No Longer Human

THE SECOND NOTEBOOK (part2)

It was a cold autumn night. I was waiting at a sushi stall back of the Cinza for Tsuneko (that, as I recall, was her name, but the memory is too blurred for me to be sure: I am the sort of person who can forget even the name of the woman with whom he attempted suicide) to get off from work. The sushi I was eating had nothing to recommend it. Why, when I have forgotten her name, should I be able to remember so clearly how bad the sushi tasted? And I can recall with absolute clarity the close-cropped head of the old man—his face was like a snake's—wagging from side to side as he made the sushi, trying to create the illusion that he was a real expert. It has happened to me two or three times since that I have seen on the streetcar what seemed to be a familiar face and wondered who it was, only to realize with a start that the person opposite me looked like the old man from the sushi stall. Now, when her name and even her face are fading from my memory, for me to be able to remember that old man's face so accurately I could draw it, is surely a proof of how bad the sushi was and how it chilled and distressed me. I should add that even when I have been taken to restaurants famous for sushi I have never enjoyed it much.
Tsuneko was living in a room she rented on the second floor of a carpenter's house. I lay on the floor sipping tea, propping my cheek with one hand as if I had a horrible toothache. I took no pains to hide my habitual gloom. Oddly enough, she seemed to like seeing me lie there that way. She gave me the impression of standing completely isolated; an icy storm whipped around her,

leaving only dead leaves careening wildly down.
As we lay there together, she told me that she was two years older than I,
and that she came from Hiroshima. "I've got a husband, you know. He used to be a barber in Hiroshima, but we ran away to Tokyo together at the end of last year. My husband couldn't find a decent job in Tokyo. The next thing I knew he was picked up for swindling someone, and now he's in jail. I've been going to the prison every day, but beginning tomorrow I'm not going any more." She rambled on, but I have never been able to get interested when women talk about themselves. It may be because women are so inept at telling a story (that is, because they place the emphasis in the wrong places), or for some other reason. In any case, I have always turned them a deaf ear.
"I feel so unhappy."
I am sure that this one phrase whispered to me would arouse my sympathy more than the longest, most painstaking account of a woman's life. It amazes and astonishes me that I have never once heard a woman make this simple statement. This woman did not say, "I feel so unhappy" in so many words, but something like a silent current of misery an inch wide flowed over the surface of her body. When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom like a "withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool." I had freed myself from fear and uneasiness.
It was entirely different from the feeling of being able to sleep soundly which I had experienced in the arms of those idiot-prostitutes (for one thing, the prostitutes were cheerful); the night I spent with that criminal's wife was for me a night of liberation and happiness. (The use of so bold a word, affirmatively,' without hesitation, will not, I imagine, recur in these notebooks.)
But it lasted only one night. In the morning, when I woke and got out of bed, I was again the shallow poseur of a clown. The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness. I was impatient to leave her while things still stood the same, before I got wounded, and I spread my usual smokescreen of farce.
"They say that love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, but people generally get the sense backwards. It doesn't mean that when a man's

money runs out he's shaken off by women. When he runs out of money, he naturally is in the dumps. He's no good for anything. The strength goes out of his laugh, he becomes strangely soured. Finally, in desperation, he shakes off the woman. The proverb means that when a man becomes half-mad, he will shake and shake and shake until he's free of a woman. You'll find that explanation given in the Kanazawa Dictionary, more's the pity. It isn't too hard for me to understand that feeling myself!"
I remember making Tsuneko laugh with just such stupid remarks. I was trying to get away quickly that morning, without so much as washing my face, for I was sure that to stay any longer would be useless and dangerous. Then I came out with that crazy pronouncement on "love flying out the window," which was later to produce unexpected complications.
I didn't meet my benefactor of that night again for a whole month. After leaving her my happiness grew fainter every day that went by. It frightened me even that I had accepted a moment's kindness: I felt I had imposed horrible bonds on myself. Gradually even the mundane fact that Tsuneko had paid the bill at the café began to weigh on me, and I felt as though she was just another threatening woman, like the girl at my lodging house, or the girl from the teacher's training college. Even at the distance which separated us, Tsuneko intimidated me constantly. Besides, I was intolerably afraid that if I met again a woman I had once slept with, I might suddenly burst into a flaming rage. It was my nature to be very timid about meeting people anyway, and so I finally chose the expedient of keeping a safe distance from the Ginza. This timidity of nature was no trickery on my part. Women do not bring to bear so much as a particle of connection between what they do after going to bed and what they do on rising in the morning; they go on living with their world successfully divided in two, as if total oblivion had intervened. My trouble was that I could not yet successfully cope with this extraordinary phenomenon.
At the end of November I went drinking with Horiki at a cheap bar in Kanda. We had no sooner staggered out of that bar than my evil companion began to insist that we continue our drinking somewhere else. We had already run out of money, but he kept badgering me.