One May night, Dragon God’s Lake lay calm as a mirror.
“…There it is again.”
Kopo, lying on his back in the grass, pointed toward the sky beyond the lake. Among the cluster of stars reflected on the water’s surface, one light moved slightly irregularly. Not blinking, not making a sound, just drifting slowly along an arc .
“The city papers are making a huge fuss ,” said Minico, lying beside him, holding up an evening edition toward the sky. “The military released sixty-four volumes of records on mysterious things in the sky, all at once.”
“Huh. Sixty-four whole volumes.”
“Yeah. And everyone’s saying how scary, how scary.”
Kopo stayed quiet for a moment, following the light with his eyes. That light had drifted above Dragon God’s Lake on clear May nights, at least for the past three years. Everyone in town knew about it, and no one made much of a fuss.
“Hey. Do you think that thing needs to be recorded?”
Minico lowered the evening paper and checked the light once more.
“I don’t think it needs to be.”
“Why not?”
“Because once you record it, it becomes a ‘mystery.’”
Kopo rolled that thought around for a while. The damp grass slowly soaked into his back. From far off came Sonchō’s “Feh-feh” laugh, followed by the crinkle of a sakura mochi wrapper being crushed.
“I once tried to catch that thing. Shut myself away in the mountains for a week.”
Turning his head, Kopo saw Sonchō on the bench, lifting the brim of his top hat slightly to look up at the sky.
“Did you catch it?” Minico asked.
“By the morning my seclusion ended, the light was gone. I thought it might never come again. But the following May, it came back.”
“So, what did you do?”
“I stopped waiting for it. And after that, it started coming every year, reliably.”
Kopo looked at the lake’s surface. The light was still tracing its arc. Somewhere beyond the city’s sky, piled high with sixty-four volumes of records, the same light might be drifting the same way, Kopo thought vaguely .
Sprawled flat on the grass, Kopo reached out a hand and traced the light’s path. Of course, he touched nothing. Just the May night air slipping through his fingertips.
Margin note: The record of Sonchō’s week-long seclusion in the mountains sits in the back of a shelf in the archive shed. Titled “Seven Days of Failure.” Only its last line is written in a different hand: “Glad I didn’t catch it.”
【Today’s Motif】
- Pentagon UFO Disclosure (May 2026): The U.S. Department of Defense publicly released 64 new files related to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). Containing extensive footage and reports, it drew worldwide attention.
This is an English translation of “夜空の六十四番目”, part of Tales of Amencho Town (蛙鳴町奇譚).