Catfish Rolling by Clara Kumagai: an excerpt from the tale inspired by Japanese legend

Magical realism blends with Japanese myth and legend in an original story about grief, memory, time and an earthquake that shook a nation.

There’s a catfish under the islands of Japan and when it rolls the land rises and falls.

Sora hates the catfish whose rolling caused an earthquake so powerful it cracked time itself. It destroyed her home and took her mother. Now Sora and her scientist father live close to the zones – the wild and abandoned places where time runs faster or slower than normal. Sora is sensitive to the shifts, and her father recruits her help in exploring these liminal spaces.

But it’s dangerous there – and as she strays further inside in search of her mother, she finds that time distorts, memories fracture and shadows, a glimmer of things not entirely human, linger. After Sora’s father goes missing, she has no choice but to venture into uncharted spaces within the time zones to find him, her mother and perhaps even the catfish itself…

Every time I’m part of a blog tour for a new book, I say I’m excited to be a part of it. And that’s always true – I only join blog tours for books I’m certain I’ll love, and I’m usually right! But when an email came through asking me to join the tour for Catfish Rolling by Clara Kumagai, I was ecstatic.

This book has been on my radar for a while now, particularly since I included it in a list of upcoming LGBTQ+ books in the first ever issue of my new zine, The Queer Code. So when a copy arrived in the post and I said a massive YES! to being on the blog tour, it was like fate.

Due to me being a later addition to the tour and me getting my hands on a copy of the book only last week, paired with an absolutely ridiculous week (I’m talking full-time work plus three 7–10pm theatre rehearsals in one week), I unfortunately haven’t finished the book yet – but oohoo, let me tell you, I am EXCITED. From what I’ve read so far, I love it and I can’t wait for others to read it too.

(Also, I could just stare at the cover for days. And look at these stencilled edges!!!)

I didn’t want to review the book before finishing it, so instead, I thought I’d treat you to an excerpt from the book! This is a section from the second chapter of the book, and it’s a section that intrigued me most and made me want to keep reading all night. So I hope it does the same to you too!

Catfish Rolling: An Excerpt from Chapter 2

I met Koki in a time zone, back when kids used to dare each other over the boundary lines. Even then, not many would do it. It was after school one day, just before the summer break, everyone giddy at the prospect of a holiday. That was why I’d tagged along with a group of kids from the class instead of going home alone, like I almost always did. We traipsed through fields, into the thin woods that ran beside a section of the boundary fence that wasn’t patrolled. Some of the other kids said they had been there before. We gathered at a point where the fence had been pulled apart, a gap wide enough for a thirteen-year-old to fit through and cross over into places where time ran faster.

We all stood around. I hovered at the back of the group, interested to see what would happen; the kids in my class were way better behaved than the ones in my old Vancouver school. The boys who’d led the way pushed each other and laughed, but suddenly nobody wanted to volunteer.

“Go get something from one of the houses and bring it back!” one said to the other. “So we can see what it looks like.”

“You do it!”

“I don’t wanna come back all wrinkled and old!”

“I heard you go insane if you spend a while in there, like those gaijin doing experiments,” a girl added.

There was a pause, and I felt everybody not looking at me. My face was hot.

They watched me, maybe waiting for me to tell them that none of those rumours were true. I didn’t know they weren’t true. I just hadn’t seen them yet.

Nobody else spoke, so it was up to me to say, inevitably, “I’ll do it.”

The boys who’d been arguing looked at me and then at each other.

“Really?” one said.

I nodded. I hadn’t searched this area yet. I figured I could do it now. I squeezed through the fence.

“Bring something back!” a girl called.

This side of the fence, the trees thinned out but the grass was longer. It was quieter. There were houses close by. I wanted to run but made myself walk. I looked over my shoulder and I could see them clustered at the fence, watching me in a way that made me wonder for a minute which side of the fence was the safe one, and which I actually wanted to be on.

I reached the first house, which had been white, once. The front door was locked, or stuck. The next house was open. I stood on the doorstep and peered in. It was very dark. I had been in houses before, a few times, but the other kids had put the creepiness into my head and now I felt a prickle down the back of my neck.

I stepped inside and the dark settled into the ordinary inside shade of a house. My foot hovered over the floor but it was too dirty for me to take my shoes off.

“Excuse me,” I mumbled, and winced as I walked down the hallway.

