Nymph with the Compound Eyes

Dark clouds descend on the elevated station. He gets a pile of tomatoes out of season at a greengrocer in front of the ticket gate exit. While transferring the red ripe fruits from a bamboo basket to a brown paper bag, the shopkeeper speaks to him.

“On dirait qu’il va pleuvoir.”

Combined with the friendly, tired atmosphere, it is strange that her Japanese mumblings sound as if she is speaking French or some other language from a distant country he has never visited.

“Can I have some oranges?”

He takes his wallet out of his cardie pocket, finds the keys to his homes, which no longer exist. The key to the old house he lived in with his parents, who died in succession a decade ago. The key to the apartment door that he closed without even saying a long goodbye to his girlfriend. The keys have been locked out of their respective whereabouts.

His gaze pierces from behind his sleeping eyes into the plug of the cylinder lock. Looking into the past through the keyhole, his almost forgotten daily life comes back to him microscopically. On the table is a bottle of whiskey and one glass, and mixed nuts overflow from an upside-down tin onto the floor of the empty room. He feels the little creatures breathing inside the cracked shell of the pistachio. Revelations like the buzzing of insect wings approaching from behind the door. The feel of translucent organza echoes softly in his ear canals. Two compound eyes of mayfly identifying the polarization from the cloudy sky. Its gaze takes in a 360-degree view of the dark, empty room. Then the mayfly stares with three single eyes at him through the keyhole.

You see yourself, you see yourself seeing yourself, you watch yourself watching yourself. Even if you were to wake up, your vision would remain the same, immutable. Even if you managed to grow thousands, billions of extra eyelids, there would still be this eye, behind, which would see you. *

The hands of the clock are moving back and forth between the past and the present, sometimes stumbling over a disengaged spring, barely circling the globe. This is because the mantle ocean, boiling deep beneath our feet, is gradually weakening the terrestrial magnetism. Cul-De-Sac signs are often found at the end of alleys downtown. There is a kindly arrow sign on the wall one step before the cul-de-sac. Probably it means that the dead end is the destination. Time also stagnates there. The summer rain, which has forgotten the passing seasons, begins to fall again, and caresses his arm. Distant music flutters on his shoulders. Mayflies gather in puddles on a vacant lot at the end of an alleyway in search of clear water. He hails a taxi with nowhere to go. The narrow alleyways must be overlaid with memories of the creek that once ran through downtown, flowed into Tokyo Bay and eventually reached the Pacific Ocean.

You are not asleep but sleep will never come again. You are not awake and you will never wake up. You are not dead and even death could never set you free. *

“The end of the underground line is at the mouth of the river.”

Mayfly larva called Nymph tells him where to go on the station platform. Her watery voice rumbles in his skull. Lulls him into an ephemeral slumber.

 

 

 

* Excerpts from A Man Asleep (Georges Perec: Un homme qui dort, 1967 / Translation by Andrew Leak)


hiromi suzuki is a poet, fiction writer, artist living in Tokyo. Her writing has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, RIC Journal, Berfrois, Minor Literature[s] and various literary journals online.

Published July 15 2025