Yasuragi
Interest notes / Seeds of Semi-Sci-Fi Curiosity
July. I came home.
When I turned on the light in the humid room, there it was, stuck to the wall: summer’s defending champion, the rhinoceros beetle.
Except no. The all-season challenger. That thing.
This year too, it had fought its way through the district preliminaries—no, the underground preliminaries—and arrived wearing a shade close to the champion’s uniform.
Final round: Human Stadium.
Anyway, while I was commentating with those worthless, maggot-like turns of phrase, the thing would get away. So without a pause, I picked up the spray insecticide by the entrance, the one made specifically for that thing.
When I buy seasonings for food, I care about versatility, so I buy things like pepper, basil, or chili oil.
When I buy clothes, too, I buy shirts that are not too sharp-edged, easy to mix and wear in different combinations.
But with insecticide, I want the specialized one.
I do not need versatility.
I only want to end that thing.
Every time summer comes, I find myself thinking that kind of thought.
Freshly, as if I never get tired of it.
But somehow, this summer, I thought a little differently.
If that thing and I could have even a small conversation, would our response change even a little?
No. Not that thing. Let me call them they.
If you ask people, in a survey, what they dislike about them, the common answers are:
They look gross.
They seem like they might fly toward me.
You cannot read where they are trying to go.
That is most of it.
But if that is all, there are humans like that too.
A rowdy toddler who has not learned language yet. A nuisance YouTuber you cannot have a conversation with.
And besides, that thing—no, they—have caused less real social damage than those humans.
They do not scribble on the sofa, or lick the soy sauce container at a sushi restaurant.
Even so, their very existence is fiercely rejected, and they are not merely avoided. They are chased around on the assumption that they will be exterminated.
If there were a translator that let us talk with them, there are a few things I would want to ask.
Why are you in my home?
Where did you get in from?
What is your purpose?
Interrogation-style questioning before the insecticide.
There are other questions, too, if I think about it.
What do you want to eat?
What would make you stop coming into human dwellings?
Questions less about coexistence than about a kind of diplomacy where they agree not to come over here.
And then there are still other questions.
Which restaurant’s leftovers were good?
Which areas have relatively dirty sewers, and which are, strangely, on the cleaner side?
Requests for marketing and maintenance data that only those living along the back-pipe routes could share.
If they really answered these questions properly, what would we feel?
Would we be able to pull the trigger of the handgun called the specialized insecticide, still clenched in our hand?
This summer, with a pssshh, their first-round defeat was decided.
Tarachine
Life logs / Transcript of a monologue
『The Wooden Maternity Mark』
On a crowded commuter train, a woman who is offered a priority seat has an unfamiliar wooden mark hanging from her bag. Sometimes a sign made to help people becomes harder to recognize when it is made more stylish.
###
I once thought that maybe this is what people mean when they say something was made without listening to the people on the ground.
My workplace is in a place called Ibaraki City, in Osaka Prefecture. Every morning, I take the train there. It is a very crowded train, so more than 95 percent of the time, I end up standing, holding on to a strap.
It is the Hankyu line going from Osaka toward Kyoto. A semi-express train bound for Kyoto-kawaramachi, which tends to have a lot of passengers.
That day, as usual, I was standing in front of the priority seats, holding on to a strap. My destination was still quite a way off, but when the train stopped at the next station, the man sitting right in front of me, in the priority seat, stood up and got off the train.
I gratefully sat down in the empty priority seat.
Looking around, I did not see any elderly people in particular. There were just a lot of high school students, younger than me, who still looked like they could keep working hard at club activities.
Then, after I sat down, people got off the train, and then new people came in. The passengers changed, but the train was reassembled with about the same number of people as before.
In the place where I had been standing, there was now a woman who seemed to be in her late twenties or early thirties. A pretty woman. She was wearing a green dress, a little more casual than office casual, and had something like a shoulder bag hanging from her shoulder.
Since I had managed to sit down, I was thinking maybe I would sleep a little. I leaned my head against the wall above the seat, half nodding off.
Then the train arrived at the next station.
The person sitting in the priority seat across from me stood up and got off at that station. An empty seat appeared, so another woman sat down there.
