No Longer Human - By Dazia Osuma

The Third Notebook: Part 1

One of Takeichi's predictions came true, the other went astray. The inglorious prophecy that women would fall for me turned out just as he said, but the happy one, that I should certainly become a great artist, failed to materialize. I never managed to become anything more impressive than an unknown, second-rate cartoonist employed by the cheapest magazines. I was expelled from college on account of the incident at Kamakura, and I went to live in a tiny room on the second floor of Flatfish's house. I gathered that minute sums of money were remitted from home every month for my support, never directly to me, but secretly, to Flatfish. (They apparently were sent by my brothers without my father's knowledge.) That was all—every other connection with home was severed. Flatfish was invariably in a bad humor; even if I smiled to make myself agreeable, he would never return the smile. The change in him was so extraordinary as to inspire me with thoughts of how contemptible—or rather, how comic—human beings are who can metamorphize themselves as simply and effortlessly as they turn over their hands. Flatfish seemed to be keeping an eye on me, as if I were very likely to commit suicide—he must have thought there was some danger I might throw myself into the sea after the woman—and he sternly forbade me to leave the house. Unable to drink or to smoke, I spent my whole days from the moment I got up until I went to bed trapped in my cubicle of a room, with nothing but old magazines to read. I was leading the life of a half-wit, and I had quite lost even the energy to think of suicide. Flatfish's house was near the Okubo Medical School. The signboard of his shop, which proclaimed in bold letters "Garden of the Green Dragon, Art and Antiques," was the only impressive thing about the place. The shop itself was a long, narrow affair, the dusty interior of which contained nothing but shelf after shelf of useless junk. Needless to say, Flatfish did not depend for a living on the sale of this rubbish; he apparently made his money by performing such services as transferring possession of the secret property of one client to another—to avoid taxes. Flatfish almost never waited in the shop. Usually he set out early in the morning in a great hurry, his face set in a scowl, leaving a boy of seventeen to look after the shop in his absence. Whenever this boy had nothing better to do, he used to play catch in the street with the children of the neighborhood. He seemed to consider the parasite living on the second floor a simpleton if not an outright lunatic. He used even to address me lectures in the manner of an older and wiser head. Never having been able to argue with anybody, I submissively listened to his words, a weary though admiring expression on my face. I seemed to recall having heard long ago from the people at home gossip to the effect that this clerk was an illegitimate son of Flatfish, though the two of them never addressed each other as father and son. There must have been some reason for this and for Flatfish's having remained a bachelor, but I am congenitally unable to take much interest in other people, and I don't know anything beyond what I have stated. However, there was undoubtedly something strangely fish-like about the boy's eyes, leading me to wonder if the gossip might not be true. But if this were the case, this father and son led a remarkably cheerless existence. Sometimes, late at night, they would order noodles from a neighborhood shop—just for the two of them, without inviting me —and they ate in silence, not exchanging so much as a word. The hoy almost always prepared the food in Flatfish's house, and three times a day he would carry on a separate tray meals for the parasite on the second floor. Flatfish and the boy ate their meals in the dank little room under the stairs, so hurriedly that I could hear the clatter of plates. One evening towards the end of March Flatfish— had he enjoyed some unexpected financial success? or did some other strategem move him? (even supposing both these hypotheses were correct, I imagine there were a number of other reasons besides of so obscure a nature that my conjectures could never fathom them)—invited me downstairs to a dinner graced by the rare presence of sake. The host himself was impressed by the unwonted delicacy of sliced tuna, and in his admiring delight he expansively offered a little sake even to his listless hanger-on. He asked, "What do you plan to do, in the future I mean?" I did not answer, but picked up some dried sardines with my chopsticks from a plate on the table and, while I examined the silvery eyes of the little fish, I felt the faint flush of intoxication rise in me. I suddenly became nostalgic for the days when I used to go from bar to bar drinking, and even for Horiki. I yearned with such desperation for "freedom" that I became weak and tearful. Ever since coming to this house I had lacked all incentive even to play the clown; I had merely lain prostrate under the contemptuous glances of Flatfish and the boy. Flatfish himself seemed disinclined to indulge in long, heart-to-heart talks, and for my part no desire stirred within me to run after him with complaints. Flatfish pursued his discourse. "As things stand it appears that the suspended sentence passed against you will not count as a criminal