Surviving Even When Clumsy: The Story of the Sunfish That Swam Diagonally

I got off the train at the terminal station.
When I stepped out of the ticket gate, the dazzling light of early summer was overflowing.
I walked up a gentle slope, and after a short walk, an old aquarium came into view.
Although it has since closed down, it was my favorite place.

My goal was the sunfish.
It had a mysterious form, as if someone had started drawing a fish and stopped halfway through.
It had no tail fin, and with its back half looking as if it had been cleanly sliced off, it drifted along.

Displaying sunfish is actually said to be very difficult.
This is because they would crash into the walls of the transparent tank.
At that aquarium, transparent vinyl was pasted all around the inside of the tank.
It looked as if it were being kept inside a large bag.

When I first saw it, I thought, "It's a little hard to see through the vinyl."
However, as I stared at it, I became transfixed by a certain sight.

The sunfish, which had been swimming slowly, bumped into the vinyl wall.
It did not stop.
As if believing it could go beyond the transparent wall, it kept moving its fins desperately.
With that momentum, its body slowly tilted diagonally.
In front of me, as I watched in a daze, it continued to struggle.

Eventually, because its body had tilted, its direction of travel changed slightly by chance.
The sunfish slipped away from the wall and drifted off into the depths of the tank.

Because there was a vinyl curtain, it managed to avoid getting hurt.
It was necessary after all.

And that clumsy, desperate fluttering.

I think about it while looking at the vast ocean from the window of the train on my way home.
I had thought that the rule of the natural world was to evolve to be "stronger and faster" in order to survive.
However, the sunfish is different.
It discarded the tail fin needed for fast swimming, possessed no weapons to attack, and survived by betting everything on the single point of "laying an overwhelming number of eggs."

While other fish competed for speed, it found a niche that no one else had chosen: "staying in a disadvantageous form and winning through sheer numbers."

To connect life, nature creates various possibilities.

That figure, bumping into a transparent wall and fluttering while tilting diagonally.
Though it might look comical and precarious to others, that movement was, nonetheless, the very "proof of a powerful life" that had survived the harsh natural world.

Maybe it's okay not to swim smartly.
Perhaps there are routes that can only be found by struggling and tilting diagonally.

When the early summer light becomes dazzling, I still want to meet that sunfish.
I remember that figure, floating clumsily, but living with all its might.