What if the price of a better world was the loss of your dreams? That’s the question that Japanese author Sachiko Kashimoto asks in this week’s Translation Tuesday, translated by Yui Kajita. In this spare, subtly plotted short story, an unnamed narrator goes for a short walk to pick dandelions, only to retreat to their apartment after experiencing sudden drowsiness. There, in conversation with their neighbor, the true nature of the narrator’s condition is revealed: their unremembered dreams are the physical substance from which their idyllic world is made. As they begin, once more, to dream, they find themself in an unexpected place, their elusive vision drawing a faint but powerful connection between their utopia and the altogether more painful world of the audience. Read on!
Today I’ll pick a hundred dandelions, I decided and walked out to the riverbank.
The sun was shining bright, the surface of the water glimmering in the warm breeze. It might’ve been a good day for picnicking by the river, too, I thought fleetingly.
All over the bank, green was shooting up from the ground, piercing through the round rocks, and there they were, blazing yellow dandelions, so vivid they almost stung my eyes, thriving everywhere. I would’ve felt sorry to pick five or six from the same clump, so I set a rule that I’d leave at least half of each cluster untouched, then started picking the flowers while counting each one in my head.
As I tossed the dandelions into my bucket with the stalk ends down, my mind wandered. 5, I wish I’d taken a pruner. My hands are getting sticky from the sap. 16, wonder what this fluid is. Is it basically their blood? I’m glad it’s white, would’ve been terrifying if this was red. 23, ah, what’s this flower called again? The purple one with four petals. Pretty, maybe I’ll pick some of these, too. But no, focus on dandelions today.
At 31, I was hit by a sudden wave of drowsiness. Not the ordinary kind that comes at night—it was much stronger, more penetrating. Oh, already? Flustered, I tried to remember what day it was. Surely it was far too early. Maybe because it’s spring, I thought. I have a feeling there was a saying like that, that there’s more sleep in the spring.
I felt the soft embrace of sunlight on my back as I knelt down, my head drooping. Somewhere far away, an unfamiliar bird was crying. Piii-hyororororo. I couldn’t see it anywhere. An uguisu? Or a cat, maybe.
Speaking of, I heard a phenomenal story from Mimio-san yesterday when we were watching the sunset together. By sheer coincidence, it turned out that Mimio-san’s cat and that primary school boy who lives in the neighbourhood were—
The fierce, eruptive drowsiness rushed over me again. Head spinning, I rolled up a sleeve and checked the gauge on my wrist. It was under one. Can’t be. Must be some sort of mistake. Well, there’s nothing I can do, I better head home for today. I’ve lost count, anyway.
I went back home with my bucket, and I put the dandelions in a vase. There were fiftytwo in total. I made a mug of hot cocoa and gazed at the dandelions as I sipped. I checked the weather forecast for tonight. Clear sky, eighteen degrees. Southerly wind.
Once the sun dipped, I went up to the rooftop terrace. I’d had my eye on this spot from the other day—it was sky all around, with just the right kind of benches around the flower bed. When I opened the iron door and stepped out on the terrace, I caught a whiff of something sweet wafting in the breeze.
Someone was already sitting on a bench. A neighbour from the fourth floor whom I sometimes said hello to when we passed in the corridors.
“Good evening,” I said.
“Oh hello.” She smiled. “Would you like one?” she asked, holding out a hand. It was a melonpan. This must be where that inviting scent was coming from.
Nibbling at the sugary bun, we each stretched out on a bench on either side of the flowerbed and chatted. She told me this spot was a favorite of hers, and this was already her third time to sit here. She’d decided that today should be a day of “N,” so she was only eating food with names that had the “N” sound in it. Konnyaku. Oshinko pickles. Tonjiru soup.
Simmered daikon. Melonpan was exceptionally good, since it had not just one but two Ns. I told her about the dandelions, too. It was fun, but my gauge dropped too low midway through, so I only managed to pick half, I said. She said hers came much earlier than she was expecting, too. “From what I’ve heard, that sort of thing is getting to be quite common these days. That’s what they told me at the city hall.”
Hmm. What did that mean exactly? If everyone’s cycles got shorter all at once, what would happen then? I thought about telling her the story about Mimio-san’s cat, but I thought better of it. Somehow I felt it wasn’t the kind of thing you brought up when you were talking to someone for the first time.
There was a lull in the conversation. I realized the moon had already risen in the sky. A full moon, perhaps—it was enormous, perfectly round and yellow. Ah, how pretty, I was about to say, but instead of words, something else plopped out of me. It was starting. Clear jelly spilled out of my mouth and began to cover my entire body. As the substance spread over me, it cut me off from the slightly chilly breeze that had been blowing just a moment ago, and I felt neither warm nor cold, wrapped up in a peculiar sensation that made it seem as if temperature itself didn’t exist anymore. When the jelly covered my ears, sound disappeared; the substance gradually came up to my eyes, then the top of my head, surrounding me like a cocoon. Wondering what had become of the fourth-floor neighbour, I turned my head in her direction, but the hyacinths blocked my view. She must be wrapped up like me by now, I thought. The jelly cocoons always appeared at the same hour, even if on different days.
Wrapped in my cocoon, I felt thoroughly at ease. In fact, it really was safe to be in this cocoon. The jelly protected me from the open air as well as from enemies, and it was impossible to rupture from outside. Once in a while, you’d come across someone who happened to turn into a cocoon in the park or in the middle of a road, but someone else would gently carry them to a place where they wouldn’t get in the way, and after that, there would be nothing to worry about.
