或阿呆の一生 English

I leave to you, of course, the question of whether to publish this manuscript at all, and, if so, when and through what organ.

You must know most of the people who appear in this manuscript.

But if it is to be published, I should like it published without an index.

I am living now in the midst of the most unhappy happiness.

And yet, strange to say, I feel no regret.

Only I feel a certain pity for those who, like me, have had the misfortune of a bad husband, a bad child, a bad parent.

With that, farewell.

In this manuscript I have tried, at least consciously, not to defend myself.

I entrust this manuscript to you above all because you, I think, probably know me better than anyone else.

(Once you have stripped away the skin I wear as a man of the city) I beg you, laugh at my foolishness as you read these pages.

The twentieth of June, Showa 2

Akutagawa Ryunosuke

To Kume Masao

1 The Age

It was the second floor of a certain bookshop.

He, twenty years old, had climbed a Western-style ladder propped against the shelves and was searching for new books.

Maupassant, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy, ...

Meanwhile the dusk was closing in.

But he went on reading the titles on the spines with fervor.

What stood arrayed there was less books than the fin de siecle itself.

Nietzsche, Verlaine, the Goncourt brothers, Dostoevsky, Hauptmann, Flaubert, ...

Battling the deepening gloom, he went on counting off their names.

But the books, of their own accord, began to sink into a listless shadow.

At last his patience gave out, and he made to climb down the Western-style ladder.

Just then a single shadeless electric bulb, directly above his head, suddenly flared to life.

He stood still on the ladder and looked down at the clerks and customers moving among the books.

They looked strangely small.

And more than that, thoroughly shabby.

"Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire."

For a while, from atop the ladder, he went on surveying them as they were, saying this to himself. ...

2 Mother

The madwomen were all dressed alike in gray kimono.

The spacious room seemed all the more melancholy for it.

One of them sat at the organ, playing a hymn over and over with great fervor.

At the same time another of them stood in the very middle of the room, not so much dancing as leaping about.

He watched this scene together with a ruddy-faced doctor.

His mother, ten years before, had been no different from these women.

No different at all — indeed he caught, in their smell, the smell of his mother.

"Shall we go, then?"

The doctor walked ahead of him down the corridor to another room.

In a corner of that room, several brains lay steeped in a large glass jar filled with alcohol.

On one of the brains he made out something faintly white.

It resembled nothing so much as a drop of egg white.

Standing and talking with the doctor, he thought of his mother once again.

"The man who owned this brain was an engineer at the — Electric Light Company. He always thought himself a great, gleaming black dynamo."

To avoid the doctor's eyes, he looked out through the glass window.

There was nothing there but a brick wall topped with broken glass bottles.

But the wall was faintly, mottledly whitened with thin moss.

3 Home

He lived and slept in a second-floor room in a certain suburb.

It was a second floor oddly tilted, the ground beneath it being loose.

His aunt quarreled with him time and again in that upstairs room.

It was not that his adoptive parents never stepped in to mediate.

Yet he felt more love for his aunt than for anyone else.

His aunt, who had remained unmarried all her life, was already nearing sixty even when he was twenty.

Many times, in that suburban upstairs room, he found himself wondering why those who love each other must torment each other.

All the while sensing, uneasily, the tilt of the upstairs floor.

4 Tokyo

The Sumida River lay dull and overcast.

From the window of the running steam launch, he watched the cherry blossoms of Mukojima.

The cherries, heavy with bloom, looked to his eyes as melancholy as a row of rags.

And yet in those cherries — the cherries of Mukojima going back to the Edo years — he had, without knowing quite when, come to find himself.

5 Self

He sat facing his senior at a table in a certain cafe, ceaselessly smoking cigarettes.

He said little.

But he listened intently to what his senior said.

"I spent half the day riding around in a motorcar."

"Did you have some business to attend to?"

His senior, chin resting on his hand, answered with utter carelessness.

"No, I just felt like riding."

Those words set him free into a world he did not know — a world of the "self"

close to the gods.

He felt something like pain.

But at the same time, too, something like joy.

That cafe was very small.

But beneath the plaque of the god Pan, a single rubber tree planted in a reddish pot hung its thick, fleshy leaves limply down.

