Editing City Series:Volume7 Layer 12 (section)

===Record 70: You Can See So Much===
[[Image:TOKYO_183.jpg|thumb]]

'''06/30/1998

'''4:29

Last night, I reformed some dumb students with my fists at Underground Tokyo’s Tokyo Bay and then realized we had missed the last train.

We could probably get back by taxi, but since we weren’t in a hurry, Lady and I decided to do some night fishing in Tokyo Bay.

We rented the rods and other gear. The bait we had to buy.

There were a surprising number of people with the same idea. The harbor pier was full of men in fishing gear or hunting gear either fishing or singing waka.

I let the fishing line down while sensing some of those people passing by behind me.

Lady had said the concrete would chill her butt, but once the dawn arrived and we started fishing, she was really getting into it.

She had just reeled in a catch from the Meiji era.

“Why am I catching so much today?”

“Because Surface Tokyo’s Tokyo Bay is so full of wastewords all the catchable things end up flowing downstream.”

“Hm. But it’s always night fishing down here, isn’t it?”

“Time is still passing, though. The catchable ones will start biting since it’s morning.”

I took a tanzaku I had bought at the fishing shop run by a star and attached it to my hook. Then I wrote “What I Want” on it in magic marker.

“Go!”

I cast my line and it soon came back.

I checked what I had caught.

“That looks like it says ‘common sense’ to me,” said Lady.

“That’s a miss then.”

I frowned and released the common sense and Lady watched it swim away with a tilt of her head.

“What’s that look for, Lady? If I didn’t know better, I’d think you wanted to eat what I caught.”

“Not really. But are you allowed to take your catches with you?”

“This isn’t a fishing hole, so that’s fine. There’s a place to prepare them a little further toward the harbor, so we can eat them there.”

She nodded and prepared another tanzaku.

“What are you trying to catch?”

“All sorts of things. I want ideas for new songs, I want to be taller, I want safety for my family, and some other things too.”

She sure had a lot of wishes, but that subtle greediness was part of what made her who she was.

She cast her tanzaku into the ocean.

Ripples spread out and I heard the whistle of the day’s first electrain in the distance.

I figured this would be our last cast, so I collapsed my own rod.

Then Lady shook.

“Whoa.”

I saw a strong pull on her line.

The line ran wildly through the sea, the rod bent into a curve, and she lost her balance toward the water.

'''If you throw a punch with belief in your heart, all things will receive the blow in accordance with the conservation of energy.

I punched away the force pulling her down and the line snapped.

The sudden loss of that tugging force caused her to tumble back onto her butt and I ran over to her.

“Are you alright? I see it’s blue today.”

“I’m going to tell everyone about this, so I’ll be fine. Anyway, I wonder what I caught.”

“Well,” I replied, pointing at the ground. “I think you caught your greed.”

'''Author Comment:

Fishing in the bay is a lot of fun in the morning.

The small fish are all biting then and you have to start fishing with one hand if you want to pull them in quick.

You can catch a lot in Underground Tokyo, but it seems to all be “old fashioned”.