Josee, the Tiger and the Fish

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“Wow! Look at that bridge!”

“Wow! Look, the ocean!”

Josee shouted with joy until she was out of breath. (She had difficulty breathing sometimes, especially when she laughed too much or the wind blew right in her face. It felt as if she were being robbed of oxygen. This apparently had something to do with the fact that she was paralyzed from the waist down, although Josee herself didn’t really understand it. She’d been diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a child, but then another doctor said, “This is completely different from CP. She doesn’t have any of the classic symptoms.” Eventually, her doctors just settled on a cerebral palsy diagnosis and called it a day. Josee never really got any concrete answers about her condition, even now, at twenty-five years old.)

The wind blew right in her face, so she started choking. She tried to shout, but the wind drowned her out.

“Josee, close the window already! What, you like not being able to breathe or something?” said Tsuneo. Josee hurriedly pressed a button by the seat and closed the car window.

The last car they’d rented had a handle you needed to crank to open and close the windows. That was really hard on Josee, depending on the position of the handles, so she was thrilled to be in a car that had windows she could control with the press of a button. One press got her excited, so she pressed it several more times.

Tsuneo chided her good-naturedly: “Quit playing with the switch.”

“I’ve never seen anything so amazing…,” Josee muttered with evident mirth.

“There’s cars out there with even better features.”

“I’m talking about this trip. I’ve never seen scenery this beautiful before.”

“This is my first time here, too.”

“Don’t even try to compare your first time with mine. This is a way bigger deal for me. It’s only the second time I’ve ever seen the ocean.”

“Yeah, yeah. Brag all you want. Still the first honeymoon for the both of us.”

“Heh-heh.”

“Ever gone on a trip with anyone before, Josee?”

“I’ll just leave that to your imagination. I was very popular back in the day, unlike you, Caretaker.”

“Tsk.”

Josee only called Tsuneo Caretaker when she was in an especially good mood.

One day, Tsuneo had stepped into the bathroom before they went out. “Gimme a second,” he said.

“Stop. I didn’t say you could pee! Who do you think you are?! Get outta there!” Josee yelled from outside the door, clearly irritated.

“The heck’s wrong with you? Is that any way to talk to your husband?” Tsuneo said as he finished up.

“You’re not my husband!”

“Then what am I?”

“My caretaker!”

Josee had just said the first thing that came to mind, but she actually took a liking to it, and from then on, she started occasionally calling Tsuneo Caretaker. Sometimes, Tsuneo would preface his own opinions with, “As your caretaker, I think…” He was very flexible in that sense and could easily adapt to anything. He even started calling Josee “Josee” after she suddenly asked him to call her that.

“From now on, my name is Josee,” she declared one day, seemingly out of nowhere.

“How’d you get from Kumi to Josee?” Tsuneo looked puzzled.

“No reason. But Josee suits me better. I’m retiring the name Kumi.”

“I don’t think you can change your name that easily. No city hall or authority is gonna call you that.”

“I don’t care what the government thinks. All that matters is that I wanna be called Josee, so that’s how you’re gonna refer to me from now on.”

After some prodding, Tsuneo learned that Josee loved novels and often borrowed some from city hall’s mobile library (people with disabilities didn’t have to pay a membership fee to borrow books) which was how she became familiar with the works of Françoise Sagan. Josee had picked out one of Sagan’s books, thinking it was a mystery novel, but after reading it, she became hooked and read several more by the author.

Sagan had a habit of naming the heroines in her novels Josée, which Josee immediately fell in love with. She thought the name Josee Yamamura sounded so much better than Kumiko Yamamura. She felt as if the name were calling her, telling her something good would happen—no—that something good had already happened, and that good thing was Tsuneo coming into her life.

Tsuneo said that Josee was a weird name (he didn’t read too many novels, and he didn’t associate the name with anything when he said it), but after spending so much time together, he eventually started calling her Josee as well.

Josee sometimes adopted quirks of the singers she watched on TV, but this was the first time a name had ever made such an impact on her. She’d always had a strong personality, though. When her father remarried, his new wife moved in and brought her three-year-old daughter along. Josee’s father doted on the little girl. When Josee was fourteen years old, she started acting out in an attempt to get her father’s love and attention as well. But once she needed a wheelchair to get around and started her period, Josee became a burden to her stepmother, who sent her to an assisted living facility. Her father had visited from time to time at first, but he soon stopped coming altogether. Josee’s tough persona still stuck with her, regardless.