6 Sickness

In the ceaseless sea wind he spread open a thick English dictionary, hunting words with his fingertip.

Talaria — winged shoes, or sandals.

Tale — a story.

Talipot — a palm native to the East Indies.

The trunk rises from fifty to a hundred feet, and the leaves are used for umbrellas, fans, hats, and the like.

It flowers once every seventy years. ...

His imagination drew this palm's flower out with perfect clarity.

Then he felt in his throat an itch he had never known before, and unthinkingly let a bit of phlegm fall onto the dictionary.

Phlegm? —

But it was not phlegm.

He thought of his short life, and once more pictured this palm's flower.

The flower of the palm towering high beyond this distant sea.

7 Painting

He suddenly — it was indeed sudden.

He suddenly came to understand what a painting was, while standing before a certain bookshop, looking through a collection of Van Gogh's work.

That collection of Van Gogh, of course, could only have been in photographic reproduction.

But even in the photographic plates he felt nature rise vividly before him.

This passion for painting renewed his eyes.

Before he knew it he had begun paying ceaseless attention to the curve of a tree branch, the swell of a woman's cheek.

On a rainy autumn evening, he happened to pass beneath a girder in a certain suburb.

Below the embankment beyond the girder, a single cart stood halted.

Passing through, he began to feel that someone had walked this road before him.

Who? —

There was no longer any need for him to ask himself that.

In the heart of the twenty-three-year-old, a Dutchman with a severed ear, a long pipe clenched in his teeth, sat fixing sharp eyes upon this melancholy landscape. ...

8 Sparks

Drenched with rain, he walked on over the asphalt.

The rain was quite fierce.

Amid the driving spray he caught the smell of his rubberized coat.

Just then a single overhead wire before his eyes let off a shower of purple sparks.

He was strangely moved.

The pocket of his coat concealed his manuscript, to be published in their coterie magazine.

Walking on through the rain, he looked back once more at the overhead wire.

The wire went on, as ever, throwing off its sharp sparks.

Surveying his life, there was nothing in particular he wanted.

But this purple spark alone — this fearsome spark alone, flying through the air — he wanted to seize, even at the cost of his life.

9 Corpses

Every corpse had a tag dangling from its thumb on a wire.

That tag recorded the name and the age.

His friend bent low and, deftly moving the scalpel, began to peel the skin from the face of one corpse.

Beneath the skin lay spread a beautiful yellow fat.

He gazed at that corpse.

It was, he was certain, necessary to him for the completion of a certain short story — a story that sought its setting in the age of the court dynasties.

But the stench of the corpses, close to the smell of rotting apricots, was unpleasant.

His friend frowned and went on quietly moving the scalpel.

"Corpses are in short supply these days."

So his friend said.

Then, before he knew it, he had his answer ready. —

"If corpses run short, I'll kill someone myself, with no ill will whatsoever."

But of course his answer stayed only in his heart.

10 The Master

He sat beneath a great oak tree reading the master's book.

The oak did not stir a single leaf in the light of the autumn sun.

Somewhere in the far-off sky a balance with glass pans hanging from it holds itself in perfect equilibrium. —

Reading the master's book, he felt just such a sight before him. ...

11 Dawn

Night gradually gave way to day.

Before he knew it he was looking out over a broad market at a certain street corner.

The crowds and carts thronging the market all began to take on a rosy hue.

He lit a cigarette and walked quietly on into the market.

Then a scrawny black dog suddenly barked at him.

But he was not startled.

He even felt affection for that very dog.

In the middle of the market stood a single plane tree, spreading its branches in every direction.

He stood at its foot and looked up at the high sky through its branches.

In the sky, directly above him, a single star was shining.

It was his twenty-fifth year — the third month since he had met the master.

12 The Naval Port

The inside of the submarine was dim.

He crouched in a machine that enclosed him on every side, peering into a small eyepiece.

Reflected in that eyepiece was the bright scenery of the naval port.

"You can see the Kongo over there too, can't you."

A certain naval officer spoke to him this way.

Gazing at the small warship above the square lens, he found himself, for no reason, recalling Dutch parsley.