The air was hot and thick. I went into the kitchen, which was generally the best room to go to because it is the most familiar and the most used to people. There wasn’t much there; the house was close enough to the boundary that it had probably been properly cleared out. The family might have even been able to come back for their things, if they had been here before the fence was put up. The cupboards were empty. I could hardly bring back a chair, though it would have been funny to see everyone’s expressions if I hauled back something really stupid like that. The other downstairs rooms were empty too, aside from the big furniture. I didn’t go upstairs.

I returned to the sunlight, which glared so harshly that it was a relief to duck into the next house, but it was as hollow as the last, and the next was the same. It should have made me feel better to find these houses empty, if it was because people had been able to take their lives with them. But somehow the empty houses felt worse, as if they’d never had anything or anyone living inside them and hadn’t ever been used for what they had been built for.

There weren’t many more buildings ahead; a small house and a big shed and then fields. I don’t know why I went to the shed first. Maybe because it was a change from the houses. The doors were hard to open. When I finally did it, light leaked in, and it was a nightmare of bones.

The tales of people’s flesh falling off them while they were still alive, turning into skeletons that walked before they collapsed into dust on the ground – no, they weren’t true, this couldn’t be that! I took a breath to calm myself and gagged at the trace of decay in the air. My head cleared. The shed was separated by bars into small sections. Pens. The bones were animal bones. The long skulls – cattle.

I walked in. Some bones were in heaps, where cows had lain down or collapsed. Other skills rested outside the pens, near dry buckets and dusty troughs. Had they died because of the time zone, or had these been deaths from starvation, thirst? Everyone had had to evacuate, and the cows were left behind. Of course, because nobody could have taken all of them. And hadn’t they been raised to be slaughtered, anyway? But the poor things.

I kneeled by a skull and touched my fingertips to it. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

There was a faint sound of cattle lowing, mournful, layering and echoing.

I stood up very slowly. There was nothing to see. The noise faded. It could have been the wind, the trees, anything really. I began to back away. I’d shut the doors and never return here. But – that’s what had happened before. I forced myself forward, to the first pen. The bolts were dry and rusty, scraping as though they were in pain as I dragged them back. I opened the pens wide. I took a bucket and went outside to find a tap, and when I twisted it water sputtered out miraculously.

“Hey.”

I clapped a hand over my mouth to stop my scream. There was a boy, wearing a school uniform. I knew his face but couldn’t remember his name.

“Sorry,” he said. “We got worried.”

“I’m fine. I just…” The bucket of water overflowed.

He turned the tap off. “What are you doing?” His eyes landed on the shed. “You went in there?”

I nodded.

“There were cows…” he said.

“How did you know that? You’ve been here before?”

After a moment, he said, “Yeah.”

“Why?”

He stuck his hands in his pockets.

“Did you live near here?” I asked.

He shook his head and kicked at another dry bucket. “Used to be my uncle’s farm. My brother worked here. Kinda weird part-time job. He wanted to be a farmer too.”

“You shouldn’t go in there. It’s only cows,” I added quickly. “But–”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I never did. It’s bad?”

I nodded.

He looked down at the spilled water instead of me. “What were you doing?”

I cleared my throat. “I thought I would clean it.”

He walked away suddenly. I watched him pause before the shed door, take a breath, and go in. He came out a minute later, rubbing a hand across his face. I looked down, stared at my reflection trapped in the bucket.

He didn’t say anything, just picked up the other bucket and filled it. We went to the shed. Inside, we sprinkled water over the bones, the way you wash a gravestone. Neither of us spoke but the silence was full of words, like there was a conversation happening in spite of ourselves. It was him saying that his brother was gone, and me saying that I understood, and that I had lost somebody too, and him saying that it was shit, and me saying, yeah, it was, it was the shittiest thing in the world, and U came here too, looking too, for anything that I could find. And this is what we had found.

When we finished, we returned to the battering sunshine. I began to push the doors closed.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to close them.”

We wedged the shed doors open and paused. We bowed and clapped and bowed. We washed our hands. Then we left, and perhaps the ghosts of the cows did too.

As we passed a house nearby, I said, “They told me to bring something back.” I went inside, and he came with me. It seemed more like a workspace than a home, but there was a small kitchen. I opened a cupboard and found a dull silver mental bento box with a faded sticker on the lid. “This would be okay, right?”

He came closer. “Let me see it,” he demanded. He examined it as though he was searching for evidence. “Let’s take it.”

We left and walked in silence until we came to a lone, dutiful vending machine. I wiped the dust from it with my sleeve. “I’m thirsty. You think it’s okay to drink a Pocari Sweat?”

“Yeah. That stuff lasts for years.”

I dug around in my pocket and fished out a hundred-yen coin. I put it in the slot and hit the button. Nothing happened. The machine was dead, obviously. I kicked it. I turned around, but the boy wasn’t there.

