人間失格 English

Preface

I have seen three photographs of this man.

One is a photograph of what might be called his childhood—he looks to be about ten years old—showing the child standing at the edge of a garden pond, wearing coarse-striped hakama, surrounded by a crowd of women (his older sisters, younger sisters, and cousins, I imagine), his head tilted some thirty degrees to the left, laughing hideously.

Hideously?

And yet dull people—that is, people with no interest in matters of beauty or ugliness—would put on a face that showed nothing of interest, and say,

"What an adorable little boy,"

offering that sort of careless flattery, and it would not sound entirely hollow, for there is, one might say, a shadow of that common kind of "cuteness"

not altogether absent from the child's smiling face—but anyone who has had even the slightest training in matters of beauty and ugliness would, at a single glance,

"What a disagreeable child,"

mutter under his breath, with no small displeasure, and might fling the photograph away with the same motion one uses to brush off a caterpillar.

Indeed, the more closely one looks at that child's smiling face, the more one senses something unaccountably disagreeable and eerie about it.

To begin with, it is not a smile at all.

This child is not smiling in the least.

The proof is that he stands there with both fists clenched tight.

A human being cannot smile while clenching his fists.

It is a monkey.

A monkey's grin.

He has simply screwed his face into ugly wrinkles, nothing more.

"Wrinkly little boy"

is what one is tempted to call him—it was, in truth, a strange photograph, its expression somehow unclean, oddly nauseating to look at.

Never once, in all my life, had I seen a child with such a peculiar expression.

The face in the second photograph had, astonishingly, transformed almost beyond recognition.

It shows him as a student.

Whether it dates from his higher-school days or his university days is unclear, but in any case, he is a student of frightening good looks.

And yet, strangely enough, this one too gave no sense of a living human being.

He wears a student's uniform, a white handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, sits in a wicker chair with his legs crossed, and again he is smiling.

This time the smile is no wrinkled monkey's grin—it has become a rather skillful one—and yet it differs somehow from the smile of a human being.

There is none of that fullness one might call the weight of blood, or the astringency of life itself—it is not even like a bird, but light as a single feather, no more than a blank sheet of paper, and it is smiling.

In short, it feels artificial from beginning to end.

To call it affected would not be enough.

To call it frivolous would not be enough.

To call it smirking would not be enough.

To call it dandified would, of course, not be enough either.

And yet, looking closely, one begins to sense, even in this handsome student, something faintly ghost-story eerie about him.

Never once, in all my life, had I seen a young man of such strange beauty.

The remaining photograph is the strangest of all.

One cannot even guess his age from it.

His hair appears to have gone somewhat gray.

He sits in the corner of a filthy room—the photograph clearly shows the wall crumbling away in some three places—warming both hands over a small brazier, and this time he is not smiling.

There is no expression at all.

It was, so to speak, a photograph of a man who had died a natural death while sitting there warming his hands over the brazier—a truly repellent thing, giving off a faint smell of ill omen.

And that is not the only strange thing about it.

The face is shown fairly large in the photograph, so that I was able to examine its structure at leisure: the forehead ordinary, the wrinkles on the forehead ordinary, the eyebrows ordinary, the eyes ordinary, the nose, the mouth, the chin—ah, this face not only lacks any expression, it lacks even any impression.

It has no distinguishing features at all.

For instance, I look at this photograph and close my eyes.

Already I have forgotten the face.

I can recall the wall of the room, the small brazier, but the impression of the face of the man at the center of that room slips away like mist, and try as I might, I simply cannot bring it back.

It is a face that cannot be made into a picture.

It is a face that cannot even be made into a caricature.

I open my eyes.

There is not even the small pleasure of thinking, ah, so that was the face, now I remember.

To put it in the most extreme terms, even when I open my eyes and look at the photograph again, I still cannot recall it.

And then there is only displeasure, irritation, and the urge to look away.

Even what people call a "death mask"

would surely carry more expression, more of an impression, than this—perhaps if one fitted a nag's head onto a human body, the effect would be something like it; in any case, without one's being able to say quite why, it sends a chill through anyone who looks at it, and leaves a thoroughly unpleasant feeling.

Never once, in all my life, had I seen the face of a man so strange.

First Notebook

Mine has been a life full of shame.

I have no idea, really, what it means to live as other human beings do.

I was born in the countryside of the Tohoku region, so I did not see a train for the first time until I was quite grown.

I climbed up and down the footbridge at the station, and it never once occurred to me that it had been built for the purpose of crossing over the tracks; I simply believed that it had been installed for no other reason than to make the station grounds into something as intricate, amusing, and fashionable as a foreign amusement park.

And I went on believing this for a good long while.

Going up and down the bridge struck me, in fact, as a rather stylish sort of game, and I thought it one of the most clever services the railway had to offer, but when I later discovered that it was nothing more than a thoroughly practical staircase for passengers to cross the tracks, my enthusiasm cooled at once.

Likewise, as a child, when I saw a picture of an underground railway in a picture book, I believed that this too had not been devised out of any practical necessity, but simply because riding a car underground, rather than one on the surface, was a novel and amusing sort of pastime.

I was a sickly child, often confined to bed, and lying there I used to think, quite earnestly, that the bedsheet, the pillowcase, and the cover on the quilt were all nothing but pointless decoration; when I learned, close to the age of twenty, that they were in fact practical items, I was struck by a dark sense of the frugality of human life, and felt a real sorrow.

Also, I did not know what it was to feel hunger.

No, I do not mean that I was raised in a household that never wanted for food, clothing, or shelter—nothing so foolish as that—I mean that the sensation called "hunger"

was something I simply could not understand at all.

It is a strange thing to say, but even when my stomach was empty, I myself was unaware of it.

In primary school, in middle school, whenever I came home, the people around me would say, there now, you must be hungry, we remember it ourselves, the hunger you feel coming home from school is truly terrible—how about some sweetened beans?

There's castella too, and bread, they would say, making a fuss over it, and so, exercising my innate spirit of flattery, I would murmur that yes, I was hungry, and toss ten or so of the sweetened beans into my mouth, but as for what the feeling of hunger actually was, I had not the faintest idea.

I too, of course, eat a great deal, but I have almost no memory of ever eating because I felt hungry.

I eat what strikes me as unusual.

I eat what strikes me as extravagant.

And when I am somewhere else and something is set before me, I generally force myself to eat it, whatever the effort.

And indeed, for me as a child, the most painful hour of the day was the mealtime in my own home.

In our house in the country, the whole family—some ten people—would set out their individual trays in two facing rows, and I, the youngest, sat of course in the lowest seat; the dining room was dim, and the sight of a dozen-odd family members eating in utter silence, even at midday, always sent a chill through me.

And since ours was an old-fashioned country household, the side dishes were more or less fixed, and there was no hope of anything unusual or extravagant, so that I came to dread mealtimes all the more.

Sitting in the lowest seat of that dim room, feeling as though I were shivering with cold, I would carry small mouthfuls of rice to my lips and force them down, wondering why it was that human beings had to eat rice three times a day, every single day—everyone ate with such solemn faces—this too seemed a kind of ritual, and I even came to think that perhaps the family gathered three times a day, at fixed hours, in that dim room, laid out their trays in proper order, and chewed their rice in silence with bowed heads, whether they wanted to eat or not, as a kind of prayer to the spirits that moved unseen throughout the house.

The saying that one dies if one does not eat sounded to my ears like nothing but an unpleasant threat.

That superstition—for even now I cannot help feeling it is a kind of superstition—has nevertheless always filled me with unease and dread.

There was no phrase more difficult, more obscure, and more menacing in its ring than this: that human beings die if they do not eat, and so must work in order to eat.

It seems, in short, that to this day I still understand nothing at all about the workings of human life.

There is a fear that my own notion of happiness and the notion of happiness held by everyone else in the world are utterly at odds, and because of this fear I have spent nights tossing and turning, groaning aloud, even coming close to losing my mind.

Am I, in fact, happy?

Since I was small, people have told me, again and again, how fortunate I was, but I myself have always felt as though I were living in hell, while the very people who called me fortunate seemed to me, by comparison, to be living in a state of ease beyond any measure.

I have even thought that I carry ten lumps of misfortune within me, and that if a single one of them were placed on the back of my neighbor, that one alone would be more than enough to cost him his life.

In other words, I do not understand.

I have no way of gauging the nature or the degree of my neighbor's suffering.

A practical suffering, one that could be solved simply by having something to eat—and yet perhaps that is the most severe agony of all, a searing hell of suffering so terrible it would blow away my own ten lumps of misfortune without a trace; that I do not know. And yet, if that were so, how is it that people go on so well, without killing themselves, without losing their minds, arguing about political parties, never despairing, never yielding, carrying on the struggle of life—isn't it that they aren't suffering at all?

Isn't it that they have become thoroughgoing egoists, and moreover are convinced this is only natural, and have never once doubted themselves?

If so, that would be easy. But then again, perhaps that is simply what human beings are, and perhaps that is a perfect score in itself—I do not know. . . . Do they sleep soundly at night, and wake refreshed in the morning? What dreams do they have? What do they think about as they walk down the street? Money?

Surely it can't be only that—I have some vague memory of hearing the theory that human beings live in order to eat, but I have never once heard anyone say that they live for the sake of money. And yet, no, perhaps depending on the case . . . no, that too I cannot say . . . the more I think about it, the less I understand, and I am left only with the unease and dread of feeling that I alone am entirely different from everyone else.

I am almost incapable of conversation with my neighbors.

I do not know what to say, or how to say it.

And so what I hit upon was clowning.

It was my last overture of courtship toward humanity.

Though I feared human beings to an extreme degree, it seems I could never quite bring myself to give up on them altogether.

And so it was by this single thread of clowning that I was able, if only barely, to remain connected to humankind.

Outwardly I never stopped putting on a smiling face, but inwardly it was a desperate service, performed in a cold sweat, balanced on a hairsbreadth margin one might call one chance in a thousand.

From childhood, even toward the members of my own family, I had no idea at all how much they suffered, or what they thought as they lived their lives; I was simply terrified, unable to bear the awkwardness of it, and had already become an accomplished clown.

In other words, before I knew it, I had become a child who never spoke a single word of truth.

Looking at photographs taken with my family from those days, everyone else wears a serious face, while I alone am always twisting mine into some strange grinning shape.

This too was a kind of sad, childish clowning of my own.

Also, I never once talked back when a member of my family said something to me.

Even the mildest scolding struck me with the force of a thunderclap, and I would nearly go mad; far from talking back, I took that scolding to be, so to speak, the eternal, unbroken "truth"

of the human race, passed down through the ages without a break, and since I lacked the power to live by that truth, I would become convinced that I could no longer go on living among human beings at all.

That is why I was incapable of arguing back or defending myself.

Whenever someone spoke ill of me, I would feel that they were absolutely right, that I myself had been terribly mistaken, and I always received their attacks in silence, while inwardly feeling a fear that verged on madness.

It may be that no one enjoys being criticized or shouted at, but in the face of an angry human being I see the true nature of a beast more terrifying than a lion, more terrifying than a crocodile, more terrifying than a dragon.

Ordinarily that nature seems to be hidden away, but on some occasion—much as a cow lying placidly in a meadow will suddenly crack its tail and kill a horsefly on its belly—the terrifying true form of a human being is abruptly exposed through anger, and at the sight of it I would always feel a shudder that made my hair stand on end; and when I considered that this nature too might be one of the qualifications for living as a human being, I felt something very close to despair.

Trembling and quaking always with fear before other human beings, unable to hold the least confidence in my own words or actions as a human being, I kept my private agonies locked away in a small box within my chest, hid my melancholy, my nervousness, absolutely from view, and put on nothing but an air of innocent good cheer, gradually perfecting myself as a clownish eccentric.

It didn't matter what, so long as I made people laugh—if I did that, I thought, then perhaps human beings would not much mind that I stood outside what they called their "life"

in any case, I must not become an eyesore to them; I am nothing, I am wind, I am sky—thoughts of this kind grew more and more insistent within me, and I made my family laugh through clowning, and even toward the menservants and maidservants, who struck me as more incomprehensible and more frightening still than my own family, I performed my desperate service of clowning.

One summer I walked down the corridor wearing a red wool sweater under my yukata, and made the whole household laugh.

Even my eldest brother, who rarely laughed, burst out at the sight of it,

"Now that, Yo-chan, does not suit you at all,"

he said, in a tone that could not have sounded more fond.

Now, even I was not so eccentric, whatever else I was, as to be oblivious to hot and cold and go about wearing a wool sweater in the height of summer.

I had simply pulled my sister's leggings onto both my arms, letting them peek out from the sleeve openings of my yukata, so as to make it look as though I were wearing a sweater.

My father, a man with much business in Tokyo, kept a villa in Sakuragicho, Ueno, and spent the greater part of each month living there.

And whenever he came home, buying a truly extravagant quantity of gifts—for the family, even for our relatives—was, one might say, something of a hobby of his.

On the eve of one of his trips up to Tokyo, my father gathered the children in the parlor and, laughing, asked each of us in turn what sort of gift we would like when he came back, jotting down each of our answers in his notebook.

It was a rare thing for my father to be so affectionate with his children.

"And Yozo?"

Asked this, I fell into a stammer.

The instant I was asked what I wanted, I would stop wanting anything at all.

A thought would flicker through me: it doesn't matter, nothing could make me happy anyway.

And yet, at the same time, whatever was given to me by someone else, however little it suited my taste, I was incapable of refusing it.

I could not say I disliked what I disliked, and even the things I liked I tasted only timidly, as though stealing them, in the bitterest of ways, writhing all the while with an unspeakable dread.

In other words, I did not even have the ability to choose between two things.

This, it seems to me, was in later years to become one of the traits behind what I have called my "life full of shame"—

one of its critical causes.

Seeing me stand there silent and fidgeting, my father's face clouded a little with displeasure, and he said,

"A book again, I suppose. At the Nakamise shops in Asakusa they were selling New Year's lion-dance masks, just the right size for a child to wear and play with—don't you want one?"

Once he said, don't you want one, it was already hopeless.

I could not manage even a clownish reply.

As a clown, I had failed completely.

"A book would be best, wouldn't it,"

my eldest brother said, with a straight face.

"Is that so,"

my father said, and with a look that had lost all interest, he closed the notebook with a snap, without writing anything down.

What a failure, I thought—I had angered my father, and his revenge was sure to be something terrible; wasn't there some way, even now, to undo it before it was too late? That night, trembling under the covers, I thought it over, then quietly got up, went to the parlor, opened the drawer of the desk where my father must have put the notebook away earlier, took it out, flipped through the pages, found the place where the gift requests were written, licked the notebook's pencil, wrote LION DANCE, and went back to bed.

I did not want that lion-dance mask in the least.

If anything, I would rather have had the book.

But I had noticed that my father wanted to buy me that mask, and simply in order to fall in line with his wishes and mend his mood, I dared to take the risk, in the dead of night, of sneaking into the parlor.

And this desperate measure of mine was rewarded, just as I had hoped, with resounding success.

In due course, my father came back from Tokyo, and I heard him, from the children's room, telling my mother in a loud voice,

"At the toy shop in the Nakamise arcade, I opened this notebook, and here, look, it says LION DANCE. That is not my handwriting. Now what could that be? I tilted my head, and then it came to me. This is Yozo's doing. When I asked him, he just sat there grinning and said nothing, but afterward he must have wanted that lion mask so badly he couldn't stand it. Really, that boy is an odd one. Pretending he didn't care, and then writing it in himself like that. If he wanted it that badly, he should have just said so. I laughed right there in front of the toy shop. Call Yozo here at once."

On another occasion, I gathered the menservants and maidservants in the Western-style room, had one of the menservants bang away wildly at the keys of the piano (for though we lived in the country, that house had nearly everything one could want), and danced an Indian dance to his nonsense tune, sending everyone into fits of laughter.

My second-eldest brother set off a flash and photographed me doing my Indian dance, and when the picture came out, my little penis was visible through the gap in my loincloth (which was in fact a chintz furoshiki), and this too sent the whole household into fresh laughter.

For me, this too might be called an unexpected success.

Every month I subscribed to more than ten new boys' magazines, and besides these I quietly sent away to Tokyo for all manner of other books and read them on my own, so that I was on the most familiar terms with characters like Doctor Nonsense and Doctor What-in-the-World, and I was also fairly well versed in ghost stories, tales of chivalry, rakugo, and Edo-period comic anecdotes of that kind, so I never lacked for material to say something absurd with a perfectly straight face and set the household laughing.

But ah, school!

There, I was on the verge of being respected.

The very notion of being respected filled me with terror as well.

To deceive people almost to perfection, and then to be seen through by some single all-knowing, all-powerful being, and be smashed to splinters, made to suffer a humiliation worse than death—that was my definition of the state called

"being respected."

Even if one deceives human beings and is "respected"

for it, still there is always that one single person who knows the truth, and when the others, eventually taught by that one person, come to realize they have been deceived—what, I wonder, would their fury and their vengeance be like then?

Even to imagine it makes my hair stand on end.

More than being born into a wealthy family, it was through what is commonly called being "capable"

that I came close to earning the respect of the entire school.

I had been sickly since childhood, and there were times when I was confined to bed and missed school for a month or two, even for nearly a full school year, yet even so, riding to school in a rickshaw with a body still recovering from illness and sitting for the year-end examinations, I would find myself, it seemed, more "capable"

than anyone else in the class.

Even when I was in good health, I never studied in the least; when I went to school I spent class time drawing cartoons and the like, and during recess I would explain them to the other students and make them laugh.

In my compositions, too, I wrote nothing but comic tales, and even when my teacher cautioned me about it, I did not stop.

For I knew that the teacher, in secret, actually looked forward to my comic tales.

One day, as usual, I wrote up, in a deliberately mournful style, and handed in the story of a blunder I had made—being taken to Tokyo by my mother, I had once urinated into the spittoon in the passage of the train carriage (though, in fact, I had not done it that time without knowing it was a spittoon.

I had done it on purpose, putting on a show of childish innocence)—and being confident the teacher would surely laugh, I quietly followed him as he made his way back to the staff room; the moment he left the classroom, he picked my composition out from among the others in the class and began reading it as he walked down the corridor, chuckling to himself, and by the time he had finished reading it in the staff room, his face had gone bright red and he was laughing out loud, and I watched him hand it straight over for another teacher to read, and I was thoroughly satisfied.

A mischievous little scamp.

I had succeeded in being seen as what is called a mischievous scamp.

I had succeeded in escaping being respected.

My report card showed top marks of ten in every subject, but for conduct alone I would get a seven, or a six, and this too was a great source of laughter throughout the household.

And yet my true nature was, in every respect, the very opposite of such a mischievous little scamp.

Even in those days, I had already been taught, and violated, by a maid and a manservant, in ways too sad to speak of.

To do such a thing to a small child is, I now believe, among the ugliest, basest, and most cruel of all the crimes a human being is capable of committing.

But I bore it in silence.

I even had the feeling that I had glimpsed, in this too, one more trait peculiar to human beings, and I laughed, weakly.

Had I been in the habit of telling the truth, I might have been able to report their crime to my father or mother without flinching, but I was incapable of fully understanding even my own father and mother.

Appealing to another human being—I could place not the slightest hope in such a course.

Whether I appealed to my father, to my mother, to the police, or to the government, wouldn't it, in the end, come down to nothing more than being talked down by whoever was more skilled at getting on in the world, with arguments that sounded better to society's ears?

It was obvious from the start that the outcome would always be lopsided—that appealing to human beings was, in the end, useless—and I could only feel that there was nothing for me to do but say nothing true at all, bear it in silence, and go on clowning.