record or anything of that sort. So, you see, your rehabilitation depends entirely on yourself. If you mend your ways and bring me your problems—seriously, I mean—I will certainly see what I can do to help you." Flatfish's manner of speech—no, not only his, but the manner of speech of everybody in the world —held strange, elusive complexities, intricately presented with overtones of vagueness: I have always been baffled by these precautions so strict as to be useless, and by the intensely irritating little maneuvers surrounding them. In the end I have felt past caring; I have laughed them away with my clowning, or surrendered to them abjectly with a silent nod of the head, in the attitude of defeat. In later years I came to realize that if Flatfish had at the time presented me with a simple statement of the facts, there would have been no untoward consequences. But as a result of his unnecessary precautions, or rather, of the incomprehensible vanity and love of appearances of the people of the world, I was subjected to a most dismal set of experiences. How much better things would have been if only Flatfish had said something like this, "I'd like you to enter a school beginning in the April term. Your family has decided to send you a more adequate allowance once you have entered school." Only later did I learn that this in fact was the situation. If I had been told that, I should probably have done what Flatfish asked. But thanks to hia intolerably prudent, circumlocutions manner of speech, I only felt irritable, and this caused the whole course of my life to be altered. "If you do not feel like confiding your problems to me I'm afraid there's nothing I can do for you."  "What kind of problems?" I really had no idea what he was driving at. "Isn't there something weighing on your heart?" "For example?" "'For example'! What do you yourself want to do now?" "Do you think I ought to get a job?" "No, don't ask me. Tell me what you would really like." "But even supposing I said I wanted to go back to school . . ." "Yes, I know, it costs money. But the question is not the money. It's what you feel." Why, I wonder, couldn't he have mentioned the simple fact that the money would be forthcoming from home? That one fact would probably have settled my feelings, but I was left in a fog. "How about it? Have you anything which might be described as aspirations for the future? I suppose one can't expect people one helps to understand how difficult it is to help another person." "I'm sorry." "I'm really worried about you. I'm responsible for you now, and I don't like you to have such halfhearted feelings. I wish you would show me that you're resolved to make a real efifort to turn over a new leaf. If, for example, you were to come to me to discuss seriously your plans for the future, I would certainly do what I could. But of course you can't expect to lead your former life of luxury on the help that poor old Flatfish can give—don't give yourself any illusions on that score. No—but if you are resolute in your determination to begin again afresh, and you make definite plans for building your future, I think I might actually be willing to help you to rehabilitate yourself if you came to me for help, though Heaven knows I haven't much to spare. Do you understand my feelings? What are your plans?" "If you won't let me stay here in your house I'll work . . ." "Are you serious? Do you realize that nowadays even graduates of Tokyo Imperial University . . ." "No, I wasn't thinking of getting a job with a company." "What then?" "I want to be a painter." I said this with conviction. "Wha-a-t?" I can never forget the indescribably crafty shadow that passed over Flatfish's face as he laughed at me, his neck drawn in. It resembled contempt, yet it was different: if the world, like the sea, had depths of a thousand fathoms, this was the kind of weird shadow which might be found hovering here and there at the bottom. It was a laugh which enabled me to catch a glimpse of the very nadir of adult life He said, "There's no point in discussing such a thing. Your feelings are still all up in the air. Think it over. Please devote this evening to thinking it over seriously." I ran up to the second floor as though driven, but even when I lay in bed nothing of a particularly constructive nature occurred to me. The next morning at dawn I ran away from Flatfish's house. I left behind a note, scrawled in pencil in big letters on my writing pad. "I shall return tonight without fail. I am going to discuss my plans for the future with a friend who lives at the address below. Please don't worry about me. I'm telling the truth." I wrote Horiki's name and address, and stole out of Flatfish's house. I did not run away because I was mortified at having been lectured by Flatfish. I was, exactly as Flatfish described, a man whose feelings were up in the air, and I had absolutely no idea about future plans or anything else. Besides, I felt rather sorry for Flatfish that I should be a burden on him, and I found it quite intolerably painful to think that if by some remote chance I felt like bestirring myself to achieve a worthy purpose, I should have to depend on poor old Flatfish to dole out each month the capital needed for my rehabilitation. When I left Flatfish's house, however, I was certainly not seriously entertaining any idea of consulting the likes of Horiki about my future