She didn’t remember her mother, since her mother left when Josee was a baby. At seventeen, she was adopted by her paternal grandmother and started living with her in the suburbs. Her grandmother was very kind, but she was too embarrassed to have people see Josee in a wheelchair, so she took her out only at night. Josee’s grandmother would gently bring her through the back door, but she was a frail old woman, so she was never that good at pushing the wheelchair around. Nevertheless, Josee still badly wanted to go out at night in the spring and summer.

One time when the two of them went out, they passed a store that hadn’t yet closed. “Give me just a second,” her grandmother said, then went inside to do a little shopping—detergent, toilet paper, that sort of thing. Josee was just outside the store, not far from her grandmother, but the street was on a slight incline. One side had a long fenced-in yard and was dark from the tree cover.

Josee briefly sensed someone nearby, and the next thing she knew, her wheelchair started moving. It was only later on that she realized the presence she felt was spite. Tsuneo once said it was probably just some drunk messing around, but Josee didn’t think so. While she was living in the assisted living facility, she became highly sensitive to spiteful presences.

A man passing by had pushed Josee’s wheelchair down the hill without warning before running away. The wheelchair slid down the hill at full tilt. Josee’s grandmother chased after her, screaming bloody murder, but Josee was so shaken up at the time that she didn’t remember. All she knew was that some stranger had shoved her wheelchair and that she had sensed his malicious intent. There was nothing she could do except scream.

Her shrieking startled a nearby man, who saw the wheelchair hurtling down the hill and threw himself in front of it. He was standing right at the bottom of the hill, which ended in a gentle curve. The impact knocked him to the ground, stopping the wheelchair’s descent.

“Are you okay?” the man asked as he quickly got to his feet.

Josee, meanwhile, was in a daze and couldn’t say anything. Getting worked up made it difficult for her to breathe, so she was desperately trying to take steady breaths. She looked dead lying there on the ground, so the man apparently started panicking, but it was all one big racket to Josee. Only after hearing her grandmother’s voice as she came rushing down the hill was Josee able to calm down.

“I can’t believe someone would do such a thing,” the man said, still quite agitated. He then offered to take Josee home in case whoever had pushed her was still around. The man who caught Josee at the bottom of the hill was Tsuneo, a college student at the time, who’d been living in a nearby off-campus apartment.

Ever since then, he would show up at Josee’s house whenever he was free and help her get around. Josee’s body had never fully developed, so she was very petite, which was why Tsuneo always thought she was younger than him.

“Kumi, you’re either totally clueless, or you know everything there is to know. There’s no middle ground with you,” he once told her. He was surprised, however, to learn that she was actually two years older than him. Tsuneo was right, though. There were a lot of things Josee was totally clueless about, since she’d spent so long cooped up in either an assisted living facility or her home. She never joined any clubs or activist groups for the disabled, so she never met any new people. Josee was something of a wallflower, always shy and anxious around the facility’s young volunteers. They started avoiding her, until one day, she ended up completely by the wayside.

All her knowledge had come from reading or the TV.

“I used to play in this huge yard that had a swing set and a pond with dozens of koi swimmin’ in it. My old house was massive,” she’d boasted to Tsuneo. However, those were things she’d seen in books and on television. She’d never attended school, since she was exempt from enrollment, although her father had taught her how to read and write katakana, hiragana, and kanji. She learned the rest of her kanji from books and her ABCs from English-language fairy tales people had given her.

Josee also played a lot of shogi with her father, since he taught her the rules. When her father was at work, she would listen to baseball games on the radio. He’d taught her about baseball, too, but she wanted to see a real game so badly that she ended up having him carry her on his back to watch one in person. It was at Koshien Stadium, and she got to see the pitcher Murayama. She also vaguely remembered spying the shortstop Yoshida, whom she really liked. Her memories of the games she saw on TV, the ones she heard on the radio, and the game she saw in person with her father were all jumbled together in the back of her mind.

“It rained during the second half, but he put his jacket over me so I wouldn’t get wet.”

