Josee, the Tiger and the Fish

ジョゼと虎と魚たち

First published in a 1984 magazine issue and collected the following year, this short story follows Tsuneo, a university student living off part-time work, who catches a wheelchair careening down a hill and finds Kumiko Yamamura in it. She calls herself Josee, after a heroine in the Françoise Sagan novels she loves, and she has built an entire private world out of secondhand books and imagination inside her grandmother's house. Tsuneo's arrival slowly starts to crack it open. Every later adaptation, including the 2003 and 2020 films and the 2020 manga, traces back to this original text.