I looked up at the moon. It was climbing higher now, shining even brighter. The light blurred and wobbled through the jelly, as if I were gazing up from the bottom of a river. A sweet scent drifted over from somewhere. That’s odd, I shouldn’t smell anything when I’m in the cocoon. Oh, I get it, it’s coming from the moonlight. They say crabs live on the moon, but try as I might, I can’t make out anything like that. If you ask me, I’d say it looks more like a pair of ants beating bongos. As these thoughts were passing through my head, another violent wave of drowsiness came over me, and everythi—
When I came to, it was already bright. I tore the jelly apart and stepped outside. Judging from the height of the sun, it was probably around eight in the morning. The bench on the other side was already empty. I’d forgotten to ask for the neighbour’s name. I made a mental note to ask her next time I see her. And to thank her for the melonpan.
The jelly that I’d shed was rapidly shrinking in the sunlight. When it was around the size of a puppy, I rolled it into a ball with both hands. This jelly had a faint tinge of yellow in it. Maybe my dreams had been full of dandelions.
On the edge of the bench, there was a piece of jelly that had broken off from the main body. This one was indigo in colour, so dark it was almost black. I rolled it up into a small ball, too, and put it away in my pocket.
I went to the city hall as usual and handed in the ball at the reception desk. When the familiar middle-aged lady took my ball, she lit up and said admiringly, What a lovely yellow, it makes me want to put it somewhere like an ornament. When I said, I’m sorry it’s not so big these days, her face clouded over a little. Don’t worry, dear, you’re not the only one, everyone’s jellies have been shrinking bit by bit lately, she said, popping my ball into a capsule and pressing the switch for the shooter. The ball that had absorbed my dreams would be sent to some faraway factory, where they would extract just the dream element and process it to make all kinds of things, or so I’d heard. The world was made up of dreams gathered from a multitude of people. Everything was made this way, including melonpan, benches, hot cocoa, buckets, and dandelions.
What would my dandelion dream—or whatever it was—turn into? Some butter, a yellow shirt, or a piece of topaz, maybe? There was no way of knowing for sure. Where the factory was and what kind of processing went on there were a secret. We all dream of chancing upon something that was formed out of our own dreams, somewhere, someday. Then, if we do, we can believe that we really have created a piece of this world. Some say you’d know at once if you came across something made from your own dream because you’d be overcome with bliss as soon as you saw it. Of course, an encounter like that was as good as a miracle, the chances of it happening close to none, but I still hoped that I might experience it myself one day. Just like that schoolboy and Mimio-san’s cat.
Walking home along the riverbank, I reached in my pocket and let my fingers brush against the indigo ball that I’d kept. Though I didn’t tell the lady, I still remembered a faint trace of my dream from last night. That shouldn’t be happening, in theory. All dreams were supposed to be sucked up by the jelly and collected as a resource.
The dream I remembered was about a different world somewhere. In that world, everyone worked hard to earn their daily bread, and living meant suffering. With no jelly coming out of their mouths, and nothing to protect them, they were beset with fatigue and anxiety day in, day out. Instead, they had lots of dreams every night. In my dream, the word dream signified something bright, brimming with hope. Not a tool for building the world.
Does anyone else remember their dreams like I do? Could that be why the balls of dreams are getting smaller, and the intervals between them shortening? If there were fewer dreams to be processed, would the world shrink? Is everyone holding on to a piece of their dreams in secret, like this indigo ball of my dream that I’d kept for myself? If we collected and processed all these hidden pieces, what kind of world would they make?
When I got home, the dandelions in the vase had all turned into white fluff. I carried the vase to the balcony and blew hard on the stalks, and the fuzz floated away towards the river. I had to think about what kind of day tomorrow would be, but nothing came to me.
Translated from the Japanese by Yui Kajita
Sachiko Kishimoto is an English translator and writer, born in Yokohama in 1960. She graduated from the Department of English Literature at Sophia University in Tokyo, and after working for some years in publicity for a Western liquor manufacturer, she became a translator. She is known for her translations of Nicholson Baker, Lucia Berlin, Lydia Davis, John Irving, Thom Jones, Miranda July, Steven Millhauser, George Saunders, Shaun Tan, and Jeanette Winterson, among many others. She has published five critically acclaimed essay collections: Kininaru bubun (Parts on My Mind, 2000), Nenimotsu taipu (The Grudging Type, 2007), Nanraka no jijyo (One Reason or Another, 2012), Himitsu no shitsumon (Secret Questions, 2019), and Shinumade ni ikitai umi (Oceans I Want to Visit Before I Die, 2020). With her unique wit and style, her writings have garnered a dedicated following.
Yui Kajita is a translator, illustrator, and literary scholar from Kyoto, Japan, currently based in Germany. She completed her PhD in English literature at the University of Cambridge in 2019. Her publications include a novel by Shion Miura, Run With the Wind (HarperVia, 2024), Riichi Yokomitsu’s short story, Spring Comes Riding in a Carriage (Vertical, 2023), Mayumi Inaba’s short story in Tales & Feathers (2023), and co-translated poems by Yosano Akiko in Modern Poetry in Translation (2020) and The Massachusetts Review (2024). She has also co-edited a collection of essays and poems, titled Walter de la Mare: Critical Appraisals (Liverpool UP, 2022). She was shortlisted for the 5th JLPP International Translation Competition in 2021 and longlisted for the John Dryden Translation Competition in 2022. Having lived between languages since she was little, she translates prose fiction, poetry, children’s books, manga, and texts on art.