That was another memory Josee shared with Tsuneo, but in truth, she’d actually been watching that game on the TV at her assisted living facility. The skies opened up, and the fans in the stands frantically covered their heads with newspapers and coats. It left such a strong impression on Josee that it got jumbled together with the childhood memory of her and her father seeing a baseball game in person.

“My dad was a real nice man, y’know. He’d do whatever I asked,” Josee bragged.

But then Tsuneo teased, “If he was so nice, why’d he send you to that facility?”

“Shut up! Fuck you, asshole! Like I give a shit about that.”

She was furious to the point that she almost started having trouble breathing again, so Tsuneo kept his mouth shut. That was when he realized: Josee wasn’t lying as much as she was saying what she wished were true. These were her dreams, and while they weren’t real, they were an undeniable part of who she was.

Josee and her grandmother were on welfare, but they could sometimes splurge enough to treat a poor college student like Tsuneo to dinner. He lived off instant ramen whenever he was in between part-time jobs, so Josee’s grandmother’s home cooking was like heaven. There would be tofu with konjak and spinach and miso soup and so many other treats. Sometimes, she would cook old-people food like squid and radish boiled in soy sauce, but those only added to Tsuneo’s delight. Soon, he started spending more and more of his days at the pair’s quiet homestead.

“What’s this mean?” Josee would ask Tsuneo when she didn’t understand something she had read. Josee couldn’t walk, but her upper body was just as strong as an able-bodied person’s. She didn’t like listening to tapes of volunteers reading aloud to people who were permanently bedridden; she wanted to read books for herself. That said, listening to the tapes would be much less work…

Tsuneo wasn’t so much tripped up by Josee’s bookworm tendencies but rather at a loss for what to do about her domineering personality. His college degree had absolutely nothing to do with social welfare, so he had no clue about working with people with disabilities.

Tsuneo consulted a friend who had experience as a volunteer caretaker. He told Tsuneo that many in the disabled community could be combative because of all the discrimination they faced, and that commonly made them come off as abrasive. But Tsuneo didn’t feel like that applied to Josee. She hated doing anything in big groups and wasn’t the type to pressure the local government through protests or demonstrations. Far from it, she led a very quiet, private life.

Some of that had to do with her grandmother’s reluctance to let her leave the house. She didn’t want Josee running into any bill collectors or people working for the city.

Josee’s only access to the outside world was Tsuneo. He took her to a bathhouse far away (at around eleven PM when it was about to close and the owner didn’t mind her coming in) and once she finished, he picked her up off the floor and put her in her wheelchair, then hopped over to the men’s bath for a soak. He figured he might as well while he was there.

“The hell do you think you’re doing, making me wait in the cold? I’m freezin’ out here.”

Josee chided him while she waited for him to finish up his bath.

“What did I do to deserve being treated like that?” Tsuneo mumbled as he pushed her back to the car. But for all his complaining, he had a feeling that her haughtiness might be due to her emotional dependency. They were two sides of the same coin. However, he knew saying that would only make her furious or cause her to have trouble breathing, so he kept it to himself. Tsuneo was neither used to nor capable of analyzing and articulating the intricacies of the human psyche.

He’d never met a woman like Josee, whose beautiful doll-like features belied such a filthy mouth. All the girls on campus were shameless and bold like a pack of tigresses. They had this sexual energy to them. Josee, on the other hand, wasn’t particularly enticing, and Tsuneo always felt like he had stolen an old doll out of the cellar whenever he accompanied her. But her brash attitude suited her to a T.

All the homes in Josee’s neighborhood still had outhouses, but once the sewage system was up and running, the city’s welfare division gave Josee’s grandmother a subsidy, which they used to get a modernized toilet. They were even able to get a footstool installed around the toilet and safety rails to make things easier for Josee. It was Tsuneo’s job to relay Josee’s thoughts about the new toilet’s design to the contractors.

She complained relentlessly, telling him the footstool was too high or the safety rails were too low. Tsuneo would then ask the contractors directly, “Hey, sorry, but do you think you could make some adjustments to these?”

Josee’s grandmother was already in her eighties by this point, so staying on her feet was becoming too much of a hassle for her, even in the kitchen. Josee decided to take over, but the counter was too high, and that made cooking in a wheelchair extremely difficult. Tsuneo liked building things, so eventually, he made her a table, installed a shelf, and gradually fixed up the old house until the kitchen was wheelchair accessible. Josee had a bevy of tough requests, and Tsuneo would get fed up from time to time.

