Pathway to Japanese Literature

Preface

I had seen three photographs of that man.

The first photograph—presumably from what might be called that man’s early childhood, when he was estimated to be around ten years old—showed the child standing by a garden pond, surrounded by a large number of women (likely imagined to be his sisters, younger sisters, and cousins), wearing hakama trousers with coarse stripes, his head tilted about thirty degrees to the left as he smiled grotesquely.
Ugly? But dull people (that is, those indifferent to beauty or ugliness) would wear an expression that was neither amused nor anything else and,

“What a sweet little boy.”

Even if they offered such perfunctory flattery, the child’s smile did bear a semblance—one might call it a vulgar sort of “cuteness”—that kept their words from ringing entirely hollow. Yet anyone with even rudimentary training in discerning beauty and ugliness would have taken one look and immediately—

“What a repulsive child!”

—muttered in evident revulsion before tossing the photograph aside with the same gesture one might use to flick away a caterpillar.

The more one looked at that child’s smile, the more an indescribable, unpleasant eeriness crept in. Fundamentally, it was not a smile. This child was not smiling at all. As proof, the child stood with both fists tightly clenched. Humans cannot laugh while clenching their fists like that. Simian. A simian smile. It was merely his face contorted into ugly wrinkles. It was a photograph of such a bizarre expression—one might have called him “the wrinkled brat”—with something indecent about it and an oddly repulsive quality. I had never before seen a child with such a mysterious expression.

The face in the second photograph had undergone a shockingly drastic transformation. It showed him as a student. Whether it was from his high school years or university years remained unclear, but in any case, he was a student of strikingly handsome appearance. However, strangely enough, this too gave no impression of being a living human. He wore a student uniform with a white handkerchief peeking from the chest pocket, sat on a rattan chair with legs crossed, and yet again was smiling. This smile was no longer the wrinkled simian grin but had become a rather skillful one; however, it differed from human laughter in some indefinable way. Whether one might have called it the weight of blood or the astringency of life—there was not the slightest sense of substance; rather than resembling a bird, it was as light as a feather, merely a single blank sheet of paper—and yet he smiled. In other words, it gave the impression of being entirely artificial from start to finish. Affected didn’t even begin to describe it. Frivolous didn’t even begin to cover it. A smirk didn’t even begin to cover it. Stylish didn’t even begin to cover it, of course. Moreover, upon closer inspection, even this handsome student began to exude something uncanny—a quality reminiscent of ghost stories that made one's skin crawl. I had never once seen such a mysteriously handsome young man before.

The third photograph was the most uncanny.
It was utterly impossible to discern his age.
His hair appeared somewhat streaked with white.
There he sat in a corner of an appallingly filthy room (the photograph clearly showed three sections of the walls crumbling away), hands held over a small brazier—this time, he was not smiling.
There was no expression at all.
In other words, it was a photograph that reeked of something truly loathsome and ominous—as if he had died naturally while sitting there with his hands held over the brazier.
What was strange wasn’t limited to that alone.
In this photograph, his face had been captured relatively large, so I was able to thoroughly examine the structure of that face; however, the forehead was ordinary, the wrinkles on the forehead ordinary, the eyebrows ordinary, the eyes ordinary, the nose, mouth, and chin—ah, this face not only lacked expression but even left no impression.
It had no distinguishing features.
For example: I look at this photograph and close my eyes.
I have already forgotten this face.
I can recall the room’s walls and the small brazier, but the impression of the protagonist’s face in that room vanishes into thin air—no matter how I try, I simply cannot remember it.
It was a face that defied artistic representation.
It was a face that would not even amount to anything in a cartoon.
I open my eyes.
Ah—so this was the face—there wasn’t even the joy of having remembered it.
To put it plainly: even when I open my eyes and look at the photograph again, I cannot recall it.
And then comes only unpleasantness—irritation—an instinctive urge to avert my gaze.

Even what’s called a “deathly countenance” would have some semblance of expression or impression, but if you attached a draft horse’s head to a human body, perhaps it would feel like this—in any case, without any discernible cause, it makes the viewer shudder and fills them with revulsion. I had still never once seen such a mysterious man’s face before.

First Notebook

I have lived a life filled with much shame.
I have no idea what human life is about.

I was born in the countryside of Tohoku, so I did not see a train until I was quite grown.
I would climb up and down the station bridge, completely unaware that it had been built to cross over the tracks, believing instead that it was merely an installation designed to make the station grounds as complex, amusing, and stylish as a foreign amusement park.
Moreover, I had indeed thought so for a considerable length of time.
Climbing up and down the station bridge felt to me like a rather sophisticated game—indeed, I had considered it one of the most ingenious services offered by the railway. But when I later discovered it was merely a utilitarian staircase for passengers to cross over the tracks, my fascination abruptly vanished.

Moreover, as a child, when I saw something called a subway in a picture book, I had thought it too was not devised out of practical necessity but rather because riding in an underground vehicle seemed like a novel and amusing game compared to riding in ones aboveground.

I had been sickly since childhood and was often bedridden, but lying there, I would stare at the mattress covers, pillowcases, and quilt covers and think them utterly frivolous decorations—only to realize around the age of twenty that they were unexpectedly practical items. This revelation about the meagerness of human existence left me despondent and filled with sorrow.

Moreover, I had never known hunger.
No—it was not that I had grown up in a household where one never lacked for food, clothing, or shelter, nor was it some idiotic meaning like that; I simply had no understanding whatsoever of what the sensation called “hunger” even was.
It may sound strange to put it this way, but even when my stomach was empty, I myself failed to notice it.

In elementary and middle school, when I returned home, those around me would fuss: “You must be starving! We remember it too—the hunger when coming home from school is truly dreadful. How about some sweet boiled beans?”
They would make a fuss, saying things like “We have castellas and bread too!” so I would put on my usual ingratiating act, mutter “I’m hungry,” and toss about ten pieces of sweet boiled beans into my mouth—but I still had no idea what this “hunger” was supposed to feel like.

Even I ate a great deal of course, but I had almost no memory of ever eating out of hunger.
I ate things people considered rare.
I ate things people considered luxurious.
And even when dining elsewhere, I would force myself to finish whatever was served.
Thus during my childhood years, my family's mealtimes became my most excruciating ordeal.

At my family’s country house, all about ten of us would arrange our individual meal trays in two facing rows—I, being the youngest child, was of course seated at the very end—and in that dimly lit dining room, during lunchtime especially, the sight of over a dozen family members silently eating their rice always left me feeling chilled to the bone. Moreover, it being an old-fashioned country house, the side dishes were mostly fixed and unchanging—rare or luxurious dishes were entirely beyond hope—so I came to dread mealtimes all the more. There I sat at the lowest seat in that dimly lit room, chattering with cold as I carried small mouthfuls of rice to my lips and forced them down, wondering: Why must humans eat three times a day? Everyone wore such solemn faces while eating—it must be a kind of ritual. Day after day, three times a day, the family gathered in that gloomy room at appointed hours, arranged their meal trays in perfect order, and chewed their rice in silence even when appetite failed them, heads bowed as though praying to the spirits writhing through the house. I had even thought such things.

The words “If you don’t eat, you’ll die” rang in my ears as nothing but an odious threat.
That superstition—(even now it still feels like pure superstition to me)—nevertheless filled me ceaselessly with dread and terror.
Of all phrases, none struck me as more incomprehensible, more impenetrably obscure, more insidiously menacing than this notion that humans must labor to eat lest they perish.

In other words, it seems I still understand nothing at all of human endeavors.
The anxiety that my concept of happiness and that of all people in the world were utterly at odds—because of this anxiety, night after night I would toss and turn, moan, and even come close to madness.
Am I really happy?
Ever since I was a child, I have truly often been told by people that I am a fortunate person, but I myself have always felt as though in hell—on the contrary, those who called me fortunate seemed to me immeasurably more at ease, beyond any comparison.

I have ten lumps of calamity within me—such that even if a neighbor were to shoulder just one of them, that single lump alone would be enough to take their life—such thoughts have even crossed my mind.

In other words, I do not understand.
I cannot grasp the nature or extent of my neighbor’s suffering at all.
Practical suffering—the kind resolved simply by getting a meal—yet that very thing might be the most intense agony, an Avīci hell so horrific it could blow away my ten calamities; I don’t know. But if that’s the case, how do they manage to keep fighting life’s battles without suicide or madness—debating political parties, neither despairing nor yielding? Aren’t they actually free from suffering?
Have they not become complete egoists, firmly convinced it’s only natural, without ever once doubting themselves?
If that’s the case, it must be easy—but then again, aren’t all human beings like that? Maybe that’s perfection itself… I don’t know. Do they sleep soundly at night and wake refreshed in the morning? What dreams do they have? What do they think about while walking down the street? Money?
Surely that can’t be all—I think I’ve heard the theory that human beings live to eat food, but never have I heard anyone say they live for money—no—or rather—...no, I don’t understand that either—...the more I think about it, the less I understand, until I’m assailed by anxiety and terror that I alone am completely different.
I can hardly hold a conversation with my neighbors.
What to say, how to say it—I don’t know.

The idea I came up with then was clowning.

That was my final courtship of humanity.
Though I was utterly terrified of human beings, I apparently couldn't bring myself to sever ties with them altogether.
And so, through this slender thread of clowning, I managed to maintain the barest connection to humankind.
Outwardly I maintained a perpetual smile, while inwardly I devoted myself to this desperate service—a thousand-to-one balancing act on the razor's edge of catastrophe, performed with greasy sweat pouring down my face.

From childhood, even toward my own family members, I had no idea how much they suffered or what thoughts occupied them as they lived. I was simply terrified, unable to endure the awkwardness, and had already become adept at clowning.
In other words, I had, unbeknownst to myself, become a child who did not speak a single word of truth.

When I look at photographs taken with my family from that time, everyone else wears serious expressions while I alone invariably contort my face into a strange grin.
This too was a form of my youthful, sorrowful clowning.

I had never once answered back when reprimanded by family.
Those faint scoldings struck me like thunderclaps, driving me near madness—far from retorting, I became convinced these very rebukes must represent humanity’s so-called “eternal truth.” Since I lacked strength to act on this truth, I concluded I could no longer live among humans.
Thus for me, neither argument nor self-defense was possible.
When criticized, I felt utterly convinced of my own grievous errors, enduring attacks in silence while inwardly trembling with terror enough to unhinge my mind.

It may be that no one feels good when criticized or scolded by others, but in the faces of angry humans, I see an animal nature more terrifying than that of lions, crocodiles, or dragons. Though they seem to conceal this nature ordinarily, when some occasion arises—like a cow lying placidly in a meadow that suddenly flicks its tail to kill a fly on its belly—and I witness this fearsome essence of humanity abruptly laid bare through anger, I always feel a terror that makes my hair stand on end. To think this nature too might be one of humanity’s qualifications to live—this thought brings me near despair.

I was always trembling with terror before human beings; as a human myself, I had not a shred of confidence in my own words and deeds. Locking away my anguish in a small box within my chest, I concealed even my melancholy and nervousness deep within myself, feigning nothing but innocent cheerfulness. In this way, I was gradually perfected into a clownish eccentric.

It didn’t matter what—as long as I kept them laughing. Then perhaps the humans wouldn’t mind too much that I existed outside their so-called “life.” At any rate, I must not become an eyesore to them. The conviction that I was nothingness, wind, empty sky swelled within me. Through clowning, I made my family laugh—and even extended these desperate antics to the male and female servants, who were more incomprehensible and terrifying than my family.

In summer, I would walk through the hallway wearing a red wool sweater under my yukata and make everyone in the house laugh.
Even my eldest brother, who rarely laughed, burst out laughing at the sight,

"Oh, Yozo, that doesn't suit you at all!"

he said in an unbearably affectionate tone.
Now really—even I wasn't such an eccentric who knew neither heat nor cold as to stroll about wearing a wool sweater in midsummer.
I had wrapped my sister's leg warmers around both arms and let them peek out from my yukata sleeves to create the illusion of wearing a sweater.

My father, who had many affairs to attend to in Tokyo, kept a villa in Sakuragi-cho, Ueno where he spent most of every month.
When returning home, he would bring back truly vast quantities of souvenirs for family members and even distant relatives—it was something like my father’s peculiar hobby.

On the eve of one Tokyo departure, Father gathered us children in the parlor and asked each with a smile what souvenirs we wanted him to bring back, diligently recording every answer in his notebook.
For Father to interact this affectionately with his children was an exceedingly rare occurrence.

“Yozo?”

When asked, I stammered and fell silent.

When asked what I wanted, I would suddenly find myself wanting nothing at all.
It didn’t matter—a thought flickered through my mind that nothing would ever bring me joy anyway.
And at the same time, no matter how ill-suited to my tastes the things given to me by others were, I could not refuse them.
I could not say "no" to unpleasant things, and even the things I liked, I would timidly steal and taste with extreme bitterness—thus I was tormented by an inexpressible sense of fear.
In other words, I did not even possess the power to choose between two alternatives.
This propensity, I think, would later become one of the significant causes of what I call "a life filled with shame."

Because I remained silent and fidgeted, Father's face clouded with displeasure,

“So books again?”
“At Asakusa’s Nakamise shops, they’re selling lion dance masks for New Year’s—just the right size for a child to wear while playing. Don’t you want one?”

When met with that “Don’t you want it?”, I was finished.
Not a trace of clowning retort could I muster.
The clown had failed completely.

“Books would be good.”

The eldest brother said with a serious expression.

“I see.”

Father, wearing a look of disappointment, neither wrote it in his notebook nor snapped the notebook shut.

What a blunder—I had angered Father. His retribution would surely be dreadful. That night, trembling violently under the futon while thinking Is there no way to undo this now?, I quietly rose and went to the parlor. Opening the desk drawer where Father must have put away his notebook earlier, I took it out, flipped through the pages until finding the souvenir request section, licked the notebook's pencil, wrote "lion mask," and went back to sleep.
I did not want that lion dance mask at all.
In fact, I would have preferred books.
Yet I had realized that Father wanted to buy that lion mask for me, and solely to accommodate his intention—to restore Father’s good humor—I dared to undertake the risk of sneaking into the parlor late at night.

And so, this drastic measure of mine was indeed rewarded with the great success I had hoped for.

Before long, Father returned from Tokyo, and I heard him speaking loudly to Mother from my room.

“At the Nakamise toy shop—when I opened this notebook—look here, it says ‘lion mask.’”
“This isn’t my handwriting.”
“Hmm?”
He tilted his head in recollection.
“This is Yozo’s mischief!”
“When I asked him earlier, he just smirked silently—but afterward, he must’ve gotten desperate for that lion mask.”
“Well, that boy’s always been an odd one.”
“He pretended not to know a thing yet wrote it down properly.”
“If he wanted it so badly, he should’ve just said so.”
“I laughed right there at the toy shop’s storefront.”
“Call Yozo here immediately.”

On another occasion, I gathered the male and female servants in the Western-style room—though it was the countryside, the house had most things one could need—and made one of the male servants pound chaotically at the piano keys. To that nonsensical melody, I performed an Indian dance for them, sending everyone into uproarious laughter.
My second brother set off a flashbulb to photograph my Indian dance. When the developed photo revealed my small penis peeking through the seam of my loincloth—which was actually a sarasa-patterned wrapping cloth—this again sent the entire household into gales of laughter.
For me, this too might be considered an unexpected success.

