For J.’s birthday, we took a two-day trip to Lake Nojiri in Nagano. The lake is surrounded by tall mountains, and we didn’t see any unsightly developments. It turned out that C.W. Nicol, a Japanese writer (formerly Welsh), has been working actively to preserve nature in this region. We stayed at a hotel designed by Kiyoshi Seike (1918-2005), a modernist architect. This is the view of the lake from our room. I watched these two fishermen casting and reeling, repeating the movement.

My stepfather regularly took me fishing when I was still a pre-teen and early teen. We didn’t get along at all. I decided to dislike this young stepfather, who was only 10 years older, and he probably didn’t know what to do with me. I was rebellious, asthmatic, and “queer.” But we went fishing together all the time because we loved fishing. I didn’t like him but needed someone to drive me to those rivers and lakes. My stepfather must have imagined that fishing would bring us together.

I’m not sure if those fishing trips made us closer. But we are good friends now, and I regard and respect him as a real father. I still remember those moments that we caught fish together. He quit fishing about 20 years ago. He became a Buddhist monk and decided to renounce any killing for sports. I want to take up fishing again someday, but I also know that I won’t.