Fish Dream (Sakana no yume) is a long novel by MMM, a writer who keeps a high degree of anonymity. MMM had earlier published The Hikikomori Notes (Hikikomori no shuki), which has been called a “strange book of the Reiwa era”[1]. Fish Dream is the enormous novel MMM published after that.
The author’s official website puts it at roughly 1.3 million characters, and the print edition runs to three volumes. Added together, the page counts in the retail bibliographic data reach 2,024 pages[2][3]. The text consists of Part 0 and Parts 1 through 5, for a total of 75 chapters[4]. Narrative, dialogue drama, erotic description, philosophical argument, diaries, essays, fragments, in-world documents, dreams, and metafiction are all packed into a single work.
It also takes on a great many questions. Love, sexuality, justice, loneliness, morality, suicide, murder, discrimination, gender, class, psychiatry, religion, capitalism, literature, language, cognition, free will, and what the world is all appear one after another. At the same time, the book has entertainment elements—romance, pornography, mystery, suspense, horror, fantasy, action, battles, and escape drama—and even mixes in character drama reminiscent of light novels and bishōjo games.
Moreover, these are not simply laid side by side. An argument that started out as a reflection on sexual desire connects to religion, capitalism, gender, freedom, and justice; an argument about justice spreads into violence, war, discrimination, social movements, censorship, and institutions. Doubts about memory lead to perception, language, records, authorship, and dreams, and in the end draw in the very structure of the work: the question of “who wrote this book.”
The author calls the work a “total novel” (sōgō shōsetsu)[2]. In its length, its redundancy, its mixture of heterogeneous elements, and the heavy demands it places on the reader’s attention, it can also be compared with the Mega-Novel as discussed in English-language criticism. Its explicit sexual expression, its immoral and antisocial ideas, and its closeness to subculture also give it a strongly underground-literature character. However, neither of these is a genre name the author officially uses; both are critical placements made by this article. This classification will be examined in detail in a separate article. If, for the purpose of introducing the work, we give it a convenient label, the closest would be “an enormous novel of sex and ideas.” The expression “an enormous perverse novel of ideas” also captures one side of the work’s obscenity and excess.
This article sets out, while avoiding major spoilers, what kind of novel Fish Dream is, its six features, its characters, its plot, its unusual difficulty, and its themes.
Contents
1. What Is Fish Dream?
Fish Dream is a long novel published under the name MMM. A Kindle trial edition went on sale in December 2024, and numbered Kindle volumes [1]–[5] were released in 2025. A print edition in three volumes—Fish Dream 1, Fish Dream 2, and Fish Dream 3—can also be confirmed[3].
| Title | Fish Dream (Sakana no yume) |
| Author name | MMM / MMM_Memento Mori Machina |
| Type | Novel |
| Structure | Part 0 + Parts 1–5, 75 chapters in total[4] |
| Length | About 1.3 million characters, according to the author’s official website[2] |
| Kindle edition | Trial edition + numbered volumes [1]–[5] |
| Print edition | 3 volumes |
| Print page count | 2,024 pages in total, per retail bibliographic data |
| Author’s genre label | Total novel (sōgō shōsetsu)[2] |
The descriptions “about 1.3 million characters” and “total novel” come from the author’s side[2]. The individual Kindle volumes, the three print volumes, and the page counts in the retail metadata, on the other hand, can be confirmed from publicly available sales information[3].
The product title carries a long subtitle: “A paradoxical, perverse, nightmarish total novel concerning I, Love, and Justice; or, a dubious, obscene, enormous labyrinthine book about sex, porn, and eros” (our translation).
“I,” “Love,” and “Justice” are abstract concepts, but they are also the three main axes on which the work is built. In the main story, the protagonist, Watashi-san (literally “Mx. I”), who cannot fully grasp who they are, meets a girl called Ai (“Love”) and a boy called Seigi-kun (“Justice”), among others, and seeks relationships with other people.
Reduced to its plot, it is the story of a lonely person who seeks friends, comes to know love, and is drawn into events surrounding a closed hospital and an island. Onto that simple skeleton are wound a vast number of characters, incidents, ideas, dreams, records, and arguments, and the work as a whole forms an enormous labyrinth.