I subscribed to over ten new boys' magazines every month and had various other books sent from Tokyo which I read in silence, so I became thoroughly familiar with characters like Dr. Chaos and Dr. Whatchamacallit, and grew quite knowledgeable about ghost stories, heroic narratives, comic monologues, and Edo-period comic sketches. Thus I never lacked for ways to make the household members laugh by delivering absurd remarks with a perfectly straight face.

However, ah, school!

At school, I stood on the precipice of being respected.
The very concept of respect filled me with dread.
To deceive people near-perfectly—only to be exposed by some omniscient being, reduced to splinters, and subjected to humiliation surpassing death itself—this was my definition of what it meant to be “respected.”
Even if you deceived humanity into “respecting” you, someone would know. And when people learned from that someone and realized their deception—what form might their wrath and vengeance take?
Merely imagining it made every hair on my body stand rigid.

Rather than being born into a wealthy family, it was through what people called being "capable" that I nearly earned the respect of the entire school.
From childhood, I was sickly and often missed school for a month or two—even nearly an entire academic year—due to being bedridden. Yet even in my weakened state after illness, I would ride a rickshaw to school and take the year-end exams, appearing more "capable" than anyone else in my class.
Even when in good health, I never studied properly. At school, I spent class time drawing cartoons and such, then during breaks would show them to my classmates and make them laugh.
In composition class too, I wrote nothing but comic tales, continuing even when the teacher warned me against it.
I persisted because I knew the teacher secretly looked forward to these stories.
One day, following an assignment example, I wrote about how I'd urinated into a train aisle spittoon while traveling to Tokyo with Mother—though in reality, I'd known full well it was a spittoon when I did it.
Feigning childish innocence in the act, I composed the story in an exaggeratedly tragic style and submitted it. Certain the teacher would laugh, I stealthily followed him as he returned to the staff room. He immediately plucked my composition from among others' work and began reading it while walking down the hallway, chuckling quietly. By the time he finished reading in the staff room—his face flushed crimson—he was roaring with laughter. When I saw him promptly showing it to other teachers, I felt thoroughly satisfied.

Cheeky one.

I had succeeded in being perceived as the so-called cheeky one.
I succeeded in evading respect.
My report card showed perfect scores in all subjects, yet my conduct marks alone fluctuated between sixes and sevens - this too became fodder for uproarious laughter throughout the household.

Yet my true nature stood diametrically opposed to such cheekiness.
By then, I had already been initiated into sorrowful matters and violated by maids and male servants.
To commit such acts against young children constitutes, I now believe, the most vile, base, and cruel crime within humanity's capacity.
Still, I endured.
I even felt I'd glimpsed another human characteristic, then laughed feebly.
Had I been accustomed to truth-telling, I might have unflinchingly reported their crimes to Father or Mother. Yet I found myself incapable of fully comprehending even those parents of mine.
Placing hope in human appeals proved impossible.
Whether appealing to Father, Mother, constables, or government officials - wouldn't it all culminate in being lectured into submission by society's smooth navigators, their words buffed to a public sheen?

It was perfectly clear that there would always be some critical flaw—after all, appealing to humans was futile. I had no choice but to continue enduring without uttering a single truth, persisting in my clowning.

What—am I speaking of distrust toward humans?
Hmm?
There may be those who mock, "When did you become a Christian?" However, it seems to me that distrust of humanity does not necessarily lead one immediately down the path of religion.
In fact, even those who mock are included among humanity, living unperturbed in mutual distrust without giving a thought to Jehovah or anything else.
Indeed, it was during my early childhood: a notable figure from the political party Father belonged to came to this town to give a speech, and I was taken by the male servants to hear him at the theater.
The theater was packed; moreover, all the faces of people in this town who were particularly close to Father were visible, and they were clapping enthusiastically.
After the speech ended, the audience—clustered in small groups along the snowy night road as they began their journey home—were all the while trashing the night’s lecture.
Among them, the voices of people particularly close to Father could also be heard.
“Both Father’s opening address was poor and that so-called notable person’s lecture was utterly incomprehensible,” declared these so-called “comrades” of Father in tones resembling angry shouts.
And then those people stopped by my house, entered the parlor, and with genuinely happy-looking faces told Father that tonight’s lecture had been a great success.
Even the male servants were asked by Mother how the lecture was tonight, and they nonchalantly replied, "It was very interesting."
"There's nothing as boring as a lecture," the male servants lamented to each other on their way home.

However, this was but a trivial example. It seemed to me human life overflowed with such vivid instances of distrust—so pristine, luminous, and buoyant—where people deceived one another without sustaining a single wound, utterly oblivious to their mutual deceit. Yet I myself felt no particular interest in their deceptions. Through clowning, I too deceived people from dawn till dusk. Textbook ethics—that morality preaching justice and such—held little appeal for me. Those who lived with radiant cheer while deceiving others, or who believed they could do so, struck me as utterly unfathomable. Humans never did impart to me their profound truth. Had I grasped it, perhaps I wouldn’t have trembled so before people or rendered such desperate service. Perhaps I could have avoided nightly hells of suffering by not opposing human life itself. In short, my silence about the servants’ vile crimes stemmed neither from distrust nor Christ-like virtue—it was because humanity had sealed its shell of trust against me, Yozo. Even my parents would occasionally reveal something beyond my comprehension.

And it seems to me that this scent of my loneliness—which I confided to no one—was instinctively detected by many women, becoming one of the factors that later led to me being taken advantage of in various ways.

In other words, I was—for women—a man who could keep secrets of love; that was the reason.

The Second Notebook

On a shore so close to the sea it might as well be the tideline, over twenty fairly large mountain cherry trees with jet-black bark stood lined up. When the new school year began, these cherry trees would bloom with resplendent flowers against the backdrop of the blue sea alongside their sticky brownish tender leaves. Then, during the flurry of falling blossoms, petals would scatter abundantly into the sea, littering the water’s surface as they drifted until waves carried them back to wash ashore again. At a certain middle school in Tohoku where this cherry-blossomed sandy beach itself served as the schoolyard, I somehow managed to enroll without even properly studying for the entrance exams.
Moreover, on both the school cap emblem and uniform buttons, cherry blossoms were stylized to bloom.

Since there was a house belonging to a distant relative of ours very close to that middle school—as well as our own home nearby—Father had chosen that seaside cherry-blossomed middle school for me among other reasons.
I was entrusted to that household and, given its proximity to the school, became quite the lazy middle schooler who would dash to class only after hearing the morning assembly bell. Yet through my customary clowning, I grew more popular among my classmates with each passing day.

For the first time since being born, I had ventured out—so to speak—into a foreign land, yet to me, that foreign land felt like a far more comfortable place than my own hometown.
One could explain this as my clowning having by then become thoroughly ingrained, no longer requiring the same effort to deceive others as before—but more than that, does there not exist an inescapable disparity in the difficulty of performance between family and strangers, hometown and foreign lands, a disparity that persists even for the greatest genius, nay, even for Jesus, the Son of God?
For an actor, the most difficult place to perform would be a hometown theater—and moreover, in a single room where all one’s relatives are gathered, wouldn’t even the greatest actor find themselves unable to act?
However, I had been performing.
Moreover, it had achieved considerable success.
For such a seasoned performer, there was no chance of failing to act once he had ventured into foreign lands.

My dread of humanity wriggled just as violently—if not more so—in the depths of my chest as it ever had before, yet my acting had grown truly effortless. In the classroom, I always made my classmates laugh, and even the teachers would lament aloud, “This class would be perfectly fine if only Oba weren’t here,” while covering their mouths with their hands to stifle laughter.
I could even make that assigned military officer—with his thunderous brutish voice—burst out laughing with remarkable ease.

Just as I began to relax, thinking I might have completely concealed my true nature at last, I was stabbed from behind—utterly unexpectedly.
He was—as might be expected of a boy who would stab someone from behind—a student with the most frail physique in our class: a face swollen and sallow, wearing a hand-me-down coat from some relative, its sleeves as absurdly long as those of Prince Shōtoku’s robes. He could barely manage his studies and always sat out during drills and gymnastics—a near-idiot.
Even I had not recognized the need to be wary of that student.

On that day during gym class, that student (whose surname I can’t recall now, though I believe his given name was Takeichi)—this Takeichi was observing as usual while we practiced on the horizontal bar.
I put on my most solemn face, shouted “Hup!” as I leapt toward the bar, went sailing forward like a long jumper, and landed with a thud on my backside in the sandy ground.
It was all premeditated failure.
Just as everyone erupted in laughter and I stood up brushing sand from my trousers with a strained smile, Takeichi—who had materialized behind me unnoticed—prodded my back and whispered in a low voice:

“An act.”
“Act.”

I was shaken.
That my intentional failure had been seen through—and by Takeichi of all people—was something I never could have imagined.
I felt as though I were witnessing the world being engulfed in hell’s flames and burning to ashes in an instant—Ah!
I shouted and with desperate force suppressed the madness threatening to consume me.

The days that followed—my anxiety and fear.

Outwardly I continued performing my sorrowful clowning to amuse everyone, but suddenly I let slip a leaden sigh—for no matter what I did, Takeichi had utterly exposed every fiber of my act. As I realized he would inevitably go about telling everyone indiscriminately, oily sweat beaded on my forehead, and I began glancing around with madman’s eyes, darting my gaze about futilely.
If possible, I wanted to stay by Takeichi’s side morning, noon, evening—every hour of the day—keeping watch to prevent him from blurting out the secret.
Thus, while clinging to him, I exerted every effort to make him believe my clowning was not an “act” but something genuine; if possible, I wanted to become his closest friend. If even that proved entirely impossible, I resolved that there was nothing left but to pray for his death.
However, try as I might, I couldn’t muster the actual urge to kill him.
In my life thus far, I have many times desired to be killed by someone, but I have never once thought of killing another person.
That was because I believed it would only bring happiness to those fearsome opponents.

To tame him, I first plastered a false Christian’s “gentle” ingratiating smile across my face, tilted my neck thirty degrees leftward, lightly embraced his small shoulders, and in a saccharine voice reminiscent of a cat’s purr repeatedly invited him to visit my boarding house—yet he would only stare vacantly and stay silent.
However, one afternoon after school—early summer without doubt—a sudden downpour fell in pale sheets, stranding students struggling to return home. Since my house stood nearby, I casually moved to dash outside when I spotted Takeichi slumped dejectedly behind the shoe lockers. “Come—I’ll lend you an umbrella,” I said, tugging his hesitant hand as we raced through the rain. Arriving home, I asked the landlady to dry our jackets and managed to coax Takeichi up to my second-floor room.

In that house lived a landlady in her fifties, a tall, sickly-looking older sister around thirty who wore glasses (this woman had once married into another family but had since returned home), and...
(I had taken to calling her Anesa, following the example of others in the house.) Along with her was a younger sister named Secchan—short in stature with a round face, unlike her sister—who had apparently just graduated from girls’ school. The three of them made up the entire family. Downstairs, they displayed a modest assortment of stationery and sporting goods, but their primary income seemed to come from the rent of five or six tenement houses that the deceased master had built and left behind.

“My ears hurt.”

Takeichi said this while standing.

“They started hurting after getting wet in the rain.”

When I looked, both ears were severely infected.
Pus was on the verge of flowing out from them.

“This is serious!”
“That must hurt.”

I put on an exaggerated show of surprise,

“I’m sorry for dragging you out into the rain like that.”

Using womanly speech patterns, I “gently” apologized, then went downstairs to get cotton and alcohol. I had Takeichi rest his head on my lap and thoroughly cleaned his ears.
Even Takeichi appeared not to have noticed this hypocritical scheme.

“You’ll surely be fallen for by women.”

Lying there with his head on my lap, Takeichi offered nothing more than some foolish flattery.

Yet it was in later years that I came to realize this had been a terrifying diabolical prophecy—one made to an extent even Takeichi himself hadn’t comprehended.
Whether saying "falling for" or "being fallen for," these words feel utterly vulgar, frivolous, and sleazy—no matter how supposedly "solemn" the occasion might be, should even one such phrase casually appear, it feels as though the cathedral of melancholy would instantly collapse into mere flatness. Yet when using a literary expression like "the anxiety of being loved" instead of crude phrases like "the pain of being fallen for," it seems this melancholy cathedral doesn’t entirely get demolished. How strange.

Takeichi had me tend to the pus from his ear infection and spouted that idiotic flattery—"You’ll be fallen for by women"—and though at the time I merely blushed and laughed without responding, in truth, I had a faint inkling of what he meant.
Yet to write that being told such things—amidst the sleazy atmosphere conjured by vulgar phrases like “be fallen for”—made me “have an inkling” would demonstrate a sentiment as foolish as lines spoken by rakugo’s young master protagonists. Let me be clear: I did not harbor such frivolous, tawdry feelings when claiming to “have an inkling.”

For me, human women were several times more incomprehensible than men.
In my family, women outnumbered men, and our relatives too included many girls—not to mention those maidservants involved in what were called "criminal" acts. It would be no exaggeration to say I had been raised from earliest childhood playing almost exclusively with women. Yet all my interactions with these female companions had been conducted with the constant sensation of treading on thin ice.
I had almost no idea at all.
Lost in a five-league fog, I would occasionally commit the grave error of treading on a tiger’s tail and suffer terrible wounds—wounds that, unlike the lashes received from men, festered inward like internal bleeding with an intensely unpleasant persistence, proving nearly impossible to heal.

Women would draw me close then push me away; or again, women would scorn me and act coldly when others were present, only to cling tightly once alone; women slept as if dead; women might even live solely for sleep—alongside these, I had already acquired various other observations about women since childhood. Though they seemed like fellow humans, they felt entirely different creatures from men, and these incomprehensible creatures that brooked no carelessness paid me this strange attention.
Phrases like “being fallen for” or “being liked” were not at all appropriate in my case—“being pestered” might have been a more fitting description of the actual circumstances.

Women seemed to relax even more than men in the face of clowning.
When I performed my clowning, men at least wouldn’t keep uproariously laughing forever, and since I also knew that getting carried away with excessive clowning toward men would backfire, I always made sure to conclude it at an appropriate point—but women knew no moderation, endlessly demanding more clowning from me, and I would exhaust myself complying with their limitless encores.
They truly laughed often.
Generally speaking, women seemed capable of stuffing themselves with pleasure more voraciously than men.

The older sister and younger sister from the house where I stayed during my middle school years would come up to my second-floor room whenever they had a moment to spare. Each time they did, I was startled enough to leap up, trembling in pure fear.

“Are you studying?”

“No.”

I smiled and closed the book.

“So today at school, there was this geography teacher named Konbo who…”

What flowed smoothly from my mouth was a heartless comedic tale.

“Yozo, try putting on glasses.”

One evening, after Secchan came to my room with Anesa and made me perform my clowning act relentlessly, she finally said such a thing.

“Why?”

“Just put them on. Borrow Anesa’s glasses.”