“Hey?” I hadn’t heard him go. “Where are you?”

There was a crash of heavy things falling and then he appeared from around the corner, holding a narrow length of metal in his hands. I didn’t move or speak because I was calculating whether to run away or to leap at him.

But he went to the vending machine. “Watch out.” He hefted the metal in his hands like a baseball bat, and then he swung it against the vending machine.

I expected a smash, but there was just a thud.

“Let me try.” I grabbed the metal from him. I stepped up and pretended I was at the home plate and that the vending machine was some kind of huge baseball, and I swung. There was a crack and the vending machine door creaked open.

The boy pulled the metal from my hand and then reached in and grabbed a Pocari Sweat. He handed it to me and took one himself. He tapped his bottle to mine. “Kanpai.”

I laughed and we drank. I choked and spat it out and heard him exclaim in disgust.

“Yuck!” I spat again. It was sour and warm and tasted like poison.

The boy scrubbed his sleeve across his mouth. “That better not make us sick. Didn’t think it could’ve gone bad so fast.”

I checked the expiry date on the cap. “It should be okay for two more years, but here…” I poured my drink on to the ground, hoping it wouldn’t murder the plants that drank it.

“We should go.” He walked over to the vending machine again. “But you should get your money back.” He levered and wrestled at the machine until the money drawer opened. We counted it.

“Two thousand yen!” he said triumphantly. “Twenty bottles of Pocari Sweat.”

“I feel bad.”

“Who else is going to use it?”

We divided it up. It weighed down my skirt pocket, the metal clinking and jingling. We didn’t say anything on the way back.

“How long were we in there for?” he asked.

“It felt like I was in there for an hour. And time goes fast in there, right? If the Pocari went off… Maybe it’s twice as fast. We’ve been gone about thirty minutes, maybe.”

“Maybe?” he said, but it didn’t sound like he was making fun of me.

We waded through the grass.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Koki.”

“Right. I’d forgotten.”

“You’re Sora.”

“Yeah.”

The small group of kids were waiting in the shade of the trees. When we reached the fence, one of the boys held if back to let us through. They all talked at the same time.

“What did you see?”

“Was it strange?”

“What did you do?”

“We drank a Pocari Sweat,” Koki said, “but it had gone bad. It was disgusting.”

“Did you bring any back?”

Koki shook his head. “It was too horrible.”

I remembered the bento box. “Oh, wait.” I pulled it out of my bag. Everyone gathered in close.

“Looks normal,” one of the girls said.

“Open it!”

I clipped the stiff clasps on the lid and opened it. We all leaned forward in fear and excitement, but there was only dust inside, and a pair of wooden chopsticks. Everybody sagged with disappointment, or relief.

I picked up the chopsticks carefully. They were completely normal, pale cheap wood. A breeze blew and my fingers tingled. The chopsticks lightened in my hand and then disintegrated into ash, like a spell breaking, like a sped-up time lapse of decay. I dropped the bento box, and when it hit the ground it began to corrode, rust redness blistering over one side of it. Everybody jumped and yelled at once.

“Did you see–”

“Turned to dust–”

“Rusted–”

“Gone–”

We were shaken, but revived too; it would be an excellent story to exaggerate in school the next day. There was some debate on whether to bring the bento box or not, but it had stopped aging and now just looked like any dirty old thing. One of the girls poked it with her shoe. Nobody wanted to touch it.

“Is your hand okay?” Koki asked.

I hadn’t noticed I was rubbing it against my skirt. “Yeah,” I muttered.

“I’m thirsty,” he said. There was a general murmur of agreement.

“How long we were gone for?” I asked suddenly.

“I timed you,” one of the boys said. “Thirty-one and a half minutes.”

Both of Koki’s eyebrows rose and I tried not to be too smug, but I probably didn’t succeed and he snorted a laugh.

One of the girls glanced from his face to mine. “So you two–” she began.

Koki had already turned away and was walking with the other boys, and I fell behind everybody, like I usually did. The heat slumped into evening. I remembered the coins in my pocket; when I pulled them out to look at them, they had tarnished and dulled. Money, of course, is made to last.

Later, in the conbini, Koki bought two bottles of Pocari Sweat and handed me one. I tapped my bottle to his, but we didn’t say anything. We drank and it was so cold and fresh that I felt like I was waking from the strangest dream.

–

Catfish Rolling by Clara Kumagai is out now. Want to read more? Find out more about it on Goodreads, or get a copy wherever you buy your books!

 

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