The Dutch parsley that gave off its faint scent even atop a thirty-sen beefsteak.

13 The Master's Death

He walked the platform of a new station in the wind after a rain.

The sky was still dim.

Beyond the platform, three or four railway laborers swung their picks up and down in unison, singing something in loud voices.

The wind after the rain tore apart both the laborers' song and his own feelings.

Without even lighting a cigarette, he felt a suffering close to joy.

"MASTER CRITICAL"

— the telegram stuffed, as it was, into his overcoat pocket. ...

From the far side of the pine hill, the up train of six in the morning came trailing a thin plume of smoke, winding its way nearer.

14 Marriage

The day after he married, he scolded his wife, saying, "You mustn't go wasting money right from the start,"

words spoken to his wife.

But that scolding was less his own than his aunt's scolding, her "Tell her,"

which was the scolding, in truth.

His wife apologized, of course to him, but to his aunt as well.

With, before her still, the pot of yellow narcissus she had bought for him. ...

15 They

They lived their lives in peace.

Beneath the shade of the great spreading banana leaves. —

For their house stood in a certain seaside town a good full hour from Tokyo by train.

16 The Pillow

With a scepticism smelling of rose leaves for his pillow, he read a book by Anatole France.

But he never noticed, in that pillow, the half-man-half-horse god that had also come to lie there.

17 Butterfly

In a wind full of the smell of seaweed, a single butterfly flashed by.

For just an instant, he felt this butterfly's wing brush against his parched lips.

But the powder that wing left behind on his lips still glimmered, even years later.

18 Moon

He chanced to meet her on the stairs of a certain hotel.

Her face, even in broad daylight, seemed to stand in moonlight.

Watching her go — they had never once met before —

he felt a loneliness he had not known until then. ...

19 Artificial Wings

He moved on from Anatole France to the philosophers of the eighteenth century.

But he did not draw near to Rousseau.

That was perhaps because Rousseau was too close to one side of himself — the side too easily swept by passion.

He drew instead toward the philosopher of "Candide," close to the other side of himself — the side rich in cold reason.

close to that philosopher.

Life, to him at twenty-nine, was not the least bit bright any longer.

But Voltaire supplied a man such as he with artificial wings.

He spread these artificial wings and rose easily into the sky.

At the same time, the joys and sorrows of life, bathed in the light of reason, sank away beneath his eyes.

Scattering irony and smiles over the shabby streets below, he climbed straight up through the unobstructed air toward the sun,

quite as if he had forgotten the ancient Greek who, his own such wings scorched by the very light of that sun, at last fell into the sea and died. ...

20 Fetters

He and his wife came to live under one roof with his adoptive parents.

This was because he had come to join a certain newspaper company.

He put his trust in a single contract written on yellow paper.

But that contract, as it turned out later, bound him to every obligation while leaving the newspaper company bound to none.

21 The Madman's Daughter

Two rickshaws ran along a deserted country road under an overcast sky.

That the road ran toward the sea was plain even from the sea wind that reached them.

He, riding in the rear rickshaw, wondered at feeling not the least interest in this rendezvous, and found himself thinking about just what had led him here.

It was certainly not love.

If it was not love, then — to avoid answering that question, he found he had no choice but to think, "At any rate, we are equals,"

a thought he could not avoid.

Riding in the rickshaw ahead was the daughter of a certain madman.

Moreover, her younger sister had killed herself out of jealousy.

"There's nothing to be done about it now."

He already felt a certain hatred toward this madman's daughter, a woman in whom only animal instinct ran strong.

Meanwhile the two rickshaws passed by the edge of a graveyard smelling of the shore.

Within a brushwood fence hung with oyster shells, gravestone after gravestone stood blackened.

Beyond those gravestones he looked out at a sea faintly gleaming, and found himself suddenly despising her husband — the husband who had failed to capture her heart. ...

22 A Certain Painter

It was an illustration in a certain magazine.

But the ink-wash painting of a single rooster showed a striking individuality.

He asked a certain friend about this painter.

About a week later, this painter came to visit him.

It was an event of particular note in the whole of his life.

In this painter he discovered a poetry no one else had discovered.

And more than that, he discovered a soul of his own that even he himself had not known.