They always spoke in this rough, commanding tone.
The clown obediently put on Anesa’s glasses.
The instant he did, the two girls burst into uproarious laughter.

“The spitting image!”
“The spitting image of Lloyd!”

At the time, a certain foreign comedy actor named Harold Lloyd had gained popularity in Japan.

I stood up and raised one hand,

“Ladies and gentlemen,”
and said,
“To all the esteemed fans of Japan on this occasion…”
I attempted a formal address, made them laugh even harder, then—every time Harold Lloyd’s films came to the theater in that town—went to see them and secretly studied his facial expressions.

And then, one autumn night, as I lay reading in bed, Anesa flitted into my room like a bird and collapsed onto my futon weeping—
“Yozo, you’ll help me, won’t you?
Yes… that’s right.
We should leave this house together.
Help me.
Help me.”

She would blurt out such vehement words only to burst into tears again.
Yet this was not the first time I had been subjected to such displays from a woman, so Anesa’s extreme declarations failed to shock me. Rather, feeling disenchanted by their trite emptiness, I quietly slipped out from under the futon, peeled the persimmon on the desk, and handed her a slice.
Then Anesa ate the persimmon between convulsive sobs, and

“Do you have any interesting books? Lend it to me,” she said.

I selected Soseki’s “I Am a Cat” from the bookshelf and gave it to her.

“Thanks for the treat.”

Anesa left the room with an embarrassed smile, but not just her—to me, pondering what feelings women lived by felt more complicated, troublesome, and eerie than probing the thoughts of earthworms. Still, I had known since childhood—through my own experience—that when women suddenly burst into tears like that, if you handed them something sweet, they would eat it and cheer up.

Moreover, the younger sister Secchan would even bring her friends to my room. I would make everyone laugh impartially according to precedent, and when the friends left, Secchan would invariably speak ill of them.
She would invariably say, "That girl is a delinquent, so you should be careful."
If that was how it was, she shouldn't have gone out of her way to bring them here—because of that, nearly all visitors to my room ended up being women.

However, that still fell far short of realizing Takeichi’s hollow praise about being “adored.” In other words, I was merely Japan’s Tohoku-region Harold Lloyd. Only years later did Takeichi’s ignorant flattery—lingering like an accursed prophecy—begin taking on an ominous shape.

Takeichi had bestowed upon me another crucial gift.

“It’s a monster painting.”

One day when Takeichi came to visit me upstairs, he proudly showed me a color-printed frontispiece he had brought and explained it as such.

Oh? I thought.
At that moment—a sensation I couldn’t shake even years later—it felt as though my path of decline had been decided.
I knew.
I knew it was merely Van Gogh’s notorious self-portrait.
In our boyhood days, French Impressionist paintings had become wildly popular in Japan, with most people beginning their appreciation of Western art through this movement. Even country middle school students generally knew works by painters like Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Luce through photographic reproductions.
As for me, I’d seen numerous Van Gogh color prints myself and taken interest in their peculiar brushwork and vivid hues. Yet never once had I thought of them as “monster paintings.”

“Then, what about this one?”
“So, is this a monster too, I wonder?”

I took Modigliani’s art book from the shelf and showed Takeichi the nude figure with skin resembling scorched bronze.

“Damn!”

Takeichi’s eyes widened in astonishment.

“Like a horse from hell.”

“So it’s a monster after all.”

“I wanna paint monsters like this too.”

Those who fear humanity too intensely paradoxically come to desire—with ever greater urgency—to behold terrifying specters with their own eyes; the more neurotic and easily frightened people are, the more they pray for storms to grow fiercer. Ah! These painters had been tormented and threatened by the monster called human until, in the end, they came to believe in phantasms—specters they saw vividly within daylight’s natural world. Moreover, they strove to express these visions as they appeared, without disguising them through clowning. Just as Takeichi had said, they resolutely painted “monster paintings.” Here were comrades of my future self—I grew so excited that tears welled up,

“I’ll paint them too.
“I’ll paint monster paintings.”
“I’ll paint a horse from hell.”

For some reason,” I said to Takeichi in a hushed voice.

Since elementary school, I had liked both drawing pictures and looking at them.
However, the paintings I drew did not receive as favorable a reputation from those around me as my writing did.
I had never placed any trust in human words to begin with, so my compositions were nothing more than clownish pleasantries to me. From elementary school through middle school, they sent my teachers into raptures, but I found them utterly uninteresting. With my paintings, however—though manga was another matter—I did put some effort into expressing my subjects, albeit through immature self-taught methods.
The school’s art examples were boring, the teacher’s paintings were terrible, and I had to haphazardly devise and try out various methods of expression entirely on my own.
When I entered middle school, I acquired a full set of oil painting tools. But even when I sought to model my brushwork after the Impressionist style, what I painted ended up as flat and lifeless as gaudy paper crafts, never amounting to anything.
However, through Takeichi’s words, I realized that my entire approach to painting up until then had been utterly mistaken.
The naivety, the foolishness of striving to beautifully express what one finds beautiful just as it is.
The masters would beautifully create something out of nothing through their subjectivity, or immerse themselves in the joy of expression without concealing their interest even while being nauseated by ugliness—in other words, they seemed not to rely at all on others’ perceptions—this primitive secret manual of painting technique was bestowed upon me by Takeichi. Concealing it from the regular female visitors, I gradually began creating self-portraits.

Even I was startled by how ghastly the painting turned out. Yet this was my true nature hidden deep in the recesses of my heart—though outwardly I laughed cheerfully and made others laugh, in truth I harbored such gloom within myself. There’s no helping it, I secretly affirmed, yet I never showed that painting to anyone besides Takeichi. Not only did I detest the prospect of others discerning the ghastly underbelly beneath my clowning and being met with petty suspicion, but I also feared they might interpret this as merely another novel comedic act rather than recognizing it as my true self—that it might become fodder for uproarious laughter. This was the most unbearable thought of all, so I immediately stored the painting deep within my closet.

Moreover, even during school art classes, I kept that "monster-style technique" concealed and continued painting in the same ordinary manner of depicting beautiful things as beautiful through mundane brushwork.

I had long been casually revealing my sensitive nerves to Takeichi alone, and when I showed him my latest self-portrait without reservation, he praised it extravagantly. I went on painting two or three more monster pictures, and from Takeichi came another—

“You’ll become a great painter.”

I received this prophecy.

Branded with these two prophecies—that I would be adored and become a great painter—by the fool Takeichi, I eventually made my way to Tokyo.

I had wanted to enter art school, but Father had long since declared his intention to enroll me in high school and ultimately make me a government official. Being constitutionally incapable of offering a single word in response, I vaguely complied.
Since I was told to take the entrance exam starting from the fourth year, and I had grown thoroughly weary of Sakura and Sea Middle School, without advancing to the fifth year and remaining a fourth-year graduate, I took and passed the entrance exam for a Tokyo high school, immediately entered dormitory life, but became utterly disgusted by its filth and roughness—to the point where clowning was out of the question—had a doctor write me a diagnosis of lung infiltration, left the dormitory, and moved into my father’s villa in Ueno Sakuragi-cho.
For me, group life was simply impossible.
Moreover, words like “youthful passion” or “pride of young men” sent chills down my spine—I simply couldn’t keep up with that so-called high school spirit.
Both the classrooms and the dormitory even felt like a cesspool of distorted sexual desire, and even my near-perfect clowning was utterly useless there.

When Parliament was not in session, Father stayed at that house for only one or two weeks per month. During his absences, only the elderly caretaker couple and I remained in that rather spacious house. I often skipped school—though I had no inclination to go sightseeing in Tokyo either (it seems I’ll end up never seeing Meiji Shrine, the Statue of Kusunoki Masashige, or the Graves of the Forty-Seven Ronin at Sengakuji)—and spent entire days at home reading books and painting.
When Father came up to Tokyo, I would hurriedly leave for school every morning, but there were times when I would instead go to the art studio of Mr. Yasuda Shintaro, a Western-style painter in Hongo Sendagi-machi, and spend three or even four hours practicing sketching.
After escaping the high school dormitory, even when I attended school classes, I felt like an auditor in some special position—though this might have been my own resentment—until I began feeling utterly insincere with myself, making it all the more bothersome to go to school.
Throughout elementary school, middle school, and high school, I never came to understand what school spirit was supposed to be.
I never once tried to memorize something like a school song either.

Before long at the art studio, I was introduced to alcohol, tobacco, prostitutes, pawnshops, and leftist ideology by a certain art student.
It was an odd combination of vices, yet undeniably factual.

That art student was named Horiki Masao. Born in Tokyo’s Shitamachi district, six years my senior, he had graduated from a private art school but, having no atelier at home, attended this studio to continue his studies in Western painting—or so it was said.

“Can you lend me five yen?”

We had merely recognized each other’s faces until then and had never exchanged a single word.
I flusteredly handed over five yen.

“Alright, let’s drink.”
“I’ll treat you.”
“Fine choice, eh?”

I couldn’t refuse and was dragged to a café in Horai-cho near the art studio, which marked the beginning of my friendship with him.

“I’ve had my eye on you for a while now. That’s it—that bashful smile of yours! That’s the distinctive look of an artist with promise. To mark our new acquaintance—cheers! Kin-san, isn’t this guy a handsome one? Don’t go falling for him. Thanks to this guy coming to the studio, I’ve regrettably been relegated to second place in the handsome rankings.”

Horiki had a tanned, well-featured face—unusually for an art student—wore a proper serge suit, favored subdued neckties, and kept his hair parted straight down the middle with pomade.

I was in an unfamiliar place and utterly terrified, crossing and uncrossing my arms while forcing bashful smiles, but after drinking two or three glasses of beer, I began to feel a strange, liberated lightness.

“I had thought about entering art school, but…”

“Nah, that’s boring.
“Such places are boring.”
“School’s boring.”
“Our teachers reside in nature!”
“Pathos toward nature!”

However, I felt not an ounce of respect for his words.
He was a fool—undoubtedly incompetent at painting—but I thought he might serve as a suitable companion for dissipation.
In other words, this marked my first encounter with a genuine urban wastrel.
Though our forms differed, we were kindred spirits in our complete detachment from human endeavors and shared bewilderment within this world.
Yet he engaged in clowning without self-awareness, remaining utterly blind to its wretchedness—this constituted our fundamental difference in nature.

While constantly telling myself I was merely keeping company with him as a plaything—while despising him and even feeling ashamed of our friendship—I ultimately found myself defeated by this man through our very act of walking side by side.

However, at first I had thought of this man as nothing but a good person—a rare specimen of decency—and even someone as terrified of humans as I was had let my guard down completely, believing I’d found myself a reliable guide to Tokyo.

The truth was, when alone, I found even riding the tram terrifying—the conductor filled me with dread. Though I wanted to enter the Kabuki-za, those usherettes standing lined up on both sides of the crimson-carpeted staircase at the main entrance daunted me. When entering a restaurant, the waiter silently waiting behind me for plates to clear frightened me. Most of all when settling bills—ah, my own clumsy gestures! When handing over money while shopping, it wasn’t out of miserliness but from sheer tension, shame, anxiety, and terror that my head would spin, the world turning pitch black until I verged on delirium. Far from haggling, I’d not only forget to take my change but even leave purchased items behind—so frequently that walking Tokyo’s streets alone became impossible. Thus I had no choice but to spend entire days lazing about the house.

When I handed my wallet to Horiki and walked alongside him, he would haggle fiercely—a master of thrift—demonstrating a payment style that maximized effect with minimal funds. He avoided pricey entaku taxis, skillfully navigating between streetcars, buses, and steam launches to reach destinations in the shortest time. On mornings returning from prostitutes’ quarters, he’d take me to certain ryotei inns for dawn baths and light sake with yudofu, practically teaching me how cheap indulgences could feel luxurious. He extolled the affordability and nourishment of stall-served gyumeshi grilled beef and assured me nothing beat electric brandy for swift intoxication. Most crucially, he never once let me feel anxiety or dread over settling bills.

Moreover, what saved me in associating with Horiki was that he utterly disregarded his listener's expectations and, letting his so-called passion gush forth (or perhaps passion means precisely this disregard for others' positions), chattered incessantly about trivialities day and night—so that we never faced the dreaded prospect of two people walking until exhausted and lapsing into awkward silence.

When interacting with people, wary that dreadful silence might descend, I—who had never been much of a talker—had desperately resorted to clowning as a last resort. But now this fool Horiki was unconsciously yet eagerly performing the clown's role himself, so I could simply let his words wash over me without proper reply, occasionally interjecting a "Surely not!" with a laugh—and that sufficed.

Alcohol, tobacco, and prostitutes—I came to realize that all these were remarkably effective means, even if only temporarily, of distracting myself from the terror of human beings. To obtain those means, I even came to harbor feelings that I wouldn’t regret selling all my possessions.

To me, prostitutes appeared neither human nor female—they seemed like idiots or lunatics—yet in their embrace, I could instead sleep soundly with complete peace of mind. They were all so pitifully devoid of even a speck of desire. Perhaps because I felt something like an affinity with fellow beings in them, I was always shown a natural kindness by those prostitutes—one that never felt stifling. Goodwill devoid of any calculation, goodwill that wasn’t forced, goodwill toward someone who might never return—to me, there were nights when I saw Mary’s halo manifest in reality upon those idiots or lunatic prostitutes.

However, in seeking to escape my terror of people and find faint respite for a single night, I would go there and consort with those prostitutes who were indeed my “kindred spirits.” Yet before I knew it, I had unconsciously come to perpetually exude a certain unsavory atmosphere about me—a so-called “bonus appendix” I had never anticipated. Gradually this “appendix” rose vividly to the surface until Horiki pointed it out, leaving me aghast and filled with revulsion. To put it crudely from an outsider’s perspective, I had undergone training in women through prostitutes—and with markedly improved technique of late, for they say such training under prostitutes is the most rigorous and consequently effective. Already the stench of being “skilled with women” clung to me, and females (not limited to prostitutes) would instinctively detect this and draw near. I had received this lewd and dishonorable atmosphere as a “bonus appendix,” one that now seemed to stand out far more conspicuously than any rest I might take.

Horiki had likely said this half in flattery, but even I had to somberly acknowledge its truth—for instance, I recalled receiving a clumsy letter from a café girl; the girl next door in Sakuragaoka—a shogun’s daughter around twenty—who each morning at my school departure time would apply light makeup and linger by her own gate without apparent purpose; when I went for beef hotpot, even if I stayed silent, the maid there would…; the cigarette boxes handed to me by the daughter at my usual tobacco shop contained…; at Kabuki performances, the person in the neighboring seat would…; on late-night trams when I dozed off drunk…; an unexpected desperate letter arriving from a cousin’s daughter back home…; an unknown girl leaving what seemed a handmade doll during my absence…. Yet due to my extreme passivity, each remained a mere fragment with no further development—but that some atmosphere clung to me, making women dream, was undeniable; this was no idle joke about romantic boasts or such.
I was made aware of this by someone like Horiki and felt a bitterness akin to humiliation; at the same time, I suddenly lost interest in consorting with prostitutes as well.