“You don’t honestly think I can do something that complicated, do you?” he’d tell her. But they didn’t have enough money to hire a professional, so they had no other choice but to make do with Tsuneo’s amateur skills.

Josee could cook, albeit very slowly. She took her time cutting vegetables that made for excellent stews. She could do laundry as well and had no issue using the laundry bar Tsuneo modified for her. Josee could hold herself up on crutches, so while she still couldn’t go outside on her own, she could at least get around the house more easily. One of the sets of crutches Tsuneo made was shaped like a snowshoe at the bottom to prevent Josee from falling. The other set, which Josee called her roller skates, was fashioned from two poles stuck into half an old vacuum cleaner he’d found in a junkyard. Whenever Josee leaned into the poles, the casters on the bottom of the vacuum sent her rolling forward. One time, she almost threw herself off the porch by accident.

Tsuneo didn’t spend every waking minute at Josee’s house, though. He made the most of his college days, went on vacations, visited family back in his hometown near Hiroshima, and enjoyed skiing. Finally, it came time to graduate, and he started panicking when his job search didn’t bear fruit, which kept him from going over to Josee’s house for a little while. Eventually, he landed a municipal job in one of the smaller neighboring towns. But when he visited Josee’s place for the first time in a long while, a different family had moved in.

“The old lady who used to live here died, and her handicapped granddaughter started living on welfare in the apartment up the street. She’s apparently on her own,” they told him.

He immediately went searching for the apartment until he found one with a wheelchair sitting outside, covered in a plastic sheet to protect it from the rain. When he knocked on the door, the person to answer was none other than Josee, a snowshoe crutch under one arm and a roller skate one under the other.

Her appearance, however, caught his attention the most. She was even skinnier than before. Her chin was more pointed, and her eyes looked bigger. Her hair was still cut in a bob, but it had lost its sheen, something Tsuneo attributed to malnutrition. He was never under any obligation to periodically check in on Josee, but he nonetheless found himself racked with guilt.

“Sorry. I’ve been really busy lately,” he said. “Had so much on my plate that I couldn’t find time to stop by. Forgive me. I heard your grandmother died?”

“Yeah,” Josee replied. She didn’t seem as depressed as he thought she would be, and he could tell from her eyes that she wasn’t about to scold him. Josee had a very sharp tongue, so Tsuneo thought she was going to yell at him and blame him or at least complain about her grandmother’s death, but she was surprisingly calm and expressionless.

“People from the city gave her a funeral,” she explained. “Getting an apartment was a bigger pain in the ass, though. Hard to find a place that has cheap rent and no stairs.”

“Are you really living on your own?”

“This volunteer lady comes by once a month, does all my shopping for me.”

“…Are your neighbors at least nice?”

“Nah, they don’t even give me the time of day. Probably just trying not to cause me any trouble. Doesn’t help that there’s this really creepy old man who lives on the second floor, though. Said he’d do anything for me if I let him touch my tits. You should’ve seen the nasty grin on his face. I’m too freaked out to go anywhere at night, so I just stay home. Daytime’s fine, though, since he’s usually out watching speedboat racing or bike racing then.”

It was the first time Tsuneo got to talk to Josee in what seemed like forever, but she sounded very detached. That was when he realized that Josee had been down and out ever since she lost her grandmother. Seeing her like this was so depressing that Tsuneo pretended to look around her apartment just to hide the pain he was in. Josee had apparently sold her grandmother’s chest, dresser, and alcove shelves, among other things, to be able to make rent.

“All I’ve got is whatever’s in these boxes, but it’s fine, since I can move everything around by myself. I’ve been snatching up any clean cardboard boxes I find in town.”

Josee had swiped some fashion magazines from a dentist’s waiting room, then cut out the colorful illustrations and glued them onto the cardboard boxes she had piled on top of one another. She’d even fashioned the boxes into drawers that opened when she pulled on the ends. For all she lacked in the way of belongings, these boxes upon multicolored boxes filled her tiny apartment to capacity.

“Have you been eating? You look like you’ve lost a lot of weight. Your face is thinner and kind of shriveled up.”

“Don’t you dare pity me. Yeah, I’m eating. I’m doing just fine!” she barked while turning her head away and scowling.