plans. I left the note hoping thereby to pacify Flatfish for a little while, if only for a split-second. (I didn't write the note so much out of a detective-story strategem to gain a little more time for my escape—though, I must admit that the desire was at least faintly present —as to avoid causing Flatfish a sudden shock which would send him into a state of wild alarm and confusion. I think that might be a somewhat more accurate presentation of my motives. I knew that the facts were certain to be discovered, but I was afraid to state them as they were. One of my tragic flaws is the compulsion to add some sort of embellishment to every situation—a quality which has made people call me at times a liar—but I have almost never embellished in order to bring myself any advantage; it was rather that I had a strangulating fear of that cataclysmic change in the atmosphere the instant the flow of a conversation flagged, and even when I knew that it would later turn to my disadvantage, I frequently felt obliged to add, almost inadvertently, my word of embellishment, out of a desire to please born of my usual desperate mania for service. This may have been a twisted form of my weakness, an idiocy, but the habit it engendered was taken full advantage of by the so-called honest citizens of the world.) That was how I happened to jot down Horiki's name and address as they floated up from the distant recesses of my memory. After leaving Flatfish's house I walked as far as Shinjuku, where I sold the books I had in my pockets. Then I stood there uncertainly, utterly at a loss what to do. Though I have always made it my practice to be pleasant to everybody, I have not once actually experienced friendship. I have only the most painful recollections of my various acquaintances with the exception of such companions in pleasure as Horiki. I have frantically played the clown in order to disentangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result. Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy. I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. (I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings really possess this faculty.) It was hardly to be expected that someone like myself could ever develop any close friendships—besides, I lacked even the ability to pay visits. The front door of another person's house terrified me more than the gate of Inferno in the Divine Comedy, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I really felt I could detect within the door the presence of a horrible dragon-like monster writhing there with a dank, raw smell. I had no friends. I had nowhere to go. Horiki. Here was a real case of a true word having been said in jest: I decided to visit Horiki, exactly as I had stated in my farewell note to Flatfish. I had never before gone myself to Horiki's house. Usually I would invite him to my place by telegram when I wanted to see him. Now, however, I doubted whether I could manage the telegraph fee. I also wondered, with the jaundiced intelligence of a man in disgrace, whether Horiki might not refuse to come even if I telegraphed him. I decided on a visit, the most difficult thing in the world for me. Giving vent to a sigh, I boarded the streetcar. The thought that the only hope left me in the world was Horiki filled me with a foreboding dreadful enough to send chills up and down my spine. Horiki was at home. He lived in a two-storied house at the end of a dirty alley. Horiki occupied only one medium-sized room on the second floor; downstairs his parents and a young workman were busily stitching and pounding strips of cloth to make thongs for sandals. Horiki showed me that day a new aspect of his city-dweller personality. This was his knowing nature,an egoism so icy, so crafty that a country boy like myself could only stare with eyes opened wide in amazement. He was not a simple, endlessly passive type like myself  "You. What a surprise. You've been forgiven by your father, have you? Not yet?" I was unable to confess that I had run away. In my usual way I evaded the issue, though I was certain that Horiki soon, if not immediately, would grasp what had happened. "Things will take care of themselves, in one way or another." "Look here! It's no laughing matter. Let me give you a word of advice—stop your foolishness here and now. I've got business today anyway. I'm awfully busy these days." "Business? What kind of business?" "Hey! What are you doing there? Don't tear the thread off the cushion!" While we were talking I had unconsciously been fiddling with and twisting around my finger one of the tassel-like threads which protruded from the corners of the cushion on which I sat—bindingthreads, I think they are called. Horiki had assumed a jealous possessivcness about everything in his house down to the last cushion thread, and he glared at me, seemingly quite unembarrassed by this attitude. When I think of it, Horiki's acquaintanceship with me had cost him nothing. Horiki's aged mother brought in a tray with two dishes of jelly. "What have we here?" Horiki asked his mother tenderly, in the tones of the truly dutiful son, continuing in language so polite it sounded quite unnatural. "Oh, I'm sorry. Have you made jelly? That's terrific. You shouldn't have bothered. I was just going out on some business. But it would be wicked not to eat your wonderful jelly after you've gone to all the trouble. Thank