6



Inheriting Property

Inquiry on Jellyfish

Something Like a Sense of Detachment



I sat in the dark. Far above me, like a sign of something, floated the perfect half-moon of
light given shape by the well cap. And yet none of the light from up there managed to find its
way to the bottom.
As time passed, my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness. Before long, I could
just barely make out the shape of my hand if I brought it close to my face. Other things
around me began slowly to take on their own dim shapes, like timid little animals letting
down their guard in the most gradual stages imaginable. As much as my eyes became used to
it, though, the darkness never ceased to be darkness. Anything I tried to focus on would lose
its shape and burrow its way soundlessly into the surrounding obscurity. Perhaps this could be
called "pale darkness," but pale as it might be, it had its own particular kind of density, which
in some cases contained a more deeply meaningful darkness than perfect pitch darkness. In it,
you could see something. And at the same time, you could see nothing at all.
Here in this darkness, with its strange sense of significance, my memories began to take
on a power they had never had before. The fragmentary images they called up inside me were


mysteriously vivid in every detail, to the point where I felt I could grasp them in my hands. I
closed my eyes and brought back the time eight years earlier when I had first met Kumiko.
It happened in the family members' waiting room of the university hospital in Kanda. I
had to be in the hospital almost every day back then, to see a wealthy client concerning the
inheritance of his property. She was coming to the hospital every day between classes in order
to tend to her mother, who was there for a duodenal ulcer. Kumiko would wear jeans or a
short skirt and a sweater, her hair in a ponytail. Sometimes she would wear a coat, sometimes
not, depending on the early-November weather. She had a shoulder bag and always carried a
few books that looked like university texts, plus some kind of sketch pad.
The afternoon of the very first day I went to the hospital, Kumiko was there, sitting on the
sofa with her legs crossed, wearing black low-heeled shoes and concentrating on a book. I sat
opposite her, checking my watch every five minutes until the time for the interview with my
client, which had been moved back an hour and a half for some reason that had not been
shared with me. Kumiko never raised her eyes from the book. She had very nice legs.
Looking at her helped to brighten my spirits somewhat. I found myself wondering what it
must feel like to have such a nice (or at least extremely intelligent) face and great legs.
After we had seen each other in the waiting room several times, Kumiko and I began to
share small talk-exchanging magazines we had finished reading, or eating fruit from a gift
basket someone had brought her mother. We were incredibly bored, after all, and we needed
someone our own age to talk to.
Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those
strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet,
but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast
darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meetings grew
more frequent, I felt not so much that I had met someone new as that I had chanced upon a
dear old friend.
Soon I found myself dissatisfied with the choppy little conversations we were fitting in
between other things in the hospital area. I kept wishing I could meet her somewhere else, so
that we could really talk to each other for a change. Finally, one day, I decided to ask her for a
date.
"I think both of us could use a change of air," I said. "Let's get out of here and go
someplace else-where there aren't any patients or clients."
Kumiko gave it some thought and said, "The aquarium?"
And so the aquarium is where we had our first date. Kumiko brought her mother a change
of clothes that Sunday morning and met me in the hospital waiting room. It was a warm, clear
day, and Kumiko was wearing a simple white dress under a pale-blue cardigan. I was always
struck by how well she dressed even then. She could wear the plainest article of clothing and
manage, with the roll of a sleeve or the curl of a collar, to transform it into something
spectacular. It was a knack she had. And I could see that she took care of her clothing with an
attention bordering on love. Whenever I was with her, walking beside her, I would find my-
self staring in admiration at her clothes. Her blouses never had a wrinkle. Her pleats hung in
perfect alignment. Anything white she wore looked brand-new. Her shoes were never scuffed
or smudged. Looking at what she wore, I could imagine her blouses and sweaters neatly
folded and lined up in her dresser drawers, her skirts and dresses in vinyl wrappers hanging in
the closet (which is exactly what I found to be the case after we were married).
We spent that first afternoon together in the aquarium of the Ueno Zoo. The weather was
so nice that day, I thought it might be more fun to stroll around the zoo itself, and I hinted as
much to Kumiko on the train to Ueno, but she had obviously made up her mind to go to the
aquarium. If that was what she wanted, it was perfectly all right with me. The aquarium was
having a special display of jellyfish, and we went through them from beginning to end,
viewing the rare specimens gathered from all parts of the world. They floated, trembling, in