What's this, are you saying you distrust human beings?

Oh?

Since when did you become a Christian, someone might sneer—but it seems to me that a distrust of human beings does not necessarily lead straight to the path of religion.

In fact, does not even that very person who sneers, along with everyone else, go on living quite unconcerned, amid mutual distrust, without a thought for Jehovah or anything of the sort?

This too was from my early childhood: a famous figure from a certain political party my father belonged to came to give a speech in our town, and the menservants took me along to the theater to hear it.

The place was packed, and among the faces there I could see all the people in town who were especially close to my father, clapping enthusiastically.

When the speech was over, the audience set off for home along the snowy night road in little clusters of twos and threes, cursing the evening's speech in the foulest terms.

Among the voices was one belonging to a man especially close to my father.

My father's opening remarks were clumsy, and as for the famous man's speech, no one could make head or tail of it, said the very men who were supposedly my father's "comrades"

in a tone that sounded almost like shouting in anger.

And yet those very same men stopped by our house afterward, sat themselves down in the parlor, and told my father, with faces that looked genuinely delighted, that tonight's meeting had been a great success.

Even the menservants, when my mother asked them how the meeting had gone that night, said it had been great fun, with the most untroubled faces imaginable.

Yet on the way home, those same menservants had been grumbling to each other that nothing in the world was as tedious as a political speech.

But this is nothing more than a small, trifling example.

It seems to me that human life is full of such examples of deceiving one another, strangely enough without either party ever being wounded by it, seemingly without even noticing that they are deceiving each other at all—vivid examples, one might say, of a distrust that is truly pure, bright, and cheerful.

And yet I myself take no particular interest in this business of deceiving one another.

I too, after all, deceive human beings from morning till night through my clowning.

I have never been able to take much interest in that kind of morality one finds in ethics textbooks—justice and all the rest of it.

What I find incomprehensible are those human beings who, even while deceiving one another, live—or seem confident that they can live—purely, brightly, and cheerfully.

No human being has ever taught me the secret of that.

If only I understood that, I would surely not have had to fear human beings so terribly, nor perform such a desperate service for them.

I would surely not have had to set myself against human life and taste, night after night, so much of this hellish suffering.

In other words, I believe that the reason I never reported even that hateful crime of the manservant and maid to anyone was not out of a distrust of human beings, nor of course for any Christian reasons, but because human beings had already, toward me, Yozo, shut tight the shell of their trust.

Even my own father and mother, after all, would sometimes show me something I found incomprehensible.

And I have a feeling that this scent of my own solitude, this habit of never appealing to anyone, was sniffed out by instinct by a great many women, and became, in later years, one of the reasons I was so often taken advantage of.

In other words, I was, for women, a man who could be trusted to keep a secret of love.

Second Notebook

On a shore close enough to the sea to be called its very edge, more than twenty good-sized wild cherry trees stood in a row, their bark black as pitch, and when the new school year began, these cherries, along with their sticky brown young leaves, would burst into gorgeous bloom against the backdrop of the blue sea; and later, when the blossoms scattered like snow, countless petals would fall into the sea, dotting the surface of the water as they drifted, borne on the waves back again to the shore—it was to a certain middle school in the Tohoku region, whose schoolyard was that very cherry-strewn beach, that I somehow managed to be admitted without having done any real preparation for the entrance examination.

And on the badge of that middle school's cap, and on the buttons of its uniform too, a stylized cherry blossom bloomed.

There was a house very near that middle school belonging to a distant relative of my family, and it was partly for this reason that my father chose that school of sea and cherry blossoms for me.

I was placed in the care of that household, and being so close to the school, I was the sort of thoroughly lazy student who would wait to hear the morning assembly bell before running off to school, but even so, through my usual clowning, I grew more popular in the class with each passing day.

It was, so to speak, the first time in my life I had left for a foreign place, and yet that foreign place seemed to me a far more comfortable place than my own native home.

One might explain this by saying that my clowning had, by then, come to fit me all the more perfectly, so that I no longer needed as much effort to deceive people as before; but more than that, is there not, between one's own flesh and blood and strangers, between one's native home and a foreign place, an ineradicable difference in the difficulty of performance, one that exists for even the greatest genius, even for Jesus, the Son of God?

For an actor, the hardest place of all to perform is the theater of his own hometown, and above all, in a single room where every one of his own kin sits gathered together, would not even the finest actor find himself utterly unable to act at all?

And yet I had gone on performing.

And moreover, it had met with considerable success.

A trickster capable of that much was hardly likely to fumble his performance out in some foreign place, even by the wildest chance.

My terror of human beings still writhed at the bottom of my chest, as fiercely as ever, if not more so, but my performance had become truly free and easy; in the classroom I was always making the other students laugh, and even the teacher, while lamenting aloud that this would be a very fine class indeed if only Oba weren't in it, would laugh behind his covering hand.

I was even able, with real ease, to make the assigned military drill officer—the one with the thunderous, barbarous bark—burst out laughing.

Just as I was beginning to breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that perhaps I had at last managed to conceal my true self completely, I was, quite unexpectedly, stabbed from behind.

True to the type of man who stabs one from behind, he was a student with the weakest body in the whole class, his face pale and puffy, wearing a jacket that was clearly a hand-me-down from his father or an older brother, its sleeves absurdly long, like something out of a portrait of Prince Shotoku, hopeless at every subject, and always sitting out drill and gymnastics to watch from the sidelines—a boy who seemed almost simple-minded.

Even I, for all my caution, had never once thought it necessary to be on guard against a boy like that.

That day, during gymnastics class, that student—I no longer remember his surname, but I believe his given name was Takeichi—that Takeichi, as usual, was sitting out to watch, while the rest of us were made to practice on the horizontal bar.

I put on as solemn a face as I could manage, shouted a great yell as I leapt for the bar, and then, as though doing a long jump, sailed straight past it and landed with a thud on my backside in the sand.

It was, of course, an entirely calculated failure.

Just as I had planned, everyone burst out laughing, and as I got up with a wry smile, brushing the sand from my trousers, Takeichi—I had not noticed him come up—poked me in the back and whispered, in a low voice, these words:

"On purpose. On purpose."

I was shaken to the core.

That my failure had been deliberate, and that of all people it should be Takeichi who had seen through it, was something I had never once imagined possible.

I felt as though I were watching, before my very eyes, the whole world burst into the flames of hell in an instant, and I wanted to cry out, aaah!—

and I fought back, with all the desperate strength I had, the urge to scream and lose my mind.

The unease and terror of the days that followed.

On the surface I went on, as always, performing my sad clowning and making everyone laugh, but every now and then a heavy sigh would escape me without my meaning it to, and whenever I thought that whatever I did, Takeichi had already seen through me completely, smashed to bits, and that before long he would surely go around telling this and that person about it, a cold, greasy sweat would break out on my forehead, and I would glance about wildly, in vain, with the strange, wild eyes of a madman.

If I could have, I would have wanted never to leave Takeichi's side, morning, noon, and night, around the clock, watching over him so that he would not blurt out my secret.

And so, while sticking close to him, I made every effort I could to convince him that my clowning was not, in fact, some so-called "trick"

but the genuine article, and if at all possible I wanted to become his one true, irreplaceable friend; and if all of that should prove impossible, I found myself driven to think that there was nothing left for me but to pray for his death.

But even so, the thought of killing him myself never once crossed my mind.

In my life up to now, there have been countless times I have wished to be killed by someone, but never once have I wished to kill anyone myself.

This was because I believed that killing a person I feared would only end up giving happiness to that terrifying opponent.

In order to tame him, I first put on a face like some false Christian, brimming with a "gentle"

coaxing smile, tilted my head some thirty degrees to the left, put my arm lightly around his small shoulders, and in a honeyed voice, like someone cooing to a cat, often invited him to come and visit me at the house where I was boarding, but he would only stand there with a vacant look in his eyes, saying nothing.

But then one day after school—it must have been early summer—a sudden white sheet of rain came pouring down, and the other students seemed at a loss over how to get home, but since my house was so close by, I was about to dash outside without a second thought when I happened to notice Takeichi standing dejectedly in the shadow of the shoe lockers; I said, come on, I'll lend you an umbrella, and pulling the hesitant Takeichi by the hand, I ran with him through the downpour, and once we reached the house, I asked the landlady to dry both our jackets, and succeeded in luring Takeichi up to my room on the second floor.

In that house lived a landlady in her fifties, and her elder daughter, a tall woman of about thirty who wore glasses and seemed sickly (this daughter had once married and gone off to another household, and had since come back to live at home.

I called her Anesa, following the way the family itself addressed her)—and besides them, a younger daughter named Sekchan, who had apparently just graduated from girls' school, short and round-faced, quite unlike her sister; the family consisted of just these three, and although the shop downstairs displayed a small assortment of stationery and sporting goods, their main income seemed to come from the rent on five or six row houses that the late master of the house had built and left behind.

"My ear hurts,"

Takeichi said, still standing.

"It started hurting when it got wet in the rain."

When I looked, both of his ears were badly discharging.

Pus looked ready to spill out of them at any moment.

"This is bad. It must hurt,"

I said, making a show of exaggerated alarm,

"I'm sorry for dragging you out in the rain,"

I said, using words that sounded almost like a woman's, apologizing "gently"

and then I went downstairs, got some cotton and alcohol, laid Takeichi down with my knee as his pillow, and carefully cleaned out his ears.

Even Takeichi, it seemed, did not notice that this was a wicked scheme of hypocrisy,

"You're sure to be loved by women,"

he said, lying there with his head on my knee, offering this ignorant bit of flattery.

But it was only in later years that I came to realize this had been, in fact, something like a terrible, devilish prophecy—one that even Takeichi himself had probably uttered without the slightest awareness of it.

To fall in love, to be loved—these words, whether spoken this way or that, have a terribly vulgar ring to them, playful, unmistakably self-satisfied, and however solemn

the occasion may otherwise be, the moment even one such word so much as pokes its face in, the whole cathedral of melancholy comes crashing down before one's eyes, and one is left with the feeling of nothing but a blank, featureless void; and yet, strangely enough, if instead of that vulgar phrase, the pain of being loved, one uses some more literary expression, such as the anxiety of being loved, it does not seem to demolish the cathedral of melancholy after all, which I find a curious thing.

When Takeichi, after having me clean the pus from his discharging ears, offered that foolish flattery about being loved, I simply reddened, laughed, and said nothing in reply, but in fact, there was, faintly, something that had already occurred to me.

But then, against the smug atmosphere produced by such a vulgar phrase as "being loved,"

to write that, hearing it, there was indeed something that had occurred to me, would show a foolishness of feeling scarcely fit even for the lines of some young rake in a rakugo tale, and it is certainly not the case that I had "something that had occurred to me"

in any such playful, self-satisfied spirit.

To me, women were several times more incomprehensible than men.

In my own family there were more women than men, and among my relatives too there were many girls, and there was also that maid of the "crime"

I mentioned earlier, so that it would not be an exaggeration to say I grew up playing almost exclusively with women from my earliest years; and yet, all the same, I have gone about my dealings with those women feeling as though I were walking on thin ice.

I have almost no idea, none at all, how to read them.

I am lost in a thick fog, and every so often I make the mistake of stepping on a tiger's tail and suffer a terrible wound, one that, unlike the lash one receives from a man, festers inward like internal bleeding, extremely unpleasant, and a wound very slow to heal.

A woman draws you close and then flings you away; or again, a woman scorns you and treats you coldly when others are around, and clings to you tightly the moment everyone else is gone; a woman sleeps as deeply as if she were dead—perhaps women live only in order to sleep; observations of this kind, and others besides, I had already gathered about women since my earliest childhood, and though they seemed to belong to the same human race, they struck me as an entirely different sort of creature from men altogether, and this incomprehensible, never-to-be-trusted creature, strangely enough, fussed over me.

"To be loved"

as a phrase, and "to be liked"

as a phrase, neither one suited my case in the least; "to be fussed over"

might, if anything, be closer to describing the actual state of affairs.

Women seemed to relax into my clowning even more readily than men did.

When I performed my clowning, men, after all, would not go on laughing forever, and besides, I knew that if I got carried away and overdid my clowning with men, it would backfire, so I always made a point of stopping at the right moment; but women knew no such moderation, and would go on and on, endlessly demanding more clowning from me, and I would answer their limitless encores until I was utterly worn out.

They really do laugh a great deal.

On the whole, it seems that women are able to stuff their mouths with far more pleasure than men can.

Both the elder and younger daughters of the household that took care of me during my middle-school years would come up to my room on the second floor whenever they had a spare moment, and every single time this happened, I would nearly jump out of my skin with fright, and, thoroughly terrified,

"Studying?"

"No,"

I would say, smiling, and close my book,

"Today at school, you see, there's this geography teacher we call Konbo—"

and what came flowing smoothly out of my mouth was nothing but comic tales I did not mean a word of.

"Yo-chan, try putting on some glasses,"

one evening, after Sekchan the younger daughter had come to my room to play together with Anesa, and had made me perform my clowning for all it was worth, she suddenly said.

"Why?"

"Never mind, just put them on. Borrow Anesa's glasses."

She always spoke in this rough, commanding tone.

The clown obediently put on Anesa's glasses.

The two girls immediately collapsed into laughter.

"It's identical. He's the spitting image of Lloyd."

At the time, a foreign film comedian by the name of Harold Lloyd was popular in Japan.

I stood up, raised one hand, and said,

"Ladies and gentlemen,"

and then,

"On this occasion, to all my fans here in Japan . . ."

attempting a little speech, which sent them into even greater fits of laughter, and after that, every time one of Lloyd's films came to the theater in that town, I went to see it, secretly studying his expressions and mannerisms.

Also, one autumn night, as I lay reading a book, Anesa darted into the room as quick as a bird, threw herself down suddenly on top of my quilt, and burst into tears,

"Yo-chan will save me, won't you. Yes, you will. We should just leave this house together. Save me. Please save me,"

she blurted out, saying such intense things, and then wept again.

But this was not the first time a woman had displayed such behavior toward me, so I was not especially surprised by Anesa's extreme words, and if anything felt my interest cool at their triteness and emptiness; quietly slipping out from under the quilt, I peeled a persimmon on the desk and handed her a slice.

Anesa, still sobbing, ate the persimmon,

"Isn't there some interesting book? Lend me one,"

she said.

I picked out for her, from the bookshelf, Soseki's I Am a Cat,

that novel.

"Thanks for the treat,"

Anesa said, and laughed bashfully as she left the room, but not only with Anesa—trying to imagine what feelings women in general lived by struck me as something more tangled, more troublesome, and more eerie than probing the thoughts of an earthworm.

The one thing I did know, from my own experience since childhood, was that when a woman suddenly burst into tears like that, if you handed her something sweet, she would eat it and her mood would improve.

Also, Sekchan the younger daughter would even bring her friends to my room, and I, as usual, made everyone laugh without playing favorites, and after her friend went home, Sekchan would invariably speak ill of that friend.

That girl is a delinquent, you have to be careful of her, she would say without fail.

If that was how she felt, she needn't have gone to the trouble of bringing her friend at all, but thanks to this, almost every visitor to my room ended up being a girl.

But this was, by no means, yet the fulfillment of Takeichi's flattering prediction that I would be "loved"

by women.

In other words, I was, at that point, nothing more than the Harold Lloyd of Tohoku, Japan.

It would be a further several years before Takeichi's ignorant flattery came vividly to life as an ominous prophecy and took on its foreboding shape.

Takeichi had also given me one more gift of great significance.

"It's a picture of a ghost,"

Takeichi explained, showing off proudly a color-plate frontispiece he had brought with him, on some occasion when he came to visit me upstairs.

Oh?

was what I thought.

It seems to me now, looking back in later years, that in that very instant, the path of my decline was decided.

I knew.

I knew that it was nothing more than that famous self-portrait by Van Gogh.

In the days of our boyhood, the so-called French Impressionists were enormously popular in Japan, and most people took their first step into the appreciation of Western painting from around there; even a middle-school boy out in the countryside was generally familiar with the reproductions of painters like Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Renoir.

I too had seen a good many color reproductions of Van Gogh, and had found something interesting in the touch of his brushwork, something arresting in the vividness of his colors, but I had never once thought of them as pictures of ghosts.

"Well then, what about something like this? Is this a ghost too?"

I took a collection of Modigliani's paintings from my bookshelf and showed Takeichi that familiar image of a nude woman with skin like sunburnt copper.

"That's incredible,"

Takeichi exclaimed, his eyes going wide with admiration.

"It's like a horse from hell."

"So it is a ghost after all, isn't it."

"I want to paint ghost pictures like this too."

People who are excessively terrified of other human beings arrive, paradoxically, at a psychology in which they long to see with their own eyes some still more terrifying specter, some certain and undeniable monster—the same psychology by which a nervous person, easily frightened by things, prays for the storm to grow even fiercer; ah, this whole group of painters must have been so battered and menaced by that monster called the human being that in the end they came to believe in their visions, and saw specters vividly, in broad daylight, amid the natural world, and moreover, rather than disguising it with any clowning, they strove to express it exactly as they had seen it—they had, just as Takeichi said, boldly and deliberately painted "pictures of ghosts"

and here, I thought, were my future companions, and I grew so excited that tears came to my eyes,

"I'll paint them too. I'll paint pictures of ghosts. I'll paint a horse from hell,"

I said to Takeichi, for some reason in a voice lowered almost to a whisper.

Since my primary-school days, I had loved both drawing pictures and looking at them.

And yet the pictures I drew were never received nearly as well by those around me as my compositions had been.

Since I never trusted human words in the first place, my compositions were, to me, nothing but a kind of clownish greeting, and they had gone on delighting my teachers throughout primary school and middle school alike, yet I myself found them utterly uninteresting; only in painting (setting aside cartoons, which were another matter) did I make even a modest effort, in my own childish, self-taught way, to render the thing before me.

The models used for art class at school were dull, and the teacher's own paintings were clumsy, so I was left with no choice but to devise, entirely on my own and by trial and error, all manner of methods of expression.

By the time I entered middle school, I had a full set of oil painting supplies, but even when I sought a model for my brushwork in the style of the Impressionists, what I produced came out flat and lifeless, like some piece of chiyogami paper craft, and seemed to have no hope of amounting to anything.

But through Takeichi's words, I came to realize that my whole attitude toward painting, up until then, had been entirely mistaken.

The naivety, the foolishness, of trying to render beautifully, just as it was, whatever one felt to be beautiful.

The masters, taking something utterly ordinary, created beauty out of it through their own subjectivity, or else, even while feeling nauseated by something ugly, did not hide their interest in it, immersing themselves in the pure joy of expression—in other words, they seemed to depend not in the slightest on how others might judge them; this rudimentary cheat sheet of painterly method, granted to me by Takeichi, I put to use, hiding it from those women who came to visit, and little by little I set to work producing a self-portrait.

What emerged was a picture so grim and dismal that even I was startled by it.

But this, I thought, is my true self, hidden away in the very depths of my chest—outwardly I laugh cheerfully and make others laugh, but in truth this is the gloomy heart I carry within me, and there's nothing to be done about it; I quietly affirmed this to myself, but even so, I did not show that picture to anyone at all, apart from Takeichi.

I hated the thought of having the grimness beneath my clowning found out, and being suddenly regarded with petty suspicion, and there was also the worry that, without anyone realizing it was my true self, it might simply be taken for some new sort of clowning and become a fresh source of laughter—that, more than anything, would have been unbearable—so I immediately hid the picture away deep in the back of a closet.