Horiki, driven once more by his show-off modernity (to this day I can conceive of no other motive in his case), one day took me to what was called a communist study group—or perhaps R.S., my memory falters—one of those secret research meetings.
For someone like Horiki, even communist secret meetings might have been just another entry in his repertoire of “Tokyo Sightseeing.”
I was introduced to so-called “comrades,” compelled to purchase a pamphlet, then subjected to a lecture on Marxist economics from a youth with a grotesquely ugly face seated in the place of honor.
Yet to me, it all seemed self-evident.
That might hold true, I thought, but within the human heart dwell things far more incomprehensible and dreadful.
To name it desire falls short; vanity falls short; even coupling lust with desire still falls short. Though I couldn’t articulate it, I sensed something spectral—beyond mere economics—lurking beneath human society’s foundations. Terrified by this phantom, I affirmed materialism as naturally as water seeks low ground, yet it granted me no liberation from human terror, no power to behold verdant leaves or taste hope’s sweetness.
Still I attended every R.S.—if that was indeed its name—meeting without fail. The sight of “comrades” stiffening their faces over theories as rudimentary as elementary arithmetic—one plus one equals two—struck me as unbearably absurd. With my usual clowning antics, I labored to relax the gatherings until gradually the stifling atmosphere dissolved, and I became what seemed an indispensable favorite.
These simple souls likely mistook me for one of their own—another optimistic jester among “comrades.” If so, then I had deceived them utterly.
I was no comrade.
Yet I attended every meeting without fail and served them my clowning.

It was because I liked it.
For me, it was because I liked those people.
However, that affection was not necessarily one formed through Marx.

Illegality.
To me, there was a faint pleasure in that.
Rather, it felt comfortable.
The legal aspects of society were, if anything, even more terrifying—they seemed to hint at some unfathomably powerful force beneath—and their mechanisms were so inscrutable that I couldn’t bear to sit in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Even if outside lay a sea of illegality, I found it far easier to plunge in and swim until death claimed me.

There is a term: "person of the shadows." The term “person of the shadows” seems to denote those pitiful failures and wrongdoers pointed at in human society, but I have always felt myself to be one born into those shadows. Whenever I encountered someone deemed by society worthy of being labeled a person of the shadows, my heart would unfailingly soften. And this “gentle heart” of mine was one so tender it could make me swoon with self-admiration.

There is also a term: “guilty conscience.” In this human world, while tormented my entire life by that consciousness, it became to me a faithful spouse who shared my coarse rice and bran—to lament alone with it in desolate play may have been my very mode of existence. There’s also the saying about “a man bearing wounds on his shins,” and indeed such a wound had appeared naturally on one of mine in infancy. Far from healing as I grew, it only festered deeper until it gnawed at the bone itself. Though my nightly agonies were a thousand shifting hells—and this is a most peculiar way to put it—that wound gradually grew dearer to me than my own flesh and blood. Its pain became the wound’s living emotion, even a whisper of affection. For such a man, the atmosphere of those underground groups felt strangely reassuring, their texture suiting me more than the movement’s original purpose ever could.

In Horiki’s case, it was pure idiocy—he introduced me to that meeting just once before making some clumsy pun about Marxists needing to study “consumption aspects” alongside production, then never attended again, forever trying to lure me toward that so-called observational side.

Looking back, there were all manner of Marxists in those days. There were those like Horiki who claimed allegiance through vanity-driven modernity, and others like myself who settled there simply relishing illegality’s scent—had genuine Marxist believers exposed our true natures, both Horiki and I would have been furiously denounced as vile traitors and expelled immediately.

Yet neither I nor even Horiki faced expulsion. Particularly within that illegal world, I could comport myself with far greater ease—so-called “health”—than among lawful gentlemen’s society. Thus I became entrusted as a promising “comrade” with preposterously clandestine tasks that nearly made me burst into laughter.

In truth, I never once refused such tasks—accepting everything with nonchalance, never botching operations through clumsy missteps that might draw police suspicion or interrogation. Laughing all the while, making others laugh too, I precisely executed their so-called dangerous work—work laughably trivial (the movement’s members treated it with grave tension, employing extreme caution bordering on bad detective novel theatrics while inflating these errands with exaggerated importance).

As for my mindset then—had I become a party member and been arrested to spend life in prison, I would have been perfectly untroubled. Dreading human society’s “real life” while groaning nightly in insomnia’s hell, I even came to think prison might prove easier.

At Father’s villa in Sakuragi-cho, between his guests and outings, even when we were under the same roof, we might go three or even four days without meeting face-to-face. Yet no matter how stifling and terrifying I found him—no matter how I contemplated leaving this house for rented lodgings—I could never voice it. Just then, I heard from the villa’s elderly caretaker that Father apparently intended to sell the property outright.

Father’s term as a Diet member was drawing to its close—there must have been various reasons—but he showed no inclination to stand for re-election again. Having built a retirement residence in his hometown too, he seemed to harbor no lingering attachment to Tokyo. Presumably he deemed it wasteful to maintain an estate with servants for me—a mere high school student—(Father’s mind, like ordinary people’s feelings generally, remained beyond my comprehension). At any rate, the house soon changed hands, and I moved into a dim room at an old boarding house called Senyūkan in Hongō Morikawa-chō, where I immediately faced financial hardship.

Until then, I had been handed a fixed monthly allowance from Father—even if it vanished in two or three days, tobacco, alcohol, cheeses, and fruits were always available at home. Books, stationery, clothing-related items—everything could be obtained on so-called “credit” from neighborhood shops. When treating Horiki to soba or tempura rice bowls at a shop in the neighborhood that Father frequented, I could simply leave in silence without settling the bill.

Suddenly finding myself living alone in lodgings and forced to manage everything through fixed monthly remittances left me utterly bewildered.
The money vanished within two or three days as always. Shuddering with dread and driven near mad by loneliness,I fired off telegrams begging Father,Brother,Sister,and others for funds in rotation—alongside Isai-fumi letters(whose pleaded circumstances were pure clownish fabrications)—while also pawning belongings under Horiki’s tutelage.Yet still,I remained perpetually destitute.
While bombarding them with letters(I’d concluded laughter was optimal when soliciting favors),I diligently followed Horiki’s pawnshop lessons—yet still,I remained perpetually destitute.

In the end, I lacked any capacity to "live" alone in that boarding house devoid of connections. Terrified to remain still in that room—convinced someone might assault me at any moment—I would flee into the streets, alternating between assisting the movement as always and drinking cheap liquor with Horiki. My studies and art practice lay nearly abandoned when, in November of my second high school year, I became entangled in a love suicide with a married woman older than myself—an event that transformed my circumstances beyond recognition.

Though I skipped school and did no studying whatsoever, my exam answers somehow showed an uncanny knack for efficiency, and up until then, I had managed to deceive my family back home. However, it seemed the school had now begun secretly reporting matters like my insufficient attendance days to Father, for my eldest brother—acting on Father’s behalf—started sending me stern, lengthy letters.
However, more than anything, my immediate suffering stemmed from having no money and from the fact that the tasks for our usual movement had grown so intense and demanding that I could no longer approach them with a half-hearted attitude.
Whether it was called the Central District or some other district—in any case, I had become something like the action squad leader for all the Marxist students at schools in Hongō, Koishikawa, Shitaya, Kanda, and those surrounding areas.
Upon hearing “armed uprising,” I bought a small knife—flimsy thing, now that I think of it, inadequate even for sharpening pencils—stuffed it into my Lencoat pocket, and raced about everywhere to establish so-called “liaisons.”
I wanted to drink and sleep soundly, but I had no money.
Moreover, from P (I recall we used that code name for the Party, though I might be mistaken) came request after request for tasks, leaving me no time to catch my breath.
With my sickly body, I could no longer keep up.
From the start, I had only been helping that group out of an interest in illegality, but when things grew absurdly busy—as if a joke had spiraled out of control—I found myself unable to suppress a bitter urge to secretly tell the P members, *“This is misplaced—why not have your direct lineage handle it?”* And so I fled.
I ran away, but after all, feeling no sense of relief, I decided to die.

At that time, there were three women who had special feelings for me.
One was the daughter of Senyūkan, the boarding house where I stayed.
This girl would invariably come to my room with stationery and a fountain pen after I returned exhausted from assisting the usual movement and collapsed into bed without eating.

“I’m sorry.
My younger sister and brother are being so noisy downstairs, I can’t even write a letter in peace.”

With that, she would sit facing her desk and write something or other for over an hour.

I should have just pretended not to notice and kept lying there, but seeing how desperately the girl seemed to want me to say something, I summoned my usual passive spirit of service—though I truly didn’t want to utter a single word—and with my body utterly exhausted, grunted as I pushed myself onto my stomach, lit a cigarette,

“I hear there was a man who became so agitated over a love letter from a woman that he went and heated the bath.”

“Oh, how awful! That was you, wasn’t it?”

“I have boiled milk and drunk it before.”

“What an honor! Go ahead and drink it.”

Why won’t she just leave? This whole letter act is painfully obvious. She’s probably just doodling some silly characters or something.

“Let me see.”

When I forced those words out—I’d sooner die than look—she cried, “Oh, no! Oh, no!” Her feigned delight was so unseemly it killed whatever interest remained. So I figured I should give her an errand to run.

“Sorry to trouble you, but could you go to the pharmacy on the tram street and buy some Calmotin for me? I’m so exhausted my face is burning up—it’s keeping me awake instead. Sorry about that. The money,……”

“It’s fine—don’t worry about the money.”

“I’ll gladly go.”

I knew full well that assigning errands never disheartened women—on the contrary, they positively delighted in being asked favors by men.

The second was a so-called “comrade”—a literature student at the Women’s Higher Normal School.
With this person, due to matters related to the usual movement, I had no choice but to meet face-to-face every day.
Even after our meetings ended, the woman would follow me around endlessly and kept buying me all sorts of things.

“You can think of me as your real sister.”

Shuddering at her affectation, I,

"That's how I intend to keep it."

With a sorrow-laden smile, I answered.
In any case, driven solely by the fear that angering her would be terrifying and that I must somehow deceive her, I found myself increasingly serving that ugly, unpleasant woman—accepting the things she bought me (all of which were in such poor taste that I usually gave them immediately to the pawnshop owner) while putting on a cheerful face and cracking jokes to amuse her—until one summer night when, unable to shake her off in a dark part of town, I kissed her just to make her leave. This sent her into a vulgar frenzy; she hailed a car and took me to a cramped Western-style room that seemed to be a secretly borrowed office for their movement’s activities, where we made a racket until morning. What an absurd “sister,” I secretly sneered.

Whether it was the boarding house daughter or this “comrade,” I found myself compelled to meet them face-to-face every day. Just like with all previous women, I couldn’t skillfully evade these two either—helplessly slipping into appeasing their moods out of habitual anxiety until I’d become paralyzed as if bound by invisible ropes.

Around that same time, I received an unexpected kindness from a waitress at a certain grand café in Ginza. Though we’d met only once, I became fixated on this debt of gratitude, feeling such anxiety and hollow dread that I found myself immobilized once more.
By then, I’d reached a point where I no longer required Horiki’s guidance to ride trams alone, visit Kabukiza theater, or even enter cafés wearing a kasuri-patterned kimono—having cultivated some semblance of audacity.
In my heart, I still distrusted and feared human confidence and violence, tormented by them even as I gradually managed—superficially—to exchange solemn greetings with others. No—wait, truthfully, I still couldn’t greet anyone without that defeated clown’s agonized smile. But at least I’d acquired enough “skill,” perhaps from racing about for the usual movement, to somehow manage these frantic, stammering greetings.
Or was it women?
Or alcohol?
But mainly, I’d nearly honed this ability through financial desperation.
Wherever I went, terror pursued me—perhaps if I could instead force my way into that grand Ginza café, jostled by drunken patrons and bustling staff, this perpetually hunted heart might find respite. Clutching ten yen, I entered alone and told the waitress with a laugh:

“I only have ten yen, so keep that in mind,” I said.

“No need to worry.”

There was a hint of a Kansai accent in her speech. And then, those words strangely calmed my trembling heart. No—it wasn’t that financial worries had vanished. It was that being beside her felt like something that required no anxiety.

I drank alcohol.
Because I felt at ease with that person, I didn’t even feel like putting on my usual clowning act. Without hiding my inherently taciturn and gloomy nature, I drank in silence.

“Do you like this?”

The woman arranged various dishes before herself.
I shook my head.

“Just alcohol?”
“I’ll have some too.”

It was a cold autumn night.
I was waiting for Tsuneko (or so I believe her name was—my memory has faded, and I cannot be certain).
(I—the sort who'd even forget the name of my suicide partner—) followed Tsuneko's instructions and ate thoroughly unappetizing sushi at a back-alley stall in Ginza. (Though her name escapes me, the foulness of that sushi remains etched in my memory with inexplicable clarity.)
And so too did I vividly recall—as if seeing it before my eyes—the sight of that completely bald old man with a face resembling a blue snake's, shaking his head all the while as he deftly feigned skill in shaping sushi. In later years, I would often find myself on trains or elsewhere puzzling over a familiar-looking face before realizing with a bitter smile that it resembled that sushi stall proprietor from back then.
Even now, when that person's name and even their face have faded from my memory, I can still recall the sushi shop owner's face with picture-perfect accuracy—a testament to how wretched that sushi was, how it filled me with cold and pain.
From the start, even when someone took me to a restaurant reputed to serve delicious sushi and I ate there, I never once found it tasty.
They were too large.
I was always thinking, "Why can't they make them neatly thumb-sized?"—and waited for that person.

That person had rented the second floor of a carpenter’s house in Honjo.
In that second-floor room, without concealing my usual gloomy state of mind in the slightest—as if gripped by severe toothache—I drank tea while pressing my cheek with one hand.
Yet this demeanor of mine seemed instead to appeal to that person.
She too was a woman around whom cold winter winds blew, with only fallen leaves whirling madly—a woman who seemed utterly isolated.

As we lay resting together, that person narrated how she was two years older than me, from Hiroshima; how she had a husband who used to work as a barber there; how they had eloped to Tokyo last spring; how he had failed to find decent work in Tokyo and eventually been convicted of fraud, now imprisoned; how she had been visiting the prison daily with care packages but would stop tomorrow—yet somehow I could never feel any interest in women’s personal stories. Whether it was due to their poor storytelling skills—their misplacement of narrative emphasis—or something else, to me they always went in one ear and out the other.

Desolate.

Though I expected that a single sigh from a woman would stir far more empathy in me than her thousand-word life story, I found it both strange and mysterious that never once had I heard such words from any woman in this world.
But that person never voiced her desolation. Instead, she carried a silent, profound loneliness around her body’s periphery like a current an inch wide. When I drew close, my own form became enveloped in that current, my jagged gloom blending with hers until—like dead leaves settling on rocks at the water’s bottom—I found myself released from fear and anxiety.

Entirely different from the sensation of sleeping soundly and securely in the arms of those idiotic prostitutes—(though to begin with, those prostitutes had been cheerful)—the single night I spent with the fraud convict’s wife was, for me, a happy (I resolve never again in this entire memoir to use such an audacious word without hesitation) night of liberation.

However, it was only a single night. When morning came and I jolted awake, I had already reverted to being that frivolous clown who could don his act at will. Cowards fear even happiness. Cotton can wound you. There are times when happiness itself inflicts injury. Eager to part ways before sustaining such wounds, I deployed my usual clownish smokescreen.