On a certain chilly autumn evening, a single stalk of maize suddenly brought this painter to mind.

The tall maize, its rough leaves ragged about it, bared its roots, thin and nerve-like, above the mounded earth.

That, too, was of course none other than a self-portrait of his own easily wounded self.

But such a discovery only left him melancholy.

"It's too late now. But when the moment truly comes ..."

23 She

Before a certain plaza, dusk was falling.

With his body running slightly feverish, he walked across this plaza.

Several great buildings set the electric lights in their windows glittering against a sky faintly clear with silver.

He stopped at the roadside and decided to wait for her to come.

About five minutes later, she came walking toward him, looking somehow worn.

But on seeing his face, she said, "I'm tired,"

and smiled a little as she said it.

They walked on side by side across the dimly lit plaza.

It was the first time for either of them.

He felt he would gladly give up anything at all just to be with her.

After they got into their car, she stared fixedly at his face and said, "You won't regret this?"

she said.

He answered flatly, "I won't regret it,"

was his reply.

She pressed his hand and said, "I won't regret it either, but —"

she said.

Her face, even at such a moment, seemed to stand in moonlight.

24 Birth

He stood by the sliding door, looking down as a midwife in a white smock washed the newborn.

Each time the soap stung its eyes, the infant repeated its pitiful grimace.

And more than that, it went on crying in a loud voice.

Sensing in it some smell close to that of a baby mouse, he could not help but think, deeply, to himself. —

"Why has this one too been born, into this world so filled with the suffering of this life? — And why has this one too taken on the fate of having a father like me?"

And this was, moreover, the first son his wife had borne.

25 Strindberg

He stood in the doorway of his room, watching several shabby Chinese men playing mahjong in the moonlight where pomegranate blossoms had opened.

Then, turning back into the room, he began, beneath a low-set lamp, to read "A Fool's Confession",

began reading it.

But before he had read even two pages, he found himself letting out a bitter laugh. —

Strindberg too, in the letters he sent to the countess who was his lover, had written lies not so different from his own. ...

26 Antiquity

The buddhas and heavenly maidens and horses and lotus blossoms, their colors worn away, nearly overwhelmed him.

Gazing up at them, he forgot everything.

Even his own good fortune in having escaped the madman's daughter's grasp. ...

27 Spartan Discipline

He was walking with his friend down a certain back street.

Just then a hooded rickshaw came straight toward them from the opposite direction.

And riding in it, unexpectedly, was the very woman of the night before.

Her face, even in broad daylight, seemed to stand in moonlight.

For his friend's sake, they of course did not exchange so much as a greeting.

"A beauty, isn't she."

So his friend remarked.

He, gazing at the spring mountain rising at the end of the street, answered without the least hesitation.

"Yes, quite a beauty."

28 Murder

The country road, in the sunlight, gave off the smell of cattle dung.

Wiping away his sweat, he climbed the road as it rose toward the hill.

On both sides of the road, the ripened wheat gave off its fragrant smell.

"Kill him, kill him ..."

Before he knew it, he found himself repeating these words under his breath.

Kill whom? —

That much was clear enough to him.

He called to mind a man with cropped hair, a man of thoroughly servile bearing.

Then, beyond the yellowed wheat, the dome of a single Roman Catholic church appeared, before he knew it, revealing itself. ...

29 Form

It was an iron sake pitcher.

From this pitcher with its fine engraved lines, he had, before he knew it, been taught the beauty of "form,"

the beauty of form.

30 Rain

He lay on the great bed talking with her about various things.

Outside the bedroom window it was raining.

The spider lily blossoms seemed, in this rain, to be quietly rotting away.

Her face, as ever, seemed to stand in moonlight.

But talking with her was not entirely without its tedium for him.

Lying on his stomach, he quietly lit a cigarette and recalled that it had already been seven years since he began spending his days with her.

"Do I love this woman?"

He put this question to himself.

The answer surprised even himself, watching himself closely as he was.

"I still love her."

31 The Great Earthquake

It was something like the smell of overripe apricots.

Walking through the burned ruins, he caught this faint smell and found himself thinking that the smell of corpses rotting under the blazing sun was, surprisingly, not so bad.