And in art class at school as well, I kept that "ghost-style method"

hidden away, and went on painting, as I always had, with the same ordinary touch of rendering beautiful things beautifully.

To Takeichi alone I had, from before, felt no hesitation about showing my easily wounded nerves, so I showed him this new self-portrait as well, with an easy mind, and he praised it highly; I went on to paint two, three more ghost pictures, and from Takeichi I received one more

"You'll become a great painter,"

prophecy.

With these two prophecies—that I would be loved, and that I would become a great painter—branded onto my forehead by the fool Takeichi, I eventually set off for Tokyo.

I had wanted to enter art school, but my father had long since decided to send me to a higher school and eventually make me a government official, and had already announced this decision to me, and being the sort of person incapable of talking back even once, I vaguely went along with it.

I was told to try taking the exams after my fourth year, and since I had, by then, grown thoroughly tired of that school of cherry blossoms and sea, I did not go on to the fifth year, but sat, having completed only the fourth, for the entrance examination of a higher school in Tokyo, passed it, and went straight into dormitory life; but I was so disgusted by its filth and brutality that clowning was out of the question, and I had a doctor write me a diagnosis of pulmonary infiltration, left the dormitory, and moved into my father's villa in Sakuragicho, Ueno.

I simply could not manage communal living, no matter what.

And besides, phrases like the raptures of youth or the pride of young men made a chill run through me just to hear them, and I could never keep pace with anything like that so-called high-school spirit.

Both the classroom and the dormitory felt to me like a dumping ground for twisted sexual urges, and even my near-perfect clowning was of no use there whatsoever.

When the Diet was not in session, my father stayed at that house only a week or two out of the month, so while he was away, that rather spacious house held only three people: an elderly caretaker couple and myself; I would skip school every now and then, though I never felt any urge to go sightseeing around Tokyo (in the end, I seem to have finished my life without ever having seen the Meiji Shrine, the bronze statue of Kusunoki Masashige, or the graves of the forty-seven ronin at Sengakuji), and I spent whole days at home, reading books and drawing pictures.

When my father came up to Tokyo, I would hurry off to school every morning, but there were also times when I went instead to the studio of the Western-style painter Yasuda Shintaro, in Sendagi-cho, Hongo, and practiced drawing for three or four hours at a stretch.

Once I had left the higher-school dormitory, even when I did attend classes, I felt as though I occupied some special position, almost like an auditing student—it may have been only my own warped sense of things, but I could not help feeling somehow false to myself, and this made me all the more reluctant to go to school.

In the end, through primary school, middle school, and higher school alike, I never once came to understand what people meant by school spirit.

I never once even tried to learn a school song.

Before long, at the painting studio, a certain art student introduced me to liquor, tobacco, prostitutes, pawnshops, and left-wing thought.

It was a strange combination, but it was, nonetheless, a fact.

That art student was named Horiki Masao; born in the old downtown quarter of Tokyo, six years my senior, he had graduated from a private art school, and since he had no studio of his own at home, he came to this school to continue his study of Western painting, or so he said.

"Won't you lend me five yen?"

We knew each other only by sight; up until then, we had never once exchanged a word.

Flustered, I handed over the five yen.

"All right, let's drink. It's my treat. You're a fine-looking lad, aren't you,"

he said, and unable to refuse, I was dragged off to a cafe in Horai-cho near the studio—that was the beginning of my acquaintance with him.

"I've had my eye on you for a while now. There, there, that shy little smile—that's the very look a promising artist has. To our new acquaintance, cheers! Kinu-san, isn't he a handsome fellow? Don't go falling for him now. Ever since this fellow started coming to the studio, I've had to settle, regrettably, for being the second-best-looking man around."

Horiki had a dark complexion and finely regular features, and unusually for an art student, he wore a proper business suit, his taste in neckties was subdued, and his hair was slicked flat with pomade, parted neatly down the middle.

It was an unfamiliar sort of place for me, and I was simply terrified, crossing and uncrossing my arms, doing nothing but that very shy little smile of mine, but by the time I had had two or three glasses of beer, I began, strangely enough, to feel a kind of lightness, as though I had been set free.

"I've been thinking of entering art school myself . . ."

"No, forget it. That kind of place is dull. School is dull. Our teacher lies in nature itself! Pathos toward nature!"

But I felt not the slightest respect for anything he said.

He's a fool, I thought, and his paintings must be bad too, but he might make good company for having fun.

In other words, this was the first time in my life I had ever laid eyes on a genuine city good-for-nothing.

Different in form though he was from myself, he was, in the one respect of being utterly detached from the workings of human life in this world, and bewildered by it, unmistakably of the same kind as me.

And yet the fact that he performed his clowning without any awareness of it, utterly unconscious of the misery underlying that clowning, was where he differed from me in essential kind.

I told myself it was nothing more than play, that I kept his company only as a playmate, always looking down on him, sometimes even feeling ashamed of my association with him, and yet, as I went about walking at his side, in the end, even by this man, I was broken.

At first, though, I believed him nothing but a good-natured fellow, a rare good-natured fellow at that, and even I, for all my terror of human beings, let down my guard entirely, thinking I had found myself a fine guide to Tokyo.

In truth, I was terrified, when riding the streetcar alone, of the conductor; even when I wanted to go to the Kabuki-za, I was terrified of the girls standing in rows on either side of the staircase, spread with its crimson carpet, at the main entrance; when I went into a restaurant, I was terrified of the waiter standing silently behind me, waiting for my plate to be cleared, and above all, when it came time to pay the bill—ah, how clumsy my hands would be—when I made a purchase and had to hand over money, it was not out of stinginess but from sheer nervousness, sheer embarrassment, sheer anxiety and dread that my head would spin and the world go black before me, until I was nearly out of my mind, and far from haggling over the price, it was often the case that I not only forgot to take my change, but sometimes even forgot to take the goods I had bought

home with me, so often did this happen, that I could not possibly walk the streets of Tokyo alone, and so, with no other choice, there was also this hidden circumstance of my having spent whole days lying idle at home.

But when I handed my purse over to Horiki and walked with him, Horiki would haggle vigorously, and being, one might say, a skilled hand at pleasure, he had a way of paying that produced the greatest effect for the smallest amount of money; he also steered clear of expensive taxis, making skillful use, as the occasion called for, of streetcars, buses, and little steam launches, showing a real talent for reaching one's destination in the shortest possible time; on the way home in the morning from the prostitutes' quarter, he would stop at some restaurant or other, take a morning bath, and have a light drink with simmered tofu, giving me practical instruction in how, for so little money, one could feel a real sense of luxury; besides this, he expounded on how the beef bowls and grilled skewers sold at street stalls were both cheap and nourishing, and guaranteed that nothing could beat electric brandy for getting drunk quickly, and in any case, when it came to the bill, he never once

made me feel the slightest anxiety or dread.

What was more, what saved me in my association with Horiki was that he paid not the slightest attention to what his listener might think, and simply let his so-called pathos gush forth as it pleased (or perhaps pathos means precisely this disregard for the other person's position), keeping up a stream of worthless chatter around the clock, so that there was never the slightest fear of falling, as we walked along together, into that exhausted, awkward silence.

In dealing with people, out of my constant wariness lest that dreadful silence appear, I, who was by nature reticent, had always felt I had to fight for my life with desperate clowning, treating each moment as though it were my last chance; but now this fool Horiki, without even realizing it, was gladly taking on that clowning role of his own accord, so all I had to do was let his words wash over me without any real answer, laughing now and then and saying, you don't say, and that was quite enough.

Liquor, tobacco, prostitutes—all of these, I came in time to understand, were extremely good means of dulling, even if only for a moment, my terror of human beings.

I came to feel that, in order to obtain these means, I would not regret selling off everything I owned.

To me, prostitutes seemed neither quite human beings nor quite women, but something more like idiots or madwomen, and in their arms, I found, I could feel completely at ease, and sleep soundly.

Every one of them was, to a degree that was almost sad, utterly without any trace of self-interest.

And whether it was because they sensed in me something like the affinity of a kindred spirit, I always found myself shown, by those prostitutes, a natural, unforced kind of kindness.

A kindness with no calculation whatsoever, a kindness that pressed nothing upon me, the kind of kindness one shows a person who might never come again—there were nights when I saw, quite literally, the halo of the Virgin Mary shining above the heads of those idiot, madwoman prostitutes.

But I went there to escape my terror of human beings, to seek some faint night's respite, and while I amused myself with those prostitutes who were truly my "own kind,"

it seems that, without my even noticing, I had come to give off, unconsciously, a certain unwholesome atmosphere that always clung about me—an entirely unexpected "bonus attachment,"

so to speak, but bit by bit that "attachment"

rose more and more clearly to the surface, until Horiki pointed it out to me, and I was startled and felt thoroughly disgusted.

Seen from the outside, in vulgar terms, I had been training myself in women through prostitutes, and had, apparently, improved my skill considerably of late—training in women through prostitutes is said to be the harshest kind, and correspondingly the most effective—so that I had already come to be trailed by that scent one might call "woman's man,"

and women (not only prostitutes) would catch that scent by instinct and draw near—it was this sort of lewd, disreputable atmosphere that I had received as a "bonus attachment,"

and this, it seemed, had become far more conspicuous than any rest I might have been seeking.

Horiki was probably half joking when he said it, but even I, however heavily, had things that came to mind—for instance, I remembered receiving a clumsy letter from a girl at a coffee shop; and there was the general's daughter, about twenty years old, who lived next door to the house in Sakuragicho, who every single morning at the exact hour I set off for school would go in and out of her own gate, lightly made up, though she seemed to have no reason to; and when I went to eat beef, even if I said nothing, the waitress there would . . . and also, in the box of cigarettes handed to me by the daughter of the tobacconist I always bought from . . . and also, at the Kabuki theater, the person seated beside me . . . and also, once, dozing off drunk on a late-night streetcar . . . and also, quite unexpectedly, an earnest, brooding letter arrived from a cousin back home . . . and also, some girl I couldn't identify

left behind, while I was out, what looked like a handmade doll of some sort . . . since I was extremely passive in all these matters, none of them ever went any further—they were nothing but fragments, with not a single one of them ever developing into anything more—but that some atmosphere, allowing women to dream of me, clung to me somewhere or other, was, and this is not the sort of loose joke lovers make when boasting, something I could not deny.

Having this pointed out to me by a man like Horiki, of all people, I felt a bitterness close to humiliation, and my interest in playing with prostitutes cooled all at once.

Also, out of his vain, showy sort of modernity (in Horiki's case, I still cannot to this day think of any other reason for it), he took me one day to some secret study group, a communist reading circle of some kind (I believe it was called something like R.S., but my memory is not clear on that point).

For a man like Horiki, perhaps a secret communist meeting was just one more item on his usual "tour of Tokyo,"

no more than that.

I was introduced to the so-called "comrades,"

made to buy a pamphlet, and given a lecture on Marxist economics by an exceedingly ugly-faced young man seated at the head of the room.

But to me, it all seemed like something perfectly obvious from the start.

It was, no doubt, exactly as they said—but there is, in the human heart, something far more incomprehensible, far more terrifying than that.

To call it desire is not enough; to call it vanity is not enough; even to set desire and lust side by side is not enough; I do not know quite what it is myself, but I have the feeling that at the bottom of the human world there lies something strangely ghost-story-like, something beyond mere economics, and terrified as I was, utterly, by that ghost story, though I could accept the so-called materialist view as naturally as water flows downhill, I was never able, through it, to be freed from my terror of human beings, to open my eyes toward the green leaves, and feel the joy of hope.

And yet I never once missed a meeting of this R.S., or whatever it was called (though I may be misremembering), attending faithfully, and finding it almost unbearably comical to watch the "comrades"

poring, with faces stiff as though over some grave matter of life and death, over theories that amounted to little more than elementary arithmetic—one plus one equals two—so that I made every effort, through my usual clowning, to put the meetings at ease, and thanks to this, the stiff atmosphere of the study group gradually loosened, and I seemed to have become something like an indispensable, popular figure at those gatherings.

These seemingly simple people may have thought of me as just as simple as themselves, a cheerful, jesting sort of "comrade,"

and if that was so, then I was deceiving them from beginning to end.

I was no comrade of theirs.

And yet I never once missed a meeting, and always went on performing my clowning service for them all.

It was because I liked them.

It was because those people had come to please me.

But this affection was not necessarily one forged by Marx.

Illegality.

That, to me, was faintly enjoyable.

If anything, it put me at ease.

It was the legal world, the ordinary world, that struck me as far more terrifying (there one senses something of unfathomable, bottomless strength), its inner workings incomprehensible, and I could not bear to sit in that windowless room, chilled to the bone, so that even if what lay outside was a sea of illegality, it seemed, to me, altogether more comfortable to leap into it, swim, and eventually drown.

There is a word: hikagemono, a person of the shadows.

It seems to be a word used to point at the wretched, the defeated, the corrupt, in the human world, but I have always felt myself to be a person of the shadows since the day I was born, and whenever I meet someone pointed out by the world as being that sort of person, my heart, without fail, grows gentle toward them.

And that "gentle heart"

of mine was gentle enough to leave even me myself entranced.

There is also the phrase, a sense of being a criminal.

In this human world, I have suffered under that sense my whole life, and yet perhaps it has also been a good companion, like a wife who has shared one's poverty from the start, and playing about desolately with that companion, just the two of us, may have been one of the postures of my life; there is also, as it's commonly said, the phrase, a man with a bruise on his shin—and that bruise appeared naturally on one of my shins from the time I was a baby, and far from healing as I grew older, it only ever deepened, reaching all the way to the bone, and though the pain of it, night after night, was a hell that shifted through a thousand forms, still (and this is a very strange way to put it) that wound came, little by little, to feel more intimate to me than my own flesh and blood, and the pain of that wound came to feel almost like the living emotion of the wound itself, or like a whisper of

affection—to a man like that, the atmosphere of that underground movement's group felt strangely reassuring, comfortable; in other words, it was not so much the movement's original purpose as the very texture of it that suited me.

As for Horiki, it was, in the end, nothing but a fool's idle mockery—he went to that meeting only once, just to introduce me, and after that, cracking some clumsy joke about how a Marxist must study consumption alongside production, he never went near the meetings again, and instead was forever trying to lure me toward that so-called study of consumption.

Looking back, there were, in those days, all manner of types who called themselves Marxists.

Some, like Horiki, called themselves Marxists out of nothing but vain modernity, while others, like myself, simply liked the scent of illegality and sat themselves down there for that reason alone; and if the true believers of Marxism had ever seen through what we really were, both Horiki and I would surely have been raged at like fire and driven out on the spot as contemptible traitors.

But neither I nor even Horiki was ever expelled, and I in particular found that in that illegal world I could behave far more freely, far more "healthily,"

so to speak, than in the world of legal, respectable gentlemen, so that I came to be entrusted, as a promising "comrade,"

with all sorts of tasks made so absurdly, excessively secretive that they nearly made me burst out laughing.

And in fact, I never once turned down a single one of those tasks, undertaking anything at all with a perfectly easy manner, never once bungling things by acting suspiciously and drawing the attention of the dogs (as the comrades called the police) into some ill-fated interrogation, but instead, laughing, and making others laugh, I carried out, precisely and without fail, the work they called dangerous (the people in that movement worked themselves into a state of tension as though over some grave matter, going so far as to imitate, clumsily, the methods of detective novels, taking the most extreme precautions, and yet the tasks they entrusted to me were, in truth, astonishingly trivial—though they themselves treated them, with great intensity, as being terribly dangerous).

As for my own feelings at the time, I would not have minded in the least becoming a party member, being arrested, and even spending the rest of my life in prison.

Rather than go on trembling in terror of what people call the "real life"

of this world, groaning night after night in a hell of sleeplessness, I even thought that a prison cell might, in fact, be a good deal easier.

At the villa in Sakuragicho, my father, what with visitors and outings, would sometimes go three or four days without our so much as seeing each other's faces, even living in the same house; but even so, he still felt to me like a thick, oppressive presence, something to be feared, and I had been thinking that I might leave the house and take a room somewhere, though unable to bring myself to say so, when I heard from the old man who looked after the villa that my father apparently intended to sell the house.

My father's term in the Diet was drawing near its end, and there were, no doubt, various reasons behind it all, but he no longer seemed to have any intention of standing for election again, and having built himself a retirement house back home, he seemed to feel no more attachment to Tokyo; perhaps he thought it a waste to go on keeping a mansion and servants for the sake of nothing more than a single higher-school student like myself (my father's mind, like the feelings of the world at large, has never been something I could well understand). In any case, the house before long passed into someone else's hands, and I moved into a dim room in an old boarding house called the Sen'yukan, in Morikawa-cho, Hongo, and immediately found myself short of money.

Up until then, I had been handed a fixed monthly allowance from my father, and even though it would always disappear within two or three days, there had always been cigarettes, liquor, cheese, and fruit around the house, and I could always order books, stationery, clothing, and anything else I needed from the neighborhood shops on so-called "credit,"

and even if I treated Horiki to soba or tempura on rice, so long as it was at a shop in the neighborhood my father patronized, I could simply walk out without saying a word about it.

But now, suddenly living alone in a boarding house, I had to make do with a fixed monthly remittance for absolutely everything, and I found myself utterly at a loss.

The remittance, sure enough, disappeared within two or three days, and I was struck with dread, driven half mad with helplessness, sending, in alternation to my father, my brothers, my sisters, telegrams begging for money and follow-up letters giving the details (every circumstance I pleaded in those letters was, without exception, a clownish fabrication.

I believed the best strategy, when asking someone for something, was first to make them laugh)—firing off these one after another, while also, on Horiki's advice, taking up frequent visits to the pawnshop, and even so, I was always short of money.

In the end, I simply lacked the ability to "live"

on my own, in a boarding house with no connections whatsoever.

I found it terrifying to sit still by myself in that boarding-house room, feeling as though someone might attack and strike me down at any moment, and I would dash out into the streets, helping out with the movement, or going around drinking cheap liquor with Horiki, abandoning almost entirely both my schoolwork and my study of painting, until, in November of my second year at higher school, I entered into a love-suicide attempt with a married woman older than myself, and my whole situation was transformed.

I skipped school, and did not study my lessons in the least, and yet my examination answers somehow always seemed to have a knack for hitting the mark, so that I had managed, up until then, to keep on deceiving my family back home; but by then it seemed the school had already begun quietly reporting things like my insufficient attendance to my father back home, and my eldest brother, acting on my father's behalf, had taken to sending me long letters written in a stern and formal style.

But more than that, my more immediate suffering came from having no money, and from the fact that the work of the movement had grown so fierce, so relentlessly busy, that it could no longer be carried on in anything like a half-hearted, playful spirit.

Whether it was called the Central District or some other district, in any case I had become the leader of the action squad of Marxist students across all the schools in that area—Hongo, Koishikawa, Shitaya, Kanda.

Hearing talk of an armed uprising, I bought a small knife (looking back now, it was such a flimsy little thing it could barely have sharpened a pencil), put it in the pocket of my raincoat, and went dashing here and there, keeping up so-called "contact"

with the others.

I wanted to drink and sleep soundly, but I had no money.

And from the P (I recall the party being called by that code name, though I may be wrong about it), requests for tasks came one after another, hardly leaving me time to catch my breath.

With my sickly body, it no longer seemed possible for me to keep this up.

I had, in the first place, only been helping out that group out of an interest in illegality itself, and once things had grown so absurdly busy—truly, as though a joke had turned unexpectedly serious—I could not help harboring, in secret, an irritated feeling toward the people of the P, thinking, this is misdirected, shouldn't you have your own direct people do this? And I fled.

