Swimming in Circles: FISH SWIMMING IN DAPPLED SUNLIGHT (2007)

Originally posted April 29, 2024.

I do love a good psychological mystery, where characters review and re-review memories, trapping themselves in an ant spiral of rumination until you’re no longer sure what the truth is. The Conversation (1974), Anatomy of a Fall (2023), Kisaragi (2007). Riku Onda’s excellent The Aosawa Murders belongs to this genre, as does her second book translated in English, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight (also translated by Alison Watts). The Aosawa Murders being a personal favourite, when I saw Onda’s latest at the library I grabbed it instantly, and while I didn’t like it quite as much as its predecessor, it was an interesting character study, if not particularly mysterious.

The narration alternates between our two protagonists, a former couple who we eventually learn are named Hiro and Aki (short for Chihiro and Chiaki). This is their last night in their apartment, stripped bare before they individually move out, and thus their last chance to hash out an incident each suspects the other of: who killed their biological father.

It’s high-concept, to say the least, but let me try to break it down: Hiro and Aki met in university and had an instant connection, but after a few dates, began to suspect that Aki, who is adopted, might be Hiro’s younger sister who was adopted out as a toddler. The circumstances of the adoption, and their reasons for suspicion, are explored over the course of the book. After coming to believe this, the pair decided to live amicably together as siblings, with mixed success on the “amicable”. They also tracked down Hiro’s biological father, a trail guide, and met him on a hiking trip under false pretenses, posing as a married couple. During a break in which all three hikers were separated, the trail guide fell to his death.

Since then, Hiro and Aki’s close relationship has been poisoned by suspicion. Each wonders if it was foul play, and attempts to corner the other into admitting it. You would think, given the alternating perspective, that at least from the reader’s point of view it would be an open-and-shut case. But the two narrators don’t always trust their own memories, or their interpretations of what they witnessed. “Unreliable narrator” doesn’t begin to cover it. You very much get the sense that some of this is motivated by resentment over the nature of their relationship—on Hiro’s side, frustration that Aki doesn’t remember their infancy in the same house, and on Aki’s side, frustration that a man who she’s never seen as a brother has turned out to be related to her, a situation of cosmic bad luck that she ruminates on to the point of overshadowing her present romantic relationship with a jealous ex-fiancé.

Hiro and Aki arrive at theories both regarding what happened on the hike, what happened during their childhood, and the truth of their parentage. Like The Aosawa Murders, these theories are ambiguous and subjective, reliant on flashbulbs of memory and hopeful speculation as characters pick at old wounds. The conclusion is spurious, and I suspect that’s the point: much is made of the way that perspective informs a relationship, and that they can appear very different The novel is bookended by descriptions of the photo Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (whose subjects were not, in fact, farmers) and a “family photo” of Hiro, Aki, and their “father”. Still, I found myself wishing that Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight were just a little longer. There are a lot of major twists and revelations packed into the back half of the book, and much like the claustrophobic apartment that serves as the book’s setting, they could have used some breathing room.