2. Six Features for Understanding Fish Dream
2-1. Enormous, difficult, and multilayered
The first feature is its staggering scale. The author’s side gives the whole as about 1.3 million characters, and the three print volumes come to 594, 701, and 729 pages in the retail bibliographic data, for a total of 2,024 pages[2][3]. The text consists of Part 0 and Parts 1 through 5, 75 chapters in all[4].
Its large-scale structure, however, is surprisingly simple. A lonely protagonist wakes up in a hospital, seeks relationships with others, and meets characters associated with “Love” and “Justice.” The work keeps this simple skeleton while adding to it a great number of characters, documents, ideas, and incidents.
Layered on top of the protagonist’s story are the compiler’s commentary, the writer’s creative diary, characters’ long harangues, dreams, recollections, philosophical fragments, records, letters, anonymous pamphlets, works-within-the-work, and more. Different explanations exist for the same event, memories and records do not match, and earlier explanations are sometimes revised later.
In Part 2, the in-world compiler explains that the writer originally tried to grasp “the world as a single story, theory, and system of thought” and gather it into one book, but that the more he wrote, the more the writing swelled and the world split apart[4]. This is not a statement that directly proves anything about the real author MMM’s creative process; it is an account of the book’s origins told within the work.
Fish Dream is not a disorderly novel. It has a huge, simple skeleton, and within it local orders and chaoses are piled up in many layers.
2-2. A redundant, relentless, grandiose, and rhetorical style
Fish Dream has strong idiosyncrasies not only in content but in its prose. Rather than aiming at concision or efficiency, it keeps talking: rephrasing the same problem again and again, multiplying examples, wandering into digressions, and anticipating objections. Conversations between characters do not end in short exchanges either; they turn into speeches, sermons, debates, and monologues running for several pages.
This redundancy recalls the giant novels of the nineteenth century. Characters expound their ideas and lives at length, and the story halts each time. Rhetorical questions, questions, exaggeration, metaphor, enumeration, antithesis, and repetition are frequent, and the prose often takes on a theatrical tone.
At the same time, contemporary colloquial speech, childish language, dirty jokes, and vulgarities sit right next to solemn prose. A grandiose discussion of the world or of justice is followed immediately by a silly joke, and a light conversation suddenly turns into epistemology or a discussion of religion.
In Part 0, the novel is understood as a talkative, crude, omnivorous form rather than one of refinement and omission, and the book itself is described as an enormous volume that swallows all kinds of language and forms[4]. The redundancy is not just a stylistic habit; it is tied to the view of the novel that this work puts forward.
It tries to explain the world in as much detail as possible. That explanation calls up new problems, which require still more words. In Fish Dream, the excess of content corresponds to the excess of style.
2-3. A mixture of many fields and genres
It is hard to explain Fish Dream in terms of a single genre or field of thought. The work contains a vast amount of heterogeneous material, from literature, philosophy, and social thought to pornography and battles.
Literary theory: theory of the novel, the total novel, the long novel, theory of reading, author and reader, the death of the author, style, genre, editing, publishing, works-within-the-work, literature and scholarship.
Epistemology and philosophy of language: perception, memory, records, testimony, dream and reality, truth and lies, self-knowledge, understanding others, words and the world, meaning and meaninglessness, classification, interpretation.
Ontology and metaphysics: the self, mind and body, free will, determinism, fate, causality, order and chaos, part and whole, a theory of the evolution of worlds.
Ethics and theories of justice: good and evil, justice, morality, responsibility, punishment, revenge, violence, murder, suicide, war responsibility, ends and means.
Discrimination and social thought: those who discriminate and those discriminated against, the weak and the strong, disability, differences in ability, appearance, sexism, gender, feminism, class, poverty, redistribution, social movements, censorship.
Theory of sexuality: sexual desire, romance, pornography, the sex industry, prostitution, BDSM, sadism, masochism, fetishism, shame, sexual freedom, sexual repression, domination, pregnancy, abortion, reproduction, antinatalism, eros and death.
