Initial transcription conducted at 03:12 AM following the courier’s arrival from the recovery vessel Natsukashii Kamome. The jar was intact. Salt-hardened seal bearing the signature stamp of Katsushika Hokusai (possibly forged, but analysis pending).

Scroll within remarkably preserved. Script brush-drawn in black lacquer ink, rolled on bone. No significant water damage. The interior of the jar was bone-dry—anomalously so.

Initial translator (Tako) reported “a sense of dizziness” while working. I completed the final pass alone. There was no dizziness. There was something else.

It is difficult to articulate the exact emotional register of the text. It is not erotic, not truly. It is reverent. Grief-shaped. Holy, somehow. Not in the manner of temples, but of tidepools—those quiet places where the world forgets to be loud, and something older than belief waits, glistening and soft-eyed.

I have read the fragment nine times. I find myself returning to it unconsciously, the way one might reach for an absent ring or an old scar.

In translation, the resonance is not present. Nor is it there when transcribing from the original. This may be a good thing.

I have begun to dream of quiet water. Of shadows rising where the sand should slope.

I do not dive. I have never been farther than waist-deep in the ocean.

And yet.

There is a feeling in me now.

Something like ink, diluted with salt, or a memory faded to near loss.

—M.

—

I was warned not to follow her into the waves, but the warnings were shallow, and spoke only of drowning. Drowning is a lung problem. My suffering was deeper. Beneath the waves, the world changes shape.

Above turns to awe, below to desire.

She did not see me. Never will. There is no need to see. Her eyes do not ask. They remember.

Before I was bone, before I was sin. I once thought of making her my own.

Foolish.

She cannot be held, only revered. She appears in the still, not in the storm. When the water holds its breath. When even the sand forgets its purpose.

The parchment is curled like a long-buried corpse, but the ink is unfaded. The seal is unbroken.

I write only in my dreams. Words take shape of themselves.

She touched the other—I know it.

My shame lies not in the way she touched me, but in how deeply I yearned to be alone.

A man can bear many sins, but jealousy of the sea will be his undoing.

If this jar is opened, do not look for her. You will not find her.

She will find you, only if you are already lost.