On the last weekend in July, I decided to drive my family to the seaside. I wasn’t all that keen, to be honest, as the holiday season had only just started and the roads were bound to be congested. But I was getting pretty fed up of lounging around at home for three whole days every week. So I resigned myself to the coming ‘leisure hell’ and decided to go. Of course, the others were all delighted.

As we moved out of the city centre, we had little more than light congestion to contend with. But when we turned onto the trunk road leading down to the coast, it was jammed solid with traffic. Each car was packed with family members. We’d remain stationary for several minutes at a time, sometimes up to an hour. When at last we’d start moving, we’d travel for a few hundred yards before stopping again. There was no room to manoeuvre, and it was already too late to turn back. Trains on the line running alongside the road were packed to the rafters. Passengers were piled on the roofs of the carriages, while others clung to doors, windows and couplings.
We’d left home in the early hours, but were only halfway to the coast when it began to get dark.

“Shigenobu! Where are you? It’s dinner time!”

He was playing tag with children from another family in the spaces between stationary cars. My wife brought him back to our car, where we enjoyed a truly bland meal.

Expecting the worst, we’d brought blankets with us. The others went to sleep, but I had to drive on through the night. If I thought we’d be stationary for a while, I’d rest my head on the steering wheel and take a nap. Then, when the traffic started moving again, I’d be woken by the driver behind me blowing his horn. With so much congestion, at least there was no fear of causing a major accident. Everyone was falling asleep at the wheel; the worst that could happen was a minor bump from behind.

The following afternoon, we crawled into a small town about two miles from the coast. We had to abandon our car on the town’s main road. Vehicles had been abandoned on all roads worthy of the name, including back streets no more than two yards wide. Continuing the journey by car was quite impossible. The town had ceased to function altogether – simply because it was near the coast.

We changed into our beachwear in the car, then started to walk along the pavement. It was already full of families like us, and nearly everyone was in swimwear. We had no choice but to join the flow of people and keep shuffling forwards with them. The sky was clear and the sun shone a bright shade of purple. I was immediately covered in sweat. The back of the man in front of me also glistened with perspiration. Beads of sweat dripped from the tip of my nose. The whole surface of the pavement was moist and slippery with human sweat.

As we moved out of the town and onto a rough country road, clouds of dust blew up around us. Our bodies turned black as we continued to walk. People’s faces became dappled with sweat and dust. My mother and my wife were no exception. Shigenobu and the other children had faces like racoons, caused by wiping their eyes with the backs of their hands. Where did people get this extraordinary power of endurance, just in order to have a good time? I asked myself, and tried to guess the mental state of others around me. But I couldn’t find any reason. Perhaps it would be clear when we got to the beach…

We negotiated a level crossing, and the commotion grew more intense. People arriving by train had joined the throng. Already, cries of “Don’t push!” could be heard here and there. In one hand I held a basket, in the other the hand of my child, who was gripping mine ever so tightly. We were already walking on sand. And even the sand was soaked with sweat.

We entered a pine wood, and the numbers increased again. Everywhere around us was packed with people, the air rank with the smell of humanity. Some, crushed against tree trunks and unable to move, were calling out for help. Then there was the astonishing spectacle of countless items of clothing hanging from the branches of pine trees, like colonies of multicoloured bats. Young women as well as men, now indifferent to the gaze of strangers, had climbed the trees to take off their clothes and change into swimsuits.

We passed through the pine wood and came out onto the beach. Even then, all I could see was the horizon in the far distance. The sea of human heads made it impossible to know where the beach ended and the water started. To my right and to my left, behind and in front of me, all I could see were waves of people, people, people, people. Their heads stretched as far as the eye could see. The sweat on their bodies was evaporating and curling up into the air.

“Hey! Stick tight together!” I barked loudly in my wife’s direction. “Stay close to me! Hold Mother’s hand!”

The sun was beating down on our faces. Sweat ran off my body like a waterfall. We were being pushed from behind, jostled by bodies that were slippery with sweat and could only move forwards. We, in turn, had no option but to press our bodies into the sweaty backs of the people walking in front of us. It was worse, much worse than a packed commuter train.

Shigenobu started to cry. “I’m hot! I’m thirsty!” he whined.

“We can’t go back. You’ll have to put up with it!” I shouted. “The water will be nice and cool, you’ll see.”

But as it stood, I had no way of knowing whether the sea would be cool or not. Perhaps it was already more than half made up of human sweat, all warm and slimy.

Every year, they used to build makeshift changing rooms around this area, with walls made of reed matting. But I couldn’t see them, however hard I looked. They must have been pushed over and trampled underfoot by the wave of humans. Yes, maybe the reed matting we just waded through was, in fact, the remains of the changing rooms.