But standing before a pond heaped with corpses upon corpses, he discovered that the word "gruesome"

was, in a purely sensory way, by no means an exaggeration.

What moved him most was the corpse of a child of twelve or thirteen.

Gazing at this corpse, he felt something close to envy.

"Those whom the gods love die young" —

such words, too, came to mind.

Both his elder sister and his half-brother had had their houses burned down.

But his sister's husband was, at the time, out on probation for the crime of perjury. ...

"It would be best if everyone simply died."

Standing amid the burned ruins, he could not help but think this, deeply, to himself.

32 A Quarrel

He got into a grappling fight with his half-brother.

His brother, no doubt, was easily made to suffer on his account.

And at the same time, he too, no doubt, had lost his own freedom on his brother's account.

His relatives kept telling his brother, "Take him as your example,"

kept saying this to him.

But to him this was no different from having his own hands and feet bound.

Still grappling with each other, they at last tumbled out toward the edge of the veranda.

In the garden by the veranda stood a single crape myrtle — he remembers it still —

heaping up its blossoms in a reddish glow beneath a sky heavy with rain.

33 A Hero

He found himself, before he knew it, looking up at a tall mountain from the window of Voltaire's house.

On the glacier-hung mountain there was not so much as the shadow of a vulture to be seen.

But a short Russian man went on climbing the mountain path with dogged persistence.

After night fell on Voltaire's house too, he sat beneath a bright lamp and wrote a tendentious poem of this sort.

recalling as he did the figure of that Russian climbing the mountain path. ...

— You who kept the Ten Commandments better than anyone

are you who broke the Ten Commandments better than anyone.

You who loved the people better than anyone

are you who despised the people better than anyone.

You who burned with ideals better than anyone

are you who knew reality better than anyone.

You are the electric locomotive

born of our Orient, smelling still of wildflowers. —

34 Color

At thirty, he found that, before he knew it, he had come to love a certain vacant lot.

There was nothing there but moss growing over scattered fragments of brick and roof tile.

But to his eyes it was no different from a landscape by Cezanne.

He suddenly recalled the passion he had felt seven or eight years before.

And at the same time he discovered that seven or eight years before, he had not known color at all.

35 The Clown Doll

He meant to live so intensely that he would have no regrets whenever he died.

But he went on, as ever, living a life deferential toward his adoptive parents and his aunt.

This gave his life both a light and a dark side.

He saw a clown doll standing in the shop of a certain tailor, and found himself wondering just how close he himself was to that clown doll.

But the self beyond his own awareness — so to speak, his second self — had already, long before, poured this very feeling into a certain short story.

36 Ennui

He was walking through a field of pampas grass with a certain university student.

"You young men must still have a hearty appetite for life, I imagine?"

"Yes — but surely you too ..."

"As it happens, I don't have it anymore. Though I do still have the appetite to create."

That was his true feeling.

He had indeed, before he knew it, lost interest in living.

"Surely the appetite to create is itself an appetite for life."

He made no answer at all.

The pampas field, before he knew it, had let a volcano rise clearly above its red plumes.

He felt toward this volcano something close to envy.

But even he himself could not have said why. ...

37 The Distant One

He met a woman able to match wits with him even in intellect.

But he composed lyric poems such as "The Distant One"

and thereby just barely escaped this crisis.

It left him with a feeling as poignant as watching brilliant snow, frozen to the trunk of a tree, come tumbling down.

Whatever sedge hat spins upon the wind,

what is there that will not fall upon the road?

Why then should I begrudge my own good name?

It is your name alone that I would spare.

38 Revenge

It was the veranda of a certain hotel, amid the young leaves of the trees.

There he sat drawing pictures while he let a small boy play.

The only son of the madman's daughter, from whom he had severed ties seven years before.

The madman's daughter lit a cigarette and watched them at their play.

With a heavy heart, he went on drawing trains and airplanes.

Fortunately, the boy was not his own child.

But to be called "uncle"

by the boy was, for him, more painful than anything else.

After the boy had wandered off somewhere, the madman's daughter, smoking her cigarette, spoke to him in a coaxing tone.

"Doesn't that child look a bit like you?"