“You’ve got it backwards—that saying about money ending relationships. It doesn’t mean women leave penniless men. When a man loses his money, his spirit withers naturally. His laughter turns hollow. He grows bitter until finally, in reckless desperation, he’s the one who casts her off—flings her away again and again in half-mad rejection. That’s what the Kanazawa Daijirin dictionary says. Pitiful, isn’t it? I understand that feeling all too well, you know.”

I seem to recall that by saying such absurd things, I made Tsuneko burst out laughing.
Deeming it unwise to linger—lest danger arise—I made a hasty retreat without even washing my face, though my nonsensical declaration at the time about "when the money ends, the relationship ends" later came to snag me in unforeseen ways.

After that, for a month, I did not meet the benefactor of that night.
As days passed after our parting, my joy faded while the transient kindness I'd received grew terrifyingly oppressive. I began feeling arbitrarily constrained—even mundane matters like having made Tsuneko pay the entire café bill that night started gnawing at me. She too now seemed like just another woman who would threaten me, no different from those lodging house girls or the Women’s Higher Normal School student. Though physically distant, I lived in constant dread of Tsuneko. Moreover, being fundamentally reluctant to meet women I'd slept with—terrified they might suddenly erupt in fiery rage upon reunion—I increasingly avoided Ginza altogether. Yet this reluctance stemmed not from cunning, but from my failure to comprehend women's mysterious ability to live as though severing two worlds: nighttime intimacy and morning detachment, without maintaining even a speck of connection between them—as if through perfect forgetting.

At the end of November, I drank cheap alcohol with Horiki at a street stall in Kanda. Even after leaving the stall, this rogue friend insisted on finding another place to drink—despite us having no money left—persisting with "Let’s drink, let’s drink!" At that moment—perhaps because I was emboldened by drunkenness—

“All right then, I’ll take you to dreamland. Don’t be shocked—it’s what they call a place of wine and meat...”

“A café?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go!”

With that settled, the two of them boarded a city tram, and Horiki, in high spirits,

“I’m starving for a woman tonight.”
“Can I kiss the waitress?”

I did not particularly care for Horiki acting drunk like that.
Horiki, knowing this, felt compelled to double-check with me.

“Listen. I’m gonna kiss her.”
“I’ll show you—I’ll kiss the waitress sitting next to me.”
“Got it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Thank God! I’m starving for a woman!”

Alighting at Ginza 4-chome, we entered that café they called an extravagant den of indulgence—clinging to Tsuneko as our lifeline despite being nearly penniless—and the instant we sat facing each other in an empty booth, Tsuneko and another waitress came hurrying over. The other waitress positioned herself beside me while Tsuneko dropped heavily next to Horiki, making me startle.
Tsuneko was about to be kissed.

I felt no reluctance. Within me, the desire for possession was inherently weak—even when faint regret stirred, I lacked the vigor to assert ownership rights or contend with others. Later, I would even silently watch as my common-law wife was violated.

I wanted above all to avoid human conflicts. The terror of being dragged into that vortex consumed me. Tsuneko and I had shared but a single night. She wasn’t my possession. To presume reluctance—such audacious desire couldn’t possibly dwell within me. Yet I startled.

It was because I pitied Tsuneko's plight—there she sat, about to endure Horiki's savage kiss right before my eyes. Once defiled by Horiki, Tsuneko would have to leave me—not that I possessed any positive ardor to retain her. Ah, this is the end, I thought, momentarily stunned by Tsuneko's misfortune. Yet instantly I yielded as pliantly as water, looking back and forth between Horiki's face and Tsuneko's before smirking.

However, the situation truly unexpectedly took an even worse turn.

“Stop!”

Horiki said, twisting his mouth,
“Even I... with such a poverty-stricken woman—”

As if completely defeated, he crossed his arms, stared unblinkingly at Tsuneko, and forced a bitter smile.

“Sake.”
“I have no money.”

I whispered to Tsuneko.
This was precisely when I wanted to drown myself in drink.
Through the eyes of so-called philistines, Tsuneko wasn’t even worth a drunkard’s kiss—just a shabby, poverty-stricken woman.
To me, it felt like being struck by lightning—both startling and unexpected.
I drank more than I ever had before—limitlessly, staggeringly—until thoroughly intoxicated, exchanging mournful smiles with Tsuneko across the table. The moment I thought, *So she’s merely an exhausted pauper of a woman*, there welled up in me an affinity between the destitute (though the rich-poor divide may seem trite, I now consider it one of drama’s eternal themes)—this affinity swelling until Tsuneko became precious to me. For the first time in my life, I consciously recognized a faint stirring of love within myself—feeble yet actively arising from my own volition.
I vomited.
I lost all awareness.
That was the first time alcohol had ever made me lose myself so completely.

When I awoke, Tsuneko was sitting by my pillow.
I had been sleeping in the carpenter’s second-floor room in Honjo.

"You said ‘When money ends, bonds end’—I thought you were joking! You meant it?"
"You wouldn’t come."
"What a tangled split this is."
"Even if I earned money for you—wouldn’t that do?"

“No.”

After that, the woman also rested, and at dawn, the word “death” first emerged from her lips. She seemed utterly exhausted by the business of being human, and I too—when I thought of my terror of the world, my weariness with it, money, political movements, women, my studies—could no longer endure living any longer, so I readily agreed to her proposal.

However, at that time, I had not yet formed the resolve to die—not in true earnest.
There was still an element of play-acting lurking within.

That morning, the two wandered through the Rokku district of Asakusa.
They entered a café and drank milk.

"You go ahead and pay."

I stood up, took the clasp purse from my sleeve, and opened it to find three copper coins. Struck not by shame but something more ghastly, my mind instantly conjured my room at Senyuukan: nothing remained but my uniform and futon—a desolate space where not a single item worth pawning could be found. Beyond that, only the kasuri-patterned kimono I now wore and my mantle remained. This was my reality. With crystalline clarity, I realized: I could not go on living.

Because I was flustered, the woman also stood up and peered into my clasp purse,

"Oh, is that all?"

It was an innocent remark, but it pierced me to the core with such pain.
For the first time, it was precisely because it was the voice of someone I had fallen in love with that it hurt so deeply.
Neither this nor that—three copper coins are not money at all.
That was a strange humiliation I had never experienced before.
It was a humiliation so unbearable I couldn’t go on living.
After all, at that time, I had not yet completely escaped from the category of being a wealthy young master.
At that moment, I resolved with genuine conviction to go so far as to willingly die.

That night, we plunged into the sea off Kamakura.
The woman said, "This obi is borrowed from a friend at the shop," untied it, folded it, and placed it on a rock. I too removed my mantle and laid it there before we entered the water together.

The woman died.
And then only I survived.

I was still a high school student then, and perhaps because my father’s name held what they call “news value,” the incident appeared to have been reported in the newspapers as quite a significant affair.

I was admitted to a seaside hospital. A relative from my hometown rushed over, handled all the arrangements for me, then informed me that my father and the entire household were enraged—that I might be disowned from my birth family for good—before departing.
Yet more than any of that, I longed for the dead Tsuneko and did nothing but weep.
Truly, among all the people I had known until then, it was only that impoverished Tsuneko whom I had loved.

A long letter came from the lodging house's daughter containing fifty tanka poems strung together.
All fifty were tanka beginning with that strange phrase: "Stay alive for me."
Nurses would come laughing cheerfully to visit my hospital room, and there was even one who would firmly grasp my hand before leaving.

At that hospital they discovered an issue with my left lung—a development that proved extremely convenient—and soon I was taken by police from the hospital under charges of suicide complicity; though at the station they treated me as a sick person and placed me in a protection cell.

Late at night, the elderly policeman keeping watch in the night duty room next to the protection cell quietly opened the connecting door,

“Hey!” he called out to me,

“Cold, aren’t you? Come over here and warm yourself,” he said.

I deliberately shuffled dejectedly into the night duty room, sat down in a chair, and warmed myself by the brazier.

“Still miss that dead woman, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

He replied in an intentionally thin voice, so faint it seemed on the brink of vanishing.

“That is indeed what human compassion is all about.”

He gradually assumed an increasingly grandiose demeanor.

“Where did you first have relations with the woman?”

He inquired with pompous self-importance, almost like a judge.
He looked down on me as a child and, on that tedious autumn night, pretended as though he himself were the chief investigator in charge of the interrogation—his true intent seemed to be drawing out lewd confessions from me.
I quickly perceived his intent and struggled to suppress the urge to burst out laughing.
I knew full well that one could refuse to answer such "unofficial interrogations" from the policeman. Yet to liven up the long autumn night, I reverently displayed what might be called sincerity—an unwavering belief that this very policeman was indeed the chief investigator, and that the severity of my punishment rested entirely on his sole discretion. Then I gave him a perfunctory "testimony," just substantial enough to mildly satisfy his lecherous curiosity.

“Yeah, that’s about all I need to know. If you answer everything honestly, we’ll show some leniency there.”

“Thank you very much.
“I humbly ask for your consideration.”

It was an almost entrancing performance.
And yet, for himself, it was a strenuous performance from which nothing—not a single thing—came of benefit.

When dawn broke, I was summoned by the police chief.
This time, it was an official interrogation.

When I opened the door and entered the chief’s office—

“Oh, you’re a handsome one.
“Look here, it’s not your fault.”
“It’s your mother’s fault for giving birth to such a handsome man like you.”

He was a dark-complexioned police chief who still looked young and carried himself like a university graduate.
When he suddenly said that, I felt as if half my face were covered by a bright red birthmark—like some hideously disfigured creature, wretched beyond words.

The police chief’s interrogation proceeded with the brisk efficiency of a judo or kendo practitioner—a world apart from that old policeman’s furtive, relentlessly lecherous “questioning” during the late hours.
After finishing the interrogation, the police chief was preparing documents to send to the prosecutor’s office while—

“You need to strengthen your body. You seem to be coughing up bloody phlegm,” he said.

That morning, I coughed strangely, and each time a cough came, I covered my mouth with a handkerchief—but that handkerchief was stained with blood as if red hail had fallen upon it. However, it was not blood from my throat but rather blood from a small sore under my ear that I had picked at the night before. Yet I had a fleeting thought that it might be more convenient not to clarify that, so I simply—

“Yes.”

He lowered his eyes and answered meekly.

The police chief finished writing the documents and,

“Whether you’ll be indicted or not is up to the Prosecutor to decide, but you’d better have your guarantor come to the Yokohama Prosecutor’s Office today by telegram or phone.”
“There must be someone—a guardian or guarantor of yours.”

I recalled that Shibuta—a stocky forty-year-old bachelor from our hometown who dealt in calligraphy and antiques, frequented Father’s Tokyo villa, and acted almost as Father’s sycophant—was registered as my school guarantor.
Because the man’s face, particularly his eyes, resembled a flatfish, Father had always called him Hirame, and I too had grown accustomed to using that name.

I borrowed the police telephone directory, searched for Hirame’s home phone number, found it, called Hirame, and asked him to come to the Yokohama Prosecutor’s Office. When I did so, Hirame responded in an unexpectedly arrogant tone—as if he were a changed man—but nevertheless agreed to do it.

“Hey, you should disinfect that telephone right away—after all, he was coughing up bloody phlegm.”

After I was taken back to the holding cell, the police chief’s loud voice issuing those orders to the policemen reached even my ears as I sat there.

In the early afternoon, I was bound around the torso with a thin hemp rope—though permitted to conceal it under a cloak—and a young policeman firmly gripped the end of that rope as we rode the train together to Yokohama.

Yet I felt not the slightest unease—indeed, even that police holding cell and the old policeman grew dear to me. Ah, why must I be this way? Being bound as a criminal brought me relief instead, a tranquil calm. Even now, as I write of those memories, I feel truly carefree and pleasant.

However, even among those nostalgic memories of that time, there was just one disastrous blunder—drenched in cold sweat—that I will never forget in my life.

I underwent a brief interrogation by the prosecutor in a dimly lit room at the prosecutor’s office.
The prosecutor—a composed man around forty whose face bore what one might call a righteous beauty, an air of intelligent serenity (for even if I had possessed beauty myself, it would surely have been of a lewd sort)—seemed unflappable in character, so I remained completely unwary and continued my absentminded testimony. Suddenly, a habitual cough arose; I took out a handkerchief from my sleeve and, upon noticing the blood on it, conceived a base stratagem—perhaps this cough too could prove useful. With exaggerated effort, I added two counterfeit coughs: *Cough*, *cough*. Keeping the handkerchief pressed to my mouth, I stole a glance at the prosecutor’s face—a hairsbreadth moment—

“Is that so?”

It was a serene smile.
Drenched in cold sweat—no, even now when I recall it, I want to spin around in a panic.
Back in middle school, when that fool Takeichi jabbed me in the back shouting "Fake! Fake!" and kicked me down into hell—to say this feeling surpassed even that moment would be no exaggeration.
These two—that incident and this one—stand as the great failures of performance in my life.
There are even times when I think it would have been better to be sentenced to ten years in prison than to suffer such quiet contempt from the prosecutor.

I received a suspended indictment. But I felt no joy at all. With a misery beyond words, I sat on a bench in the prosecutor’s office waiting room, waiting for Hirame, who was coming to retrieve me.

From the tall window behind me, the sunset sky was visible, and seagulls were flying in a formation resembling the character for "woman".

Third Notebook

I.

Of Takeichi’s prophecies, one had come true; the other had not.
The unflattering prophecy—that I would be loved—had come true, but the auspicious prophecy that I would surely become a great painter had not.

I had only managed to become an anonymous, incompetent cartoonist for third-rate magazines.

Expelled from high school over the Kamakura incident, I came to live in a three-tatami room on Hirame’s second floor. From my hometown came an exceedingly meager monthly allowance—not sent directly to me, but covertly routed through Hirame (though even this was framed as my brothers secretly remitting funds behind Father’s back). With that, every remaining thread connecting me to my birthplace was severed entirely. Hirame maintained perpetual sullenness—no matter how obsequiously I smiled, he never reciprocated—to such wretched, or rather ludicrous extremes that one marveled at how effortlessly humans could transform themselves, as if flipping over their own palms.

"You mustn't go out.
In any case, you must not go out."

That was all he ever said to me.

Hirame seemed to suspect I was at risk of suicide—or rather, perceived the danger that I might chase after some woman and leap into the sea again—and thus strictly prohibited me from going out.
But with no alcohol to drink or cigarettes to smoke, merely burrowing into the kotatsu in that second-floor three-tatami room from morning till night while reading old magazines like an utter fool, even the willpower required for suicide had abandoned me.

Hirame’s house stood near Okubo Medical College, its sign ostentatiously declaring “Seiryuen: Dealers in Calligraphy and Antiques” despite occupying just one unit in a duplex with a cramped storefront. Dust-coated shelves displayed haphazard junk—though Hirame didn’t actually trade in these trinkets; he apparently profited by brokering transfers of collectors’ prized items between so-called connoisseurs. He scarcely lingered at the shop, departing each morning with a severe expression. A seventeen- or eighteen-year-old errand boy—my de facto jailer—remained behind. When not playing catch with neighborhood children, he treated me like an imbecile or lunatic, delivering pompous lectures to which I, constitutionally averse to conflict, listened with exhausted fascination before capitulating.

