Quoted By:
In 1971, Japan had seven hundred thousand seagoing workers.
In 1990, it had half of that,
and while Wakoko was smashing that poor fish who must have been Hitler reincarnated, it had less than eighty seven thousand active workers.
The advent of new jobs and commodities, the introduction of options that came with the rise of technology had left people with other choices than going bay fishing, which was risky and required physical strength. Not only that; sonar radars, GPS trackers, the advents in large-scrape deep-sea fishing… Traditional fishermen like the Koizumis, barely scraping by through grit and white rice, were also being left behind by the huge leaps in technology. Not without putting up a fight, of course; for some of them, fishing was all they had. The small boats would leave even in the cold winter mornings, carrying nets, rods, spare reels, and boxes filled with cheap bait and colorful lures, manned by grim men whose attitude was sculpted by the fresh winter winds. Inside her dad’s little cabin, chopping fish just like he taught her, little Wakoko was oblivious to how this lingering sense of impending doom was shaping the culture around her. Because she’s, well, not a very sensitive girl, or very empathic for that either, not really,
but she is, and nobody else knows, quite the scientist.
This time, instead of just taking the guts out, she took a good luck at them- almost burying her nose on the shit and intestines. The knife then became a scalpel, and fish after fish would end up less than the last, open wide on the table like a map to a buried treasure. The heart, the liver, the pancreas, the kidney and stomach; fish after fish, knife after knife, certain parts would always look the same. It couldn’t be, mini Wakoko thought, that they all had such a specific shape for no good reason. Laid out bare in front of her like a puzzle to be solved, neatly arranged in careful order, it was like the rotten organs of dead fish were taunting her.
Then it happened.
It happens to all of us; most don’t even remember it. One time, during our childhood, something makes us as happy as we’ll ever be- and we spend the rest of our lives chasing a high like that. Wakoko is fully convinced that even back then she finally understood, after weeks spent with dead fish with vapid, stupid stares, how the organs fit together in a system, and what each of them does. Only many years, eight years later, would Wakoko finally be able to explain it properly to his father, as the man is having the breakfast that will have to carry him to the end of his shift. Who even now is still thinking about that fish.