Having fled, I naturally did not feel good about it, and decided to die.

Around that time, there were three women who showed me particular favor.

One was the daughter of the Sen'yukan, the boarding house where I lived.

This girl, without fail, would come to my room carrying stationery and a fountain pen after I had come home exhausted from helping with the movement and fallen asleep without even eating,

"I'm sorry. Downstairs my younger sister and brother make such a racket I can't get any writing done in peace,"

she would say, and sit there writing something at my desk for more than an hour.

I could just as well have pretended not to notice and gone on sleeping, but the girl always looked so evidently as though she wanted me to say something to her that I would summon up my usual spirit of passive service—though I truly did not want to say a single word—and, forcing myself with a grunt of effort despite my utterly exhausted body, I would roll onto my stomach and light a cigarette, saying,

"I hear there was a man who once heated his bath water with a love letter from a woman."

"Oh, how awful. That was you, wasn't it?"

"I did once heat up some milk and drink it."

"How flattering. Go ahead and drink me too, then."

I wish this girl would just hurry up and leave already—that business about writing a letter is so transparent.

She's probably not writing a letter at all—just doodling one of those silly stick-figure faces made out of hiragana characters, for all I know.

"Let me see it."

I would say it, even though I would rather have died than actually see it, and she would say, oh no, oh no, and be so pleased about it, so unbecomingly delighted, that it only killed my interest all the more.

So then I would think, let me give her some errand to run instead.

"I'm sorry to ask, but would you go to the pharmacy on the streetcar street and buy me some Calmotin? I'm so exhausted my face is burning and, of all things, I can't sleep. I'm sorry. The money is . . ."

"Never mind about the money."

She would spring up, delighted.

I understood perfectly well that giving a woman an errand never dampens her spirits—that, on the contrary, a woman is only too glad to be asked by a man to do something for him.

The other was a so-called "comrade,"

a literature student at a women's higher normal school.

With this one, because of the work of the movement, I had no choice but to see her face every single day, whether I liked it or not.

Even after our business was finished, this woman would go on walking alongside me endlessly, and would insist, again and again, on buying me things.

"You may think of me as a real older sister, you know,"

she would say, and shuddering at the pretentiousness of it, I would answer,

"I already do,"

putting on an expression of a sorrowful little smile.

In any case, out of the single thought that it would be frightening to make her angry and that I had to somehow smooth things over, I went on serving that ugly, disagreeable woman all the more, letting her buy me things (they were, without exception, items of thoroughly bad taste, and I generally handed them off at once to the old man who ran the yakitori stand), keeping up a happy face, cracking jokes to make her laugh, until one summer night, when she simply would not leave my side, I kissed her in a dark corner of the street, wanting nothing more than for her to go home, and she became abjectly, almost madly excited, called a car, and had me taken to a cramped Western-style room that looked like an office in some building the movement had apparently rented in secret, and we made a great commotion there until morning,

and I laughed inwardly, thinking, what an outrageous sort of older sister.

Between the boarding-house daughter and this so-called "comrade,"

since I had no choice but to see each of them every single day, I could not skillfully avoid them the way I had managed with the various other women up until then, and, bit by bit, out of that same anxious heart of mine, I found myself desperately trying to keep both of them in good spirits, until I was, by then, as good as bound hand and foot.

Around the same time, I also received an unexpected kindness from a waitress at a large cafe in Ginza, and though I had met her only once, I found myself unable to let go of that debt of kindness, feeling, again, a worry and a nameless dread that left me unable to move.

By then, I had grown able to affect at least a little brazenness—enough to ride the streetcar alone without relying on Horiki as my guide, enough even to go to the Kabuki-za, or to walk into a cafe wearing an ikat kimono.

In my heart, I still went on doubting, fearing, and agonizing over other people's confidence and violence, just as before, but outwardly, little by little, I had come to be able to exchange straight-faced greetings with others—no, that's not quite true, I was still the sort of person who could not greet anyone without the pained laughter of my clowning, admitting defeat—but in any case, I had come to acquire, however clumsily, however dazedly, some kind of "skill"

at getting through even a frantic, stammering greeting, whether thanks to my running about for the movement,

or thanks to the women,

or thanks to the liquor,

but mostly, I was coming to acquire it thanks to being short of money.

No matter where I was, I felt terrified, and it occurred to me that if I could instead lose myself, jostled about among the many drunken customers, waitresses, and waiters at some large cafe, this heart of mine that always felt as though it were being pursued might finally settle down—and so, with ten yen in my pocket, I went alone into that large cafe in Ginza, and, laughing, said to the waitress who came to serve me,

"I've only got ten yen, so keep that in mind,"

I told her.

"No need to worry,"

she said, with a trace of a Kansai accent somewhere in her voice.

And that one remark, strangely enough, calmed my trembling, frightened heart.

No, it was not because I no longer had to worry about money—it was that being at her side made me feel there was nothing to worry about at all.

I drank.

Feeling at ease with her, I felt, if anything, no inclination at all to put on my usual clowning, and instead showed, without hiding it, the taciturn, gloomy metal of my true self, drinking in silence.

"You like this kind of thing?"

the woman said, setting all manner of dishes down before me.

I shook my head.

"Just drinking, then? I'll join you."

It was a cold autumn night.

I recall her name was Tsuneko (though my memory has faded, and I am not certain of it—

I am, after all, the sort of person who forgets even the name of the woman with whom he attempted a love suicide) doing exactly as I was told, I ate, at a sushi stall in the back streets of Ginza, some thoroughly unappetizing sushi (though I have forgotten her name, for some reason how bad that sushi was has remained vivid in my memory to this day.

I can still picture, as vividly as if it were before my eyes, the shaven-headed old man, with a face like a rat snake's, tilting his head this way and that, shaping the sushi with a hand that only pretended to be skillful; and in later years, on the streetcar and elsewhere, I would think, now where have I seen that face before, only to realize, ah, he resembles that old man from the sushi stall, and laugh wryly to myself, over and over again.

That I still remember, precisely enough to draw it, the face of that sushi-stall old man, even now, when both the name and the very features of that woman have receded far from memory, must mean that the sushi that night was truly awful, and left me with a great deal of cold and pain.

In fact, even when someone has taken me to a place said to serve delicious sushi, and I have eaten there, I have never once found it delicious.

The pieces are always too large.

I have always wondered why they can't shape them neatly, about the size of a thumb)—I waited for her there.

She rented the upper floor of a carpenter's house in Honjo.

In that upstairs room, I drank my tea without hiding my usual gloomy state of mind in the least, pressing one cheek with my hand as though I were suffering from a terrible toothache.

And this posture of mine seemed, if anything, to please her all the more.

She too was a woman around whom a cold winter wind seemed always to blow, with only fallen leaves whirling madly about her, a woman who felt utterly and completely alone.

As we lay together, she told me things—that she was two years older than me, that her home was Hiroshima, that she had a husband, that he had run a barbershop in Hiroshima, that the two of them had eloped and run off to Tokyo together the previous spring, but that her husband, never finding any decent work in Tokyo, had before long been charged with fraud and was now in prison, that she went every day to the prison to bring him this and that, but that starting tomorrow she was going to stop—she told me all this, but for some reason I was simply the sort of person who could never take the least interest in a woman's tale of her own circumstances, whether because women tell such stories badly, or because they place the emphasis in the wrong places, in any case, it always went in one ear and out the other for me.

How lonely I am.

I have always felt certain that this single murmured phrase would draw far more sympathy from me than any thousand words a woman might tell of her own circumstances, and yet, strangely enough, I have found it stranger still that in this whole world, I have never once, from any woman, heard those words spoken.

But that woman, though she never spoke the words "how lonely I am"

aloud, carried a silent, terrible loneliness around her body like a current of air an inch or so thick, and when I drew close to her, my own body would be enveloped in that current too, blending pleasantly with the somewhat prickly current of my own gloom, so that, like a withered leaf that finally comes to rest against a rock on the riverbed,

I myself could, for a while, break free from both my terror and my anxiety.

This feeling was entirely different from that of falling soundly and safely asleep in the arms of those idiot prostitutes (for one thing, those prostitutes had always been cheerful); the single night I spent with the wife of that fraud convict was, for me, a night of happiness (a word so audacious that I intend never again, in the whole of this notebook, to affirm it and use it without hesitation)—a night of liberation.

But it was only that one night.

In the morning, when I woke and sprang up, I had already become again my old shallow, put-on clown of a self.

Cowards fear even happiness.

One can be wounded even by cotton wool.

One can be injured by happiness itself.

Before I could be wounded, I grew impatient to part with her, just as things stood, as quickly as possible, and threw up my usual smokescreen of clowning.

"That saying, when the money runs out, love runs out—people have it backwards, you know. It doesn't mean the woman leaves the man once he's broke. It means that when a man has no more money, he simply loses heart on his own, falls apart, his laugh loses all its force, and he grows strangely resentful, until finally he goes to pieces, and it's the man who leaves the woman—half out of his mind, casting her off, again and again, until it's done for good. That's according to some book called the Kanazawa Dai Jirin. Pitiful, isn't it. Though I understand the feeling myself."

I have some memory of saying something along those foolish lines, and of making Tsuneko burst out laughing.

Sensing the danger of overstaying my welcome, I hurried off without even washing my face, but that reckless, nonsensical remark of mine that day—money runs out, love runs out—

was, later on, to snag on something quite unexpected.

After that, for a full month, I did not see the woman I owed that night of kindness to.

As the days passed after our parting, my sense of joy faded, and having received even that fleeting kindness began, instead, to feel like a nameless dread, and I began to feel a heavy, self-inflicted sense of confinement; even the trivial matter of having let Tsuneko cover the entire bill at that cafe began, bit by bit, to prey on my mind, and Tsuneko too came to seem, just like the boarding-house daughter or that women's higher normal school student, nothing but a woman who threatened me, and even from a great distance I found myself in constant dread of her; on top of that, whenever I saw again a woman with whom I had once spent the night, I was overcome by the feeling that she might suddenly, without warning, fly into a rage at me, and being by nature exceedingly reluctant to meet such women again, I had by then come to keep well clear of Ginza altogether; and yet that reluctance of mine was never

any cunning of my own—it was simply that I had not yet fully grasped the strange phenomenon by which women live, allowing not the slightest thread of connection, not even a speck of dust, between what happens once they have lain down together and what happens once morning comes and they rise, cutting the two worlds cleanly and completely apart, as if in perfect forgetfulness.

At the end of November, I was drinking cheap liquor with Horiki at a food stall in Kanda, and this disreputable friend of mine, even after we left the stall, insisted we go drink somewhere else, and though we no longer had any money at all, he kept nagging, let's drink, come on, let's drink.

At that moment, partly because the drink had made me bold, I said,

"All right, then, I'll take you to a land of dreams. Don't be shocked—a garden of wine and flesh . . ."

"A cafe?"

"That's right."

"Let's go!"

and so the two of us boarded the streetcar, and Horiki, in high spirits, said,

"I'm starving, dying of thirst for a woman tonight. Mind if I kiss one of the waitresses?"

I did not much care for Horiki putting on that sort of drunken display.

Horiki, well aware of this, kept pressing me on the point.

"You hear me? I'm going to kiss one. Whichever waitress sits next to me, I'll kiss her, you'll see. All right?"

"I suppose it's fine."

"Much obliged! I'm starving, dying of thirst for a woman."

We got off at Ginza 4-chome and went into that so-called garden of wine and flesh, that large cafe, practically penniless, relying on Tsuneko as our lifeline, and the moment we sat down facing each other in an empty booth, Tsuneko and another waitress came hurrying over, and that other waitress plopped herself down beside me, while Tsuneko dropped down with a thud beside Horiki, and I felt a jolt run through me.

Tsuneko was about to be kissed.

It was not a feeling of resentment.

I had, to begin with, very little sense of possessiveness, and even on the rare occasion when a faint sense of loss stirred in me, I never had the strength of will to assert my claim boldly and fight anyone over it.

Later on, there would even come a time when I silently watched while a woman who was, in effect, my common-law wife was violated.

I wanted, as much as possible, never to touch human conflicts of any kind.

I was terrified of being swept up into that whirlpool.

Tsuneko and I were nothing more than a one-night acquaintance.

Tsuneko was not mine.

There was no way I could possibly harbor so presumptuous a desire as to begrudge losing her.

And yet I felt a jolt.

It was because I felt a pang of pity for Tsuneko, having to receive Horiki's fierce kiss right before my eyes.

Tsuneko, sullied by Horiki, would surely have to part ways with me, and yet I myself had no positive enough passion to hold her back—ah, this is the end of it, then, I thought, struck for a moment by pity at Tsuneko's misfortune, but I resigned myself at once, as readily as water flows, and I looked back and forth between Horiki's face and Tsuneko's, grinning.

But things unfolded in a way that was, quite unexpectedly, far worse than that.

"Forget it!"

Horiki said, twisting his mouth,

"Even I draw the line at a woman who looks this down-and-out . . ."

he said, folding his arms as though thoroughly defeated, giving Tsuneko a long, appraising look, and laughing bitterly.

"Some sake. We have no money,"

I said to Tsuneko in a low voice.

I felt as though I truly wanted to drink myself into oblivion.

Seen through the eyes of what one might call the vulgar and worldly, Tsuneko was not even worth a drunkard's kiss—she was simply a shabby, down-and-out sort of woman.

It struck me, unexpected and astonishing both, like being shattered by a thunderbolt.

I drank, more and more, without end, as I never had before, growing dizzy with drink, exchanging glances with Tsuneko, exchanging sad little smiles, and thinking, now that he mentions it, she really is a strangely worn-out, down-and-out sort of woman, isn't she—and at the very same moment, an affinity between those without money (the discord between rich and poor may seem a trite theme, but I believe now, all the same, that it remains one of the eternal themes of drama) welled up in my chest, and Tsuneko grew dear to me, and for the first time in my life I became aware, on my own, actively, of the faint stirring of something like love.

I threw up.

I lost all sense of what was happening.

It was the first time I had ever drunk myself into such a state of losing myself completely.

When I opened my eyes, Tsuneko was sitting beside my pillow.

I was lying in that upstairs room at the carpenter's house in Honjo.

"You went and said that thing about money running out and love running out—I thought you were joking, but were you serious? You never came to see me. What a complicated kind of running out that is. Even if I earn the money for us, is it still no good?"

"No good."

After that, she too lay down, and near dawn, the word "die"

came from her lips for the first time, and she too seemed utterly worn out by the ordinary business of living as a human being, and for my part, when I thought of my terror of the world, its endless troubles, money, the movement, women, my studies, it seemed to me that I could not possibly go on enduring it any longer, and I agreed to her proposal without the least hesitation.

But even then, I had not yet arrived at any real, felt resolve to actually

"die."

There was, somewhere in it, still an element of "play"

lurking somewhere within it.

That morning, the two of us wandered around Rokku, in Asakusa.

We went into a coffee shop and drank milk.

"You pay for it, would you,"

I stood up, took my coin purse out of my sleeve, and opened it; there were only three copper coins, and I was struck less by shame than by a feeling of sheer desolation, and what rose at once in my mind was my room at the Sen'yukan, that bare, desolate room with nothing left in it but my uniform and my bedding, not a single other thing left worth pawning, and besides that only the ikat kimono and the cloak I had on my back at that very moment—this, I thought, was my reality, and I understood, with absolute clarity, that I could not go on living.

Seeing me flustered, the woman stood up too, and peered into my coin purse,

"Oh, is that really all?"

she said, in an utterly innocent voice, and yet this too struck me with a pain that went straight through to the bone.

It hurt precisely because it was the voice of the very first person I had ever loved.

Not that much, not this little—three copper coins were not, to begin with, money at all.

It was a strange humiliation, one I had never once tasted before.

It was a humiliation so unbearable that I could not go on living with it.

In the end, I suppose, I had, at that time, still not fully shed the species of creature known as the rich man's son.

It was at that moment that I resolved, of my own free will, with true and genuine feeling, to die.

That night, we threw ourselves into the sea at Kamakura.

The woman said this obi is borrowed from a friend at the shop, and she untied it, folded it, and set it down on a rock, and I too took off my cloak and laid it in the same place, and together we walked into the water.

The woman died.

And I alone was saved.

Being a higher-school student myself, and my father's name apparently having some so-called news value, the incident seems to have been taken up in the newspapers as a fairly major story.

I was taken into a hospital by the shore, and one of my relatives came rushing up from back home, took care of all sorts of arrangements, and, telling me that my father and the entire family back home were furious, and that I might well be disowned by my own household from that point on, went back home.

But more than any of that, I longed for the dead Tsuneko, and did nothing but weep, sniveling.

For truly, of all the women I had known, that shabby, down-and-out Tsuneko was the only one I had ever loved.

A long letter came from the boarding-house daughter, filled with fifty short poems strung together in a row.

"Live on for me, won't you,"

was the strange phrase that began every single one of the fifty poems.

Also, nurses would come to my hospital room laughing merrily, and one of them would give my hand a firm squeeze before leaving.

A problem was discovered in my left lung during my stay at that hospital, and this proved to work greatly in my favor; before long I was taken from the hospital to the police under the charge of aiding a suicide, but at the police station they treated me as an invalid, and placed me in a special protective cell.

Late one night, an elderly policeman keeping the night watch in the duty room next to my cell quietly opened the door between us,

"Hey!"

he called out to me,

"You must be cold. Come over here and warm yourself,"

he said.

I went into the duty room with a deliberately downcast air, sat down in a chair, and warmed myself at the brazier.

"You must still be longing for that woman who died, eh."

"Yes."

I answered, deliberately, in a thin, fading voice.

"That's just human feeling for you."

Little by little, he began to puff himself up.

"Where was it that you first had relations with the woman?"

he asked, in a portentous manner, almost like a judge.

He looked down on me as a mere child, and to pass the tedium of the autumn night, he seemed intent on pretending, as though he himself were the officer in charge of the investigation, to draw out of me some confession with a lewd flavor to it.

I caught on to this at once, and had to struggle to keep myself from bursting out laughing.

I knew perfectly well that I was entitled to refuse any answer at all to that policeman's "unofficial interrogation,"

but to add some entertainment to the long autumn night, I put on, with the utmost meekness, an expression of what one might call sincerity, as though I firmly and unquestioningly believed that this very policeman was the officer in charge of my case, and that the severity of my punishment lay entirely at his discretion, and I offered a slapdash "statement"

just detailed enough to satisfy, in some small measure, his lecherous curiosity.

"Yes, that gives me a fair idea of it. If you answer honestly like this, we'll go easier on you."

"Thank you very much. I'll be counting on your kindness."

It was, if I say so myself, an almost inspired performance.

And a strenuous performance that would not do me the slightest bit of good, not in the least.

When morning came, I was summoned by the police chief.

This time it was the real interrogation.

The moment I opened the door and stepped into the chief's office,

"Well, aren't you a handsome fellow. Now, that's not your fault. It's your mother's fault, for bearing such a handsome son."

He was a still-young police chief, dark-complexioned, with the air of a university graduate.

Told this so abruptly, I felt as wretched as if half my face were covered with an ugly red birthmark, as though I were some kind of hideous cripple.

This chief's interrogation, the sort one might expect from a judo or kendo champion, was truly straightforward and simple, a world apart from

that late-night old policeman's furtive, doggedly persistent, lecherous "interrogation."

When the questioning was over, the chief, drawing up the papers to be sent to the prosecutor's office, said,

"You need to get that body of yours in shape. Looks like you're coughing up bloody phlegm."

he said.

That morning I had an odd cough, and every time I coughed I covered my mouth with a handkerchief, and there was blood on that handkerchief, scattered like little red hailstones.