"He doesn't. In the first place ..."

"But there is such a thing as prenatal influence, you know."

He said nothing and looked away.

But deep in his heart, it was not entirely true that he felt no cruel desire to strangle this woman before him. ...

39 The Mirror

He sat talking with his friend in the corner of a certain cafe.

His friend ate a baked apple and talked of the recent cold.

He suddenly felt a contradiction rising up within this talk.

"You're still unmarried, aren't you."

"No, actually — I'm to be married next month."

He fell silent without meaning to.

The mirror set into the cafe wall reflected countless versions of himself.

Coldly, as if somehow threatening him. ...

40 Catechism

Why do you attack the social order of this age?

Because I see the evil that capitalism has bred.

Evil?

I thought you recognized no difference between good and evil.

Then what of your own life?

— So he held this catechism with an angel.

An angel, moreover, who wore a top hat he had no cause to be ashamed of before anyone. ...

41 Sickness

He began to be plagued by insomnia.

And more than that, his physical strength began to fail.

Several doctors each gave his illness two or three diagnoses. —

Hyperacidity of the stomach, gastric atony, dry pleurisy, neurasthenia, chronic conjunctivitis, cerebral fatigue, ...

But he himself well knew the true source of his illness.

It was a feeling made up equally of shame at himself and fear of others.

Of them — of the society he so despised!

One afternoon overcast with the promise of snow, he sat in the corner of a certain cafe, a lit cigar in his mouth, listening to the music drifting from the gramophone across the room.

It was music that struck strangely deep into his heart.

He waited for the piece to end and walked over to the gramophone to check the label on the record.

Magic Flute — Mozart

He understood it in an instant.

Mozart, who had broken the Ten Commandments, must surely have suffered as well.

But surely never so much as he himself ... His head bowed, he quietly walked back to his table.

42 The Laughter of the Gods

He, at thirty-five, was walking through a pine grove lit by the spring sun.

Recalling words he himself had written two or three years before: "The gods, unfortunately, cannot kill themselves as we can"

— recalling those words even as he walked. ...

43 Night

Night was closing in once again.

The rough sea, in the dim light, threw up spray without ceasing.

Beneath such a sky he married his wife a second time.

For them it was a joy.

But at the same time, too, a suffering.

Their three children watched the lightning offshore together with them.

His wife held one of the children and seemed to be holding back tears.

"You can see a ship out there, can't you."

"Yes."

"A ship with its two masts snapped."

44 Death

Taking the chance of sleeping alone, he tried to hang himself, looping his sash over the window bars.

But once he had put his neck through the sash, he suddenly found himself fearing death.

It was not at all that he feared the pain of the moment of dying.

The second time, he took his pocket watch with him and set about trying the hanging as an experiment.

After a brief spell of pain, everything began to grow hazy.

Once he passed through that point, there could be no doubt he would slip on into death.

He checked the hands of the watch and found that the pain had lasted only a minute and some twenty-odd seconds.

Beyond the window bars it was pitch dark.

But even in that darkness there sounded, too, the rough crowing of a cock.

45 Divan

The Divan sought once more to give his heart new strength.

It was the "Oriental Goethe"

he had never known.

He gazed upon Goethe, standing serenely beyond all good and evil, and felt an envy close to despair.

The poet Goethe was, to his eyes, greater than the poet Christ.

In this poet's heart, beyond the Acropolis and Golgotha, even the roses of Arabia had opened into bloom.

If only he had had some small strength to follow in this poet's footsteps — having finished reading the Divan, and once the fearsome emotion it stirred had settled, he could not help but despise himself, deeply, as a man born a eunuch of life.

46 Lies

His sister's husband's suicide struck him down all at once.

He now had to look after his sister's family as well.

His future, to him at least, was as dim as the fall of dusk.

Feeling something close to a sneer at his own spiritual bankruptcy (he knew every one of his own vices and weaknesses, without exception),

he went on reading, as ever, book after book.

But even Rousseau's Confessions was filled to overflowing with heroic lies.

Above all, "Vita Nuova"

— when it came to that book, he had never, in "Vita Nuova,"

met so cunning a hypocrite as its hero.

But Francois Villon alone soaked into his heart.