Society, politics, and economics: groups, institutions, power, the state, the judiciary, democracy, capitalism, consumption, money, labor, class struggle, the commodification of desire.
Psychiatry and the body: mental illness, diagnosis, medication, physical restraint, hospitalization, normal and abnormal, hallucination, memory, brain and mind, bodily sensation, illness, disability, death.
Religion and mystical thought: Christianity, the Bible, God, atheism, reincarnation, mysticism, magic, the devil, faith and reason.
Art and culture: fine art, architecture, music, pornography, subculture, high culture and popular culture, regulation of expression, art institutions.
Entertainment: romance, pornography, mystery, suspense, horror, splatter, fantasy, action, battles, pursuit, escape, survival, and character drama reminiscent of light novels and bishōjo games.
Forms: dialogue drama, philosophical dialogue, ensemble drama, debate drama, monologue, diary, essay, fragment, pseudo-documents, works-within-the-work, metafiction.
Yet what characterizes Fish Dream is not just the number of these elements. They are connected to one another.
An example of how issues connect in Fish Dream
Sexuality → morality, religion, capitalism, gender → freedom, discrimination, justice
Justice → punishment, violence, war, social movements → institutions, censorship
Memory → cognition, language, testimony, records → authorship, works-within-the-work, metafiction
Literature → philosophy, religion, politics, art → a mixture of different forms and languages
What began as a reflection on sexual desire turns into a discussion of capitalism or religion; thinking about discrimination brings up problems of classification and language. Arguing about justice shifts to problems of violence and institutions; doubting memory leads to doubting records, and eventually to the question of “who wrote this book.”
This mixture is made explicit within the work as well. Part 1 voices the idea that dividing things into fine art, aesthetics, law, theology, philosophy, literature, religion, thought, history, economics, politics, and so on is forced, and that these are by nature organically connected[4].
Among its explicit points of reference, the most prominent are Dostoevsky, Georges Bataille, and the Marquis de Sade. In Part 0, The Brothers Karamazov is named as a point of comparison, and Bataille and Sade are also referenced in the text and in epigraphs[4]. One can read Dostoevskian clashes between characters and ideas, Bataillean eroticism and transgression, and Sadean provocation of desire against morality as the intellectual groundwork for reading this book.
Around them overlap many other writers, ideas, and religious discourses, beginning with Nietzsche, Simone Weil, and the Bible.
2-4. Fantastical and radical ideas inserted into the story
In Fish Dream, an original philosophy or theory can suddenly begin in the middle of the story. These are not necessarily organized introductions to existing philosophical ideas. Speculations that sit on the borderline between philosophy, thought experiment, flight of fancy, delusion, and pseudo-theory are produced one after another.
A representative example is the “Fragmentary Drafts on a Theory of the Evolution of Worlds” in Part 2. There it is argued that perhaps not only living things evolve, but the “world” as perceived by living things has evolved as well, and that the time and space humans perceive may have been acquired as forms suited to survival[4].
Other questions also recur: Does free will exist? Can we perceive the world correctly? Can words express the world? What does it mean to understand another person? Can we understand the whole by examining the parts in detail?
The theories built within the work do not settle into a stable system. New theories break earlier ones, and the more explanations are added, the more new contradictions arise.
Ideas that depart sharply from social convention—about suicide, antinatalism, murder, violence, revenge, discrimination, domination, and so on—also appear. At the beginning of Part 1, the work itself places a warning that it contains depictions of violence, discriminatory expressions, sexual content, biased political claims, and antisocial and immoral philosophies and ideas[4].
However, the statements of characters cannot be taken as the conclusion of the work as a whole. When one character asserts something, another objects, and yet another premise is brought in. The same character may later change position.
Fish Dream does not present dangerous ideas as the right answer; it brings even dangerous ideas into the work and makes them collide with other ideas.