their tanks, everything from a tiny cotton puff the size of a fingertip to monsters more than
three feet in diameter. For a Sunday, the aquarium was relatively uncrowded. In fact, it was
on the empty side. On such a lovely day, anybody would have preferred the elephants and
giraffes to jellyfish.
Although I said nothing to Kumiko, I actually hated jellyfish. I had often been stung by
jellyfish while swimming in the ocean as a boy. Once, when swimming far out by myself, I
wandered into a whole school of them. By the time I realized what I had done, I was
surrounded. I never forgot the slimy, cold feeling of them touching me. In the center of that
whirlpool of jellyfish, an immense terror overtook me, as if I had been dragged into a
bottomless darkness. I wasn't stung, for some reason, but in my panic I gulped a lot of ocean
water. Which is why I would have liked to skip the jellyfish display if possible and go to see
some ordinary fish, like tuna or flounder.
Kumiko, though, was fascinated. She stopped at every single tank, leaned over the railing,
and stayed locked in place as if she had forgotten the passage of time. "Look at this," she'd
say to me. "I never knew there were such vivid pink jellyfish. And look at the beautiful way it
swims. They just keep wobbling along like this until they've been to every ocean in the world.
Aren't they wonderful?"
"Yeah, sure." But the more I forced myself to keep examining jellyfish with her, the more
I felt a tightness growing in my chest. Before I knew it, I had stopped replying to her and was
counting the change in my pocket over and over, or wiping the corners of my mouth with my
handkerchief. I kept wishing we would come to the last of the jellyfish tanks, but there was no
end to them. The variety of jellyfish swimming in the oceans of the world was enormous. I
was able to bear it for half an hour, but the tension was turning my head into mush. When,
finally, it became too painful for me to stand leaning against the railing, I left Kumiko's side
and slumped down on a nearby bench. She came over to me and, obviously very concerned,
asked if I was feeling bad. I answered honestly that looking at the jellyfish was making me
dizzy.
She stared into my eyes with a grave expression on her face. "It's true," she said. "I can
see it in your eyes. They've gone out of focus. It's incredible-just from looking at jellyfish!"
Kumiko took me by the arm and led me out of the gloomy, dank aquarium into the sunlight.
Sitting in the nearby park for ten minutes, taking long, slow breaths, I managed to return
to a normal psychological state. The strong autumn sun cast its pleasant radiance everywhere,
and the bone-dry leaves of the ginkgo trees rustled softly whenever the breeze picked up.
"Are you all right?" Kumiko asked after several minutes had gone by. "You certainly are a
strange one. If you hate jellyfish so much, you should have said so right away, instead of
waiting until they made you sick."
The sky was high and cloudless, the wind felt good, the people spending their Sunday in
the park all wore happy expressions. A slim, pretty girl was walking a large, long-haired dog.
An old fellow wearing a felt hat was watching his granddaughter on the swing. Several
couples sat on benches, the way we were doing. Off in the distance, someone was practicing
scales on a saxophone.
"Why do you like jellyfish so much?" I asked.
"I don't know. I guess I think they're cute," she said. "But one thing did occur to me when
I was really focused on them. What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get
into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is in a
much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We
just happen to forget all that. Don't you agree?
Two-thirds of the earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is
the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what's underneath the skin."
We took a long walk after that. At five o'clock, Kumiko said she had to go back to the
hospital, so I took her there. "Thank you for a lovely day," she said when we parted. There


was a quiet glow in her smile that had not been there before. When I saw it, I realized that I
had managed to draw a little closer to her in the course of the day-thanks, no doubt, to the
jellyfish.



Kumiko and I continued to date. Her mother left the hospital without complications, and I
no longer had to spend time there working on my client's will, but we would get together
once a week for a movie or a concert or a walk. We drew closer to each other each time we
met. I enjoyed being with her, and if we should happen to touch, I felt a fluttering in the chest.
I often found it difficult to work when the weekend was drawing near. I was sure she liked
me. Otherwise, she wouldn't see me every weekend.
Still, I was in no hurry to deepen my relationship with Kumiko. I sensed a kind of
uncertainty in her. Exactly what it was I couldn't have said, but it would come out every now
and then in her words or actions. I might ask her something, and a single breath would
intervene before she answered-just the slightest hesitation, but in that split-second interval I
sensed a kind of shadow.
Winter came, and then the new year. We went on seeing each other every week. I never
asked about that something, and she never said a word. We would meet and go someplace and
eat and talk about innocuous things.
One day I took a chance and said, "You must have a boyfriend, don't you?"
Kumiko looked at me for a moment and asked, "What makes you think so?"
"Just a hunch," I said. We were walking through the wintry and deserted Shinjuku
Imperial Gardens.
"What kind of hunch?"
"I don't know. I get the feeling there's something you want to tell me. You should if you
can."
The expression on her face wavered the slightest bit-almost imperceptibly. There might
have been a moment of uncertainty, but there had never been any doubt about her conclusion.
"Thanks for asking," she said, "but I don't have anything that I want to make a special point
of talking about."
"You haven't answered my question, though."
"About whether I have a boyfriend?"
"Uh-huh."
Kumiko came to a stop. Then she slipped her gloves off and put them into her coat pocket.
She took my gloveless hand in hers. Her hand was warm and soft. When I squeezed her hand
in return, it seemed to me that her breaths grew smaller and whiter.
"Can we go to your apartment now?" she asked.
"Sure," I said, somewhat taken aback. "It's not much of a place, though."
I was living in Asagaya at the time, in a one-room apartment with a tiny kitchen and a
toilet and a shower the size of a phone booth. It was on the second floor and faced south,
overlooking a construction company's storage yard. That southern exposure was the
apartment's only good point. For a long time, Kumiko and I sat next to each other in the flood
of sunlight, leaning against the wall.
I made love to her for the first time that day. It was what she wanted, I was sure. In a
sense, it was she who seduced me. Not that she ever said or did anything overtly seductive.
But when I put my arms around her naked body, I knew for certain that she had intended that
this happen. Her body was soft and completely unresisting.
It was Kumiko's first experience of sex. For a long time afterward, she said nothing. I
tried several times to talk to her, but she made no reply. She took a shower, put her clothes on,
and sat in the sunlight again. I had no idea what I should say to her. I simply joined her in the