But that blood had not come from my throat—it had come from a small boil that had formed under my ear the night before, which I had fiddled with until it bled.

But it suddenly struck me that it might be more convenient not to explain this, and so I simply said,

"Yes,"

lowering my eyes and answering with a show of proper meekness.

The chief finished writing up the papers, and said,

"Whether or not you'll be indicted is for the prosecutor to decide, but you'd better wire or telephone whoever's responsible for you, and have them come to the prosecutor's office in Yokohama today. There must be someone—your guardian, or whoever stands surety for you."

I remembered that a stocky, unmarried, forty-year-old dealer in calligraphy and antiques named Shibuta, who came from the same part of the country as my family and used to frequent my father's villa in Tokyo, playing something like the role of my father's flatterer, had been made the guarantor for my schooling.

That man's face, and especially the look in his eyes, resembled a flounder, so my father always called him Flatfish, and I too had grown used to calling him that.

I borrowed the police telephone directory, looked up Flatfish's home number, found it, and called him, asking him to come to the prosecutor's office in Yokohama, and Flatfish, in a tone so pompous it was as though he had become an entirely different person, nonetheless agreed to take charge of the matter.

"Hey, better get that telephone disinfected right away. He's coughing up bloody phlegm, after all."

After I had gone back to the protective cell, the chief's loud voice, giving that order to the policemen, reached even my ears, sitting there in the cell.

Past noon, I had a thin hemp rope tied around my waist, which I was allowed to hide beneath my cloak, but a young policeman held tightly to the end of that rope, and the two of us set off together by train for Yokohama.

And yet I felt not the slightest anxiety, and I even felt a fond nostalgia for that police protective cell, for the old policeman—ah, why is it that I am like this, that being bound as a criminal only leaves me feeling relieved, settled, at ease, and even now, setting down the memory of that time in writing, I find myself in a truly light and pleasant state of mind.

But even among the fond memories of that period, there was one single, wretched blunder—cold sweat pouring off me—that I will never forget for the rest of my life.

I was given a brief interrogation by a prosecutor, in a dim room at the prosecutor's office.

The prosecutor was a quiet man of about forty (if I myself had ever possessed good looks, they would, so to speak, have been the good looks of some sinful lechery, but this prosecutor's face carried the air of what one might call righteous good looks, an intelligent, tranquil bearing), and his manner seemed unfussy and easygoing, so that I let down my guard entirely and gave my statement in a rather absentminded way, when suddenly that cough of mine came again, and I took out my handkerchief from my sleeve, and catching sight of the blood on it, a mean, calculating thought occurred to me—that this cough too might prove useful—and I added, exaggeratedly, two or three fake coughs on top of it, and, still holding the handkerchief to my mouth, I glanced up at the prosecutor's face, and in that split second,

"Is that real?"

he asked, with a quiet, gentle smile.

Cold sweat poured off me—no, even now, remembering it, I want to spin around in circles from sheer mortification.

It would be no exaggeration whatsoever to say that this feeling exceeded even what I felt back in middle school, when that fool Takeichi poked me in the back and said, on purpose, on purpose, kicking me down into hell.

That, and this—two entries in the record of my life's great failures of performance.

There are times, even now, when I think I would rather have been sentenced to ten years in prison than have met with that prosecutor's quiet contempt.

I was granted a suspended indictment.

And yet I felt not the slightest happiness, and sat, in a mood of the most wretched misery imaginable, on a bench in the waiting room of the prosecutor's office, waiting for Flatfish, who was to take custody of me, to arrive.

Through the high window behind me, I could see the sky glowing red with sunset, and gulls flying in a shape like the character "woman"

as it's written.

Third Notebook

I

Of Takeichi's two prophecies, one came true, and one did not.

The dishonorable prophecy, that I would be loved, came true, but the blessed prophecy, that I would surely become a great painter, did not.

The most I managed to become was a nameless, mediocre cartoonist for cheap, low-quality magazines.

Because of the Kamakura incident, I was expelled from higher school, and I lived and slept in a three-mat room on the second floor of Flatfish's house; every month, an extremely small sum of money seemed to be sent, in secret, not directly to me but to Flatfish, from back home (and this, moreover, appeared to take the form of my brothers back home sending it without my father's knowledge), and beyond that, all connection with my hometown was cut off entirely; and Flatfish was always in a foul mood, never laughing even when I put on a placating smile, and it seemed to me almost shameful, or rather, downright comical, how easily, how completely, like the turning of a palm, a human being could change,

"You mustn't go out. Whatever happens, please don't go out,"

was all he ever said to me.

Flatfish, it seemed, suspected me of being at risk of suicide—that is, he seemed to think there was a danger I might go chasing after the dead woman and throw myself into the sea again—and so he strictly forbade me from going outside.

But I could not drink, could not smoke, and simply spent my days, from morning to night, buried under the kotatsu in that three-mat room upstairs, reading old magazines, living a life scarcely better than an idiot's, and by then I had even lost the will and energy to kill myself.

Flatfish's house stood near the medical college in Okubo, and though the shop sign proudly proclaimed "Dealer in Calligraphy, Paintings, and Antiques, Seiryuen," it was only one half of a semidetached two-unit building, with a narrow shopfront, and inside, the place was thick with dust, lined with nothing but shoddy odds and ends (though, in fact, Flatfish did not rely on the junk in that shop for his living—he seemed to make his money mainly by acting as a go-between, transferring ownership of some so-called patron's prized possession over to another so-called patron elsewhere); he was hardly ever to be found sitting in the shop, generally hurrying off from early morning with a difficult expression on his face, and in his absence there was only a boy of seventeen or eighteen left behind, who served, in effect, as my guard, though whenever he had a free moment he would go out and play catch with the neighborhood children,

and this boy seemed to regard the freeloader upstairs as little better than an idiot or a lunatic, and would even lecture me in a manner far too grown-up for his years, and since I was, by nature, incapable of arguing with anyone, I would listen with a face that seemed both weary and dutifully impressed, and simply obey.

This boy was Shibuta's illegitimate son, though for some strange reason Shibuta never acknowledged their relationship as parent and child in the usual way, and the fact that Shibuta had remained unmarried all this time seemed to have something to do with that very circumstance; I have some vague memory of hearing rumors about it once from my own family, but since I never had much interest in other people's personal affairs, I know nothing of the details.

But there was something in the look of that boy's eyes, too, that oddly called to mind a fish's eyes, so perhaps he really was Flatfish's own illegitimate son . . . but if that were so, then the two of them were a truly lonely sort of father and son.

Late at night, in secret from me upstairs, the two of them would sometimes order soba and eat it together in silence.

In Flatfish's house, meals were always prepared by that boy, and only the meals for the burden upstairs were set on a separate tray, which the boy carried up three times a day, while Flatfish and the boy ate together, hurriedly, down in the damp four-and-a-half-mat room beneath the stairs, the clatter of dishes and small bowls knocking together audible from below.

One evening at the end of March, whether Flatfish had come into some unexpected windfall, or had some other scheme in mind (and even if both of these guesses happened to be correct, there were surely, besides them, several other finer reasons entirely beyond my powers of guessing), he invited me downstairs to a dinner table that, for once, had a flask of sake set out on it, and marveled at, and praised, the tuna sashimi—flatfish himself extolling the fish, though it was not flounder—and even offered a little sake to me, the vacant, absentminded freeloader,

"What exactly do you intend to do, going forward?"

I did not answer, and picked up a sheet of dried baby sardines from the plate on the table, gazing at the silver eyes of those small fish, and as a gentle drunkenness began to spread through me, I grew nostalgic for the days I had spent running wild, nostalgic even for Horiki, and I found myself earnestly longing for "freedom,"

and, quite suddenly, felt a thin, faint urge to cry.

Ever since I had come to this house, I had lost even the will to perform my clowning, and simply lay there, subject to the contempt of Flatfish and the boy; Flatfish, for his part, also seemed to avoid ever settling into an open, frank conversation with me, and I too felt no urge to chase after him and appeal to him about anything, so that I had, by then, all but become a freeloader with a vacant, foolish face.

"A suspended indictment, from what I understand, doesn't count toward any sort of criminal record. So really, it's entirely up to your own conduct whether you rehabilitate yourself. If you were to reform, and come to me yourself with a serious matter to discuss, I'd be willing to think it over."

In the way Flatfish spoke—no, in the way everyone in the world speaks—there is always this sort of tangled, vaguely hazy, almost evasive kind of subtle complexity, and I was always thrown into confusion by that near-uselessly rigorous caution, that near-infinite web of petty, fussy maneuvering, until I would simply give up caring altogether, and take what one might call the posture of defeat—either turning it all into a joke with my clowning, or silently nodding and leaving everything entirely up to the other person.

It was only in later years that I learned that, at that moment, all Flatfish had needed to do was tell me, in simple terms, roughly the following, and the matter would have been entirely settled, and I felt a truly gloomy sort of feeling at the thought of Flatfish's unnecessary caution—no, at the incomprehensible vanity and formality of people in the world in general.

All Flatfish needed to say, at that moment, was this.

"Whether it's a national school or a private one, in any case, enter some school starting in April. Once you're in school, your family back home is prepared to send you a much more adequate living allowance."

I learned much later that this was, in fact, exactly how things stood.

And I would surely have followed such an instruction.

And yet, because of Flatfish's oddly cautious, roundabout way of speaking, things became strangely tangled, and the whole direction of my life was completely altered.

"If you don't feel like coming to me seriously to discuss things, well, there's nothing to be done."

"Discuss what?"

I truly had not the faintest idea what he meant.

"That's something you'd know best yourself, isn't it, in your own heart?"

"Such as?"

"What do you mean, such as—what I'm asking is, what do you yourself intend to do from now on?"

"Should I get a job?"

"No, what I'm asking is, what do you actually want, deep down?"

"But you say enter school, and yet . . ."

"Well, that takes money, of course. But the issue isn't money. It's your own feelings."

Why didn't he just say, the money is arranged to come from home?

That single remark would surely have settled my own feelings on the matter, and yet I was left completely lost in a fog.

"Well? Do you have anything like a hope for the future? Really, I don't suppose someone who's being taken care of ever understands just how difficult it is to take care of another person."

"I'm sorry."

"It really is a great worry. Now that I've taken on responsibility for you, I don't want you going about with a half-hearted attitude either. I want to see some resolve—a determination to properly walk the road of rehabilitation. If, for instance, you were to come to me yourself, seriously, to discuss your plans for the future, I'd be willing to hear you out. Since this is only the support of a poor man like myself, if you're hoping for the same luxury as before, you'll be disappointed. But if your mind is made up, and you set a clear course for the future, and come and discuss it with me, then I'm even willing to help you rebuild your life, however little I can offer. Do you understand? How I feel about this? Now then, what exactly do you intend to do from here on?"

"If I can't stay upstairs here anymore, I'll get a job, and . . ."

"Are you serious, saying something like that? In this day and age, even a graduate of an Imperial University . . ."

"No, I don't mean becoming a salaryman."

"Then what?"

"A painter."

I said it, having summoned up my resolve.

"Oh, really?"

I have never been able to forget the shadow of pure cunning on Flatfish's face as he laughed then, hunching his neck down.

It resembled a shadow of contempt, and yet it was not quite that either; if one compares the world to an ocean, it seemed like the sort of strange shadow that might drift somewhere down in the fathomless depths of that ocean—a laugh that gave me a fleeting glimpse into the very bottom of adult life.

I was told that this sort of thing was no basis for any real conversation, that my mind was not made up in the least, that I should think it over, think it over seriously for the whole of that night, and I went upstairs as though driven away, and even lying there in bed, no particular thoughts came to me at all.

And then, at daybreak, I fled Flatfish's house.

I will definitely be back by evening.

I am going to consult with the friend named below about my plans for the future, so please don't worry.

Really.

I wrote in large pencil letters on a piece of stationery, and then, adding the name and address of Horiki Masao in Asakusa, I quietly slipped out of Flatfish's house.

It was not out of resentment at being lectured by Flatfish that I fled.

It was exactly as Flatfish had said—I truly was a man with no firmness of purpose, and I had absolutely no idea what direction my future should take, and I felt it was becoming a real burden to him for me to go on relying on his household any longer; and even if, by some slim chance, a spirit of resolve should ever rise up in me and I should set myself some goal, the thought of having the funds for my own rehabilitation supported month after month by that poor man Flatfish left me feeling so pained, so unable to bear it, that this too was part of the reason.

But it was not my so-called "future plans"

that I seriously intended to go and consult with someone like Horiki about, when I left Flatfish's house.

It was only that I wanted, even for a moment, even briefly, to set Flatfish's mind at ease (I wrote that note less out of some detective-novel scheme to buy myself time to flee as far away as possible while he was reassured—though I'm sure some faint trace of that feeling was there too—and more, it might be more accurate to say, out of a simple terror of suddenly shocking Flatfish and throwing him into confusion and bewilderment.

Even though it was bound to be found out anyway, telling the plain truth as it stood always terrified me, and adding some sort of decoration to it was one of my sad habits—one that resembles the sort of character the world scorns and calls a "liar,"

and yet I have almost never once dressed up the truth in order to bring myself any benefit; it was only that the sudden, suffocating dread of a mood turning sour and flat all at once terrified me, and even knowing full well it would work against my own interests later, I would find myself, again and again, out of that usual "desperate service"

of mine—twisted, feeble, absurd as it might be—unable to resist tacking on some single embellishment or another, out of that very spirit of service, or so it seems to me; but this habit, too, was something the world's so-called "honest people"

took great advantage of)—and so, at that moment, I simply wrote Horiki's address and name at the edge of the stationery, just as it happened to surface from the depths of my memory.

I left Flatfish's house, walked all the way to Shinjuku, sold a book I had in my pocket, and even so, found myself, after all, utterly at a loss.

In exchange for being so amiable to everyone, I had never once, in all my life, actually felt what people call "friendship"

—setting aside a playmate like Horiki, every other form of association brought me nothing but pain, pain I would try desperately to knead away by performing my clowning, only to leave myself all the more exhausted for it, and even catching sight, in the street, of the face of someone I only barely knew, or even a face merely resembling theirs, would send a jolt through me, a dizzying, unpleasant shudder—so that although I knew well enough how to be liked by people, I seemed to be lacking, in some essential way, the ability to love another person.

(Though, for that matter, I have very serious doubts as to whether human beings in general truly possess the capacity for "love"

at all.) To someone like me, a so-called "best friend"

such a thing was impossible from the start, and on top of that, I lacked even the ability to "visit"

someone.

The gate of another person's house struck me as more eerie than even the gate of hell in that Divine Comedy, and beyond that gate I could genuinely feel, without the slightest exaggeration, the presence of some terrifying dragon-like beast, rank with the smell of raw flesh, writhing there.

I kept company with no one.

I could go and visit nowhere.

Horiki.

It was, truly, a case of a joke turning unexpectedly real.

Just as I had written in that note, I decided to go and visit Horiki in Asakusa.

Up until then, I had never once gone to visit Horiki's house myself, usually summoning Horiki to come to me instead by telegram, but now I could not even be sure of the money for a telegram, and, warped by my own fallen state, I worried that Horiki might not come merely on the strength of a telegram, and so I resolved to do the one thing I was worst at—"visiting"

and, sighing, boarded the streetcar, and when it struck me that this Horiki, of all people, was the one and only lifeline I had left in this whole world, I was seized by a terrible sense of dread that seemed to send a chill straight down my spine.

Horiki was at home.

In a two-story house at the far end of a dirty back alley, Horiki used only a single six-mat room on the second floor, while downstairs his elderly parents and a young craftsman, three of them together, sewed and hammered away, manufacturing thongs for geta sandals.

That day, Horiki showed me a new side of himself, one belonging to him as a true city dweller.

It was what people vulgarly call a knack for looking out for oneself.

It was a cold, cunning egoism, the sort that made even a country boy like me stare in astonishment.

He was not, like me, a man of the sort who simply drifted along without limit.

"You really are something. Has your father given you his forgiveness yet? Not yet, is it?"

I could not bring myself to say that I had run away.

As usual, I dodged the question.

Even though Horiki was sure to catch on before long, I dodged it anyway.

"Oh, that'll sort itself out somehow."

"Hey, this is no laughing matter. Let me give you some advice—it's about time you gave up this foolishness. I've got business today, you know. I've been absurdly busy lately."

"What kind of business?"

"Hey, hey, don't go pulling threads out of my cushion."

As we talked, I had been unconsciously playing with my fingers at one of the threads—the binding thread, or perhaps the tassel cord, whatever one called it—at the corners of the cushion I sat on, tugging at it now and then.

Horiki, it seemed, could not bear to lose even a single thread of a cushion, so long as it belonged to his household, and, without the slightest shame, his eyes went sharp with irritation as he scolded me for it.

Thinking it over, I realized that Horiki had never, in the whole course of our acquaintance, lost so much as a single thing on my account.

Horiki's elderly mother brought in two bowls of sweet red-bean soup on a tray.

"Oh, well, isn't this something,"

Horiki said, deferring to his mother like a truly dutiful son, his manner unnaturally polite,

"You shouldn't have. Sweet bean soup? What a treat. You didn't need to go to all that trouble. I've got to go straight out on business, you know. No, but still, it'd be a shame to waste your prized specialty. I'll have some. Why don't you have some too? Mother went out of her way to make it. Ah, this is delicious. What a treat."

he said, delighted in a way that did not seem entirely a performance, and ate it with evident relish.

I too sipped at mine, but it smelled of hot water, and when I bit into what should have been a piece of rice cake, it was not rice cake at all, but something I could not identify.

I do not mean, by any means, to hold that poverty in contempt.

(I did not, at the time, think it tasted bad, and I was genuinely moved by his old mother's thoughtfulness.

I believe I have a dread of poverty, but not contempt for it.) I only wish to set down here that through that bowl of sweet red-bean soup, and through Horiki's evident delight in it, I found myself confronted with the frugal true nature of the city dweller, with the actual substance of a Tokyo household that carefully drew a line between what was shown to the world and what was kept within, and that I, a half-witted man who did nothing but flee headlong from human life, with no distinction whatsoever between inside and outside, was left utterly alone, apparently abandoned even by Horiki, and I felt a helpless bewilderment at this, and, fumbling with the chopsticks whose lacquer had worn away with all that red-bean soup, I felt a loneliness I could hardly bear.

"Sorry, but I've got business today, you see."

Horiki said, standing up and putting on his jacket,

"I'll be off then, sorry about this."

Just then, a woman came to visit Horiki, and my own fortunes took a sudden turn.

Horiki suddenly brightened up, and said,

"Ah, sorry about that. I was actually just about to come and see you—but this lady's shown up unexpectedly. No, no, it's fine. Please, come in."

He seemed thoroughly flustered, and snatched up the cushion I had taken off my own seat and flipped over to offer him, then flipped it over yet again and offered it to the woman instead.

There was, apart from Horiki's own cushion, only that single guest cushion in the whole room.

The woman was thin, and tall.

She set the cushion aside and sat down in a corner near the entrance.

I listened absentmindedly to their conversation.

The woman seemed to work at a magazine publisher, and appeared to have commissioned some kind of illustration or the like from Horiki some time before, and had come now to collect it.

"I'm rather in a hurry."

"It's done. It's been done for ages now. Here it is, please."

A telegram arrived.

Horiki read it, and his cheerful face darkened into an ugly scowl before my eyes,

"Tch! What in the world is this, you?"

It was a telegram from Flatfish.

"Just get yourself home right away, would you. He probably wants me to escort you back myself, but I've got no time for that right now. Running away from home, and yet you sit there with that carefree face of yours."