Right around the moment she sat down, just as the person from that priority seat had stood up and was getting off the train, the woman in the green dress standing in front of me noticed that the seat behind her had opened up. She turned around and checked it.
But by then, someone else had already sat down, so the woman in the green dress could not sit.
Still, since she had turned her body toward the seat as if she might sit there, the woman who had sat down first and the woman in the green dress seemed to make very direct eye contact.
Then the woman who had sat down first stood up again and gave the seat to the woman in the dress.
I thought, what a kind person. At the same time, half of me wondered if there was some sign, something I had missed, that meant this person should be sitting in a priority seat.
When the woman in the green dress sat down, she was right across from me, so I checked her whole body very slightly with my eyes.
I did not see any obvious mark.
There is, for example, the Help Mark keychain, with a white cross and heart printed on a red rectangular plate. It is a keychain used by people with physical conditions or some kind of disability to indicate that they may need support. She did not have that.
And there is the maternity mark, the cute icon on a white base with pink, showing a mother and baby together. In Japan, when someone has this maternity mark, it is considered good manners to offer them a seat.
But she did not have that either.
Then I remembered one thing, and I looked closely at a certain part of her.
It was the brown wooden keychain attached to her bag.
I remembered having seen it somewhere before, and then I remembered what it was.
A woman at my workplace had put on the same keychain when she became pregnant. It was not an ordinary keychain. It was one given out by the city office, made with a traditional wood from that town, with the mother-and-child icon carved into it. A craft-style maternity mark keychain.
And then I realized that the thing attached to the bag of the woman in the green dress sitting across from me was the same thing.
At that moment I thought, damn, I should have noticed. But to be honest, it was extremely hard to understand.
Because this mark is something you can only receive from that city office. It is not part of the shared, almost global recognition that exists in public.
The white icon with pink that we usually see. That is the same as the maternity mark you can get anywhere in Japan. The national version.
But the one that this woman and my coworker had been wearing was an original local version, something only people living in that city could receive.
Maybe for fathers or mothers who have raised children in that area, it is something they can notice right away.
But for someone who has not had that experience, it is an unfamiliar mark, one you have almost no way of noticing.
The keychain just looks like a somewhat stylish craft keychain. That is all it looks like.
In fact, when I looked up at the train wall behind the woman in the dress, there was a notice that said,
“Please offer your seat to people wearing this mark.”
And next to those words, the national version of the maternity mark was displayed, large and clear.
It is true that it is important not to ruin the fashion or appearance of people raising children, pregnant women, mothers.
But probably, for both the people being supported and the people trying to support them, the most important thing is whether it is easy to understand.
This is just my guess, but the city employee who thought up this design and decided to actually make it, or the craftsperson who joined the project, was probably someone without children.
Thinking that, I arrived at the station nearest my workplace and got off the train.
Bisho-An
Micro fictions / narrative works
Work: Things We Don’t Understand
The Work
Woman: God! What even is love? I don’t understand it anymore!
Man: ...
Woman: Say something!
Man: Have you ever heard of the theory of several complex variables?
Woman: What? Don’t start spouting things I can’t understand.
Man: Well, the theory of several complex variables is...
Woman: Stop! I don’t want to hear about boring things! I hate things I don’t understand because I’ve never studied them!
Man: Love?
“If you hate what you do not understand, then love is still a course you have not taken.”
Rinri
Soundscapes / auditory meditations
0:00 - 0:03:46:00
🎧 Track: Dryer
🧠 Field Note / Background
🗂 Technical Info
- Recorder: RODE Wireless PRO,ZOOM M2 MicTrak
- Format: 48kHz / 24bit / Stereo
🪶 Metadata
- Recorded: 20260706, Home
- Duration: 0:03:46:00
- Genre: ambient,lifestyle
- License: All Rights Reserved
Endnote / Reflection
“”
© 2026 不得井（enui） / Futagu
All text, audio, and visual materials in this post are original works by the author.
Unauthorized reproduction, redistribution, or derivative use is prohibited.
For inquiries regarding citation, translation, or collaboration, please contact via the Substack profile page.
This work is part of the Futagu series — a four-layered cycle exploring consciousness through curiosity, reflection, creation, and sound.
Follow the flow, or just drift.
© 2026 不得井（enui） / Futagu — All Rights Reserved
Thank you for reading. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.