The islands
Were facing one another

When I first spied a duck
On the island outlined dimly in the distance
The puzzle
Long perplexed me
Even after I realized that the duck was
In reality a sand dune
Why
Would a duck be
In such a place
.....

When I venture out onto the seashore you are a little closer. So lonely so far from human habitation      simply      planted there white no doubt you've spent many sleepless nights lying awake. I could have looked away. Pretended not to see blown by the sea breezes      I should have gone back. Simply because I stared and cried "A duck!"      your place is like an open wound defenseless        against the wild sea!

Look
the sea is rough
Water-shears are gleaming
They will dive through the waves
Work the coastline
In sand
This is how
The duck is born
In the island-outline

I should not have called her a "duck". Like someone turning back      the duck was a little out of shape but the memory of the numeral 2 was distinctly impressed upon my vision. As if from a cold place like an inside-out Sado Island covered by snow       she looked back like the wind    and     inadvertently revealed a lonely soul. I should not have called out. When I call out beside the sea    I miss her all the more.

Islands were
Gazing at melancholy
Between them
The autumn waves tossed
The wind was
Disturbed
Glances
Entwined
And vanished
Quite distinct from the numeral
2
They
Became one person
And yet another still
I was staring at
The actuality
Of her body
Which was 2
Sitting on the coastline

I wonder was the duck playing with the waves with her thighs? Was she tickling the soles of her feet with the duckweed? Like the tranquil memory of the violent three minutes just now passed, of the hourglass. With the movements of the lovers' feet the shore becomes white foam whipped up by the cool breezes it flies to this island the brine which splits with a snap how it stings the eyes! Quietly I recall someone.

In water things swell up. But the mighty dimensions of the giant clam exceed by far the rate of enlargement caused by water. Even on the basis of an actual survey it appears to be one metre in size. It has been living for at least 100 years. This is how the discovery of the world's largest bivalve was reported in the M newspaper. As if it was a UFO out of the past, ethnologists made a great fuss over the discovery of something that was presumed not to inhabit Japanese waters.

A woman burst out laughing. But isn't it a vulva? On that shore a peculiar magnetism is working so it's an everyday event for people to lose their souls, for women's vulvas to disappear, for men to have their penises removed. On the shore common giant clams and bęche de mer live, they copulate round the clock and thus increase their numbers two to three times. Their numbers grow to such a magnitude that tour companies organize shell-gathering tours.

As a sequel the M newspaper went to great pains to play up a large-scale search for giant shellfish the result being to introduce a photograph of a giant clam hauled onto the land. What was the idea? There was also a photograph of three two-year olds looking at a shell with the flesh cut out. One metre in length. 150 kgs in weight. The peculiar logic of the ethnologists who could not be satisfied with mere numbers who wished to get to the heart of the matter was even more repulsive. The egg cracked open slippery with brine from over the ocean the clam arrived here pushed by intermittent labor pains. I'm sure I remember that. A woman remembered the pain of ligaments being opened as far as possible.

They were tiny aliens who had become the possessions of human beings.

Along the roads of memory leading to that rocky shore thousands, hundreds of thousands of waves flow. Only on the night of the harvest moon does the road float up like a bridge. The shore is a thorn in the sea. A tendril of bone inside a woman. Awakening from the long slumber of 100 years on the green patch of shore the giant clam for the first time        exposed its vast body to the sky.