you so much." Then, turning in my direction, "How about one for you? Mother made it specially. Ahh . . . this is delicious. Really terrific." He ate with a gusto, almost a rapture, which did not seem to be altogether play acting. I also spooned my bowl of jelly. It tasted watery* and when I came to the piece of fruit at the bottom, it was not fruit after all, but a substance I could not identify. I by no means despised their poverty. (At the time I didn't think that the jelly tasted bad, and I was really grateful for the old woman's kindness. It is true that I dread poverty, but I do not believe I ever have despised it.) The jelly and the way Horiki rejoiced over it taught me a lesson in the parsimoniousness of the city-dweller, and in what it is really like in a Tokyo household where the members divide their lives so sharply between what they do at home and what they do on the outside. I was filled with dismay at these signs that I, a fool rendered incapable by my perpetual flight from human society from distinguishing between "at home" and "on the outside," was the only one completely left out, that I had been deserted even by Horiki. I should like to record that as I manipulated the peeling lacquer chopsticks to eat my jelly, I felt unbearably lonely. "I'm sorry, but I've got an appointment today," Horiki said, standing and putting on his jacket. "I'm going now. Sorry." At that moment a woman visitor arrived for Horiki. My fortunes thereby took a sudden turn. Horiki at once became quite animated. "Oh, I am sorry. I was just on my way to your place when this fellow dropped in without warning. No, you're not in the way at all. Please come in." He seemed rattled. I took the cushion from under me and turned it over before handing it to Horiki, but snatching it from my hands, he turned it over once more as he offered it to the woman. There was only that one cushion for guests, besides the cushion Horiki sat on. The woman was a tall, thin person. She declined the cushion and sat demurely in a corner by the door. I listened absent-mindedly to their conversation. The woman, evidently an employee of a magazine publisher, had commissioned an illustration from Horiki, and had come now to collect it. "We're in a terrible hurry," she explained. "It's ready. It's been ready for some time. Here you are." A messenger arrived with a telegram. As Horiki read it I could see the good spirits on his face turn ugly. "Damn it, what have you been up to?" The telegram was from Flatfish. "You go back at once. I ought to take you there myself, I suppose, but I haven't got the time now. Imagine—a runaway, and looking so smug!" The woman asked, "Where do you live?" "In Okubo," I answered without thinking. "That's quite near my office." She was born in Koshu and was twenty-eight. She lived in an apartment in Kocnji with her fiveyear-old girl. She told me that her husband had died three years before. "You look like someone who's had an unhappy childhood. You're so sensitive—more's the pity for you."  I led for the first time the life of a kept man. After Shizuko (that was the name of the lady journalist) went out to work in the morning at the magazine publisher's, her daughter Shigeko and I obediently looked after the apartment. Shigeko had always been left to play in the superintendent's room while her mother was away, and now she seemed delighted that an interesting "uncle" had turned up as a new playmate. For about a week I remained in a state of daze. Just outside the apartment window was a kite caught in the telegraph wires; blown about and ripped by the dusty spring wind, it nevertheless clung tenaciously to the wires, as if in affirmation of something. Every time I looked at the kite I had to smile with embarrassment and blush. It haunted me even in dreams. "I want some money." "How much?" she asked. "A lot.. . Love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, they say, and it's true." "Don't be silly. Such a trite expression." "Is it? But you don't understand. I may run away if things go on at this rate." "Which of us is the poor one? And which will run away? What a silly thing to say!" "I want to buy my drinks and cigarettes with my own money. I'm a lot better artist than Horiki." At such times the self-portraits I painted in high school—the ones Takeichi called "ghost pictures" —naturally came to mind. My lost masterpieces. These, my only really worthwhile pictures, had disappeared during one of my frequent changes of address. I afterwards painted pictures of every description, but they all fell far, far short of those splendid works as I remembered them. I was plagued by a heavy sense of loss, as if my heart had become empty. The undrunk glass of absinthe. A sense of loss which was doomed to remain eternally unmitigated stealthily began to take shape. Whenever I spoke of painting, that undrunk glass of absinthe nickered before my eyes. I was agonized by the frustrating thought: if only I could show them those paintings they would believe in my artistic talents. "Do you really? You're adorable when you joke that way with a serious face." But it was no joke. It was true. I wished I could have shown her those pictures. I felt an empty chagrin which suddenly gave way to resignation. I added, "Cartoons, I mean. I'm sure I'm better than Horiki at cartoons if nothing else." These clownish words of deceit were taken more seriously than