This boy was Shibuta’s unacknowledged son—though peculiar circumstances prevented any public parentage claim and explained Shibuta’s perpetual bachelorhood. I vaguely recalled family whispers about this matter, but having little interest in others’ affairs, I knew no details. Yet something unnervingly piscine in the boy’s gaze made me suspect he might truly be Hirame’s secret child… If so, theirs was a desolate kinship indeed.

Late at night, unbeknownst to me upstairs, they would sometimes summon soba noodles and dine in wordless communion.

At Hirame's house, meals were always prepared by that errand boy, who would separately place the lodger's meals on a tray and bring them up to the second floor three times daily, while Hirame and the errand boy themselves ate hurriedly in the damp four-and-a-half-mat room beneath the stairs, making clattering sounds with their plates and bowls.

On a certain evening in late March—whether Hirame had stumbled upon an unexpected windfall or was scheming something else (even if both speculations were correct, there were likely several trivial causes beyond my ability to discern)—he invited me downstairs to an unusually well-appointed dining table bearing a sake decanter. Admiring and praising the tuna sashimi—a departure from his flatfish namesake—as if he were the guest of honor at his own feast, he even offered a little alcohol to his dazed lodger,

“What do you intend to do, really, from now on?”

I did not answer him, but picked up a sardine from the plate on the table. As I gazed at the silver eyes of those small fish, a gentle warmth from the sake began to spread through me. I grew nostalgic for my days of carousing—even Horiki seemed dear now—and felt an acute longing for “freedom.” Suddenly, I nearly burst into feeble tears.

Ever since coming to this house, I had lost even the will to play the clown. I simply stretched out amidst Hirame and the errand boy’s contempt. Hirame too seemed to avoid any candid conversations with me, and I felt no urge to pursue him with appeals or complaints—I had nearly become a complete fool of a lodger.

“A suspended indictment doesn’t count as a prior conviction or anything of that sort,” he said. “So really, your rehabilitation depends entirely on your own resolve. If you were to reform and sincerely come to me for guidance of your own accord, I might consider assisting you.”

Hirame’s manner of speaking—or rather, the way all people in this world spoke—contained this convoluted complexity: vaguely evasive, as if perpetually sidestepping, coupled with such excessive caution that it seemed nearly pointless and countless petty maneuvers. I would always grow perplexed by it, then sink into a mood of resigned indifference—either deflecting through clownish antics or silently nodding in total acquiescence—adopting what might be called an attitude of defeat.

Only in later years did I realize that even then, if Hirame had simply informed me in roughly the following manner, that would have sufficed—and I felt inexpressibly gloomy over Hirame’s unnecessary caution, or rather, the incomprehensible vanity and decorum of people in the world. At that time, Hirame should have simply said this.

“Whether public or private, you must enroll in some school starting this April.”
“Once enrolled, your family will send far more adequate living expenses from home.”

Only much later did I realize this arrangement had already been settled.
I likely would have complied had matters been stated plainly.
Yet Hirame’s needlessly guarded phrasing twisted everything—diverting the course of my life entirely.

“If you have no intention of sincerely consulting me first, then there’s nothing to be done.”

“What sort of consultation?”

I truly couldn’t grasp anything.

“That’s something you should have in your own heart, no?”

“Such as?”

“Such as—what exactly do you intend to do with yourself from now on?”

“Would it be better for me to work?”

“No—what exactly is your state of mind?”

“But even if I were to enter school...”

“That would require money.”
“But the problem isn’t money.”
“It’s your state of mind.”

Why hadn’t he simply said the money would come from home?
With that single statement, my resolve should have solidified—yet I remained utterly lost in fog.

“How about it?”
“Do you have anything resembling hopes for the future?”
“Truly—those being cared for can never grasp how arduous it is to tend to someone alone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That is truly worrisome.”
“Since I’ve taken responsibility for your care, I can’t have you remaining half-hearted either.”
“I want you to show me your resolve to splendidly walk the path of rehabilitation.”
“For example, were you to seriously consult me about your future plans, I’d be prepared to respond.”
“After all, this is just the help of a poor wretch like me—expecting former luxuries would disappoint.”
“But if you solidify your resolve, clearly establish future plans, then consult me properly—I’d even consider assisting your rehabilitation bit by bit.”
“Do you understand?”
“This is my position.”
“What exactly do you plan to do henceforth?”

“If I can’t be allowed to stay here on the second floor, I’ll work…”

“Are you being serious right now? In this world today, even if one were to graduate from Imperial University…”

“No, it’s not that I’m going to become a salaryman.”

“Then what will you be?”

“A painter.”

I blurted it out.

“Oh?”

I cannot forget the utterly cunning shadow of Hirame’s face as he laughed with his neck drawn in at that moment. It resembled a shadow of contempt, yet differed—if one were to liken the world to a sea, this strange shadow seemed to undulate in its thousand-fathom depths, a laugh that seemed to offer a fleeting glimpse into the abyssal depths of adult existence.

“With that attitude, this discussion is pointless. You show no resolve whatsoever. Think properly. Spend tonight seriously considering your options,” I was told. Driven out, I fled upstairs—yet even after lying down, no thoughts came to mind. When dawn broke, I escaped from Hirame’s house.

I will return without fail this evening.
I am going to consult with the friend listed below regarding my future plans, so please do not concern yourself.
Truly.

I wrote this in large pencil letters on a sheet of stationery, then added Horiki Masao’s address in Asakusa along with his full name before slipping out of Hirame’s house.

It had not been out of resentment at being lectured by Hirame that I fled.
It was precisely as Hirame had said—I was a man of unsteady resolve, one who had no inkling of future plans or anything of the sort. Moreover, continuing to burden Hirame’s household would be pitiable even for him, and if by some chance a determined spirit were to arise within me and I established a purpose, the thought that my rehabilitation funds would need to be supported month after month by that impoverished Hirame became so agonizing, so utterly unbearable, that I had fled.

However, I had not left Hirame’s house with any genuine intention of consulting someone like Horiki about my so-called “future plans.” It was simply that I wanted to reassure Hirame, if only slightly and momentarily—though rather than claiming I wrote that note out of some detective novel strategy to buy time for escape (no—I must have faintly harbored such notions too), it would be more accurate to say I acted purely from terror at the thought of abruptly shocking Hirame and throwing him into confusion. Even when exposure was inevitable, I remained terrified of stating things plainly—this compulsion to invariably embellish constituted one of my pitiful traits. While resembling what society scornfully calls a “liar’s” nature, I had hardly ever performed these adornments for personal gain. It was simply that a sudden shift in atmosphere—so terrifying it felt suffocating—drove me to this desperate service of mine, even while knowing full well it would later bring me disadvantage. Even if those embellishments were distorted, feeble, and absurd—mere trifles born of that servile impulse—I suspect there were many instances where I tacked on decorative phrases regardless. Yet this very habit became ruthlessly exploited by society’s so-called “honest people.” In that moment, I had simply jotted down Horiki’s address and full name at the stationery’s edge as they floated up from memory’s depths.

I left Hirame’s house, walked to Shinjuku, sold the book I had on me, and then found myself at a complete loss.
Though I was friendly to everyone, I had never truly felt what is called “friendship.” Apart from playmates like Horiki, all my interactions brought me nothing but pain, and in my desperate attempts to ease that pain by acting the clown, I only grew utterly exhausted. Even catching sight of a face resembling someone I barely knew on the street would startle me, plunging me into a moment of such nauseating dread it nearly made me dizzy. I knew how to make myself liked—yet it seemed I lacked any capacity to love others.
(Though I greatly doubt whether people in general truly possess any capacity for “love” themselves.) Someone like me could never have something like a “close friend,” and what’s more, I lacked even the ability to “visit” others.
The gates of others’ houses were, for me, more eerily unsettling than the Gates of Hell from the Divine Comedy; without exaggeration, I could tangibly sense that beyond those gates lurked terrifying, dragon-like beasts reeking of raw flesh, writhing in the shadows.

I had no one to associate with.
I could not go anywhere.

Horiki.

It was precisely a case of a jest taking on a life of its own.
In accordance with what I had written in that note, I decided to visit Horiki in Asakusa.
I had never once visited Horiki’s house on my own initiative before—I had always summoned him via telegram. But now, even the cost of a telegram felt precarious, and in the bitterness of my fallen state, I feared that sending one alone might not bring him. Resolving to undertake the dreaded act of “visiting,” I sighed and boarded the city tram. When I realized that Horiki was the sole lifeline I had left in this world, a spine-chilling ferocious presence seemed to seize me.

Horiki was at home.
In a two-story house at the end of a filthy back alley, Horiki occupied a single six-tatami room on the second floor, while downstairs, his elderly parents and a young craftsman—three people in total—stitched and hammered at manufacturing geta thongs.

Horiki showed me a new aspect of himself as a city dweller that day.
It was what is commonly called shrewd opportunism.
It was a cold, cunning egoism that left even this country bumpkin staring wide-eyed in shock.
He was not a man like myself—one who merely drifted endlessly without direction.

“I’m completely fed up with you.”
“Did you get permission from the old man?”
“Still not?”

I couldn’t bring myself to say I had run away.

I resorted to deception, following the usual pattern.
Even though Horiki would surely notice soon, I resorted to deception.

“It’ll work out somehow.”

“Hey. This isn’t a laughing matter.”
“Let me give you some advice—you’d better cut out the foolishness right here.”
“I’ve got business today.”
“Lately, I’ve been swamped.”

“What sort of business?”

“Hey, hey, don’t go cutting the thread on the zabuton.”

As I spoke, I unconsciously toyed with one of the threads—whether you’d call it a binding string or a tie—at the four corners of the zabuton I had laid out, even giving it an occasional yank.
Horiki, who seemed begrudging of even a single thread from his household’s zabuton, scolded me without a trace of shame, his eyes flashing with anger.
When I thought about it, Horiki had not lost a single thing in all his dealings with me.

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

“Oh, this is—”

Horiki turned to his elderly mother apologetically, like a genuinely dutiful son, speaking with an unnatural degree of politeness,

“Thank you. Is this the sweet red bean soup?”
“How extravagant!”
“You didn’t need to go to such trouble.”
“Because I have business to attend to and must go out right away.”
“No, but it’s such a waste of your proud specialty.”
“Thank you for this.”
“Why don’t you have one too?”
“Mom went to the trouble of making it.”
“Ah, this is damn good!”
“How extravagant!”

and, as if it weren’t entirely an act, he appeared genuinely delighted and ate with relish.
I too sipped it, but it smelled of hot water, and when I ate the mochi, it wasn’t mochi—it was something I couldn’t comprehend.
By no means did I look down on that poverty.
(At that time, I did not find it unpalatable, and the old woman’s thoughtfulness sank into me.
I may feel terror toward poverty, but I intend no contempt for it.) It was through that sweet red bean soup—and through Horiki’s delight in it—that I was shown the frugal nature of city dwellers and the reality of Tokyo households maintaining a clear distinction between public and private. Left utterly behind was I alone, a half-wit ceaselessly fleeing human existence without distinction between inner and outer worlds. Panicked by the sense that even Horiki had abandoned me, I handled the peeling lacquered chopsticks from the sweet red bean soup and felt unbearably desolate—this is all I wish to record.

“My bad, but I’ve got business today.”

Horiki stood up and said this while putting on his coat,

“Gotta run. My bad.”

At that moment, a woman came to visit Horiki, and my circumstances took a sudden turn.

Horiki suddenly became animated,

“Oh, excuse me.”

“Actually, I was just about to call on you, but then this person showed up unexpectedly. No—it’s perfectly fine.”
“Here.”

He seemed utterly flustered—snatching away the zabuton he himself had laid out, flipping it inside out to present it, then flipping it again before urging the woman to sit.
In the room, apart from Horiki’s own zabuton, there was only one guest cushion.

The woman was thin and tall.
She moved the zabuton aside and sat in a corner near the entrance.

I was absently listening to their conversation. The woman seemed to work for a magazine company and had apparently commissioned Horiki for an illustration or something some time earlier; she appeared to have come to collect it.

"I'm in a hurry,"

“It’s done.”
“It’s been ready for ages.”
“Here you are. Please take this.”

A telegram arrived.

Horiki read it, and his cheerful face rapidly darkened.

“Tch!”
“What the hell have you done now?”

It was a telegram from Hirame.

“Anyway, come back immediately.”
“I suppose it’d be best if I escorted you back myself, but I ain’t got time for that now.”
“You’ve run away from home, yet look at that carefree face of yours.”

“Where do you live?”

“Ōkubo.”
I blurted out.
“In that case, since it’s near the office.”

The woman was a twenty-eight-year-old native of Kōshū.
She lived in an apartment in Kōenji with a five-year-old daughter.
She said it had been three years since her husband passed away.

“You seem like someone who’s had a hard life.”
“You’re quite attentive.”
“Poor you.”

For the first time, I lived like a kept man.
After Shizuko (that was the woman journalist’s name) left for work at the magazine company in Shinjuku, it became routine for me and a five-year-old girl named Shigeko to stay quietly at home together.
Until then, when her mother was away, Shigeko had apparently been playing in the apartment manager’s room, but with the arrival of an “attentive” playmate, she seemed quite delighted.
With the man appearing as a playmate, she seemed to be in high spirits.

For about a week, I stayed there in a daze.
A single kite had become entangled in the power lines just outside the apartment window—blown by dusty spring winds, torn yet stubbornly clinging to the wires as though nodding in agreement. Each time I saw it, I smiled bitterly, flushed with shame, and even dreamed of it while tossing restlessly in my sleep.

“I wish I had money.”

“How much... do you need?”

“A lot… As they say, when the money runs out, so does the relationship—but that’s the truth.”

“That’s ridiculous. That’s so old-fashioned...”

“Is that so? But you wouldn’t understand. As things are now, I might end up running away.”

“Just who’s poor here? And which one of us would be running? That’s absurd.”

“I want to earn money myself—to buy alcohol... no, cigarettes instead. When it comes to painting, I’m certain I’m far better than someone like Horiki.”

At such moments, what spontaneously surfaced in my mind were those several self-portraits from middle school that Takeichi had called “ghostly.” Lost masterpieces. They’d vanished during my frequent moves, yet I couldn’t shake the conviction that those alone had been truly exceptional works. No matter what I painted afterward, none came close to matching that remembered pinnacle of artistry. An empty-chested weariness of loss had perpetually haunted me since.

A glass of absinthe left undrunk.

I had secretly characterized that eternally irreparable sense of loss as such. Whenever painting was mentioned, that undrunk glass of absinthe would flicker before my eyes—Ah, I want to show her those paintings; I want to make her believe in my talent—and I would writhe in frustration.

“Heh, who’s to say?”
“You’re adorable when you tell jokes with such a straight face.”

It’s not a joke—it’s true! Ah, I want to show her those paintings—I churned in futile anguish before abruptly changing tack and surrendering.

“Cartoons.”
“At least when it comes to cartoons, I think I’m better than Horiki.”

