ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on ‘duality’ related to the ‘fish’ symbol, above all in Japan, and explores it from the viewpoint of ‘Mercurius’, which dynamically integrates the opposites. As a key to this exploration, it narrates a certain Japanese short story. Although the fish of this work is a ‘carp’, the chapter considers the meaning of the ‘fish’ symbol in general. Fish have a very familiar and especially physical relationship to humankind in the sense that it becomes our blood and meat. People managed to rationalise eating fish anyway. ‘Fish without a foot was treated as having little sin and Kegare. Since the fish is related with prolificacy or the sea, on the one hand it is a symbol representing fertility and life, but, on the other hand, ‘fishy’, the adjective form has a negative connotation. In spite of his desperate resistance, Kogi is finally laid on a chopping board as meat of the feast, exposed to death.