2-5. Sex at the center of the story and its ideas
Any description of Fish Dream has to deal with sexuality. Its official subtitle itself announces “sex, porn, and eros,” and Part 1 contains a large-scale debate on sexual desire, pornography, the sex industry, sexual freedom, and sexual repression. Part 2 is titled “The Pleasures of Vice: The Amoral Flesh Below the Waist,” and the relationship between the protagonist and Ai cannot be described without sexuality[4].
The amount of sexual content is also large. The range covered is wide: romance, sexual desire, pornography, the sex industry, BDSM, sadism, masochism, fetishism, shame, sexual norms, pregnancy, abortion, reproduction, antinatalism, and more.
What matters most for this work, however, is not depicting sex so much as continuing to think about sex.
Why are humans ashamed of sexual desire? Are romantic love and sexual love the same thing? Is desire free? Which is freer: a society that represses sexual desire or a society that commodifies desire? Is pornography liberation or exploitation? Can love and domination coexist? Where is the line between sexual freedom and harm? Is being born unconditionally good?
Questions that begin with sexuality spread to religion, capitalism, morality, gender, discrimination, the body, freedom, and justice.
In this sense, sexuality is not just one theme among many. It is the central circuit that links the different problems within the work.
2-6. It is unclear “who wrote it”
The real-world author name is MMM. Publicly available information is scarce, however, and retail bibliographic data show both “MMM” and “MMM_Memento Mori Machina”[3]. Little about the author’s real name or detailed background can be established from external sources.
Things are even more complicated inside the work. The narrator of Part 0 at first seems to be praising his own book. Partway through, however, he declares that he is not the writer but the “compiler” who gathered together the writings left by a friend. According to the compiler, the writer killed himself, but reservations are later added to that account as well[4].
In the main story, the protagonist also writes, and the title Fish Dream appears inside the work. The real MMM, the writer in the outer frame, the compiler, the protagonist of the main story, and the Fish Dream within the work: how these positions relate to one another does not line up simply. The question of “who wrote what, and how much” is built into the outer frame of the story. Who is the author? Whose work is it? How far can records be trusted? These literary questions become part of the story rather than mere setting.
3. Main Characters
Watashi-san (“Mx. I”)
The protagonist of the main story. Watashi-san lives in a hospital but cannot fully grasp their own name, past, face, sex, and so on, and their self-understanding is unstable. They long to be loved and to have friends, yet they fear contact with people. They love reading and writing, and as the story goes on, writing itself becomes an important problem.
Ai (“Love”)
A girl the protagonist meets at the hospital. She is free-spirited and has few inhibitions about sexual topics. She takes the protagonist out of the hospital and gradually builds an intimate relationship with them. She seems bright and cheerful at first glance, but there is much about herself that she has not told the protagonist. Through her relationship with the protagonist, she carries the work’s central question: “What is love?”
Seigi-kun (“Justice”)
A boy at the hospital. He is intensely hostile to a society that affirms desire and sexuality, and he upholds his own idea of justice. He has his own theory about who is behind the incidents involving the cat and the rat, and he suspects the protagonist and the Witch. He is a character tied to the questions “What is justice?” and “At what point does justice turn into violence?”
The Witch
The psychiatrist in charge of the protagonist, whom the protagonist calls “the Witch.” She holds distinctive views on sexuality, freedom, education, treatment, ability, society, and more, and clashes fiercely with Seigi-kun. She appears as a doctor who helps the protagonist, yet some of her words and actions seem domineering or violent, and she cannot be sorted simply into good or evil.
Megane-san (“Glasses”)
A character involved with the protagonist and Ai. Megane-san talks about literature and records and shows interest in what the protagonist writes. This is also an important character for thinking about authorship, records, and the relationship between the work and reality in this novel.
4. Plot Summary of Fish Dream (No Spoilers)
The protagonist of the main story, Watashi-san, lives in a hospital. Their sense of their own name, face, past, and sex is unstable. They say they “don’t know” why they are hospitalized, yet they also think, “Actually I do know, but I don’t want to remember.”
What the protagonist wants most is connection with others. While afraid of getting close to people, they wish to be loved by someone and to have friends.
