile was plastered on his face, and yet somehow it didn’t look to me like he was smiling at all.

“I thought you’d gone out. Do you know how long I’ve been waiting here?”

“I’d just come back, you see.”

“I didn’t hear you come back.”

“No? You probably weren’t paying attention.”

I didn’t find his answer very convincing, but he insisted that was what had happened.

“What were you doing on the second floor?”

“Looking for this.” He showed me a bundle of candles. “The lights are out, if you haven’t noticed.”

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He prepared dinner by candlelight. Saying that he “prepared” it was pretty generous though, considering that all he did was put what appeared to be convenience store food onto plates. If I’d known this how it was going to be I would have suggested that we just go out somewhere nearby.

“The creatures must have dragged them away,” he said matter-of-factly when I told him that my clothes had gone missing while I was in the shower. His apparent lack of concern infuriated me.

“Come on, this isn’t funny.”

“They come in rummaging for food. Happens all the time.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do? Are you telling me to go home wearing nothing but a yukata?”

“All right, I’ll lend you some of my clothes later, you can wear those.”

I didn’t see another way out of it.

“Hey, look at that,” he said, picking up a bottle of shochu that was sitting at his feet as if to make me feel better.

Guiding us by candlelight he carried the ready-made meal to the tatami room. By now night had fallen, and the meager light of the candles was hardly enough to penetrate the darkness outside, where I could sense the forest stirring uneasily.

“These creatures that keep coming into your house,” I remarked as I sat down. “Isn’t there anything that can be done?”

“I set out poison a few times, but it doesn’t seem to work on them at all. They just come and go as they pleases.”

“How do you fall asleep at night?”

“Once, they crept up and gnawed at my hair as I slept. At this point they might as well own the place.”

“That’s insane!”

“A while back, a kid was napping on the veranda of a house not too far from here. The creatures came up one by one to take turns nibbling. By the time the kid’s parents discovered what had happened there was only half the kid left.”

“Come on!” I recoiled, as he laughed. Apparently it was just an off-colour joke.

“Do you remember the park you passed on the way here from the station? Once I saw a bunch of kids all making a fuss, shouting that they’d seen the creatures. I guess kids find those kinds of things more interesting.”

By the orange glow that surrounded us he seemed even less like the boy I had known in high school. Perhaps it was only the flickering of the candles that made his eyes gleam. Though cool night air flowed through the screen door, sweat glistened on his forehead.

“You’re sweating,” I told him as I took a swig of shochu. He grimaced. I continued, “I’ve never seen you sweat like that, you used to be so easygoing. Are you feeling alright?”

“I don’t want to talk about the past.”

“Well, if you don’t want to talk about the past, what do we talk about?” I scowled.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it that way. What are you up to these days?”

I filled him in briefly on how things were going, just the same few things I’d told countless times to my old classmates when we met. Occasionally he would interject with questions, but they were all rote and perfunctory which ticked me off.

I decided to ask how things were for him instead. His answers were just as perfunctory as his questions: some café in Kyoto had decided to use his pottery; he was teaching at a pottery studio run by his mentor; and so on. His mentor seemed to be something of an eccentric who was difficult to deal with, but he would only dance around the details, never offering anything specific. I was curious as to why he had taken up pottery after dropping out of college, but he refused to touch the subject. He must have been quite passionate about it once, to have dropped out of college in order to take it up, yet you would never know it listening to how indifferently he spoke of it tonight.

“Where do you fire your pottery?” I asked.

“Right here.”

“So you set up your own kiln? That’s pretty impressive.”

“It’s an electric kiln, not one of the big ones you’re thinking of.”

With that the conversation died again. I kept bringing up whatever came to mind, not wanting to just sit there in silence, but each topic was dead on arrival. It felt as if the halfhearted words were simply piling up on the tatami. I’d expected the alcohol to lubricate our tongues, but on the contrary things were only becoming stranger and stranger.

“See that?” I pointed at the dangling white thread at the top of the veranda, which was swaying ever so slightly. He frowned uncomprehendingly as he looked at where I was pointing, but when he saw the thread his expression froze.

“That used to be a wind chime, didn’t it?” I asked.

“What’s it matter to you?” he asked roughly, staring at the thread.

“Nothing, really,” I answered, startled.

But he didn’t seem to take any notice of my befuddlement at this odd exchange, instead taking a swig of shochu before answering my question in an agitated tone. “You’re right, it was a wind chime. But it’s gone now.”

“I’m sure it was very elegant.”

He grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t like wind chimes. I find them frightening.”

“Really?” I said. But when I imagined him coming out to the empty tatami room after spending all day cooped up in his studio, only to be greeted by the solitary sound of the wind chime, I could sympathize with his animus. It was a damp wind which tinkled the wind chime, a wind which came whistling out from the darkness of the forest to sound softly within the sitting room. When you put it that way, I’d probably find the wind chime creepy too.