Tsuneo wasn’t thinking before he spoke, and he seemed to have offended her and her big ego as a result. It wasn’t until he’d known Josee for a while that Tsuneo noticed how she liked her smooth, snow-white skin and her small yet well-proportioned doll-like features. She truly considered herself drop-dead gorgeous, so it upset her when Tsuneo said her face looked “shriveled up.”

He got to his feet as if he’d had enough of Josee’s ranting.

“I’ll stop by again sometime,” he said.

“Don’t bother! I don’t want you comin’ here anymore!” Josee shouted.

“…All right. Bye.”

He didn’t have any other choice but to leave. He started putting on his sneakers at the front door, when…

“Where do you think you’re going?! You plan on leaving after upsetting me like this?!”

Josee was out of breath.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know!”

“…Bye, then.”

All of a sudden, the snowshoe-shaped crutch hit him in the back. Tsuneo turned around to find tears welling in Josee’s big eyes.

“Kumi,” he said.

“Hurry up and go. Get out of here… And never come back!” Josee hollered, still teary-eyed. She was hysterical, desperately trying to breathe. Tsuneo couldn’t leave her like this. He cautiously approached her.

“I don’t want you to go,” Josee wailed before clinging to him. “Please don’t go. At least stay for another thirty minutes. I sold the TV, and the radio’s broken, and I’m just…so lonely…”

“Wait. So I’m just a replacement for your TV and radio?”

“Yep. I like you better than my last radio, though, since you can talk back.” Josee laughed through her tears, and that instantly reminded Tsuneo how cute she was. Those unbelievably tiny, beautiful lips of hers were right in front of him, so he went ahead and kissed her. After he’d held her tensed lips in his for a few moments, her mouth gradually opened, and he immediately trapped her warm, small tongue before it could escape.

The only noise outside the quiet apartment was the revving of a motorcycle.

“You can do anything you want to me, Tsuneo. Anything,” Josee said once she eventually took her lips off his. Her breath was ragged.

“Like what?”

“‘Like what’? I know you wanna do me.”

“No, I don’t. I’m not like that creep on the second floor.”

“Do you hate me or something?”

“…I don’t hate you,” he was forced to say.

“Then let’s do it. C’mon, what kind of man are you?”

“…That’s not why I came all the way here.”

“Oh, shut up. It’s not like I was planning on doing any of this today, either, but now I want to. Plus, I like you. I would never say something like this to anyone else. I don’t know where this is gonna go, but I’ve never felt this way before.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“Is the door locked?”

“No, it’s not.”

She immediately made Tsuneo lock it. Just like always, Josee was forcing him into things. This wasn’t going to be his first time with a woman, either. He’d slept with a few classmates in the past, but never anyone so seemingly fragile.

It wasn’t until that day that he’d ever seen Josee’s slim legs up close; they reminded him of a doll’s. And though her body was as exquisite as one would expect from a doll, as far as he could tell, her feminine functions seemed quite healthy and robust. Josee had learned about sex from TV and magazines to an extent, but somewhere in the process, she appeared to stop pretending to know what she was doing. She was at a loss for words and in a daze, even when Tsuneo finished.

“Are you mad…?” he whispered into Josee’s ear as he sat up and held her in his arms.

“I’m not mad,” she replied quietly yet matter-of-factly. “It was just totally different than how I imagined it’d be.”

“In a bad way?”

“In a good way.”

“…Glad to hear it.”

Tsuneo thought back to the flings he’d had with the women he met at school, many of whom he had no interest in seeing again once they’d slept together. But here Josee (he’d still called her Kumi back in college) was pressed up against him, and he never wanted this moment to end.

“I like you. And I like what you do, too,” said Josee, which Tsuneo found adorable. “Stay the night.”

“Okay.”

“And tomorrow. All day, all night.”

“I have a job, so I gotta go to work. You know how that creep on the second floor is out at the boat races during the day? Well, all men are like that. We all have to work during the day.”

“If you don’t do what I say, I’m gonna tell everyone you forced yourself on a disabled little girl. I’ll call the newspaper and the city and tell them, too.”

“Oh, shut up.”

And just like that, they quietly held each other until they fell asleep. Eventually, the light peeking in through the curtainless glass door turned from orange into deep blue. Right by the bedside was a cardboard box that rustled when Tsuneo’s hand hit it.