In this hospital, a black cat the protagonist had been fond of is injured and dies. A rat also dies in another place, and the protagonist ends up being the one who discovers both bodies. Who killed them, whether the two incidents are related, and why the protagonist is the one to find them are all unclear. A boy called Seigi-kun suspects the protagonist, and also turns his suspicion on hospital staff.
Around the same time, the protagonist takes part in a “friendship meeting” held at the hospital. There, patients and others connected with the hospital talk about their lives while debating sexuality, war, justice, discrimination, morality, and more. The protagonist also gives a presentation in the hope of making friends, but it does not go well.
Eventually the protagonist meets a girl named Ai. Ai takes the protagonist out to a cave and a forest on the outskirts of the hospital, and the two grow close as they share secrets.
Meanwhile, the hospital has places the protagonist does not know about. Behind the library is a room of forbidden books, and beyond that, strange spaces continue. The more the protagonist becomes involved with Ai, Seigi-kun, the Witch, Megane-san, and others, the more the hospital and the island where they live begin to show a different face.
Who killed the cat and the rat? Why is the protagonist in the hospital? What is Ai hiding? What is happening in this hospital? Can the protagonist leave the island?
Fish Dream begins as a small story about a lonely protagonist trying to make friends and swells into an enormous story that draws in sexuality, love, justice, illness, violence, society, and the world.
5. Why Is Fish Dream So Hard to Read?
The difficulty of Fish Dream cannot be explained away simply as “because it’s long” or “because difficult ideas appear.” The real problem is that the work demands too many different kinds of ability from a single reader.
5-1. It demands too many kinds of reading skill
Fish Dream contains a wide variety of texts: narrative, philosophical dialogue, essays, diaries, fragments, in-world documents, dreams, recollections, mystery, metafiction, and more. So high logical ability alone is not enough to read it.
Reading the essays requires following a line of argument. Literary passages require reading metaphor, irony, exaggeration, symbolism, and shifts in narration. In dialogues between characters, one must grasp from what premises and values each speaker is talking. Mystery scenes call for comparing testimony and timelines, and the metafiction requires thinking about the relationships among the writer, the compiler, the protagonist, and the works-within-the-work. With dreams and fantasies, it is not even settled whether events should be read as fact.
It is not a matter of mastering one way of reading; the reader has to keep switching reading modes according to the kind of text.
5-2. The range of knowledge and learning required is too broad
Trying to understand the work in depth makes the range of reference expand endlessly beyond the work.
It cuts across literature, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, sexology, feminism, theories of discrimination and class, capitalism, art, social movements, and more, and refers to Dostoevsky, Sade, Bataille, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, and others.
Of course, one does not need to know all of these to understand even the story. But if one tries to follow what is being quoted, what is being transformed, and what is being argued against, the background knowledge required grows rapidly.
If you only read for the story, you can make progress. The more deeply you try to read the work, the more you find you need to read other books, ideas, and disciplines.
5-3. There is a great deal of information, and its reliability is unstable
If there were merely many characters, incidents, ideas, backstories, and in-world documents, one could cope by organizing them. But in Fish Dream, the information itself is unstable.
The protagonist’s memory is vague, and characters’ testimonies contradict one another. Earlier explanations are sometimes revised later. The boundary between dream and reality is also unstable, and with documents and records it is sometimes unclear who wrote them and how far they can be trusted.
So readers must not only remember information but also keep track of “who said it,” “at what point the information dates from,” and “how far it can be trusted.”
Moreover, there is no guarantee that all the information will be sorted out into a single truth at the end. Readers themselves have to take on a state of uncertainty.
5-4. The style gives the reader no rest
The redundant, relentless style described above continuing throughout such a long work is itself a heavy burden. Even content that could be explained briefly has further examples, objections, metaphors, associations, and digressions added to it. A character’s harangue begins, and new problems often arise partway through it.
The work itself allows for partial reading. But if one tries to grasp the connections between different chapters and arguments, one must read an enormous amount of text closely.
Partial reading is possible. The moment you try to grasp the whole, the difficulty shoots up.