the truth. "Yes, that's so. I've really been struck by those cartoons you're always drawing for Shigeko. I've burst out laughing over them myself. How would you like to draw for our magazine? I can easily ask the editor." Her company published a monthly magazine, not an especially notable one, for children. "Most women have only to lay eyes on you to want to be doing something for you so badly they can't stand it . . . You're always so timid and yet you're funny . . . Sometimes you get terribly lonesome and depressed, but that only makes a woman's heart itch all the more for you." Shizuko flattered me with these and other comments which, with the special repulsive quality of the kept man, I calmly accepted. Whenever I thought of my situation I sank all the deeper in my depression, and I lost all my energy. It kept preying on my mind that I needed money more than a woman, that anyway I wanted to escape from Shizuko and make my own living. I made plans of every sort, but my struggles only enmeshed me the more in my dependence on her. This strong-minded woman herself dealt with the complications which developed from my running away, and took care of almost everything else for me. As a result I became more timid than ever before her. At Shizuko's suggestion a conference took place attended by Flatfish, Horiki and herself at which it was concluded that all relations between me and my family were to be broken, and I was to live with Shizuko as man and wife. Thanks also to Shizuko's efforts, my cartoons began to produce a surprising amount of money. I bought liquor and cigarettes, as I had planned, with the proceeds, but my gloom and depression grew only the more intense. I had sunk to the bottom: sometimes when I was drawing "The Adventures of Kinta and Ota," the monthly comic strip for Shizuko's magazine, I would suddenly think of home, and this made me feel so miserable that my pen would stop moving, and I looked down, through brimming tears. At such times the one slight relief ca little Shigeko. By now she was calling me with no show of hesitation. "Daddy, is it true that God will grant you anything if you pray for it?" I thought that I for one would like to make such a prayer: Oh, vouchsafe unto me a will of ice. Acquaint me with the true natures of "human beings." Is it not a sin for a man to push aside his fellow? Vouchsafe unto me a mask of anger. "Yes. I'm sure He'll grant Shigeko anything she wants, but I don't suppose Daddy has a chance." I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment. Faith. That, I felt, was the act of facing the tribunal of justice with one's head bowed to receive the scourge of God. I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven. "Why haven't you a chance?" "Becaus e I disobeyed what my father told me." "Did you? But everybody says you're so nice." That's because I deceived them. I was aware that everybody in the apartment house was friendly to me, but it was extremely difficult for me to explain to Shigeko how much I feared them all, and how I was cursed by the unhappy peculiarity that the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them—a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody. I casually changed the subject. "Shigeko, what would you like from God?" "I would like my real Daddy back." I felt dizzy with the shock. An enemy. Was I Shigcko's enemy, or was she mine? Here was another frightening grown-up who would intimidate me. A stranger, an incomprehensible stranger, a stranger full of secrets. Shigeko's face suddenly began to look that way. I had been deluding myself with the belief that Shigeko at least was safe, but she too was like the ox which suddenly lashes out with its tail to kill the horsefly on its flank. I knew that from then on I would have to be timid even before that little girl. "Is the lady-killer at home?" Horiki had taken to visiting me again at my place. I could not refuse him, even though this was the man who had made me so miserable the day I ran away. I welcomed him with a feeble smile. "Your comic strips are getting quite a reputation, aren't they? There's no competing with amateurs—they're so foolhardy they don't know when to be afraid. But don't get overconfident. Your composition is still not worth a damn." He dared to act the part of the master to me ! I felt my usual empty tremor of anguish at the thought, "I can imagine the expression on his face if I showed him my 'ghost pictures'." But I protested instead, "Don't say such things. You'll make me cry." Horiki looked all the more elated with himself. "If all you've got is just enough talent to get along, sooner or later you'll betray yourself." Just enough talent to get along—I really had to smile at that. Imagine saying that I had enough talent to get along! It occurred to me that a man like myself who dreads human beings, shuns and deceives them, might on the surface seem strikingly like another man who reveres the clever, wordly-wise rules for success embodied in the proverb "Let sleeping dogs lie." Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death? Horiki, I had to admit, participated in the settlement after my running away, though reluctantly, under pressure from Shizuko, and he was now behaving exactly like the great benefactor to whom I owed my rehabilitation or like the go-between of a romance. The look on his face as he lectured me was grave. Sometimes he would barge in late at night, dead-drunk, to sleep at my place, or stop by to borrow five yen (invariably five yen). "You must stop your fooling around with women. You've gone far enough. Society won't stand for more." What, I wondered, did he mean by "society"? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called "society"? I had spent my whole life thinking that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words "Don't you mean your- self?" come to the tip of my tongue. But I held the words back, reluctant to anger him. Society won't stand for it. It's not society. You're the one who won't stand for it—right? If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it. It's not society. It's you, isn't it? Before you know it, you'll be ostracized by society. It's not society. You're going to do the ostracizing, aren't you? Words, words of every kind went flitting through my head. "Know thy particular fcarsomeness, thy knavery, cunning and witchcraft!" What I said, however, as I wiped the perspiration from my face with a handkerchief was merely, "You've put me in a cold sweat!" I smiled. From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual? From the moment I suspected that society might be an individual I was able to act more in accordance with my own inclinations. Shizuko found that I had become rather self-willed and not so timid as before. Horiki remarked that it was funny how stingy I had become. Or, as Shigeko had it, I had stopped being so nice to Shigeko. Without a word, without a trace of a smile, I spent one day after the next looking after Shigeko and drawing comic strips, some of them so idiotic I couldn't understand them myself, for the various firms which commissioned them. (Orders had gradually started coming in from other publishers, all of an even lower class than Shizuko's company—third-rate publishers, I suppose they'd be called.) I drew with extremely, excessively depressed emotions, deliberately penning each line, only to earn money for drink. When Shizuko came home from work I would dash out as if in relay with her, and head for the outdoor booths near the station to drink cheap, strong liquor. Somewhat buoyed after a bout, I would return to the apartment. I would say, "The more I look at you the funnier your face seems. Do you know I get inspiration for my cartoons from looking at your face when you're asleep9 " "What about your face when you sleep? You look like an old man, a man of forty." "It's all your fault. You've drained me dry. 'Man's life is like a flowing river. What is there to fret over? On the river bank a willow tree . . .'" "Hurry to bed and stop making such a racket. Would you like something to eat?" She was quite calm. She did not take me seriously. "If there's any liquor left, I'll drink it. 'Man's life is like a flowing river. Man's river . . .' no, I mean 'the river flows, the flowing life'." I would go on singing as Shizuko took off my clothes. I fell asleep with my forehead pressed against her breast. This was my daily routine. . . . et puis on recommence encore le lendemain avec settlement la meme regie que la veille et qui est d'eviter les grandes joies barbares de meme que les grandes douleurs comme un crapaud contorne une pierre sur son chemin. . . . When I first read in translation these verses by Guy-Charles Cros, I blushed until my face burned. The toad. (That is what I was—a toad. It was not a question of whether or not society tolerated me, whether or not it ostracized me. I was an animal lower than a dog, lower than a cat. A toad. I sluggishly moved— that's all.) The quantities of liquor I consumed had gradually increased. I went drinking not only in the neighborhood of the Koenji station but as far as the Cinza. Sometimes I spent the night out. At bars I acted the part of a ruffian, kissed women indiscriminately, did anything as long as it was not in accord with "accepted usage," drank as wildly—no more so—as before my attempted suicide, was so hard pressed for money that I used to pawn Shizuko's clothes. A year had passed since I first came to her apartment and smiled bitterly at the torn kite. One day, along when the cherry trees were going to leaf, I stole some of Shizuko's underrobes and sashes, and took them to a pawnshop. I used the money they gave me to go drinking on the Cinza. I spent two nights in a row away from home. By the evening of the third day I began to feel some compunctions about my behavior, and I returned to Shizuko's apartment. I unconsciously hushed my footsteps as I approached the door, and I could hear Shizuko talking with Shigcko. "Why does he drink?" "It's not because he likes liquor. It's because he's too good, because . . ." "Do all good people drink?" "Not necessarily, but . . ." "I'm sure Daddy'll be surprised." "Maybe he won't like it. Look! It's jumped out of the box." "Like the funny man in the comics he draws." "Yes, isn't it?" Shizuko's low laugh sounded genuinely happy. I opened the door a crack and looked in. I saw a small white rabbit bounding around the room. The two of them were chasing it. (They were happy, the two of them. I'd been a fool to come between them. I might destroy them both if I were not careful. A humble happiness. A good mother and child. Cod, I thought, if you listen to the prayers of people like myself, grant me happiness once, only once in my whole lifetime will be enough! Hear my prayer!) I felt like getting down on my knees to pray then and there. I shut the door Boftly, went to the Cinza, and did not return to the apartment. My next spell as a kept man was in an apartment over a bar close by the Kyobashi Station. '"Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is the struggle between one indiyidualjinjLanotherT' a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything. Human beings never submit to human beings. Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except in terms of a single thenand-there contest. They speak of duty to one's country and suchlike things, but the object of their efforts is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual's needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment. When I left the apartment in Koenji I told the madam of the bar in Kyobashi, "I've left her and come to you." That was all I said, and it was enough. In other words, my single then-and-there contest had been decided, and from that night I lodged myself without ceremony on the second floor of her place. "Society" which by all rights should have been implacable, inflicted not a particle of harm on me, and I offered no explanations. As long as the madam was so inclined, everything was all right. At the bar I was treated like a customer, like the owner, like an errand boy, like a relative of the management; one might have expected that I would be considered a very dubious character, but "society" was not in the least suspicious of me, and the regular customers of the bar treated me with almost painful kindness. They called me by my first name and bought me drinks. I gradually came to relax my vigilance towards the world. I came to think that it was not such a dreadful place. My feelings of panic had been molded by the unholy fear aroused in me by such superstitions of science as the hundreds of thousands of whooping-cough germs borne by the spring breezes, the hundreds of thousands of eye-destroying bacteria which infest the public baths, the hundreds of thousands of microbes in a barber shop which will cause baldness, the swarms of scabious parasites infecting the leather straps in the subway cars; or the tapeworm, fluke and heaven knows what eggs that undoubtedly lurk in raw fish and in undercooked beef and pork; or the fact that if you walk barefoot a tiny sliver of glass may penetrate the sole of your foot and after circulating through your body reach the eye and cause blindness. There is no disputing the accurate, scientific fact that millions of germs are floating, swimming, wriggling everywhere. At the same time, however, if you ignore them completely they lose all possible connection with yourself, and at once become nothing more than vanishing "ghosts of science." This too I came to understand. I had been so terrorized by scientific statistics (if ten million people each leave over three grains of rice from their lunch, how many sacks of rice are wasted in one day; if ten million people each economize one paper handkerchief a day, how much pulp will be saved?) that whenever I left over a single grain of rice, whenever I blew my nose, I imagined that I was wasting mountains of rice, tons of paper, and I fell prey to a mood dark as if I had committed some terrible crime. But these were the lies of science, the lies of statistics and mathematics: you can't collect three grains of rice from everybody. Even as an exercise in multiplication or division, it ranks as one of the most elementary and feeble-minded problems, about on a par with the computation of the percentage of times that people slip in dark, unlighted bathrooms and fall into the toilet, or the percentage of passengers who get their feet caught in the space between the door of a subway train and the edge of the platform, or other such footling exercises in probability. These events seem entirely within the bounds of possibility, but I have never heard a single instance of anyone hurting himself by falling into the toilet. I felt pity and contempt for the self which until yesterday had accepted such hypothetical situations as eminently factual scientific truths and was terrified by them. This shows the degree to which I had bit by bit arrived at a knowledge of the real nature of what is called the world. Having said that, I must now admit that I was •till afraid of human beings, and before I could meet even the customers in the bar I had to fortify myself by gulping down a glass of liquor. The desire to see frightening things—that was what drew me every night to the bar where, like the child who squeezes his pet all the harder when he actually fears it a little, I proclaimed to the customers standing at the bar my drunken, bungling theories of art. A comic strip artist, and at that an unknown one, knowing no great joys nor, for that matter, any great sorrows. I craved desperately some great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue, but my only actual pleasure was to engage in meaningless chatter with the customers and to drink their liquor. Close to a year had gone by since I took up this debased life in the bar in Kyobashi. My cartoons were no longer confined to the children's magazines, but now appeared also in the cheap, pornographic magazines that are sold in railway stations. Under a silly pseudonym I drew dirty pictures of naked women to which I usually appended appropriate verses from the Rubaiyat.

Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit
Of This and That endeavour and dispute;
Better be merry with the fruitful Grape Than sadden after none, or bitter,
Fruit. Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Promise go.
Nor heed the music of a distant Drum!
And that inverted Bowl we call
The Sky Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die
Lift not your hands to It for help—for It
As impotently rolls as you or I.

There was at this period in my life a maiden who pleaded with me to give up drink. "You can't go on, drinking every day from morning to night that way." She was a girl of seventeen or so who worked in a little tobacco shop across the way from the bar. Yoshiko—that was her name—was a pale girl with crooked teeth. Whenever I went to buy cigarettes she would smile and repeat her advice. "What's wrong with drinking? Why is it bad? 'Better be merry with the fruitful Grape than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.' Many years ago there was a Persian . . . no, let's skip it. 'Oh, plagued no more wilh Human or Divine, To-morrow's tangle to itself resign: And lose your fingers in the tresses of The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.' Do you understand?" "No, I don't." "What a stupid little girl you are. I'm going to kiss you." "Go ahead." She pouted out her lower lip, not in the least abashed. "You silly fool. You and your ideas of chastity " There was something unmistakable in Yoshiko's expression which marked her as a virgin who had never been denied. Soon after New Year, one night in the dead of winter, I drunkenly staggered out in the cold to buy some cigarettes and fell into a manhole in front of her shop. I shouted for Yoshiko to come save me. She hauled me out and bandaged my bruised right arm. Yoshiko, earnest and unsmiling, said, "You drink too much." The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks. I thought as I watched Yoshiko bandage my hand that I might cut down on my drinking. "I'm giving it up. From tomorrow on I won't touch a drop." "Do you mean it?" "There's no doubt about it. I'll give it up. If I give it up, will you many me, Yoshiko?" Asking her to marry me was, however, intended only as a joke. "Natch." ("Natch" for "naturally" was popular at the time.) "Right. Let's hook fingers on that. I promise I'll give it up." The next day, as might have been expected, I spent drinking. Towards evening I made my way to Yoshiko's shop on shaking legs and called to her. "Yoshiko, I'm sorry. I got drunk." "Oh, you're awful. Trying to fool me by pretending to be drunk." I was startled. I felt suddenly quite sober. "No, it's the truth. I really have been drinking. I'm not pretending." "Don't tease me. You're mean." She suspected nothing. "I should think you could tell by just looking at me. I've been drinking today since noon. Forgive me. "You're a good actor." "I'm not acting, you little idiot. I'm going to kiss you." "Go ahead." "No, I'm not qualified. I'm afraid I'll have to give up the idea of marrying you. Look at my face. Red, isn't it? I've been drinking." "II'H just the sunset shining on it. Don't try to fool me. You promised yesterday you wouldn't drink. You wouldn't break a promise, would you? We hooked fingers. Don't tell me you've been drinking. It's a lie—I know it is." Yoshiko's pale face was smiling as she sat there inside the dimly lit shop. What a holy thing uncorrupted virginity is, I thought. I had never slept with a virgin, a girl younger than myself. I'd marry her. I wanted once in my lifetime to know that great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue. I had always imagined that the beauty of virginity was nothing more than the sweet, sentimental illusion of stupid poets, but it really is alive and present in this world. We would get married. In the spring we'd go together on bicycles to see waterfalls framed in green leaves. I made up my mind on the spot: it was a thenand-there decision, and I did not hesitate to steal the flower. Not long afterwards we were married. The joy I obtained as a result of this action was not necessarily great or savage, but the suffering which ensued was  staggering—so far surpassing what I had imagined that even describing it as "horrendous" would not quite cover it. The "world," after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a single then-and-there decision.