In a number of his poems he discovered "a beautiful bull"

— that, he discovered.

The figure of Villon awaiting the gallows appeared to him even in his dreams.

Many times he tried to sink, as Villon had, to the very bottom of life.

But his circumstances and his physical energy would never permit such a thing.

He grew gradually weaker.

Just like the standing tree, withering from its topmost branches down, that Swift once watched long ago. ...

47 Playing with Fire

Her face was radiant.

It was just as if the light of the morning sun were shining on thin ice.

He felt a fondness for her.

But he felt no love.

More than that, he had never once so much as laid a finger on her body.

"They say you want to die, don't they."

"Yes. — No, it's less that I want to die than that I'm tired of living."

From this exchange, they promised to die together.

"A Platonic suicide, is it."

"A double Platonic suicide."

He could not help but marvel at how calm he himself remained.

48 Death

He did not die with her.

Only it gave him a certain satisfaction that he had, even now, never once laid a finger on her body.

She would sometimes talk with him, as if nothing at all had happened.

And more than that, she gave him a single bottle of the potassium cyanide she kept, saying, "As long as we have this, we'll both feel stronger for it,"

she said, giving it to him.

That, in truth, could not help but steady his heart.

Sitting alone in a rattan chair, gazing at the young leaves of the chinquapin, he could not help but think, again and again, of the peace that death would grant him.

49 The Stuffed Swan

He summoned his last remaining strength and tried to write his autobiography.

But he found, to his own surprise, that it was no easy thing to do.

That was because his pride, his skepticism, and his calculations of self-interest still remained within him.

He could not help but despise himself for it.

But at the same time he could not help but think, too, "Strip anyone down and it comes to the same thing."

that thought as well.

The title of the book "Poetry and Truth"

struck him as a title that might serve for any autobiography at all.

And more than that, he understood clearly that no one is necessarily moved by any work of literature.

There could be no one whom his own work reached, beyond those who had lived a life close to his own. —

such a feeling worked in him as well.

And so he set about writing, briefly, his own "Poetry and Truth,"

trying his hand at writing it.

After he finished writing "A Fool's Life,"

he happened, in the shop of a certain secondhand dealer, to catch sight of a stuffed swan.

It stood there with its neck raised, but even its yellowed feathers had been eaten through by insects.

Thinking of his own life, he felt tears and a bitter laugh rising up within him at once.

Before him now lay nothing but madness or suicide.

Walking the evening streets all alone, he resolved to wait, quietly, for the fate that had come to destroy him.

50 The Captive

One of his friends went mad.

He had always felt a certain closeness to this friend.

That was because he understood, more keenly than most, this friend's solitude — the solitude beneath his light and easy mask.

After this friend went mad, he visited him two or three times.

"You and I are possessed by demons, aren't we — by that thing called the demon of the fin de siecle."

This friend told him so in a lowered voice, and it was said that two or three days later, on his way to a certain hot-spring inn, he had even eaten rose blossoms.

After this friend was hospitalized, he found himself recalling, before he knew it, the terracotta bust he had once given him.

It was a bust of the author of "The Government Inspector,"

a work this friend had loved.

Recalling that Gogol too had died mad, he could not help but sense some force ruling over them both.

Utterly exhausted, he happened to read Radiguet's dying words and once more felt the laughter of the gods.

They were the words, "God's soldiers are coming to take me" —

such were the words.

He tried to fight against his own superstitions and his own sentimentality.

But any such fight was, physically, simply impossible for him.

"The demon of the fin de siecle"

was, in truth, without doubt tormenting him.

He felt envy for the people of the Middle Ages, who had made God their strength.

But to believe in God — to believe in the love of God — was something he could never, in the end, do.

Not even the God in whom that Cocteau himself believed!

51 Defeat

Even the hand with which he held his pen began to tremble.

And more than that, he had even begun to drool.

His mind was never once clear except right after waking from 0.8 grams of Veronal.

And even then it stayed clear for only half an hour, or an hour at most.

He simply lived out his days in a dim half-light, one day at a time.

Leaning, so to speak, on a thin sword whose blade had long since chipped away.

(Written in June, Showa 2; a posthumous manuscript)