Short Stories
vol.5Casting Out（2/4）
As soon as the hotel alarm clock rang, I jumped out of bed and went over to the window. There was still a gap of fifteen centimeters and the light shining through was blinding. It was always blinding, but especially at this time of day when it was still too early for the photochemical smog. Before long, though, the sun would be covered in a dull yellow veil And there they still were. The man and the goldfish. The man was a little bit closer to the goldfish than he had been the night before, but he was standing in the same position. The room was still dark, but the water in the aquarium bubbled with oxygen, and the inside of it shone green. I couldn’t see the red color of the goldfish, it must have been hiding in the algae. I wondered if he had fed the fish. He didn’t make the same vivid impression on me as he had at night, so my eye went first to the tank, and then I saw the shape of the man. The man and the tank took up the whole width of the window they occupied. The morning sun was shining in from the other side of the building, so the light was, as ever, behind them. Still, I could see other things that had been invisible to me at night. The shikumen was built of reddish brown bricks. Each of the windows had a balcony large enough for a single person to stand in it. On the balcony of the window below the man was a mop. I could clearly see that the mop had been propped on its handle and set out to dry. I could also see the outdoor air conditioner units from each of the apartments, precariously installed and protruding from under each balcony. In the early morning light the wiring that wound its way around the units and on either side of the balconies was visible. In some places it was left dangling. On the balcony diagonally under the man was a TV antenna that had been attached to the handrail, inside of which was a pile of old furniture and a baby bath. Bedding was hung out to air on other balconies. There was nothing cluttering the balcony of the man with the tank, so I could see right inside his apartment. All I had to do was open the curtains and my eye went straight to his window. It was maybe ten or fifteen meters away. The green water in the aquarium almost sparkled. I decided that he was probably a man who liked things clean, and he frequently scrubbed the moss off the sides of it. That was my decision, but I had yet to see him do any cleaning. The man was dressed in a gray, loosely knit sweater. Since he was always in a shadow from the neck up, the whitish color from his chest down stood out. I checked the clock and then hurriedly went into the bathroom to take a shower. I undressed and the man was watching. He had no face except for his eyes. The parts of my body he was looking at, my nipples, side, and thighs, stung so badly in the hot water that they broke out in goose bumps. I tried to block his view by holding up one hand, but it didn’t work. I wished the shikumen would disappear and I’d see all of Shanghai sparkling in front of me. The water was so hot it became difficult to breathe. I had come to Shanghai to do some work with a team of people, and after I left in the morning, I didn’t come back to my hotel room until after dinner. I was always tipsy. By then the hotel maids had turned down the beds and pulled the curtains. I decided that I wouldn’t look that night. But even if I did, he couldn’t possibly still be there. And I really did want to look at the night lights. I opened the curtains a crack, and put just one eye up to it to look outside. It was the same Shanghai night scene as the day before. The man was gone, but the aquarium was there, glowing as greenly as ever. It bubbled as usual, and seemed close enough to hear, but was quiet. And since there was no one next to it, I got a good look at the actual size of the tank. Before I had seen the side flush with the balcony, but now I could tell how far behind the railing it stretched. It was quite large, a real aquarium. Japanese would be inclined to keep something more exotic than goldfish in a tank of this proportion; maybe tropical fish or something shipped in from the Amazon. There was a light at the top that kept the aquarium illuminated, and I could see that the side closest to the window was open, probably for feeding the fish.