"Whereabouts is your home?"

"Okubo."

I answered without thinking.

"Oh, that's near my company, then."

The woman was born in Koshu, and was twenty-eight years old.

She lived in an apartment in Koenji with a daughter who was five years old.

She said her husband had died three years before.

"You seem like someone who's had a hard time of it growing up. You're very perceptive. Poor thing."

For the first time, I lived a life not unlike a man kept as a mistress.

After Shizuko (that was the woman journalist's name) went off to her job at the magazine publisher in Shinjuku, I and her five-year-old daughter, Shigeko, were left behind to quietly mind the house.

Until then, whenever her mother was out, Shigeko had apparently played in the room of the apartment manager, but now that a "perceptive"

uncle had appeared to play with her, she seemed in very high spirits about it.

I stayed there, in a kind of daze, for about a week.

On the electric wire just outside the window of the apartment, a yakko kite had gotten tangled, buffeted by the dusty spring wind, torn to shreds, and yet it clung on stubbornly, unwilling to let go of that wire, nodding away as though in agreement with something, and every time I caught sight of it I would laugh bitterly to myself, blush, and even see it in my dreams and wake up in a cold sweat.

"I want some money."

". . . How much?"

"A lot. . . . When the money runs out, love runs out—that's really true, you know."

"How silly. That's such an old, worn-out . . ."

"You think so? But you wouldn't understand. As things stand, I might end up running off."

"Now which of us is poor here, I'd like to know. And which of us is going to run off? How strange."

"I want to earn my own money, and buy sake with it—no, cigarettes. As for painting, I think I'm quite a bit better at it than someone like Horiki."

At times like this, what naturally rose up in my mind, of its own accord, was that handful of self-portraits I had painted back in middle school—the ones Takeichi had called "pictures of ghosts"

—several self-portraits of that kind.

My lost masterpieces.

They had been lost somewhere along the way, through my many moves, but it seems to me, even now, that those alone were, without question, truly excellent paintings.

Afterward, no matter how many things I tried to paint, none of them ever came anywhere close to that masterpiece I carried in my memory, and I remained, always, tormented by a dull, hollow sense of loss, as though something had been scooped out of my chest.

A glass of absinthe, left half-drunk.

That was how I secretly described this feeling of loss, one that seemed forever beyond redress.

Whenever painting came up as a topic, that half-drunk glass of absinthe would flicker before my eyes, and I would be tormented by an anxious longing—ah, if only I could show her that painting, if only I could make her believe in my talent.

"Ha, I wonder about that. You're sweet, telling jokes with such a serious face."

It's not a joke, it's true, ah, if only I could show her that painting—I agonized, spinning my wheels in vain, then abruptly changed my mind, gave up, and said,

"Cartoons, I mean. At least when it comes to cartoons, I think I'm better than Horiki."

And that deceptive, clownish remark of mine was, in the end, believed far more readily and seriously.

"That's true. Actually, I've been impressed myself. The cartoons you're always drawing for Shigeko—even I end up bursting out laughing at them. Why don't you give it a try? I could put in a word for you with the editor-in-chief at my company."

That company published a not particularly well-known monthly magazine aimed at children.

. . . Just looking at you, most women can't help wanting to do something for you. . . .

You're always so timid, and yet you're such a jester about it. . . .

Every now and then, you sink into a deep gloom all by yourself, but even that only makes a woman's heart itch all the more for you.

Even flattered as I was by Shizuko with all sorts of remarks like this, whenever I thought that these very qualities were the disreputable traits of a man kept as a mistress, it only made me sink

all the deeper, without the slightest rise in my spirits; more than a woman I wanted money, and I secretly resolved and schemed to somehow escape from Shizuko and support myself, but instead I found myself, more and more, forced to depend on her, having nearly everything, from settling the affairs of my runaway household to everything else, taken care of by this more-than-manly woman from Koshu, so that I ended up having to be all the more "timid"

toward Shizuko than ever.

Through Shizuko's arrangement, a meeting was held between Flatfish, Horiki, and Shizuko herself, and I was cut off entirely from my hometown, and it was decided that Shizuko and I would live together "openly and above board"

as a couple, and this too, thanks to Shizuko's efforts, brought in surprisingly decent money from my cartoons, and I used that money to buy sake and cigarettes, but my own sense of helplessness and gloom only grew heavier and heavier.

Truly sunk down

sunk to the very depths

as I sat drawing the monthly serial cartoon for Shizuko's magazine, The Adventures of Kinta and Ota,

the house back home would suddenly come to mind, and I would grow so lonely that my pen would stop moving, and there were times when I bowed my head and let the tears fall.

At times like that, my one faint salvation was Shigeko.

By then, Shigeko had come to call me "Papa,"

without the slightest hesitation.

"Papa. Is it true that if you pray, God gives you anything you want?"

It was I myself who wanted to offer that prayer.

Oh, grant me a cold, unyielding will.

Grant me knowledge of the true nature of "human"

beings.

Is it not a sin, when one human being pushes another aside?

Grant me a mask of anger.

"Yes, that's right. God will probably give Shige-chan anything she wants, but for Papa, it might not work."

I was afraid, even, of God.

I could not believe in God's love—only in God's punishment.

Faith.

It seemed to me nothing more than bowing one's head and walking toward the seat of judgment, simply to receive the lash of God.

I could believe in hell, but the existence of heaven I could not, no matter what, bring myself to believe in.

"Why won't it work?"

"Because I disobeyed my parents' orders."

"Is that so? Everyone says Papa's a very good person, though."

That's because I deceive them, I thought—I knew perfectly well that everyone in this apartment building held me in good regard, and yet how terrified I was of them all; the more terrified I grew, the more they came to like me, and the more they liked me, the more terrified I grew, and had to distance myself from them all—explaining this unhappy affliction of mine to Shigeko would have been an impossible task.

"What is it you'd like to ask God for, Shige-chan?"

I asked, changing the subject as though it were nothing in particular.

"Shigeko wants Shigeko's real papa."

I felt a jolt, and my head spun dizzily.

An enemy.

Was I an enemy to Shigeko, or was Shigeko an enemy to me? In any case, here too, it seemed, was a terrifying grown-up threatening me; a stranger, an incomprehensible stranger, a stranger full of secrets—Shigeko's face suddenly began to look that way to me.

I had thought, if nothing else, Shigeko would be different, and yet even this child possessed that same "cow's tail that suddenly cracks and kills the horsefly,"

just the same.

From that time on, I found myself having to be timid, even with Shigeko.

"Hey, lady-killer! You in there?"

Horiki had taken to coming around to visit me again.

Even though he was the very man who had made me feel so miserably lonely on the day I ran away from home, I still could not bring myself to refuse him, and greeted him with a faint smile.

"Your cartoons are getting pretty popular, aren't they. Amateurs have that reckless, know-nothing nerve, that's what does it. But don't get overconfident. Your draftsmanship isn't up to snuff at all, you know."

He even put on airs, like some kind of master instructor.

What kind of face would he make, I wondered, if I showed this fellow that "ghost"

picture of mine—agonizing uselessly to myself, as usual, over that thought, I said,

"Don't say that, I might just let out a scream."

Horiki, looking all the more pleased with himself, said,

"A talent for getting on in the world alone will eventually catch up with you, you know."

A talent for getting on in the world. . . .

I had nothing to do but laugh bitterly to myself.

A talent for getting on in the world, me!

But is fearing, avoiding, and deceiving human beings, the way I do, the same, in the end, as faithfully observing that common proverb, "leave the god alone and it won't curse you,"

that shrewd, cunning maxim for getting through life—is that what it amounts to?

Ah, is it not the case that human beings understand nothing whatsoever about each other, that they see one another in a way that is entirely mistaken, and yet believe themselves to be each other's one true, irreplaceable friend, never once realizing this their whole lives long, and then, when the other dies, weep and read out some eulogy or other over them?

In any case, since Horiki had been present at the settlement of my runaway household affairs (though he had, no doubt, only reluctantly agreed to it after Shizuko pressed him into it), he behaved as though he were nothing less than my great benefactor in rehabilitation, or the go-between who had arranged my marriage, putting on a solemn face to deliver sermon-like remarks to me, and would also show up drunk in the dead of night and stay over, or borrow five yen (it was always exactly five yen) and go off with it.

"But you'd better give up this business of playing around with women, about here. Any more than this, and the world won't stand for it, you know."

What, exactly, is this thing called "the world"?

Is it the plural of human beings?

Where does the substance of this thing called "the world" actually exist?

Even so, I had lived my whole life believing it to be, at any rate, something strong, strict, and terrifying, but when Horiki said this, the words rose suddenly to the very tip of my tongue,

"Isn't 'the world' just you, though?"

but not wanting to make Horiki angry, I swallowed them back down.

(The world won't stand for that.)

(Not the world.

It's you who won't stand for it, isn't it?)

(Do something like that, and the world will make you pay for it.)

(Not the world.

It's you, isn't it?)

(Before long, the world will bury you.)

(Not the world.

It's you who'll bury me, isn't it?)

Know your own terrifying, uncanny, wicked, wily-old-badger, witch-hag self, you!

and various other words like this passed through my mind, but I merely wiped the sweat from my face with a handkerchief,

"Cold sweat, cold sweat,"

I said, and laughed.

But from that time on, I came to hold something like a thought—that the world might, after all, be nothing but the individual.

And once I began to think that the world was perhaps nothing more than an individual, I found myself able, if only a little more than before, to act according to my own will.

To borrow Shizuko's words, I grew a little selfish, and stopped being so timid.

And to borrow Horiki's words, I became strangely stingy.

And to borrow Shigeko's words, I no longer doted on her quite so much.

Silent, never laughing, taking care of Shigeko day after day, I drew The Adventures of Kinta and Ota,

and also Easygoing Priest, an obvious knockoff of Easygoing Dad,

and also Hasty Pinchan,

a serial cartoon whose title, even I could not say what it meant, thrown together out of pure desperation—all this in response to the commissions of various companies (bit by bit, orders had begun coming in from publishers other than Shizuko's, but every one of them came from what one might call even more vulgar third-rate publishers than hers), drawing in a truly, truly gloomy state of mind, slowly and sluggishly (my brushwork had always been extremely slow), now doing it purely for the sake of drink money, and then, the moment Shizuko came home from her office, going straight back out in exchange, drinking cheap, strong liquor at the food stalls and standing bars near Koenji Station, and coming home to the apartment a little cheerful,

"The more I look at you, the stranger your face gets, you know. The face of Easygoing Priest, actually, I got the idea from your sleeping face."

"Your sleeping face has gotten pretty old-looking too, you know. Like a man in his forties."

"That's your fault. I've been drained dry. The flow of water, the life of man, ah— why fret and worry, willows by the riverbank, ah—"

"Don't make such a racket, and go to bed already. Or would you like something to eat first?"

She was perfectly composed, not taking me seriously at all.

"I'll take a drink, though. The flow of water, the life of man, ah— the flow of man, no, the flow of water, ah, the body of water, ah—"

singing away, I would have my clothes taken off by Shizuko, and fall asleep with my forehead pressed against her chest—that was my daily routine.

And the next day, the same thing all over again,

one need only follow the same old routine as yesterday.

That is, so long as one avoids the rough, great pleasures,

no great sorrow, naturally, will come along either.

The toad, rather than confront

the stone blocking its path, simply goes around it.

When I came across these lines of verse, by someone called Guy-Charles Cros, in Ueda Bin's translation, I found myself alone, my face burning red.

The toad.

(That is me.

It's neither that the world forgives nor that it doesn't forgive.

Neither that it buries nor that it doesn't bury.

I am an animal lower than even a dog, lower than even a cat.

A toad.

Simply crawling sluggishly along.)

The amount I drank steadily increased.

Not only around Koenji Station, but I would go out drinking as far as Shinjuku and Ginza, even staying out overnight, and simply to break free of the "routine"

in order to break free of that "routine," I began putting on the airs of a ruffian at the bars, kissing anyone within reach, and became, in short, a drinker even more dissolute and coarse than I had been before the love suicide—no, even worse than in those days—until, driven by lack of money, I even began carrying off Shizuko's clothes to pawn.

By this point, more than a year had passed since I first laughed bitterly at that torn yakko kite, and now, in the season of leafy young cherry trees, I again secretly carried off Shizuko's obi and underclothes to the pawnshop, made some money, drank in Ginza, stayed out overnight two nights running, and on the third night, feeling, at last, genuinely uneasy about it, I found myself unconsciously softening my footsteps as I approached the door of Shizuko's room at the apartment, when I heard, from inside, a conversation between Shizuko and Shigeko.

"Why does Papa drink sake?"

"Papa doesn't drink because he likes it, you know. It's because he's such a good person, that's why he . . ."

"Do good people drink sake?"

"Not really, but . . ."

"Papa will surely be surprised, won't he."

"He might not like it. Oh, look, look, it jumped right out of the box."

"It's just like Hasty Pinchan, isn't it."

"Isn't it, though."

I heard Shizuko's low laugh, one that sounded truly, genuinely happy.

I opened the door a crack and peered inside, and there was a baby white rabbit.

It was hopping all around the room, and mother and daughter were chasing after it.

(These two are happy.

A fool like me has come between them, and before long I'll wreck everything for the two of them.

A modest happiness.

A good mother and daughter.

Happiness—ah, if God would only hear the prayer of a wretch like me, just once, just once in my whole life, that is all I would ask for.)

I felt as though I wanted to crouch down right there and press my palms together in prayer.

I quietly closed the door, and went off again to Ginza, and never went back to that apartment again.

And so, once again, in the manner of a man kept as a mistress, I ended up lying about on the second floor of a standing bar near Kyobashi.

The world.

It seemed to me that I had somehow, vaguely, begun to understand it, if only a little.

It is a conflict between one individual and another, and moreover a conflict of the moment, and all one has to do is win in that particular moment; a human being never truly submits to another human being; even a slave will find some servile, cringing way to strike back; so a human being has no way to survive except by relying on that one decisive bout of the moment; while professing something that sounds like a lofty cause, the true target of one's effort is always an individual—get past one individual, and there is only another individual waiting; the difficulty of "the world" is the difficulty of the individual; the ocean is not the world, it is the individual—and once I had come to think this way, I was freed, somewhat, from the illusion of the world as some vast sea, no longer troubling myself endlessly over this and that as I had before, and I learned, in response to whatever necessity happened to press upon me at the moment, to behave with a certain amount of shamelessness.

Having abandoned the apartment in Koenji, I said to the madam of the standing bar in Kyobashi,

"I've left her."

That was all I said, and it was quite enough; that is, the decisive bout was settled, and from that very night, with no further ado, I ended up staying over on the second floor of that place, but the supposedly terrifying "world"

did me no harm whatsoever, and I, in turn, offered no explanation whatsoever to "the world"

in return.

So long as the madam herself was willing, everything about it was perfectly fine.

I must have looked, from the outside, like something thoroughly hard to pin down—part customer of the place, part husband of it, part errand boy, part relative—and yet "the world"

found nothing suspicious in it at all, and the regulars at that bar even called me Yo-chan, Yo-chan, treating me with great kindness, and pouring me drink after drink.

I gradually stopped being so guarded toward the world.

I came to think that the world was not, in fact, such a terrifying place after all.

In other words, my terror up until then had been something like this so-called "scientific superstition": that the spring wind carried hundreds of thousands of whooping-cough germs, that the public bathhouse harbored hundreds of thousands of germs that could blind you, that the barbershop carried hundreds of thousands of germs that caused baldness, that the straps on the commuter trains swarmed with scabies mites, that sashimi and undercooked beef or pork always concealed tapeworm larvae, liver fluke eggs, and all manner of other things, and that if you walked barefoot, tiny slivers of glass might enter through the soles of your feet and travel around inside your body until they pierced an eyeball and blinded you—

it was as if I had been living under the constant threat of such things.

It is certainly true, no doubt, "scientifically"

speaking, that hundreds of thousands of germs really do float, swim, and swarm about.

But at the same time, I came also to understand that if one simply ignores their existence entirely, they become nothing more than a "scientific ghost,"

one that vanishes at once, losing every last connection to oneself.

Three grains of rice left uneaten in one's lunchbox—if ten million people each leave three grains uneaten every day, that already amounts to so many sacks of rice thrown away for nothing; or, if ten million people economize by a single sheet of tissue paper each day, how much wood pulp would that save—this sort of "scientific statistic"

used to terrify me no end, and every single time I left even one grain of rice uneaten, or blew my nose, I would be tormented by the illusion that I was wasting mountains of rice, mountains of pulp, and would sink into a dark mood, as though I were committing some grave crime at that very moment; but that itself was nothing but a "scientific lie,"

a "statistical lie,"

a "mathematical lie,"

for three grains of rice are not something that can actually be gathered up; even as an applied problem in multiplication and division, it was a truly primitive, feeble-minded sort of theme, no more sensible than calculating the probability of how often, out of how many times, a person loses his footing in a dark, unlit outhouse and drops one leg into the hole, or how many passengers, out of how many, catch a foot in the gap between the door of a commuter train and the edge of the platform—the kind of thing that sounds perfectly plausible, and yet I have never once heard of a single case of someone actually getting hurt by missing his footing over a toilet hole, and being taught such a hypothesis as a "scientific fact"

and accepting it entirely as reality, living in fear of it—I came to feel a kind of tenderness for the self I had been up until yesterday, even an urge to laugh at him; that is how, little by little, I came to know something of the true substance of the world.

That said, human beings themselves still remained, as ever, terrifying to me, and I could not so much as face a customer at the bar without first knocking back a full glass of sake.

A fascination with the very thing one fears.

Even so, I went out to the bar every night, and, much like a child who grips all the more tightly a small animal he is secretly a little afraid of, I even took to expounding, drunkenly and clumsily, my theories of art at the customers.

A cartoonist.

Ah, but I was a nameless cartoonist with neither great joy nor great sorrow to speak of.

However great a sorrow might come afterward, I inwardly longed for some rough, great pleasure, and yet the sum total of my present joy amounted to nothing more than trading idle chatter with customers and drinking their sake.

Having come to Kyobashi, I had already kept up this worthless sort of life for nearly a year, and my cartoons had begun appearing not only in children's magazines but in the cheap, vulgar magazines sold at station kiosks, and under the thoroughly frivolous pen name Joshi Ikuta (a play on words meaning, roughly, "lived through a love suicide"), I drew dirty pictures of naked women, generally inserting into them verses from the Rubaiyat.

Give up, I tell you, those useless prayers of yours,

fling away anything that calls up tears.

Come now, let's have a drink, and think of nothing but good things,

forget all your needless worrying.

Those fellows who go about frightening others with anxiety and dread

are themselves cowering before the monstrous sins they made with their own hands,

and, bracing themselves against the vengeance of the dead,

are forever scheming, inside their own heads.

Last night, my heart, brimming with wine, brimmed with joy too;

this morning, sober, it is nothing but a wasteland.

Strange, isn't it, that in the course of one single night

this mood of mine should change so completely.

Stop thinking of it as some curse, would you.

Like a drum echoing from far away,

somehow, without reason, that thing unsettles me.

If even the farts a man lets slip are counted one by one as sins, there's no saving any of us.

Justice, the guiding light of life, is it?

Then on the blood-soaked battlefield,

on the very point of the assassin's blade,

what justice, tell me, dwells there?

Where is there any guiding principle to be found?

What light of wisdom is there anywhere?

Beautiful, and yet terrible, is this fleeting world.

