Suicide Attempt in the Koi Pond

The Suicide Attempt in the Koi Pond is the Narrator’s first and only deliberate attempt to die, made at three during a period of mounting unease and despair. The episode turns an ordinary task—feeding the carp at noon—into a confrontation with life, death, and the limits of what a child can say about her own experience. Although Nishio-san ultimately rescues her, the Narrator keeps the attempt secret from her parents and remains ambivalent about having survived.

Background and Crisis

By late August, the Narrator senses that life is changing but cannot identify the details. She takes refuge in a spinning top, hoping it might offer an explanation, and approaches the day’s task of feeding the fish with the feeling that a painful ordeal is due. For two weeks she has gone to the pond at noon. Rather than becoming accustomed to the carp’s feeding, she has grown increasingly depressed by their mouths and by the act of giving them food.

That reaction becomes a crisis of identity. A condemning inner voice recasts human beings as bodies that consume and remain unfilled, and tells the Narrator that she is no different from anyone else. She wonders whether the repeated task carries a divine message and decides she must listen to the voice rather than silence it. The pond, once part of the garden that sheltered her from the outside world, now seems to harbor death. Faced with the alternatives as she perceives them—life represented by the feeding fish, or death represented by slow decay—she becomes unable to continue resisting the choice before her.

The Attempt at the Pond

At noon, the Narrator takes rice cakes from the pantry and goes out to the pool. The water is bright in the sun, and the fish have gathered for food. She stands at the edge, becomes cold and physically overwhelmed, and collapses into the pond. Her head strikes the stone edge; the pain quickly fades, and her body settles underwater. Unlike an earlier drowning, which had brought an urgent desire to return to the surface, this time she feels she has chosen death and does not miss the air.

Underwater, her experience shifts from crisis to calm. She feels at home and regards the garden through the water, concentrating on the bamboo near the pool. The carp move to the far side and become still. The Narrator is absorbed by this altered view and is happy there, unaware, or unwilling to respond, when a person leans over the water. The figure is Kashima-san. The Narrator expects that Kashima-san will not intervene: she believes the woman hates her and interprets her impassive gaze as acceptance of the Narrator’s death.

The older Narrator connects this scene to her memory of drowning at sea, when people on the beach watched without rescuing her before Mother pulled her out. At three, she now understands the onlookers and Kashima-san through a fatalistic idea that a person destined to drown will drown. The recollection therefore gives the pond episode a second, troubling dimension: the attempt is not only a private act but also a test of whether another person will interrupt it. The Narrator imagines Kashima-san letting events follow their course, though she cannot know what the woman understood.

Rescue and the Account of an Accident

The Narrator’s near-death experience is interrupted when someone seizes her and shakes her back into awareness. Air returns, pain follows, and she recognizes Nishio-san. Nishio-san calls for help, carries her into the house, and finds Mother, who reacts with alarm. She then accompanies them as they hurry to the car, trying to explain what happened in a mixture of Japanese, French, English, and groans.

On the drive, Mother supplies an accidental explanation: the Narrator must have slipped while feeding the fish, fallen into the water, and lost consciousness after striking her head. The Narrator knows this account is not true. She nonetheless understands that she should not tell Mother what happened and that the family should keep to the explanation already offered. She does not know the word for suicide, or how to put her experience into words. What she can express is that she does not want to feed the carp again.

Secrecy and Ambivalence

The Narrator never tells her parents that the fall was deliberate. She also withholds her belief that Kashima-san watched without intervening. As an adult, she speculates that Kashima-san may have understood the choice and respected it, while acknowledging that she cannot be certain. The event thus remains divided between the family’s practical account of an accident and the Narrator’s private memory of a chosen death and a rescue she had not wanted.

The conclusion does not resolve survival into simple gratitude or disappointment. The Narrator recalls being glad that she was taken from the water in time, while also feeling that life and death were ultimately much the same to her. Her attempt ends, but the indifference surrounding it persists as part of her recollection. The later account of mass deaths on Okinawa sharpens this meditation: after Japan’s surrender, inhabitants who believed they would be killed by the advancing Americans leaped from cliffs, despite orders to stop resisting. The Narrator sees a paradox in people dying from fear of death. This historical reflection does not equate the child’s private act with a mass event shaped by wartime beliefs; rather, it places both beside the question of how fear, choice, and the expectation of death can govern action.