Those very words of feigned clownery—contrary to their deceptive intent—were instead taken with earnest seriousness.

“Hmm, I suppose so.”
“I had actually been impressed myself.”
“The comics you always draw for Shigeko—even I end up bursting out laughing at them.”
“Why don’t you give it a try?”
“I could ask my company’s editor-in-chief for you.”

That company had been publishing a little-known monthly magazine targeted at children.

...When women see you, most find themselves unbearably compelled to do something for you... You’re always fidgeting nervously yet playing the clown... Even when sinking into solitary gloom at times, that very sight only pricks at their hearts all the more.

Even when Shizuko and others showered me with flattery and kind words—if I considered these precisely the loathsome traits of a kept man—I sank deeper into despondency without recovering any vitality. Secretly resolved to escape Shizuko and live independently—choosing money over women—and devising plans toward that end, I instead became increasingly compelled to depend on her. Nearly all matters concerning my runaway’s aftermath fell under the care of this mannish woman from Kōshū, leaving me fidgeting around Shizuko more anxiously than ever before.

Through Shizuko’s arrangements, a meeting was convened among Hirame, Horiki, and herself, resulting in my complete severance from my hometown. Thus began my cohabitation with Shizuko “in broad daylight,” and thanks to her tireless efforts, my manga unexpectedly began to earn money. With that money, I bought alcohol and cigarettes—yet my anxiety and gloom only grew more oppressive by the day.
That was “sinking” upon “sinking.”
Cutting out panels for Shizuko’s magazine’s monthly serialized manga *The Adventures of Kinta and Ota*, I would suddenly recall my family home. At times, overwhelmed by such desolation, my pen would stop moving as I bowed my head and let tears fall.

During those times, the faint salvation for me was Shigeko. By then, Shigeko had come to call me “Daddy” without reservation.

“Daddy.
“Daddy, if you pray to God, He’ll give you anything—is that true?”

I thought it was I who ought to be making that prayer.

Ah, grant me an unyielding will.
Reveal unto me the essence of human.
If a person pushes aside another person, is that not a sin?
Grant me a mask of anger.

“Yeah, that’s right. He might grant you anything, Shigeko, but for Daddy, it might not work.”

I was even afraid of God.
I could not believe in God’s love and believed only in His punishment.
Faith.
It felt like nothing more than bowing my head before the judgment seat to receive God’s scourge.
I could believe in hell, but the existence of heaven was something I simply could not accept.

“Why can’t you?”

“Because I disobeyed my parents’ orders.”

“Oh?
But everyone says Daddy’s such a good person.”

It was because I was deceiving them—I knew full well that everyone in this apartment held me in their good graces—but how profoundly I feared them all! The more I feared them, the more they liked me; and the more they liked me, the more I feared them, until I had no choice but to withdraw entirely. Explaining this unfortunate affliction of mine to Shigeko proved an impossible task.

“Shigeko, what exactly do you want to ask God for?”

I casually changed the subject.

“Shigeko wants her real daddy.”

Startled, I felt a dizzy spell.
Enemy.
Was I Shigeko’s enemy, or was she mine? Here too existed a terrifying adult threatening me—strangers, incomprehensible strangers, strangers brimming with secrets—and suddenly Shigeko’s face appeared as one of them.

I’d believed Shigeko alone was different, yet even she possessed that “cow’s tail that swats down a horsefly unawares.”
From then on, I had to act skittishly even around Shigeko.

“You sex fiend! You there?”

Horiki began visiting me again.
Despite being the man who had made me feel utterly desolate on that day I ran away from home, I found myself unable to refuse him and greeted him with a faint smile.

“I hear your manga’s become quite popular.”
“Amateurs have that damn reckless audacity—can’t compete with that.”
“But don’t let your guard down though.”
“Your draftsmanship isn’t improving one bit.”

He even adopted a mentor-like attitude.
While writhing in futile agony at the thought of what face this guy would make if I showed him that “ghost” painting of mine,

“Don’t say that.
I’d let out a shriek!”

Horiki grew more and more triumphant,

“Even with just a talent for getting by, your flaws will show through eventually.”

Talent for getting by.
……For me, there was truly nothing but a bitter smile.
Me, with a talent for getting by!
But did this mean that someone like me—who feared humans, avoided them, and deceived them—was following the same pattern as that vulgar old proverb “No calamity befalls those who do not touch the gods,” obeying some shrewd maxim for survival?
Ah, humans know nothing of each other. Though seeing one another completely wrong, they presume themselves dearest friends, go their whole lives unawares, and when the other dies, weep and recite eulogies—is that not how it goes?

Horiki—after all, he was the one who had dealt with the aftermath of my running away (no doubt reluctantly pressured into it by Shizuko)—now carried himself as if he were my great savior of rehabilitation or some matchmaker under the moon, putting on a solemn face to lecture me, visiting late at night drunk to stay over, and borrowing five yen (always five yen) each time.

“But you ought to put an end to this womanizing of yours here.”
“The world won’t tolerate it any further.”

What exactly was this “world” they spoke of?
Was it merely humans in plural?
Where did this entity called “the world” truly reside?
Yet I had always envisioned it as some formidable, merciless force—but when Horiki uttered those words, I suddenly—

“The world is none other than you.”

The words had reached the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed them back down, not wanting to anger Horiki.

(It’s the world that won’t allow it.)

(Not the world.
(It’s you who won’t allow it, right?)

(Do that and the world will make you suffer!)

(Not the world.
(You’re the one, aren’t you?)

(Soon you’ll be cast out by ‘the world’.)

(Not *the world*.
(You’ll be casting me out, won’t you?)

Know thyself—thy terrifying nature! Thy grotesqueness! Thy malice! Thy vulpine cunning! Thy witch-like craft!
Such words churned within me, yet I merely wiped the sweat on my face with a handkerchief,

"Cold sweat, cold sweat," I said with a laugh.

Yet from that moment onward, I found myself harboring what resembled a philosophical conviction: *Society is nothing but the individual.*

Once I began viewing this thing called "society" as ultimately reducible to individuals, I became slightly more capable of acting according to my own will than before. To borrow Shizuko's phrasing, I grew more self-indulgent and less timid. To borrow Horiki's words, I turned oddly stingy. And to borrow Shigeko's expression, I stopped doting on her quite so much.

Silent and unsmiling, day after day I cared for Shigeko while drawing serialized comics like *Kinta and Ota’s Adventures*, an obvious derivative *Easygoing Monk* (a clear knockoff of *Laidback Tōsan*), and *Hasty Pinchan*—a title even I couldn’t make sense of—in response to orders from various publishers (though aside from Shizuko’s company, these came only sporadically from what could only be called third-rate publishers far more vulgar than hers). With an utterly gloomy heart, I worked sluggishly (my brushwork had always been painfully slow), drawing now solely for liquor money. Then when Shizuko returned from work, I’d promptly go out in her place to drink cheap strong liquor at street stalls and stand bars near Kōenji Station before returning to the apartment slightly cheerier.

“The more I look at you, the stranger your face gets.”
“The Easygoing Monk’s face was actually inspired by your sleeping expression.”

“Even your sleeping face has aged terribly—like a forty-year-old’s.”
“Like a forty-year-old man.”

“It’s your fault.”
“You drained me dry.”
“The river flows where it will—why fret over life?”
“What’s the use frettin’ by the water’s edge?”

“Don’t make a fuss. Go to bed already.”
“Or would you like to have a meal?”

Calmly, she paid no attention at all.

“If it’s alcohol, I’ll drink though.”
“The river flows, and life goes on—what’s the use?”
“The flow of people—no, the flow of water, and the fate of water—what’s the use?”

While singing, I would have Shizuko take off my clothes, press my forehead against her chest, and fall asleep—that was my daily routine.

And then the next day, I would repeat the same routine,

I just had to follow yesterday’s routine.
In other words, as long as I avoided rough indulgences,
then great sorrows wouldn’t come either.
The obstructive stone blocking my path—
the toad detoured around.
When I found these lines from Guy-Charles Cros’s poem in Ueda Bin’s translation, my face burned red enough to feel on fire all by myself.

Toad.

(That is me.
It matters not whether society permits or forbids.
It matters not whether they bury me or leave me unburied.
I am an animal inferior even to dogs and cats.
Toad.
Merely plodding along.)

My drinking gradually increased in quantity. I began drinking not only around Kōenji Station but as far as Shinjuku and Ginza, even staying out overnight. To defy “routine,” I’d act the ruffian in bars or kiss women indiscriminately—in short, I became a drinker even more debased and vulgar than before that double suicide, no—even worse than back then. When money ran short, I resorted to taking Shizuko’s clothes to pawn.

By now, over a year had passed since I’d smiled bitterly at that torn kite. In the season when cherry trees bore young leaves, I once again stole Shizuko’s obi sashes and underrobes, took them to the pawnshop for money, drank in Ginza, stayed out two nights straight, and on the third evening—finally feeling the strain—I unconsciously muffled my footsteps and approached Shizuko’s apartment door. From inside, I could hear Shizuko and Shigeko talking.

“Why does he drink?”

“Daddy isn’t drinking because he likes it, you know.”
“Because he’s too good a person… That’s why…”
“Do good people drink alcohol?”
“Well, not exactly, but…”
“Daddy will surely be surprised.”
“He might not like it.”
“Look, look! It jumped out of the box!”
“It looks just like Hasty Pinchan!”
“Hmm, I suppose so.”

I heard Shizuko’s low, genuinely happy laughter.

I opened the door a crack and peeked inside—it was the white rabbit.
It hopped about the room while the mother and child chased after it.

(They’re happy, these people.
This fool called me will come between them and ruin everything.
A humble happiness.
A good mother and child.
Happiness—ah, if God would hear even someone like me praying just once—once in my whole life—I’d pray for it.)

I felt compelled to crouch there and clasp my hands in prayer. I quietly closed the door, returned to Ginza, and never went back to that apartment again.

Thus I came to lie about once more on the second floor of a stand bar near Kyōbashi, playing the role of a kept man.

Society.
It seemed even I was beginning to dimly comprehend it—that it’s a struggle between individuals, confined to the moment, where one need only triumph then and there. Humans never submit to other humans; even slaves retaliate in their own servile fashion. Thus mankind has no recourse but to stake survival on these fleeting victories. Though paying homage to grand causes, our true aim remains surpassing one individual after another. The inscrutability of society is the inscrutability of the individual; the vast ocean isn’t society but the solitary self. Partially freed from dread of this oceanic phantom called “the world,” I stopped agonizing over every trifle as before and learned—if you will—to act with a measure of audacity according to immediate needs.

I abandoned the Kōenji apartment and went to the madam of the stand bar in Kyōbashi,

“I left and came here.”

With just those words—enough to decide the matter—I began brusquely staying on the second floor that very night. Yet the supposedly terrifying “society” inflicted no harm upon me, nor did I offer any explanations to “society.” If the madam permitted it, all was well.

To any observer, I might have been a customer of that bar, its proprietor, an errand boy, or a relative—an existence defying categorization—yet “society” showed not the slightest suspicion. The regulars there called me “Yozo” with excessive kindness, treating me gently and letting me drink their liquor.

I gradually grew less guarded toward the world.
I had come to think that the world was not such a terrifying place after all.
In other words, my past terrors had been akin to being menaced by so-called “scientific superstitions”—the belief that spring winds carried hundreds of thousands of whooping cough bacilli; that public baths teemed with just as many sight-destroying germs; that barbershops harbored equal hordes of baldness-inducing microbes; that government railway straps swarmed with scabies mites; that sashimi and undercooked beef or pork inevitably concealed larvae of roundworms, liver flukes, and other such horrors; that walking barefoot would allow tiny glass shards to pierce my soles, which might then course through my body to stab my eyeballs and cause blindness.
That hundreds of thousands of germs were indeed floating, swimming, and writhing about was, from a “scientific” standpoint, an accurate fact.
At the same time, I came to realize that if one were to utterly disregard their existence, they would become mere “scientific phantoms”—losing all connection to me and vanishing instantly.
How thoroughly I had been menaced by those “scientific statistics”—the kind claiming three leftover grains in a lunchbox, if ten million people wasted three grains daily, amounted to discarding enough rice to fill countless bales; or that saving one tissue per day across ten million people would conserve untold volumes of pulp. Each time I left even a single grain uneaten or blew my nose, I’d be tormented by delusions of squandering mountainous rice and pulp reserves, sinking into gloom as though committing mortal sins. Yet this too was nothing but a “scientific lie.”
“The lie of statistics.”
It was a “mathematical lie”—three grains could never actually be collected, and even as an applied arithmetic problem, it remained a primitive, imbecilic premise. Calculating probabilities like how often someone might misstep into an unlit toilet hole, or how many passengers would catch their feet in the gap between government railway doors and platform edges—such reckonings proved equally absurd. Though these scenarios seemed plausible in theory, I’d never heard of anyone actually injuring themselves straddling a toilet hole. Having been indoctrinated with these “scientific facts” until yesterday—accepting them as absolute reality while cowering in terror—I now found my former self pitiable, almost laughable. This was how I came, bit by bit, to grasp the true nature of the world.

Even so, human beings remained utterly terrifying to me, and I still had to down a full glass of liquor before facing the bar's customers.
Morbid curiosity.
Every night I still appeared at the bar, and like a child who—frightened by some small creature—ends up clutching it tighter, I even began drunkenly expounding clumsy theories about art to the patrons.

Cartoonist.
Ah, but I was an obscure cartoonist with neither great joys nor great sorrows.
However much I might inwardly crave some violent, overwhelming joy—even if great sorrows were to follow—my present happiness consisted solely of exchanging idle talk with customers and drinking their liquor.

Having come to Kyōbashi, I had already maintained this trivial existence for nearly a year. My manga now appeared not only in children's magazines but also in the cheap, obscene periodicals sold at station kiosks. Under the absurd pseudonym "Joshi Kito"—written with characters meaning "Double Suicide" yet read as "Lived On"—I drew filthy nudes, typically inserting verses from the Rubaiyat alongside them.

Stop your vain prayers already.
Tear-jerking things—fling them all away.

Let’s have another drink. Just think of the good times.
Forget all your needless worries.
Those wretches who wield anxiety and fear to threaten others—
Trembling at the heinous sins they themselves have wrought—
Preparing for the vengeance of the dead,
Their heads ceaselessly devising schemes.
Call out! With wine my heart is filled with joy—
This morning, awakening to mere desolation.
Wondrous strange—within a single night’s span—
How transformed—this very mood!
Stop thinking about curses.
Like a drum echoing from afar—
Somehow, that fills me with unease.

If every single thing like farting were tallied as a sin, I wouldn’t last a day, I tell you.

Can justice be life’s guiding star?
Farewell to battlefields drenched in blood—
At the assassin’s blade-tip edge

What justice could dwell here?

Where lies the guiding principle?

What light of wisdom exists?

Beautiful yet terrifying remains this fleeting world.

The frail child of man bears burdens beyond endurance,

Merely for having been sown with seeds of ungovernable lust.

Good and evil, sin and punishment—all accursed,

Left helplessly adrift with no recourse.

Merely because one had not been granted the power or will to suppress and crush.

Where have you wandered, and how?

What critique? What scrutiny? What reexamination?