5-5. Much of the content is unpleasant, harmful, or unethical
The difficulty is not only intellectual. Fish Dream contains a large amount of explicit sexual content, crude language, fetishism, BDSM, violence, bodily mutilation, suicide, murder, antinatalism, discriminatory remarks, and antisocial and immoral ideas.
So there are scenes that are hard to read not because one cannot understand them, but because, even when one does understand, continuing to read is itself unpleasant.
Furthermore, the work does not take the structure of having a villain voice an unpleasant idea only for a righteous character to refute it at once. Extreme ideas are expounded at length, and rebuttals by other characters do not necessarily settle the matter.
Readers are asked not only “What is this character saying?” but also to judge “How far does the work endorse this?” and “How do I myself respond to this argument?”
5-6. It is unclear what to focus on
In Fish Dream, even what one should focus on is unstable. Follow the incidents of the cat and the rat, and it looks like a mystery. Follow the protagonist and Ai, and it becomes a romance. Follow Seigi-kun and the Witch, and it becomes a dialogue of ideas. Follow the debates on sexuality, and it becomes a novel of sexual thought; follow the writer and the compiler, and it becomes metafiction.
Ordinary novels often come with an implicit way of being read: “this is a love story,” “this is a detective novel.” In Fish Dream, however, that reading contract is changed again and again.
Readers themselves have to decide, “What in this work am I going to follow?”
For these reasons, Fish Dream is not the kind of difficult novel that anyone clever can read easily. It demands, all at once, logical reading ability, literary reading ability, broad background knowledge, tolerance of ambiguity, long-term concentration, and tolerance of unpleasant content. The level of ability the work asks of its readers is unrealistic from the start.
6. What Is Fish Dream About?
Fish Dream contains so many problems that it is hard to reduce it to a single theme. Even so, “I,” “Love,” and “Justice,” which appear in the long subtitle, serve as three important axes for reading the work as a whole.
“I” is tied to the question of who one is. The protagonist cannot be certain about their name, memory, body, or words, and the more they talk about themselves, the more their self-image wavers.
“Love” is tied to relationships with others. The protagonist tries to escape loneliness through meeting Ai, but other problems enter into love: sexuality, desire, domination, dependence, secrets, and the body.
“Justice” leads to the question of how one should treat others and society. What is right? Who decides what is right? Is it acceptable to hurt others for the sake of justice? These questions recur.
And what connects these is “language.” Through words, the protagonist tries to understand themselves, to speak of love, to argue about justice, and to explain the world. But the more they explain, the more new problems arise, and the world grows more complex rather than simpler.
The compiler in Part 2 explains that the writer once tried to grasp the world through a single story, theory, and system of thought and gather it into one book, but that the plan swelled and split apart the more he wrote[4].
Fish Dream therefore contains a movement to take as much of the world as possible into a single book and to connect it all. At the same time, it cannot be fully brought together into one answer. A great diversity of things is organically connected, yet never quite comes together.
The desire to understand the world through “I,” “Love,” and “Justice,” and the fact that this never settles into a single system to the very end: this tension can be read as one of the major themes of Fish Dream.
7. Where Can You Read Fish Dream?
As of September 2026, the main formats that can be confirmed are the Amazon Kindle edition and the paperback edition[3].
On Kindle, a trial edition and numbered volumes [1]–[5] can be confirmed. Amazon displays the series as “6 volumes” including the trial edition, but this does not mean the main text is in six parts. The numbered main-text releases are [1]–[5].
In print, three volumes can be confirmed: Fish Dream 1, Fish Dream 2, and Fish Dream 3. Their page counts in the retail bibliographic data are 594, 701, and 729 pages respectively, for a total of 2,024 pages.
The figure of about 1.3 million characters is the author’s official website’s description[2]. The multi-volume electronic edition and the print edition of over 2,000 pages, on the other hand, can be confirmed from public sales information[3].
8. Summary: Fish Dream as an Enormous Novel of Sex and Ideas
Fish Dream is an enormous novel that MMM published after The Hikikomori Notes. The author’s official website puts it at about 1.3 million characters, and it consists of Part 0 and Parts 1 through 5, 75 chapters in all.