“What in the world?” he muttered as he opened it to reveal something wrapped in a white bag.

“Those are my grandma’s ashes,” Josee mentioned amusedly. Her father had said he was going to come pick them up, but he still hadn’t stopped by. Half the cardboard box was plastered with pictures of foreign cities.

Tsuneo didn’t want to leave, so he stayed the night and was welcomed the next morning by wonderful early spring weather. He decided to take Josee outside for the first time in a few months. After calling as many friends as he could, he was eventually able to borrow someone’s car that could fit both Josee and her wheelchair. Josee, however, was sulking.

“What’s wrong?” Tsuneo asked her. “We don’t have to go anywhere if you don’t want to. We can stay inside today.”

“Nuh-uh. I’m just in a bad mood right now ’cause I’m so happy. That’s all.”

Tsuneo laughed and kissed her. Just looking at her made him want to lock them both in the apartment and sleep with her again. The view of her slender, doll-like legs was strangely erotic, and between them was a quivering bottomless trap that held Tsuneo spellbound.

Josee ended up asking him to take her to the zoo. When she was living at the care facility, some of the volunteers took her to the zoo on a bus, but there was a time limit, so they only got to see the birds, monkeys, and elephants before having to leave. It was a big place that quickly tired out people with disabilities.

Josee said she wanted to see the tigers, so Tsuneo showed her to where the wild cats were kept. The zoo was surprisingly crowded for a weekday; maybe the first day of nice spring weather had drawn them all here. One look at the tiger, and Josee was unsurprisingly hooked. She watched in fascination as it tirelessly paced back and forth in its cage in a way unique to predators.

The tiger’s deranged golden eyes full of silent, ferocious energy fixated on Josee, causing her to tremble in fear. However, her morbid curiosity was far stronger than any urge to look away.

The beast stopped right in front of Josee. She froze with terror to the point that she started struggling to breathe. The tiger then took one front limb, which looked strong enough to kill an elephant in a single swipe, and struck the concrete terrain in frustration before letting out a roar.

Its vivid golden and black fur glittered in the sunlight as it writhed, and its roar was so terrifying that Josee almost fainted.

“That thing’s gonna give me nightmares…,” she said, clinging to Tsuneo.

“Why’d you wanna see it if it scares you so much?”

“’Cause I wanted to see whatever scared me the most…once I met the love of my life. That way I could hold on to him like this,” she explained. “I thought I’d go see a tiger as soon as I found that someone. And if I never found anybody, then I guess I’d just never see a real tiger in person. I couldn’t let that bother me, though.”

From high above, the island seemed hidden among a mass of greenery surrounded by ocean. The weather was hot and muggy, typical of southern Japan, and the lush trees were stubbornly verdant, making the island resemble a giant ball of moss.

There was an underwater aquarium here, which was why Josee had been asking Tsuneo to bring her for a visit. The island was part of an archipelago at the farthest point in Kyushu, so a day trip wasn’t feasible. Therefore, Tsuneo decided to take some time off work to bring Josee here, since she adored zoos and aquariums so much.

A massive red bridge connected the island to the mainland. It looked like a long piece of yarn attached to the island. Just like a yo-yo, Josee thought. The expressway ran up through the mountains, occasionally obscuring the island and bridge from view until they reappeared even larger than before. The next thing they knew, Tsuneo and Josee had reached the bridge.

The bridge was dizzyingly high up and intimidating. It didn’t help that the ocean below looked incredibly distant. Once they finally crossed it, Tsuneo and Josee continued through a parking lot full of sightseeing buses. Tsuneo followed the signs to a coastal road that snaked through a fourth of the island, until they eventually arrived at a beachside resort hotel.

“Hey, I called you guys earlier. Said I wanted a room on the first floor. Something wheelchair-friendly,” Tsuneo told a hotel worker as he pulled the folded wheelchair out of the trunk of the car.

The young man in the black suit who came to greet them was making every effort not to look down at Josee’s feet, to the point that Tsuneo actually started to feel bad for him.

Josee was wearing a long light-pink skirt along with a pink short-sleeved shirt. She was in a haughty mood with her chin held high, not even sparing a glance in the young man’s direction, much less offering him a polite smile. The hotel employee eyed her as if she were a doll in an unopened box.