“Someone gave me it not too long ago, but to be frank, I was relieved when it vanished.”

“Maybe one of the long creatures came and snatched it away,” I joked, trying to take the edge off my annoyance at losing my clothes.

To my surprise he laughed quite loudly. “Perhaps so,” he said. “Sometimes I still hear a wind chime from somewhere. Those creatures must be running around it carrying it in their mouths. They must think it’s some sort of exotic toy.”

He let out another peal of raucous laughter.

But I didn’t find it funny at all.

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As I looked on silently, he abruptly stopped laughing as quickly as he had begun and went back to drinking from the bottle without a word. It was like seeing a turtle snap its head back into its shell.

It was all so strange.

We sat there drinking shochu in silence. Cicadas sang out leisurely into the night.

I studied him closely and noticed that for some reason his hand shook each time he brought the bottle to his mouth. He kept wiping his brow, yet there always seemed to be sweat beading at his temple.

The alcohol began to make its way to my head (or so I thought), for it began to look to me that his hunched form was hovering ever so slightly off the ground. I squinted hard at him, but he just looked less and less like himself. When you write a word over and over it seems to lose all meaning, and that feeling is very close to what I felt then.

I suddenly thought to myself: what if he was someone else entirely?

When we’d first met up we hadn’t waxed nostalgic over the good old days. That feeling of unease that I’d first experienced when he was standing behind me back at Daikokuten had never gone away. And we’d hardly spoken a word about the old days since we’d been here at this house. He simply fed me whatever vague platitudes he thought I wanted to hear, never once bringing up those days of his own accord. He clearly didn’t want to talk about them. And his inexplicable burst of laughter just a moment ago had felt more and more uncomfortable as it went on.

Now that I think about it, those misgivings were clearly wild flights of fancy. But sitting there in that dark old house drinking mindlessly, they seemed so plausible.

“You’re not an impostor, are you?” I asked jokingly.

He froze in horror and looked at me. “Why would you say such a thing?”

“Well, I just have this feeling. I don’t remember you being like this at all back in the old days.”

For a long moment he was silent, then took another sip of shochu.

“Yes,” he finally grunted, one side of his mouth curled up in a smile. “You and I have never met.”

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I heard the things scuffling below the floorboards, but he didn’t pay the sound any attention. The candlelight flickered on the walls.

I had no idea why he would say such a thing. Unsure of how to reply, I instead took a sip of shochu and smiled back at him weakly. He grinned back uncertainly. Feeling creeped out at what I had said, I decided that he probably meant it as a joke, and said nothing in hopes of dropping the matter. He continued to stare at me for some time, probing me with his gaze, but as I showed little reaction he returned to the alcohol again.

“You don’t seem like yourself, either,” he suddenly interjected. “I don’t trust you.”

“All right, all right.”

“What’s all right?”

“I think we’ve had enough to drink for the night.”

He scowled and went quiet. After clearing away the mostly empty plates, he brought out a large castella, carefully slicing it and offering me a piece. Not having much of an appetite for castella, I nibbled just enough to be polite, looking on as he devoured slice after slice as if in a trance, washing each mouthful down with shochu, until he’d polished off the entire thing.

I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but he seemed to be drinking faster and faster. Continuing to watch him carefully, I noticed that his hand was indeed trembling and he was sweating quite profusely.

It was still summer, but the night breeze that came in from the veranda was quite cool and damp. Considering how he lived in this old house by himself, drinking alone and being kept up at night by creatures scurrying beneath the floorboards, perhaps it should have been no surprise that he seemed so different.

I stared at the flickering candle flames for a moment before turning my gaze outside. Looking at the garden through the red afterimages burned in my vision, I was reminded of the girl who had come into the garden while he had been out shopping.

“Is there a festival today?” I inquired.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Earlier there was a girl wearing a yukata in the garden. She came in without asking, so I was quite surprised. A neighbour of yours?”

He looked back at me, seeming quite surprised. “A girl wearing a yukata, you said?”

“And she spit a goldfish out of her mouth at me.” When I told him this, I felt a tingle go up my spine, for reasons that I don’t understand. Perhaps it was the horrible expression on his face. The eerie sensation I had felt earlier at sunset returned.

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said, taking a swig. “Nothing at all.”

Following this he grew more and more uneasy, taking searching glances at my face. Sometimes it seemed to me that there was an anger in his eyes. Maybe he was just a bad drunk, but all the same I felt very uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure if it was only my own intoxication that made me think back to the glare the girl had given me earlier that afternoon, standing in the middle of the road.