The frail children of man are made to carry a burden too heavy to bear,

only because a seed of desire, which no one can help, was planted within them,

and for that alone they are cursed with talk of good and evil, sin and punishment,

helpless to do anything at all, left only to flounder in bewilderment.

only because they were granted neither the strength nor the will to crush it down,

Now where in the world have you been wandering off to?

What's that, criticism? Examination? Reappraisal?

Hah—empty dreams, phantoms that never even existed.

Heh—forgetting your drink, that's all just foolish thinking.

Well then, take a look at this boundless sky.

You're just a tiny speck floating somewhere within it.

Who could possibly know why this earth spins on its axis?

Spinning, orbiting, reversing—let it do as it pleases.

Everywhere I go, I sense some power supreme,

and in every nation, among every people,

I find the very same human nature.

So they say I'm a heretic, is that it?

Everyone's just misreading the holy scriptures, that's all.

Otherwise they'd have neither common sense nor wisdom,

forbidding the joys of the living flesh, banning drink—

no thank you, Mustafa, I can't stand any of that.

But around that time, there was a young virgin who urged me to give up drinking.

"It's no good, you're drunk from midday, every single day."

She was a girl of seventeen or eighteen from a small tobacco shop across from the bar.

Her name was Yoshi-chan, and she was fair-skinned, with a snaggletooth.

Every time I went to buy cigarettes, she would give me this advice, laughing as she said it.

"Why's it no good? What's wrong with it? Drink whatever sake there is, oh child of man, and wash away your hatred, wash it away, wash it away—there was an old Persian poet who said something like that, well, never mind—the only thing that brings hope to a heart worn weary with sorrow is the jeweled cup that carries a faint tipsiness—you know that one? Get it?"

"I don't get it."

"You brat. I'll kiss you."

"Go ahead."

she said, jutting out her lower lip without the slightest embarrassment.

"You idiot. Have you got no sense of chastity . . ."

And yet there was, unmistakably, in Yoshi-chan's expression, the scent of a virgin no one had ever sullied.

One bitterly cold night, in the new year, I went out drunk to buy cigarettes, and fell into a manhole in front of that tobacco shop, and shouted, Yoshi-chan, help me!, and Yoshi-chan pulled me out, and tended to a wound on my right arm, and at that moment Yoshi-chan said, quite earnestly,

"You drink too much, you know,"

not laughing at all.

I did not much mind the thought of dying, but I could not bear, under any circumstances, the thought of being injured, bleeding, and ending up crippled, and so, while Yoshi-chan tended to the wound on my arm, I found myself thinking that perhaps it was about time I gave up drinking after all.

"I'll quit. Starting tomorrow, not a single drop."

"Really?"

"I promise, I'll quit. If I quit, Yoshi-chan, will you become my wife?"

But the business about becoming my wife was a joke.

"Course."

"Course" was an abbreviated form of the word "of course,"

shortened in that way.

"Mobo" this and "moga" that—all sorts of abbreviated slang were in fashion at the time.

"All right. Let's shake on it, pinky swear. I'll definitely quit."

And the very next day, I ended up drinking from noon anyway.

In the evening, I wandered outside, unsteady on my feet, and stood in front of Yoshi-chan's shop,

"Yoshi-chan, I'm sorry. I drank."

"Oh, come on. Pretending to be drunk like that."

I felt a jolt.

I felt as though the drink itself had suddenly worn off.

"No, it's true. I really did drink. I'm not just pretending to be drunk."

"Don't tease me. That's mean of you."

She would not doubt me in the least.

"You should be able to tell just by looking at me. I drank again today, from noon. Forgive me."

"You really are good at putting on an act."

"It's not an act, you idiot. I'll kiss you."

"Go ahead."

"No, I don't have the right to. I have to give up on marrying you too. Look at my face, isn't it red? I drank."

"That's just the sunset shining on you. You can't fool me. We made a promise yesterday. There's no way you'd drink. We shook on it, pinky swear. Saying you drank—liar, liar, liar."

Yoshi-chan's pale face, smiling as she sat in the dim shop—ah, unsullied virginity is a precious thing, I thought; I had never once, until now, slept with a virgin younger than myself; let us marry, let whatever great sorrow might come afterward come, let it come; I want, just once in my life, some rough, great joy; I had always thought the beauty of virginity was nothing more than some foolish poet's sweet, sentimental illusion, but it seems, after all, to be something that truly lives and breathes in this world; once we're married, when spring comes, we'll ride our bicycles together to see the falls at Aoba—I resolved all this, then and there, and, in what one might call a single decisive bout,

I did not hesitate for a moment to steal that flower.

And so, before long, we were married, and the joy we gained from it was not necessarily very great, but the sorrow that came afterward arrived on a scale so vast, so beyond all imagining, that even to call it harrowing would not be enough.

For me, "the world"

was, after all, a place of unfathomable, bottomless terror.

It was never so soft or forgiving a place that everything could simply be settled, once and for all, by some single decisive bout of the kind I had imagined.

II

Horiki and me.

If keeping each other's company while quietly despising one another, and each dragging the other steadily down into worthlessness, is the true shape of what this world calls "friendship,"

then the relationship between Horiki and me was, without question, exactly that: "friendship,"

nothing less.

Relying on the chivalrous spirit of that madam at the standing bar in Kyobashi (a chivalrous spirit in a woman is an odd way to put it, I know, but from my own experience, at least among city men and women, it is women, far more than men, who possess this thing one might call a chivalrous spirit.

Men, for the most part, are timid and jumpy, forever dressing themselves up in appearances, and, on top of that, stingy)—I was able to make Yoshiko, that girl from the tobacco shop, my common-law wife, and we rented a room on the ground floor of a small wooden two-story apartment building near Tsukiji, close to the Sumida River, and lived there together; I gave up drinking, and threw myself into the cartoon work that was gradually becoming something like a settled profession for me; after dinner, the two of us would go out together to see a film, and on the way home, we would stop in at a coffee shop, or buy a potted flower; but more than any of that, I found joy simply in listening to the words, in watching the movements, of this small bride who trusted me from the very bottom of her heart, and I had begun, faintly, to warm within my chest to the sweet thought that perhaps I too might, before long, gradually become something more like a proper human being, and might, after all, be spared some wretched sort of death—

just as I had begun to nurse that faint, sweet thought, Horiki appeared before me once again.

"Hey! Lady-killer. Oh? Even you've managed to put on a bit of a sensible face, huh. I'm here today as a messenger from the lady of Koenji, as it happens."

he began, then suddenly lowered his voice, and jerking his chin toward Yoshiko, preparing tea in the kitchen, asked, is it all right?

he asked,

"It's fine. Say whatever you like,"

I answered calmly.

In truth, Yoshiko was what one might call a genius of trust—not only did she never doubt anything about the madam of the Kyobashi bar, but even when I told her outright about the incident I had caused in Kamakura, she never once suspected anything between me and Tsuneko, and this was not because I was especially skilled at lying; there were even times when I put it to her in the plainest possible terms, and yet Yoshiko seemed to hear every bit of it as nothing more than a joke.

"Still putting on airs, aren't you. Nah, it's nothing much—just a message that you should come around to Koenji for a visit sometime."

Just when I would begin to forget, some monstrous bird would come flapping in and tear open, with its beak, the wound of memory.

In an instant, the memory of my past shame and sin would unfold vividly before my eyes, and with a terror that made me want to cry out, aaah!, I would find myself unable to sit still.

"Shall we drink?"

I said.

"Sure."

said Horiki.

Horiki and me.

In shape, the two of us were alike.

There were even times when it felt as though we were exactly the same sort of human being.

Of course, this was only true while we were out drinking cheap liquor from place to place, but in any case, the moment the two of us met face to face, we would transform, before one's very eyes, into two dogs of the same shape and the same coat, and go racing off together through the falling snow of the streets.

From that day on, it took the shape of us renewing our old friendship all over again, and we went together to that little bar in Kyobashi, and, before long, that pair of dead-drunk dogs even went so far as to pay a visit to Shizuko's apartment in Koenji, staying the night before heading home.

I have not forgotten it.

It was a muggy summer night.

Horiki came to my apartment in Tsukiji around dusk, wearing a rumpled yukata, saying that he had needed to pawn his summer clothes for some reason that day, but that it would be truly awkward if his old mother found out, so he wanted to redeem them right away, and would I just lend him some money.

As luck would have it, I had no money of my own either, so, as usual, I told Yoshiko to take her own clothes to the pawnshop and make some money, and after lending some to Horiki, there was still a little left over, so I had Yoshiko buy some cheap shochu with the remainder, and we went up to the roof of the apartment building, and, catching the faint, gutter-smelling breeze that drifted in now and then from the Sumida River, held a truly shabby little party to cool off in the summer air.

That night we began a game of guessing which nouns were comic and which were tragic.

This was a game of my own invention: every noun, I held, has its distinction of masculine, feminine, and neuter, but along with that, there ought also to exist a distinction between comic nouns and tragic nouns—steamships and trains, for instance, are both without exception tragic nouns, while streetcars and buses are both, without exception, comic nouns; anyone who cannot understand why this is so is not fit to discuss art at all; a playwright who inserts even a single tragic noun into a comedy has, by that alone, already failed, and the same holds true in reverse for tragedy.

"All right? Cigarettes?"

I asked.

"Tra. (Short for tragedy.)"

Horiki answered at once.

"Medicine?"

"Powdered, or pills?"

"Injections."

"Tra."

"You think so? There are hormone injections too, though."

"No, definitely tragedy. The needle alone settles it—isn't that a fine piece of tragedy right there?"

"Fine, I'll concede that one. But you know, medicine and doctors, surprisingly enough, are actually com. (Short for comedy.) What about death?"

"Com. Priests and monks are the same too, I'd say."

"Well done. And so, life must be tragedy, then."

"Wrong. That's comedy too."

"No, if you go on like that, everything ends up as comedy. Well then, let me ask you one more thing—what about a cartoonist? Surely you won't call that comedy?"

"Tra, tra. A grand tragic noun!"

"Ha, sounds to me like you're the one who's a grand old drunk, tra and all."

It's a boring thing to admit, since it comes down to a clumsy pun in the end, but at the time, we were terribly pleased with ourselves, convinced that this game was something wonderfully clever, the likes of which had never once existed in any salon in the world.

And there was one more game like this that I had invented around the same time.

It was a game of guessing antonyms.

The ant (short for antonym) of black is white.

But the ant of white is red.

The ant of red is black.

"What's the ant of flower?"

I asked, and Horiki twisted his mouth and thought it over,

"Let's see . . . there's a restaurant called Kagetsu, 'flower-moon,' so, moon."

"No, that's not an ant at all. If anything, that's a syn. Stars and violets would be syns too, wouldn't they. Not an ant."

"I've got it, it's bee."

"Bee?"

"Peony has . . . an ant, doesn't it?"

"Come on, that's just a painting motif. No cheating."

"Got it! A cluster of clouds over the flowers . . ."

"That's clouds over the moon, isn't it."

"Right, right. The flowers and the wind. Wind. The ant of flower is wind."

"That's no good, that's just a line out of some naniwabushi ballad. Now your roots are showing."

"No, wait, it's biwa."

"Even worse. The ant of flower ought to be . . . whatever, in this whole world, is least like a flower."

"So then, that's . . . wait a moment, well, isn't it woman?"

"While we're at it, what's the syn of woman?"

"Entrails."

"You really have no idea about poetry, do you. All right then, what's the ant of entrails?"

"Milk."

"That one's actually pretty good. In that spirit, one more. Shame. The ant of that."

"Shamelessness. Fashionable cartoonist Joshi Ikuta."

"What about Horiki Masao?"

Around this point, the two of us gradually stopped laughing, and fell into that peculiar gloom of a shochu drunk, the sensation of one's head being filled with shards of broken glass.

"Watch your mouth. I've never once been shamed with a rope tied around me, the way you have."

I felt a jolt.

So Horiki, deep down, had never once treated me as a true human being at all—he understood me as nothing more than some failed suicide, some shameless, foolish monster, what one might call a "living corpse,"

and had simply used me, wherever he could, for his own pleasure—that was all our "friendship"

had ever amounted to, I realized, and it was not, understandably, a pleasant thought to have; but then again, it made perfect sense that Horiki should see me that way, since I had, from long ago, been a child who seemed to lack even the qualification to be human, and perhaps it was only right that even Horiki should hold me in contempt, I reconsidered, and said,

"Sin. What's the antonym of sin, I wonder. Now this is a hard one."

putting on an expression of studied indifference as I said it.

"Law, of course."

Horiki answered so matter-of-factly that I found myself looking again, closely, at his face.

Lit by the flickering red light of a neon sign on a nearby building, Horiki's face looked as stern and imposing as some demon of a detective.

I was utterly, thoroughly astounded, and said,

"Sin isn't something like that, is it, really."

The antonym of sin, law!

But perhaps everyone in the world thinks about it just as simply as that, and goes on living their lives without a care.

That sin, so they think, wriggles about only where no detective is watching.

"Well then, what, God? You've got something of the smell of a Christian preacher about you, you know. It's off-putting."

"Well, don't dismiss it so lightly. Let's think about it a little more, the two of us. It's an interesting theme, isn't it, after all. It seems to me that a single answer to this one theme could tell you everything about a person."

"Come on now. . . . The ant of sin is virtue. A good, upstanding citizen. In other words, someone like me."

"Let's not joke about it. But good is the ant of evil, not the ant of sin."

"Is evil different from sin?"

"I think it is. The concept of good and evil is something human beings made up. It's a moral term human beings invented for their own convenience."

"You're a bore. Then it must be God after all. God, God. You can never go wrong just calling everything God. I'm hungry."

"Yoshiko's boiling fava beans downstairs right now."

"Much obliged. My favorite."

He clasped his hands behind his head and flopped down flat on his back.

"You really don't seem to have the slightest interest in this thing called sin, do you."

"Well, of course not, since I'm not a sinner like you. I fool around, sure, but I don't go getting women killed, or squeezing money out of them."

I did not get her killed, I did not squeeze money out of anyone—somewhere within me a faint but desperate voice of protest rose up, and yet, once again, I found myself falling back at once into that habit of thinking, no, it was my own fault after all.

I have never, under any circumstances, been able to argue a point head-on.

Struggling to hold back the mood, growing more and more sharp-edged by the minute under the gloomy influence of the shochu, I said, almost as if talking to myself,

"But being thrown into jail isn't the only kind of sin. If I could just find the ant of sin, I feel like I could grasp the true substance of sin itself . . . God . . . salvation . . . love . . . light . . . but God has an ant, Satan, and the ant of salvation is probably suffering, and love has hate, light has darkness for its ant, good has evil, sin and prayer, sin and repentance, sin and confession, sin and . . . ah, they're all syns, every one of them. What's the counterword to sin?"

"The counterword to tsumi, sin, is mitsu, honey. Sweet as honey. I'm hungry. Go bring me something to eat."

"Why don't you go bring it yourself!"

The words came out in a voice of anger so fierce it was almost the first time in my life I had ever raised one.

"Fine, then, I'll just go downstairs and commit a sin with Yoshi-chan, the two of us together. On-site inspection beats argument any day. The ant of sin is mitsumame, sweet bean soup—no, fava beans, maybe."

He was drunk almost to the point of slurring his words.

"Do whatever you like. Just get out of here!"

"Sin and hunger, hunger and fava beans—no wait, is this a syn?"

he said, talking nonsense as he got up.

Crime and Punishment.

Dostoevsky.

The thought flickered for a moment across the corner of my mind, and I felt a sudden jolt.

What if that man Dostoevsky had not thought of crime and punishment as synonyms, but had set them down, side by side, as antonyms?

Crime and punishment—two things utterly unable to communicate with each other, as irreconcilable as ice and coal.

The image of Dostoevsky, thinking of crime and punishment as antonyms, at the bottom of some green-scummed, festering pond, some tangled skein of hemp . . . ah, I feel like I'm on the verge of understanding it, no, not yet . . . and my mind was spinning like a magic lantern in a whirl of images, when—

"Hey! What a fava bean this turned out to be. Come here!"

Horiki's voice and the color of his face had both changed.

Horiki had only just gotten up, unsteadily, and gone downstairs, and now he had come rushing back up already.

"What is it?"

With an oddly murderous tension in the air, the two of us went down from the roof to the second floor, and halfway down the stairs from the second floor to my own room below, Horiki stopped,

"Look!"

he said in a low voice, pointing.

There was a small window above the door of my room, left open, through which one could see inside.

The light was still on, and there were two animals inside.

My head spun dizzily, and even as I muttered to myself, breathing hard, this too is a human shape, this too is a human shape, there's nothing to be shocked at, I forgot even to go and rescue Yoshiko, and simply stood rooted to the stairs.

Horiki gave a loud, deliberate cough.

I fled, alone, back up to the roof, and lay down, and looked up at the rain-laden summer night sky, and the feeling that seized me at that moment was neither anger, nor disgust, nor even sorrow, but a terror of overwhelming, staggering force.

And it was not the sort of terror one feels toward a ghost in a graveyard, but something more like the raw, ancient, no-arguments-allowed terror one might feel upon encountering, among the cedar groves of a shrine, the white-robed sacred body of the god itself.

My hair began going prematurely gray from that very night, and I lost, more and more, all confidence in everything, and grew, more and more, to distrust people with a bottomless suspicion, and came, from that point on, to be forever and permanently cut off from every last expectation, joy, or sense of fellow-feeling toward the workings of this world.

This was, in truth, a decisive event in my life.

I had been struck straight across the forehead and split open, and from that time on, the wound would ache every single time I drew close to any human being at all.

"I feel for you, but at least you've learned your lesson a little now, haven't you. I'm never coming back here again, you know. This place is a living hell. . . . But go easy on Yoshi-chan. You're no great catch yourself, after all. I'll be going."

Horiki was not so slow-witted as to linger long in such an awkward place.

I got up, drank shochu alone, and then wept aloud, sobbing in great heaving breaths.

I found I could go on weeping, endlessly, endlessly.

Before I knew it, Yoshiko was standing behind me, vacant-faced, holding a plate piled high with fava beans.

"He said he wouldn't do anything, and . . ."

"It's all right. Don't say anything more. You simply never learned how to doubt anyone. Sit down. Let's eat the beans."

We sat side by side and ate the beans.

Ah, is trust itself a sin?

The man in question was an uneducated little merchant of about thirty, who commissioned cartoons from me and left behind, with an air of great condescension, some paltry sum of money for them.

That merchant, understandably, never came around again after that, but for some reason, on sleepless nights, it was not so much my hatred for that merchant, but a hatred and rage that would suddenly well up within me toward Horiki, who, upon first discovering it, had not even given a single loud, deliberate cough right then and there, but had instead gone straight back up to the roof to tell me about it—that was the feeling that made me groan.

There is no question of forgiving or not forgiving.

Yoshiko was a genius of trust.

She simply never learned how to doubt anyone.

But this, precisely, was the source of her ruin.

I put the question to God.

Is trust itself a sin?

More than the fact that Yoshiko had been sullied, it was the fact that Yoshiko's trust had been sullied that became, for me, in the long years that followed, a seed of anguish so unbearable I could hardly go on living with it.

To someone like me—disgustingly timid, forever reading the expressions on people's faces, my own capacity for trusting anyone cracked clean through—Yoshiko's innocent, unspoiled trust had seemed truly as refreshing as the falls at Aoba themselves.

And in a single night, it had turned into yellow, fouled water.

Behold, from that night on, Yoshiko began to watch anxiously for every slightest change in my expression, every frown, every smile.

"Hey,"

I would call, and she would flinch, already at a loss where to look.