It reminded me of an advancing herd of elephants that flattened everything in its path. Or perhaps a swarm of locusts, leaving nothing standing behind it. These people aren’t human, I thought, as I surveyed the half-witted smiles of those around me. They’re leisure animals.

“Please keep moving. Please keep moving,” screamed a voice through a loudspeaker at the top of an observation tower. But of course – we had no alternative. If we’d stopped moving, we’d have been pushed over and trampled to death. So we all just kept moving forwards in silence. Only the tearful cries of children could be heard here and there.

As I was relentlessly pushed from behind, my sweat-soaked chest and stomach were now wedged into the tattooed back of the man in front of me. I’d long since lost sight of my mother and my wife. For all I knew, they could have drifted off anywhere in the human tide.

At last, I felt sea water swirling around my feet. But the human congestion remained the same, and I continued to be pushed from behind. I looked down to see the water glistening slimily with human fat. It was grey-brown in colour, like liquid mud.

Soon I was up to my waist in muddy water, sickened by the unpleasantly lukewarm sensation of it. It was only then that I first realized the danger we might face if we kept being pushed forwards like this. Once the water came above our heads, with the mass of humanity around us as it was now, we might not even be able to tread water. Then what would happen?

Shigenobu, already out of his depth, started clinging to my waist. I hastily threw away the basket I’d held in my hand and lifted him up in both arms.

The water now came up to my chest. I shuddered on noticing the sensation under my feet. I’d been so preoccupied with the lukewarm feeling of the water that I’d failed to notice. For some time now, it was clear that we weren’t stepping on pebbles any more, but something soft.

It was the bodies of drowned people. I was sure of it. The drowned bodies of children who’d become separated from their parents and had gone under the water.

I took another good look at the faces around me. No one was calling out or making any noise. I could hear nothing but an eerie silence. That and the dimly roaring echo of the clamour from the beach.

Everyone was smiling, as if demented with euphoria. They simply stared ahead with vacant eyes and a look of longing. Sometimes, as if wanting others to recognize their joy, they would look around, face each other, then give another smile of satisfaction. Perhaps even I, unknown to myself, might also be smiling that smile.

The water was up to my neck now. A woman near me started to drown. I thought it might be my wife – but it wasn’t. Even so, both she and my mother must now be drowning, somewhere. As she started to go under, the woman suddenly seemed overcome, for the first time, by the fear of dying. With eyes opened wide, she desperately tried to keep the water away from her nose and mouth, and kept splashing against the surface of the water. Soon, people who were shorter than me started drowning on both sides.

The sensation of soft meat on the soles of my feet remained as strong as ever. Drowned bodies must be piling up on the sea bed. If it weren’t for them, I thought, I would have gone under long since.

The number of people advancing had decreased somewhat, and my field of vision was slightly broader. But I could still see no facial expressions on the procession of watermelon-heads that now floated, now sank to right and left ahead of me, as far as the eye could see. The water came up to just below my nose. My nostrils were tickled by the sickly sweet smell of sweat, rising with vapour from the water.

The body of a drowned woman wrapped its hair around my neck. I pushed the floating corpse away and at the same moment let go of my son. He tried to cling to my chest, but I thrust him away and let him drown. Because from here on, swimming was the only way forwards. He sent air bubbles floating to the surface as he struggled, but quickly sank out of sight.

My mind was blank through lack of sleep, and the heat. The only thought in my head, a hazy notion of unknown origin, was that I just had to keep going forwards. When they fall to their deaths at the end of their march, lemmings have no noble intention of restoring the balance of nature by keeping their numbers down. In the same way, I entertained no feeling of introspection over the abnormal wealth, the abnormal peace, or the abnormal happiness of the human race.

There was just enough room for me to start swimming now. But, perhaps due to lack of sleep, I started to tire immediately. I looked down the line of watermelon-heads. They were thinning out now, but still stretched to the point where the sky merged with the sea. I wondered if I could really swim that far. Still I continued to move my arms and legs… automatically… automatically…

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Yasutaka Tsutsui is a Japanese novelist, science fiction author, and actor born in Osaka. His Yumenokizaka bunkiten won the Tanizaki Prize in 1987. He has also won the 1981 Izumi Kyoka award, the 1989 Kawabata Yasunari award, and the 1992 Japan SF award. In 1997, he was decorated as a Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

‘The Very Edge of Happiness’ © Yasutaka Tsutsui, 1979-2007, translation © Andrew Driver, 2007. LITRO is published every Friday and handed out for free near to London Underground stations and elsewhere around the world. To get in touch please email litro.fiction@gmail.com or visit www.litro.co.uk.