“We have a room for you on the second floor,” he said. “The resort has an elevator, so you can use the banquet hall and cafeteria on the first floor whenever you like.”

However, the elevator ended up being too small for the wheelchair to fit, so Tsuneo had to hoist Josee onto his back instead. The bellhop folded the wheelchair and carried it up to their room for them. A tour group of middle-aged women was making no effort not to stare at Josee, which got her really annoyed.

Tsuneo had told the hotel that they were on their honeymoon, so their room was decorated with flowers. Once the bellhop left…

“This is all your fault, Caretaker! You should’ve checked if the elevator was big enough to fit a wheelchair before you booked the room! Those old ladies were staring at me the entire time!” Josee howled with fury.

“Hey, Josee, forget about that for a sec and check out this view. Just look at that ocean.”

Tsuneo opened the curtains and marveled at the sight. Outside the bay window was a panoramic vista of the sea, which put Josee in a slightly better mood. She climbed over the table and across the chairs, then gazed at the ocean in silence.

“There’s really an aquarium down there?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“Hurry up and let’s go, then.”

“Gimme a second to breathe, okay? I’m tired from driving all day.”

“Then you don’t have to come! I don’t need you! I’ll just ask the bellhop to take me.”

Tsuneo heaved a deep sigh, then decided to take Josee straight to the aquarium. He still needed the bellhop’s help, though. The aquarium was eight meters below ground, and the only way to get there was via the long concrete staircase. Tsuneo managed to carry Josee down the stairs and had the bellhop bring the wheelchair for them.

All of a sudden, they were surrounded by faint lights. Once Josee was back in her wheelchair, the bellhop departed the aquarium, leaving Josee and Tsuneo to themselves. The walls and ceiling were made of glass, and the seawater had a clear green tint to it. Rows of tiny cobalt fish swam through the swaying seaweed as vivid red fish passed them by.

Crawling along the sand at the bottom were eels, crabs, shrimp, and turtles. The only sounds were Tsuneo’s footsteps and the creaking wheelchair; it must have been just the two of them there. A long silver and blue fish slowly came into view—a yellowtail.

Greater amberjack, black sea bream, and banded dogfish swam through the tank, brushing against the coral reef. Their eyes were dry, and each one looked slightly more human than the last.

“Wow. It was more than worth it coming all the way here. This is great,” said Tsuneo, simply enjoying himself.

Josee, however, couldn’t even speak. Down here, where you couldn’t tell whether it was night or day, Josee felt as if she and Tsuneo were all alone at the bottom of the sea. She was entranced—borderline terrified—looping around the aquarium over and over again. Tsuneo eventually lost patience and scolded her, then had the lady at the ticket stand call for the bellhop before carrying Josee back up the staircase. By the time they got to the top, Tsuneo was already panting. They came face-to-face with the bright summer sunshine and the gift shop, and the salty sea air tickled their noses. The two of them decided to have some iced coffee at the nearby parlor before heading back up to the hotel, where they ordered room service.

When Josee woke up late into the night, the moonlight peeking through the opened curtains lit up the room like an underwater grotto in an aquarium.

Both Josee and Tsuneo were fish.

I must’ve died, Josee thought. We both must’ve died.

Tsuneo started living with Josee from then on. They were planning on getting married, but they never changed their family register, or announced a wedding, or even told Tsuneo’s parents. Josee’s grandmother’s ashes remained in that same cardboard box, too.

And Josee was fine with this. She would take her time cooking and flavor the food just as Tsuneo liked. She’d leisurely wash his clothes and make sure that Tsuneo looked his absolute best. The two of them would carefully save their money so that they could go on a trip like this once a year.

We’re both dead. Just a couple of bodies.

Dead bodies was what she meant.

Josee let out a sigh of deep satisfaction at their fishlike bodies. She didn’t know if Tsuneo would leave her one day, but she was happy as long as he was by her side. That was enough. And in Josee’s mind, happiness felt synonymous with death. Absolute happiness was death itself.

We’re fish. Just a couple of bodies was her way of saying they were happy.

Josee laced her fingers through Tsuneo’s, leaned into him, and pushed her beautifully slender yet limp doll-like legs closer before falling back into a peaceful slumber.