No matter how hard I tried to make her laugh with my clowning, she only grew flustered, timid, and took to using excessively formal, deferential language toward me.

Is innocent trust, then, in truth, the very wellspring of sin?

I searched out and read a number of books, stories of married women who had been violated.

But I came to think that not a single one of those women had been violated in a way as wretched as what happened to Yoshiko.

To begin with, this hardly amounted to any kind of story at all.

If there had been even the faintest trace of something resembling love between that little merchant and Yoshiko, my own feelings might, if anything, have been spared; but it was only that, on a single summer night, Yoshiko had trusted him, and that was all there was to it—and yet because of that, my own forehead was split clean open, my voice went hoarse, my hair began going prematurely gray, and Yoshiko was left with no choice but to spend the rest of her life in a state of flustered anxiety.

Most of these stories seemed to place their emphasis on whether or not the husband forgives his wife's "conduct,"

but to me, that never seemed like such an agonizingly difficult problem after all.

Blessed indeed is the husband who reserves for himself the right to forgive or not forgive; if he truly finds himself unable to forgive her, why not simply, without all this fuss, divorce his wife and take a new one instead? And if he cannot even manage that, then let him "forgive her,"

so to speak, and put up with it—either way, it seemed to me, everything could be settled neatly, in every direction, by the husband's own state of mind alone.

In other words, such an incident might certainly be a great shock to the husband, but it remains, after all, a mere "shock,"

and unlike some endless, unceasing wave that keeps rolling back and crashing in again, it seemed to me the sort of trouble that could be dealt with, one way or another, by the rightful anger of a husband who possessed the right to be angry in the first place.

But in my own case, the husband had no such right at all, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that everything was my own fault, so that far from getting angry, I could not even offer a single word of complaint, and besides, my wife had been violated precisely because of a rare and beautiful quality she herself possessed.

And that very quality was the one thing her husband had long adored in her—an innocent trust of an unbearably touching, endearing kind.

Is innocent trust, then, a sin?

I came to harbor doubt even in that one quality I had relied on, and by then I could no longer make sense of anything at all, and the only place left for me to turn was alcohol.

My facial expression grew extremely coarse and mean, I drank shochu from morning on, my teeth crumbled and chipped away, and my cartoons came to resemble little more than pornography.

No, let me say it plainly.

From around that time, I copied erotic prints and sold them on the sly.

I wanted money to buy shochu.

Looking at Yoshiko, always avoiding my eyes, always in a state of flustered anxiety, I would think, this girl never knew the first thing about caution, so wasn't it likely that it hadn't only been the once, with that merchant? And what about Horiki?

Or, for that matter, perhaps with someone I didn't even know about?

and doubt bred more doubt, and yet I lacked the courage to bring myself to demand a straight answer, and, writhing in that same familiar unease and dread, I would only drink shochu, and, growing drunk, timidly attempt something like a servile, leading sort of interrogation, foolishly swinging between joy and despair on the inside, while on the surface carrying on with excessive clowning as ever, and then afterward, subjecting Yoshiko to some ghastly, hellish caress, and falling asleep like a lump of mud.

At the end of that year, I came home late at night, dead drunk, wanting a glass of sugar water, and since Yoshiko seemed to be asleep, I went to the kitchen myself and found the sugar jar, and when I opened the lid, there was no sugar in it at all—only a small, black, oblong paper box.

I picked it up without thinking, and was struck with horror at the label pasted onto the box.

More than half of that label had been scratched off with a fingernail, but the portion with Western letters remained, and on it was written, clearly,

DIAL.

Dial.

By then I was relying exclusively on shochu and had not been using sleeping pills, but sleeplessness had always been something like a chronic ailment of mine, so I was quite familiar with most sleeping medications.

This single box of Dial certainly ought to have contained well over a fatal dose.

The box had not yet been opened, but it was clear that Yoshiko had hidden it there, meaning, someday, to actually use it, having even scratched off the label to conceal what it was.

Poor thing—since she couldn't read the Western letters on the label, she had probably scratched off half of it with her fingernail and thought that was enough to be safe.

(You are not to blame.)

I quietly filled a glass with water, taking care not to make a sound, and then slowly opened the box, threw the entire contents into my mouth at once, calmly drank down the water in the glass, turned off the light, and went straight to sleep, just like that.

For three full days and nights, I lay as though dead.

The doctor treated it as an accident, and, apparently, held off on reporting it to the police.

The first words I supposedly muttered, half-conscious, as I began to come around, were, I'm going home.

Even I myself do not really know just where I meant by home, but in any case, I am told I said it, and wept bitterly.

The fog gradually lifted, and when I looked, Flatfish was sitting beside my pillow, wearing an intensely displeased expression.

"Last time too, it was right at the end of the year. Here we are, both of us busy enough to lose our heads, and every single time, he times it for the end of the year—if he keeps pulling this sort of thing, it's my own life that won't survive it."

The person listening to Flatfish's complaint was the madam of the bar in Kyobashi.

"Madam,"

I called out.

"Yes, what is it? Are you awake?"

the madam said, bringing her smiling face down close over mine, as though covering it.

I let the tears fall, one after another, and said,

"Let me separate from Yoshiko."

The words came out even I had not expected.

The madam straightened up, and let out a faint sigh.

And then I made another slip of the tongue, one so genuinely unexpected, so hard to describe as either comical or foolish, that words fail me.

"I'm going somewhere without any women."

Flatfish burst out laughing first, in a great loud guffaw, and the madam started giggling too, and I, still with tears streaming down my face, blushed and laughed bitterly along with them.

"Yes, that's for the best,"

Flatfish said, laughing on and on in an utterly unrestrained way,

"You'd better go somewhere without any women. Women are simply no good for you. Somewhere without women—now that's a fine idea."

Somewhere without any women.

But this foolish, drunken remark of mine came, in later years, to be realized in a truly grim and grievous way.

Yoshiko, it seemed, had somehow convinced herself that I had drunk the poison in her place, as a kind of substitute for her, and so she became even more flustered and anxious around me than before, never laughing no matter what I said, scarcely able to speak at all, so that I too found it oppressive to stay inside the apartment room, and I would step outside and, as ever, drink cheap liquor without restraint.

But ever since that business with the Dial, my body had grown noticeably thin and gaunt, my arms and legs listless, and I had grown lazy about my cartoon work; with the money Flatfish had left behind at the time as a get-well gift (Flatfish presented it to me by saying, this is a token of Shibuta's concern, as though it had come entirely out of his own pocket, but this too seemed, in fact, to have come from my brothers back home.

By then, unlike that earlier time when I had fled Flatfish's house, I had come to see through, if only vaguely, that pompous little performance of his, so I too, cunningly, pretended not to notice anything at all, and thanked Flatfish, quite properly, for the money—though I could never quite say whether I understood or failed to understand just why Flatfish and the others went to all the trouble of such an elaborate charade, and it always struck me as strange, no matter how I looked at it) and with that money, on a sudden impulse, I went alone to a hot spring in southern Izu, but I was hardly the sort of person cut out for such a leisurely hot-spring excursion, and thinking of Yoshiko filled me with an endless loneliness, so that a composed state of mind, of gazing at the mountains from the window of an inn room,

was hopelessly out of reach for me; I never even changed into the padded robe, never once got into the bath, but instead dashed outside and ducked into some shabby little teahouse-like place, drank shochu until I was practically drowning in it, and returned to Tokyo having only made my condition worse than ever.

It was a night of heavy snow in Tokyo.

Drunk, I walked through the back streets of Ginza, murmuring over and over, in a low voice, some verse about how far, how many hundred miles, this is from my homeland, how far, how many hundred miles, kicking at the ever-deepening snow with the toe of my shoe, when suddenly I vomited.

It was the first time I had ever coughed up blood.

A great red rising-sun flag took shape upon the snow.

I crouched there for a while, and then scooped up, with both hands, some of the snow that had not been soiled, and washed my face with it, weeping.

Which way, oh which way, is the narrow path?

Which way, oh which way, is the narrow path?

The pitiful singing voice of a little girl seemed to reach me faintly, from somewhere far away, like an auditory hallucination.

Unhappiness.

This world holds all manner of unhappy people—no, it would not be too much to say that it holds nothing but unhappy people—but the unhappiness of most of those people is something they can protest openly, with dignity, against the so-called world, and "the world"

in turn readily understands and sympathizes with their protest.

But my own unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own sins and misdeeds, so there was no one I could possibly protest to, and if I so much as stammered out a single word that sounded like a protest, then not only Flatfish but every last person in the world would surely be dumbfounded at my nerve in saying such a thing—whether I was, in the vulgar phrase, a "selfish, willful person,"

or, on the contrary, simply too weak-willed, I could not say myself, but in any case I seemed to be a lump of pure wickedness, and so I could only go on, of my own accord, growing more and more unhappy, with no concrete measure whatsoever to stop it.

I stood up, thinking that I ought, for the moment, to get some suitable medicine, and went into a nearby pharmacy, and found myself face to face with the woman who ran the place; for an instant, she lifted her head as though caught in a flash of light, her eyes went wide, and she froze stock still.

But in those wide-open eyes there was no trace of shock, no trace of disgust—only something that looked almost like a plea for help, almost like longing.

Ah, this woman too must surely be unhappy, I thought—for the unhappy are always sensitive to the unhappiness of others—and just then I noticed that she was standing there, precariously, leaning on a pair of crutches.

Suppressing the urge to rush over to her, I stood there still gazing back at her, and tears began to well up.

And then, from her own large eyes too, the tears came spilling over, one after another.

Without saying a single word more, I left that pharmacy, staggered back to the apartment, had Yoshiko make me a glass of salt water and drank it, and went to bed in silence, and the next day too, lying about the whole day, lying that I had a bit of a cold, and that night, unable to bear the anxiety of my secret coughing up of blood any longer, I got up, went back to that pharmacy, and this time, smiling, confessed quite openly to the woman about my condition up to then, and asked for her advice.

"You must give up drinking."

We might have been blood relatives, the two of us.

"I might already be an alcoholic. Even now, I want to drink."

"That won't do. My own husband, even with tuberculosis, kept saying he could kill the germs with alcohol, and drank himself into the ground, and shortened his own life for it."

"I just can't bear the anxiety. I'm too afraid, it's simply no good."

"I'll give you some medicine. But you must give up drinking, at the very least."

The woman (a widow, with one son, who had entered a medical school somewhere in Chiba or thereabouts and had soon come down with the very same disease as his father, and was now on leave from school, hospitalized; at home lay her paralyzed father-in-law, and the woman herself had lost the use of one leg entirely to infantile paralysis at the age of five) went about, tapping her crutches, gathering all sorts of medicines for me from this shelf and that drawer.

This one's a blood tonic.

This one's a vitamin injection.

Here's the syringe.

This one's calcium tablets.

And diastase, so as not to upset your stomach.

This one is such-and-such.

This one is such-and-such, she explained, with real tenderness, for five or six kinds of medicine, but this unhappy woman's tenderness too, in the end, ran too deep for me to bear.

Last of all, the woman handed me a small box, quickly wrapped in paper, saying, and this is the medicine for when you absolutely, no matter what, cannot bear not drinking any longer.

It was a morphine injection.

The woman told me it was less harmful than alcohol, and I believed her, and moreover, at just that point I had already begun to feel that drunkenness itself was somehow unclean, and there was, on top of that, the pleasure of being able, for the first time in a long while, to escape that Satan called alcohol, so, without the slightest hesitation, I injected that morphine into my own arm.

My unease, my anxious restlessness, my shyness were all wiped away, cleanly, and I became an extremely cheerful, talkative man.

And once I gave myself the injection, I forgot even the exhaustion of my own body, threw myself into my cartoon work, and came up with such strange, whimsical ideas that I would burst out laughing at my own drawings as I made them.

What was meant to be one dose a day became two, and by the time it had become four, I had already reached the point where I could not work at all without it.

"You mustn't, you know. If you become an addict, that's a truly terrible thing."

Whenever the pharmacist's wife said something like this to me, I would begin to feel as though I had already become a genuine addict (I am, by nature, a person who falls hopelessly for other people's suggestions.

If someone tells me, don't spend this money, and then adds, but well, knowing you, you probably will anyway, I get the strange, mistaken feeling that not spending it would somehow be a betrayal of their expectations, something wrong to do, and I invariably end up spending it right away)—and out of this very anxiety about addiction, I came, paradoxically, to demand still more of the drug.

"Please! One more box. I'll settle the bill by the end of the month, I promise."

"The bill can wait any time, but the police are the fussy ones, you know."

Ah, always, everywhere around me, there clung some murky, dark, suspicious air of the shadow-dweller.

"Come on, work around it somehow, please, ma'am. I'll give you a kiss."

The woman blushed.

I pressed my advantage all the more, and said,

"Without the medicine, my work doesn't get anywhere at all. For me, it's practically like a tonic."

"Well then, wouldn't a hormone injection be better?"

"Don't make fun of me. It has to be either sake or that medicine, one or the other, or I can't work at all."

"Sake is no good."

"Isn't that right? Ever since I started using that medicine, I haven't touched a single drop of sake. Thanks to it, I'm feeling wonderfully well. I don't intend to go on drawing clumsy cartoons like this forever, either—from now on, I'll quit drinking, fix up my health, study hard, and become a truly great painter, just you watch. Right now is the crucial moment. So please, I'm begging you. Shall I give you a kiss?"

The woman burst out laughing, and said,

"You really are a handful. Don't blame me if you become an addict."

and, tapping her crutches, took the medicine down from the shelf,

"I can't give you a whole box. You'd use it all right away. Half of one, then."

"How stingy. Well, I suppose there's nothing to be done."

I went home, and gave myself an injection at once.

"Doesn't it hurt?"

Yoshiko would ask me, timidly.

"Of course it hurts. But to raise my work efficiency, I've got to do this, whether I like it or not. I've been in great spirits lately, haven't I? Now then, work. Work, work,"

I would say, in high spirits.

There were times I even knocked on the door of the pharmacy in the dead of night.

When the woman came out in her nightclothes, tapping her crutches, I threw my arms around her at once, kissed her, and pretended to weep.

The woman silently handed me a whole box.

By the time I fully understood, in the deepest way, that this medicine too was just as loathsome, just as unclean as shochu—no, more so—I had already become a complete and thorough addict.

It was, in truth, the very depths of shamelessness.

Simply in order to obtain that medicine, I took up copying erotic prints once again, and, moreover, entered into a literally sordid relationship with the crippled woman at that pharmacy.

I want to die, I would rather just die, there's no turning back now, no matter what I do, no matter what I try, it'll only get worse, only pile shame upon shame; a bicycle ride to the falls at Aoba is nothing I could ever hope for now, only filthy sin heaped on top of wretched sin, only suffering growing more vast, more intense; I want to die, I have to die, being alive is itself the very seed of sin—even as I brooded on such thoughts, in the end all I ever did was go back and forth, half out of my mind, between the apartment and the pharmacy.

No matter how much work I did, my dosage kept increasing to match, so that my debt for the medicine climbed to a truly terrifying sum, and the woman, whenever she saw my face, would well up with tears, and I too would weep.

Hell.

As a final means of escaping this hell, and with a resolve so intense that it staked the very existence of God on it—if this failed, there would be nothing left but to hang myself—I decided to write a long letter to my father back home, confessing every last detail of my true circumstances (though, of course, I could not bring myself to write about the women).

But the result was worse still; however long I waited, day after day, no reply ever came, and out of that very restlessness and anxiety, I only increased my dosage all the more.

That very afternoon, on the day I had secretly resolved to inject ten doses at once that night and then throw myself into the great river, Flatfish, as though sniffing it out with some devilish instinct, appeared, bringing Horiki with him.

"I hear you've been coughing up blood."

Horiki said, sitting cross-legged in front of me, and smiled at me with a gentleness I had never once seen from him before.

That gentle smile was so grateful, so welcome to me, that I turned my face away and let the tears fall.

And by that single gentle smile of his, I was completely broken, and buried, once and for all.

I was put into a car.

You have to be hospitalized, in any case, leave the rest to us, Flatfish too urged me, in a subdued voice (one so quiet it might almost be called compassionate), and I, as though I had no will, no judgment left whatsoever, simply wept and sniveled, and followed obediently, without the slightest resistance, whatever the two of them told me to do.

The four of us, Yoshiko included, rode swaying in the car for a very long time, and by the time the surroundings had grown dim, we arrived at the entrance of a large hospital deep in a forest.

I believed the whole time that it was a sanatorium.

I was examined by a young doctor, unnervingly gentle and courteous in his manner, and afterward the doctor said,

"Well, why don't you just rest and recuperate here for a while,"

smiling in a way that seemed almost bashful, and Flatfish, Horiki, and Yoshiko all prepared to leave me there alone and go home, but Yoshiko handed me a furoshiki bundle containing my change of clothes, and then, silently, drew from between the folds of her obi the syringe and the remaining supply of that drug.

She must, after all, have gone on believing it was some kind of tonic.

"No, I don't need it anymore."

It was, in truth, a genuinely rare thing.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that this was the one and only time, in the whole of my life up to that point, that I ever refused something offered to me.

My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a man incapable of refusal.

Whenever something was offered and I refused it, I was seized by a terror that some stark, glaring crack would open, forever beyond repair, in the heart of the other person and in my own heart alike.

But at that moment, I refused, quite naturally, the very morphine I had been chasing after in a state of near-madness only moments before.

Was it that I had been struck by what one might call Yoshiko's "godlike ignorance"

?

Was it perhaps that, in that very instant, I had already ceased to be an addict?

But immediately afterward, I was led away by that young doctor with his bashful little smile, put into a certain ward, and heard the lock click shut behind me with a clang.

It was a mental hospital.

That foolish, drunken remark of mine, about going somewhere without any women, from when I had swallowed the Dial, had, in a truly strange way, come true.

In that ward there were only male lunatics, the attendants too were all men, and there was not a single woman anywhere.

By now I was no longer merely a sinner—I was a madman.

No, I was, absolutely and without question, not mad at all.

Not for a single instant had I ever been mad.

But, ah, they say that most madmen say exactly that about themselves.

In other words, it seems that whoever is put into this hospital is a lunatic, and whoever is not put in is normal.

I put the question to God.

Is non-resistance itself a sin?

I wept at that strange, beautiful smile of Horiki's, forgot all judgment, all resistance, got into the car, and was brought here, and became, in this way, a madman.

Even once I leave this place, I will surely still bear, branded upon my forehead, the mark of a madman—no, of a broken, ruined man.

No longer human.

By now, I had ceased, completely, to be a human being at all.

I had come here in early summer, and through the iron-barred window I could see red water lilies blooming in a small pond in the hospital garden, but three months passed from then, and cosmos flowers began blooming in the garden, when, quite unexpectedly, my eldest brother came from back home, bringing Flatfish with him, to take me into his care, and told me that our father had died the previous month of a stomach ulcer, and that they would no longer ask anything of my past, and did not intend to burden me with worries about making a living, that I need not do anything at all, but that instead, however much I might feel attached to it, I was to leave Tokyo at once and begin a life of recuperation in the countryside, and that the settling of everything I had done in Tokyo had, for the most part, already been taken care of by Shibuta, so I need not concern myself with any of it—all this he told me in that same earnest, tense-sounding tone of his.

I felt, before my very eyes, as though I could see the mountains and rivers of my hometown, and I nodded faintly.

Truly, a broken, ruined man.

Once I learned that my father was dead, I became more and more like a hollowed-out husk of myself.

My father was no longer there—that dear and terrifying presence that had never once left my chest for so much as an instant was no longer there—and I felt as though the very jar that held my suffering had gone empty.