I was dimly beginning to understand that he was deathly afraid. But not of the sound of wind chimes, nor of that strange little girl in the yukata, nor of the long creatures that crept around beneath the floor, nor of the singing of the cicadas in the forest. No, there was something else.

“What are you afraid of?” I asked.

He looked back at me, an expression of fear on his face, almost as if he was about to cry.

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The alcohol must have made its way to my head all at once, for suddenly everything seemed to be expanding and contracting as if it were breathing. My friend merely sat there silently, not even bothering to wipe the sweat from his face. I felt something cold and distant in the space between us, but thanks to the shochu I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

He began to talk about the pot in the garden, slurring his words. There’d been a test of courage one summer in high school. It’d been held in a nearby temple, he said, and the goal was to circle clockwise around the main building; there was a large pot behind it, filled up with black water, and we’d looked into it together. I didn’t know why he was telling me this. I didn’t know why he was putting so much force into his words, as if he was exposing some crime that I had committed.

“I’ll never forget it. I couldn’t forget it,” he mumbled, his torso swaying from side to side. “I saw it. It was in a room just like this one—no, maybe a little larger.

As he spoke he glanced behind himself at the top of the cabinet. His eyes widened.

“Now I see,” he muttered. “It was the faces of the Seven Gods of Fortune that I saw back then.”

There was a strange look in his eyes. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“You were with me then,” he said. Without warning he stood up. “You looked, too.”

Taken aback, I watched him stride over to the cabinet, each footstep heavy on the tatami. Picking up a figurine, he walked over and slid the screen door open, then proceeded to toss each of the figurines out into the garden one by one.

“Stop that!” I said, but he didn’t listen. The miniature gods flew out one after another, disappearing into the darkness where the light from the room did not reach.

Once all of the gods were gone, he sat down across from me as before.

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I traced the fuzzy strand of memory, trying to keep the alcohol at bay.

Next to our high school there had been a small temple. It was on the road between school and the station, so we often hung out there after school. For some reason there were a number of cylindrical stones set out in a circle. I remember we used to hang out on those stones and shoot the breeze, whiling the time away. I never saw a single monk or visitor, which now that I think about it was pretty strange.

One autumn, we threw a party to celebrate the success of the campus festival. The festivities went on late into the night, and after parting from the rest of our friends the two of us went walking down the road. Eventually we passed in front of the temple.

Behind the main hall was a pot which had seemingly been set out and then forgotten, which had become the subject of a silly high school urban legend. The story was that if you went to the temple at night, circled clockwise around the hall to the pot, and looked inside, “something good” would happen. People always said it was “something good”, though no one ever actually meant it literally. Some people said that you’d see a reflection of yourself from the distant future, while others said that you’d see a ghost staring back from the surface of the water. I’d even heard someone claim that whichever showed up depended on who was looking, which struck me as pretty sketchy. Of course, I didn’t believe either of those apparitions really existed, but I figured that if I ever found myself at the shrine in the middle of the night I might start to believe after all.

There was a crisp autumn chill in the night air. The temple must have been quite eerie that late at night. But still flushed with the lingering excitement of the festival we were feeling pretty daring, and decided to go see this infamous pot for ourselves.

We circled clockwise around the hall just like the rumour said, proceeding along the chill shadows that lay between the hall’s outer walkway and the enclosing wall. The pot was behind the hall right where people said it would be. My friend was first to boldly look inside. I apparently waited beside him; in the darkness we couldn’t see one another’s faces. After he stepped back from the pot, I took my turn to look inside.

After some time he dragged me away, out from behind the hall. We left the temple and headed up the road towards the station.

I asked him if he’d seen anything, but he didn’t reply.

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Even after hearing him speak of those memories, I had no recollection of being there with him in the scenes he described. It all seemed plausible: the temple, and the urban legend, and the two of us going to look into the pot. Yet it was all so foggy and blurred.

Here I’d thought he was finally willing to talk about a shared memory, but in this short span of time he’d dug an even deeper rift between us. The more agitated he became, the more convinced I was that he was a stranger who just happsened to bear an uncanny resemblance to my friend. But the odds that this was just someone who happened to have the same name, who happened to have gone to the same high school, who happened to have become a potter like all the rumours I’d heard from my old high school classmates. But if he really was the same person, then who was I?

“What did you see in the pot?” he demanded, glaring at me.

But I could hardly answer his question when I didn’t recall any of this. “I don’t remember,” I told him plainly.

“You must!” he snapped.

“Enough of this,” I groaned. “This is ridiculous.”

“You can’t fool me!”

“I said enough!”

We glowered at one another. I noticed that my own back was now drenched with sweat.

“You’re going stir-crazy cooped up here all alone. Why don’t you leave here for a while, go see your parents for a little while. We can both head out tomorrow,” I said. Seeing that he remained silent, I continued, “Don’t you know any of your neighbours? That girl I saw in the garden earlier, she must live around here?”