The work takes in literary theory, epistemology, philosophy of language, ontology, ethics and theories of justice, theories of discrimination, theory of sexuality, social thought, psychiatry, religion, politics and economics, art theory, and more, and mixes in romance, pornography, mystery, horror, fantasy, action, battles, and even character drama reminiscent of light novels and bishōjo games.
Its style is not concise either. Redundant and relentless, grandiose and provocative, it multiplies words by piling up metaphors, rhetorical questions, enumerations, and harangues.
Yet Fish Dream is not simply a novel stuffed with everything. Thinking about sexuality leads to morality, religion, capitalism, discrimination, freedom, and justice. Thinking about memory leads to cognition, language, records, and authorship. Thinking about justice leads to violence, punishment, institutions, and social movements. Heterogeneous problems call one another up and form a huge web.
Even so, it does not come together into a single answer. The positions of the writer and the compiler within the work, the definition of justice, and the theories that explain the world all remain unstable.
The author calls the work a “total novel.” How the work can be placed in terms of literary theory when this category is compared with the “whole novel” (zentai shōsetsu), the Mega-Novel, the maximalist novel, and so on will be examined in a separate article, “Is Fish Dream a Mega-Novel?” Summed up in a phrase as an introduction to the work, Fish Dream is an enormous novel of sex and ideas.
We have also published critical essays on individual themes in Fish Dream: “The Chimera’s Song”, “The Gaze Gazed Upon”, and “An Evil Scripture”.
About the Research for This Article
This article used the text of Fish Dream as the standard for confirming the work’s content, and checked characters, incidents, in-world documents, speakers, and levels of narration against the text. Statements and explanations by characters, the writer, and the compiler within the work are treated as distinct from the views of the real author MMM and from real-world facts.
Publication information was cross-checked between MMM’s official website and public sales information on Amazon and elsewhere. Matters described by the author’s side, such as “about 1.3 million characters” and “total novel,” were distinguished from bibliographic information that can be confirmed externally, such as the number of products and the print page counts.
In addition, labels such as “an enormous novel of sex and ideas” and “an enormous perverse novel of ideas,” and statements about the work’s style and themes and its relationship to Dostoevsky, Bataille, and Sade, are this article’s own classifications and interpretations based on facts in the text; they are not presented as the author’s official genre classification or as an established literary-historical assessment.
Most sources below are in Japanese. Original titles are given with English translations in brackets.
Notes
- HorrorCat「おすすめ 令和の奇書『ひきこもりの手記』」 [Recommended: The Strange Book of the Reiwa Era, The Hikikomori Notes], February 2, 2021. Introduces The Hikikomori Notes as a “strange book of the Reiwa era.”
- MMM_Memento Mori Machina公式サイト「BOOK」 [MMM_Memento Mori Machina official website, “BOOK”]. Introduces Fish Dream (FISH DREAM) as “1.3 million characters” and a “total novel” published 2024–2025.
- See the Amazon.co.jp product pages for the Kindle and paperback editions of 『魚の夢』 [Fish Dream]. The trial edition, numbered volumes [1]–[5], the three print volumes, page counts in the retail metadata, etc. were confirmed.
- MMM, 『魚の夢』 [Fish Dream], Part 0 to Part 5. The text’s structure, characters, story, philosophical arguments, and passages concerning the writer and the compiler within the work were checked.
References and Main Sources
Text of the work
- MMM, 『魚の夢』 [Fish Dream], Part 0 to Part 5.
Author’s official information
Publication and sales information
- Amazon.co.jp product pages for the Kindle and paperback editions of 『魚の夢』 [Fish Dream].
Reception of The Hikikomori Notes
Translated from the Japanese original, “『魚の夢』とは？｜ あらすじ・登場人物・内容・特徴を解説”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.
*This is an ATTESTED article. Factual statements are based on existing, verifiable sources; where it includes third-party views or the author’s inferences, interpretations, or evaluations, these are presented so as not to be confused with confirmed facts. It contains no deliberate fiction or fabrication presented as real-world fact.
Presented by MMM (publisher of Fish Dream)