Chapter 1
I started collecting butterflies when I was eight or nine.
At first, I wasn't particularly enthusiastic; I just did it because it was the trend.
But by the second summer, when I was about ten, I became completely hooked on the game, and I became so absorbed in it that I neglected everything else, and many times my friends thought they would have to make me quit.
When I went out to collect butterflies, I never heard the tower clock chime, even at school time or lunchtime.
On holidays, I often put a piece of bread in my bag and run around from early morning until late at night, not even coming home for dinner.
Even now, when I see a beautiful butterfly, I sometimes feel that passion well up in my veins.
At those times, I am overcome for a moment by that indescribable, greedy, enchanting feeling that only a child can feel.
It was the same feeling I had when I first crept up on Old World Swallowtail as a boy.
And at times like these, I immediately recall countless moments from my childhood.
Burning afternoons on the dry, strongly smelling wilderness, cool mornings in the garden, evenings on the edge of a mysterious forest, I would wait with my net like a treasure hunter.
And when I found a beautiful butterfly, it didn't matter if it was particularly rare.
When I spotted one resting on a sunny flower, its colorful wings moving up and down with each breath, I would nearly suffocate with joy at catching it, and as I crept closer and closer, each of the butterfly's brilliant specks of color, each of the translucent veins on its wings, each of the fine, auburn hairs on its antennae, the tension and joy I felt was unparalleled.
I never felt that mixture of subtle joy and intense desire so often after that.