For a moment his mouth worked soundlessly. He sucked in a breath, and his eyes flashed with an even fiercer light than I had seen before. “So you _do _know.”

“Know what?”

“You know the master’s daughter, don’t you?”

“You mean the girl in the garden was your master’s daughter?”

My question was met with a hoarse caw of laughter. He shook his head from side to side, a hideous grin on his face.

“She couldn’t possibly have been in the garden. She burned long ago,” he cackled. “You know that just as well as I do. And now you have come—”

Among his ravings was the insinuation that the girl and I were connected somehow. I knew nothing of the matter, and there was no purpose in attempting to unravel the threads of this illogical fantasy. All I could think of, the sole thought which occupied my mind, was that living in this house was a bad thing.

“I don’t understand your meaning,” I told him.

“But I know yours.” He pierced me with his gaze. “You have come to kill me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I see through it all. That is why I called you here.”

My thoughts fought to break through the alcoholic haze as I watched him rant and rave.

He had been the one to invite me here to this house, and yet he had not met me at the station or answered my calls. At the station I imagined that he stood by the ringing phone, not deigning to answer; it seemed that my imagination had, if only by chance, been on the mark. Why had he been standing behind me so stealthily at Daikokuten? And why had he been hidden upstairs instead of going out to dinner as he had told me?

What was going through his mind now as we stared at each other? As my mind raced trying to figure out what he was planning, the situation seemed less and less detached from reality.

My body had broken out into an unpleasant sweat. I felt the night air whisper over me. My friend wiped his sweat with his long white handkerchief then began to fidget with it in his hands.

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My head was pounding like there was a gong ringing inside it, but the rest of my body was cold. My legs felt heavy and sluggish as if they were waterlogged. My friend kept stretching the handkerchief out as if to see how it felt.

“Let’s just chill out,” I said. I’d set down a cigarette earlier, but now it was nowhere to be seen. I knew I’d stashed another one in my bag, and when I turned around to search for it I found that my entire bag was missing.

“Hey, what happened to my bag?”

“They must have dragged it away,” he replied, his expression unchanged.

The noise from beneath the floorboards was gone now. The room was still, so still I could almost hear the candle flames flickering. A sudden blast of wind came in from the forest, rattling the fusuma that separated the roomhad i from the hallway. They were slid shut most of the way, but there was just enough room between them for a human to slip inside, or out, from the darkened hallway.

“Look!” I cried, pointing at the gap. “There’s something there!”

There was a twinkle in the dark, followed by a long, black thing slithering from the front door down the hallway towards the pottery studio. Its body was incredibly long. The sheen from its dense fur told me that it wasn’t a snake.

But my friend continued to fidget with the handkerchief, not so much as shifting his gaze towards the hallway.

“I suppose it headed towards the studio,” he snorted. “I roast them in the kiln till there’s nothing left. That’s why they keep coming.”

The thing disappeared down the hallway. I felt another presence approach, the air growing tauter and tauter.

Just before it arrived, a memory slid out from the hazy depths of my mind.

I was behind the main temple hall. I caught a whiff of mud, and the trees rustled in the wind. My friend must have been standing off to the side in the darkness, staring intently at me.

I was crouched down gazing into the black water that had collected in the pot. Something red flashed before my eyes, perhaps a goldfish that resided in the depths. But no goldfish could possibly live in such a place. The water grew still. Only my face remained, reflected on its surface.

But the longer I looked, the less the face in the water resembled my own. Its jaw was working, though my own mouth was doing no such thing. Its hair seemed long, and in fact it looked like it belonged to a little girl. Strange, I thought to myself, and I continued to stare until my friend at last pulled me away.

Here my memories turned to the little girl I had seen in the garden. She had also held a goldfish in her mouth, looking into that rainwater-filled pot in the garden: a curious parallel indeed.

It was only then that I finally realized that she had been the one who had been peering out from the waters at my high school self those many years ago.

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The forest rustled, and the wind moaned. My friend sat there frozen and unmoving, the handkerchief stretched to its breaking point. His face, so drenched it looked as if he had poured a bucket of water on his head, was pointed at me.

I glanced once more at the trembling fusuma. Through the gap I spied a flash of colour, red as a goldfish, pass by like a phantom. Though it appeared only as a flutter, I could hear heavy footsteps tromping to the end of the hallway. It seemed to be headed towards the studio, as if it were pursuing the long creature. I heard the wind chime tinkling, the wind chime which my friend had supposedly lost.

“I roast them in the kiln till there’s nothing left,” my friend repeated.

And the wavering candle flames went out.

The last thing I remember seeing before the room went dark was my friend beginning to get to his feet, his hungry eyes fixed on me.