patch of sunlight and said nothing. The two of us edged along the wall as the sun moved.
When evening came, Kumiko said she was leaving. I saw her home.
"Are you sure you don't have something you want to say to me?" I asked again in the
train.
She shook her head. "Never mind about that," she murmured.
I never raised the topic again. Kumiko had chosen to sleep with me of her own volition,
finally, and if indeed she was keeping something inside that she was not able to tell me, this
would probably be resolved in the course of time.
We continued our weekly dates after that, part of which now usually included stopping by
my apartment for sex. As we held and touched each other, she began more and more to talk
about herself, about the things she had experienced, about the thoughts and feelings these
things had given her. And I began to understand the world as Kumiko saw it. I found myself
increasingly able, too, to talk with Kumiko about the world as I saw it. I came to love her
deeply, and she said she never wanted to leave me. We waited for her to graduate from
college, and then we got married.
We were happy with our married life and had no problems to speak of. And yet there were
times when I couldn't help but sense an area inside Kumiko to which I had no access. In the
middle of the most ordinary-or the most excited-conversation, and without the slightest
warning, she might sink into silence. It would happen all of a sudden, for no reason at all (or
at least no reason I could discern). It was like walking along the road and suddenly falling into
a pit. Her silences never lasted very long, but afterward, until a fair amount of time had gone
by, it was as if she were not really there.
The first time I went inside Kumiko, I sensed a strange kind of hesitation. Kumiko should
have been feeling only pain this first time for her, and in fact she kept her body rigid with the
pain she was obviously experiencing, but that was not the only reason for the hesitation I
seemed to feel. There was something oddly lucid there, a sense of separation, of distance,
though I don't know exactly what to call it. I was seized by the bizarre thought that the body I
was holding in my arms was not the body of the woman I had had next to me until a few
moments earlier, the two of us engaged in intimate conversation: a switch had been pulled
without my noticing, and someone else's flesh had taken its place. While I held her, my hands
continued to caress her back. The touch of her small, smooth back had an almost hypnotic
effect on me, and yet, at the same time, Kumiko's back seemed to be somewhere far away
from me. The entire time she was in my arms, I could have sworn that Kumiko was some-
where else, thinking about something else, and the body I was holding was nothing but a
temporary substitute. This might have been the reason why, although I was fully aroused, it
took me a very long time to come.
I felt this way only the first time we had intercourse. After that, I felt her much closer to
me, her physical responses far more sensitive. I convinced myself that my initial sense of
distance had been the result of its being her first experience of sex.



Every now and then, while searching through my memories, I would reach out to where
the rope ladder was hanging against the wall and give it a tug to make sure it hadn't come
loose. I couldn't seem to shake the fear that it might simply give way at any moment.
Whenever the thought struck me, down there in the darkness, it made me uneasy. I could actu-
ally hear my own heart pounding. After I had checked a number of times-possibly twenty or
thirty-I began to regain a measure of calm. I had done a good job of tying the ladder to the
tree, after all. It wasn't going to come loose just like that.
I looked at my watch. The luminous hands showed it to be just before three o'clock. Three
p.m. I glanced upward. The half-moon slab of light was still floating there. The surface of the


earth was flooded with blinding summer light. I pictured to myself a stream sparkling in the
sunlight and green leaves trembling in the breeze. The light up there overwhelmed everything,
and yet just below it, down here, there existed such a darkness. All you had to do was climb a
little ways underground on a rope ladder, and you could reach a darkness this profound.
I pulled on the ladder one more time to be certain it was anchored firmly. Then I leaned
my head against the wall and closed my eyes. Eventually, sleep overtook me, like a gradually
rising tide.