Because of Murakami, no visit to the aquarium is complete without seeing the Jellyfish.
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 it was obvious she had made up her mind to go to the aquarium. If that was what she wanted, it was all right with me. At the aquarium there was 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 school of them. By the time I realised what I had done, I was surrounded. I never forgot the slimy, cold feeling of them touching me. In the centre of their 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 sea 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 remained transfixed as if she had lost all sense 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 tightening 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 on a nearby bench. She came over to me and, clearly very concerned, asked if I was feeling ill. 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 gingko 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, as we were doing. Off in the distance, someone was practising scales on a saxophone.
"Why do you like jellyfish so much?" I asked.
"I don't know. I guess I think they're sweet," she said. "But one thing did occur to me when I was focusing 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?"
- The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
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