Heh—futile dreams... illusions that never were.

Heh—forgot the liquor, so everyone’s just mulling over empty thoughts.

How about it? Behold this boundless sky.

In all this vastness, it's just a tiny speck floating here.
Who knows why this Earth spins?

Rotation, revolution, reversal—all free to do as they please!
Everywhere one feels the supreme power.
In all countries, in all ethnic groups,
One discovers a shared humanity.

I am called a heretic.
Everyone misreads the Holy Scriptures.
Otherwise there's neither common sense nor wisdom.
Forbidding earthly pleasures and banning drink—

“No good, Mustafa. I hate that kind of thing.”

However, around that time, there was a virgin who urged me to stop drinking.

"You mustn’t do this—getting drunk every day starting at noon."

She was the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl from the small tobacco shop across from Baa.
Her name was Yoshiko, a fair-skinned girl with double teeth.
Every time I went to buy cigarettes, she would laugh and admonish me.

"Why shouldn’t I?
What’s wrong with that?
Drink all the liquor there is—‘O child of man, cast off hatred, cast it off, cast it off!’—you know, like in old Persia. Well, never mind that. ‘To bring hope to a heart wearied by sorrow, naught but a jeweled cup that brings mild intoxication.’ You get it?"
"Do you get it?"

“I don’t understand.”

“You little brat. I’ll kiss you!”

“Go on then.”

Without the slightest hint of shame, she thrust out her lower lip.

“You idiot. Chastity, you…”

Yet Yoshiko’s expression undeniably carried the pristine scent of a virgin untouched by any man.

On a bitterly cold night after New Year’s, I staggered out drunk to buy cigarettes, tumbled into the manhole before the tobacco shop, screamed “Yoshiko, help!”, was hauled up by Yoshiko, had her tend to the gashes on my right arm—and in that moment Yoshiko admonished me earnestly,

“You drink too much.”

She said without laughing.

I didn’t fear dying itself, but the prospect of being injured, bleeding, and ending up a cripple was utterly detestable—so as Yoshiko tended to the wound on my arm, I thought perhaps I should finally quit drinking altogether.

“I’ll quit.
Starting tomorrow, I won’t drink a single drop.”

“Really?”

“I’ll quit for sure.
If I quit, Yoshiko, will you become my bride?”

However, my marriage proposal had been a joke.

"You bet."

"Mochi" was an abbreviation for "mochiron" ("of course"). Back then, all sorts of abbreviations were in vogue—things like *mobo* for modern boys and *moga* for modern girls.

“Alright.”
“I’ll make a vow.”
“I’ll definitely quit.”

And so the next day, I ended up drinking from noon again.

In the evening，I staggered out and stood in front of Yoshiko’s shop，

“Yoshiko，I’m sorry．
“I ended up drinking．”

“Oh，don’t be silly．
“Quit pretending to be drunk．”

I was startled.
The drunkenness had cleared from my mind.

“No, it’s true.
I really did drink.
I’m not pretending to be drunk.”

“Don’t tease me.
You’re mean.”

She didn’t doubt me in the slightest.

“You should see it just by looking at me.”
“I drank again today since noon.”
“Forgive me.”

“You’re quite the performer, aren’t you?”

“It’s not an act, you idiot!”
“I’ll kiss you!”

“Go ahead.”

“No—I’ve no right.”
“I must give up on making you my bride.”
“Look at my face—it’s red, isn’t it?”
“I did drink.”

“That’s just the sunset on your face.”
“Arguing won’t help.”
“You promised yesterday.”
“You couldn’t have drunk.”
“You swore a vow.”
“Lies! All lies!”

In the dim shop sat Yoshiko, her pale face smiling—ah, how precious was this virginity untainted by filth! I had never slept with a virgin younger than myself. Let us marry, I thought. Let whatever great sorrow follow come later. Let me taste even a crude sort of pleasure once in this lifetime. I’d believed the beauty of virginity to be nothing but sentimental delusions of foolish poets, yet here it existed—alive in this world. Marry her, and when spring came, we’d ride bicycles to see Aoba Waterfall together. Resolving this on the spot, I didn’t hesitate to steal that flower in what they call an “all-or-nothing gamble.”

And so we were married, and though the pleasure we gained from it was not particularly great, the sorrow that followed was so ghastly that even 'ghastly' fell short—truly beyond imagining and immense.
To me, “the world” remained an unfathomably terrifying place.
It was by no means such a naive realm where everything from start to finish could be settled through something like an all-or-nothing gamble.

II

Horiki and myself.

If associating with one another in mutual contempt, thereby mutually reducing ourselves to worthlessness, constitutes what this world calls “friendship,” then my relationship with Horiki was indeed precisely that.

I relied on the chivalrous spirit of that madam at the Kyobashi stand bar—(“chivalrous spirit” being a strange way to describe women, but according to my experience, at least in the case of urban men and women, women possessed far more of what might be called this chivalrous quality than men did). Men were generally timid, concerned only with appearances, and stingy—I managed to make Yoshiko from that tobacco shop my common-law wife, rented a small wooden two-story apartment near Tsukiji and the Sumida River where we lived together on the first floor, quit drinking, threw myself into my cartoon work—which was gradually becoming my established profession—went out to see movies with her after dinner, stopped by cafés on our way home, bought flower pots, and—no, more than any of that—found joy in listening to this little bride who trusted me wholeheartedly and watching her movements. I had even begun to faintly nurture a sweet hope in my chest that perhaps I too might gradually become something resembling a human being and avoid a miserable death—when Horiki appeared before me once again.

“Hey!

“You lech!”
“Oh?”
“Even so, you’ve gone and put on a somewhat sensible-looking face.”
“Today, I’m here as a messenger from Ms. Koenji.”

He began to speak but suddenly lowered his voice, jerking his chin toward Yoshiko preparing tea in the kitchen. “Is it okay?” he asked—

“It doesn’t matter.”
“Say whatever you want.”

I calmly replied.

In truth, Yoshiko was—one might say—a genius of trust. Not only did she never doubt my relationship with the madam at the Kyobashi bar, but even when I told her about the incident I had caused in Kamakura, she showed no suspicion toward Tsuneko. This was not because I lied skillfully; at times, I even bluntly stated such matters. Yet to Yoshiko, it all seemed to register as nothing more than jokes.

“Still lugging that around, I see. Oh, it’s nothing major—just a message from Ms.Koenji saying you should come visit Koenji sometime.”

Just as I began to forget, a monstrous bird would come flapping its wings and pierce the wound of memory with its beak. In an instant, memories of past shame and sins were vividly laid bare before my eyes—with such terror that I wanted to scream—and I could no longer remain seated.

“Shall we drink?”

I said.

“Alright.”

said Horiki.

Myself and Horiki.
In appearance, we resembled each other.
There were times when we felt like exact duplicates of a human being.
Of course, this only occurred when wandering about drinking cheap liquor, but whenever our faces met, we’d transform in an instant into two dogs of identical build and coat, racing through snow-choked alleyways as though possessed.

From that day onward, we resumed what could be called our old friendship, going together to that small bar in Kyobashi, until finally even such acts as those two drunken dogs visiting and staying overnight at Shizuko’s apartment in Koenji came about.

I will never forget.

It was a muggy summer night. Horiki came to my apartment in Tsukiji around dusk, wearing a worn-out yukata, and said he had pawned his summer clothes that day out of necessity—if his old mother found out about the pawn, it would be disastrous, so he needed to redeem them immediately and begged me to lend him the money no matter what. Unfortunately, I had no cash either, so following our usual routine, I ordered Yoshiko to take her clothes to the pawnshop to raise funds. After lending Horiki his share, there was still a little left over. With the remaining money, I made Yoshiko buy shochu, then we went up to the apartment rooftop and held a pathetically shabby cooling party, catching the occasional faint whiffs of ditch-stinking breeze that drifted over from the Sumida River.

At that moment, we began a game of categorizing comedy nouns and tragedy nouns.
This was a game I had invented: while all nouns have distinctions like masculine, feminine, and neuter, they ought also to be divided into comedy and tragedy nouns. For instance, steamships and trains are tragedy nouns, while trams and buses are comedy nouns. Those who fail to grasp why this is so have no right to discuss art. A playwright who inserts even one tragedy noun into a comedy has already failed by that alone—and the same applies conversely to tragedies. Such was the reasoning behind it.

“Ready? Tobacco?” I asked.

“Tra. (short for ‘tragedy’),” Horiki answered promptly.

“Medicine?”

“Is it powdered medicine? Is it a pill?”

“Injection?”

“Tra.”

“Is that so? There’s also hormone injections, you know.”

“No—it’s Tra., no question. First off—the needle. And you’re a splendid Tra. yourself!”

“Fine, I’ll concede this one. However, you know—medicine and doctors? Those are actually Com. Death?”

“Com. Pastors and monks too—they’re Com., ain’t they?”

“Brilliant! And so, life is Tra., I suppose?”

“No. That’s also Com.”

“No—if that’s how you see it, everything would just become Com.”
“Then let me ask one more thing—what about cartoonists?”
“Surely you can’t call them Com., can you?”

“Tra., Tra.”
“A great tragedy noun!”

“What’s this? You’re the great Tra. here!”

Though it had devolved into such an awkward punning contest that felt utterly meaningless, we nevertheless swelled with pride over this game of ours—convinced it was an ingeniously sophisticated creation that had never before existed in any salon throughout the world.

At that time, I had devised another similar game.
It was a contest of guessing antonyms.
Black’s Ant.—short for antonym—was white.
Yet white’s Ant. was red.
Red’s Ant. was black.

“What’s the Ant. for ‘flower’?”

When I asked, Horiki twisted his mouth in thought,

“Hmm, since there’s a restaurant called Hanatsuki, it’s ‘moon’.”

“No—that’s not an Ant.”
“Rather, it’s a synonym.”
“Even stars and violets are synonyms, aren’t they?”
“Not an Ant.”

“Got it! That’s… a bee.”

“Bee?”

“Peony’s… ant?”

“Oh, come on—that’s a painting subject.”
“Don’t try to weasel out of it.”

“Got it!
“For flowers—cluster clouds…”

“The Ant. for ‘moon’ would be ‘cluster clouds,’ I suppose.”

“Yes, yes.”
“Flower’s Ant. is wind.”
“Wind.”
“Flower’s Ant. is wind.”

“That’s no good—isn’t that a line straight out of a naniwa-bushi ballad? That gives you away.”

“No—it’s ‘biwa’.”

“Still no good. The Ant. for ‘flower’… You should name precisely what’s least flower-like in this world.”

“So then… Wait! A woman?”

“By the way, what’s the synonym for ‘woman’?”
“Offal.”

“You really don’t know anything about poetry.”
“Then, what’s the Ant. for ‘offal’?”

“Milk.”

“Hmm, that’s rather clever.”
“Keep it up. Another one.”
“Shame.”
“Ant.’s Ant.”

“Shamelessness. Popular cartoonist Joshi Kikuta.”

“Horiki Masao?”

From around this point, the two of us gradually became unable to laugh, sinking into that particular shochu-induced drunkenness—a gloomy mood as if shards of glass had filled our heads.

“Don’t get cocky,” he said. “I’ve never suffered the shame of rope marks like you have.”

I was startled.

When I realized Horiki had never truly treated me as a proper human being—that he saw me only as a failed suicide, a shameless fool, a monstrous creature, what you might call a “living corpse,” exploiting me solely for his own pleasure in this so-called “friendship”—I naturally felt wretched. Yet I reconsidered: perhaps it was only reasonable for Horiki to view me this way. After all, I had been a child devoid of human qualifications from the start. Maybe even someone like Horiki was justified in despising me.

“Sin.
“What’s the antonym of sin?”
“This is a tough one.”

he said, feigning nonchalance.

“Law.”

Since Horiki had answered with such composure, I took another look at his face.
Bathed in the flickering red light of a nearby building’s neon sign, Horiki’s face appeared with an air of solemn authority, like that of a demon detective.
I was utterly appalled,

“Sin isn’t something like that, you know.”

The antonym of sin is law?! Yet people might all think so simply and live unbothered. That where no detectives lurk is where sin writhes.

“Then what? God?”
“There’s something priestly about you.”
“No—reeking of it.”

“Don’t dismiss it so lightly. Let’s think more—the two of us. This is an interesting theme though. I feel one answer to this theme could reveal a person’s entirety.”

“No way… The antonym of sin is good.”
“Model citizens.”
“In other words, someone like me.”

“Let’s stop with the jokes.
But good is the Ant. of evil.
It’s not the Ant. of sin.”

“Are evil and sin different?”

“I think they are.
The concepts of good and evil are human creations.
Arbitrary moral terms people invented.”

“Are evil and sin different?”

“No—I think they’re different.”
“The concept of good and evil is something created by humans.”
“Moral precepts are just words humans invented on a whim.”

“Shut up already.”
“Then I guess it’s God.”
“God. God.”
“Just pin everything on God and you can’t go wrong.”
“Man, I’m starving.”

“Yoshiko’s boiling broad beans downstairs right now.”

“Thanks.”
“My favorite.”

He clasped his hands behind his head and flopped onto his back.

“You seem utterly indifferent to the nature of sin.”

“Course I am. Not a sinner like you.”
“I might fool around, but I don’t kill women or swindle ’em.”

Even as a faint, desperate protest rose somewhere in my heart—I didn’t kill her; I didn’t swindle anything—the old habit reasserted itself: No—it was all my fault.

I simply could not engage in a direct argument.
Desperately trying to suppress the perilous shift in my mood brought on by the gloomy drunkenness of shochu, I muttered almost to myself.

"But it's not just being thrown in prison that counts as sin."
"If I could understand the Ant. of sin, I might grasp its essence—...God,...salvation,...love,...light,...but God has Satan as its Ant., salvation's Ant. would be suffering, love has hatred, light has darkness as its Ant., good has evil—sin and prayer, sin and remorse, sin and confession, sin and... Ah—they're all synonyms! What is sin's true antonym?"

“The Ant. of sin is honey.”
“It’s as sweet as honey.”
“Man, I’m starving.”
“Bring me something to eat!”

“Then why don’t you go get it yourself!”

A voice of fierce anger erupted—as if for the first time in my life.

“Fine! Then I’ll go downstairs and commit a sin with Yoshiko.”
“Enough debate—let’s get hands-on.”
“The Ant. of sin is honey beans—no, broad beans?”

He was so drunk he could barely form coherent words.

“Do as you please.”
“Get the hell out of here!”

“Sin and hunger, hunger and broad beans—no, are these synonyms?”

While spouting nonsense, he got up.

*Crime and Punishment*.
Dostoevsky.
It fleetingly brushed past a corner of my mind, and I suddenly realized—
What if Mr. Dostoevsky had positioned Crime and Punishment not as synonyms but as antonyms?
*Crime and Punishment*—utterly irreconcilable, as incompatible as fire and ice.
As a kaleidoscope of thoughts whirled through my mind—Dostoevsky’s *Crime and Punishment* considered as Ant., his bluish mold, the rotten pond, the depths of tangled threads… Ah, I almost grasped it—no, not yet—…—when…

“Hey!”
“What madness! Broad beans!”
“Come here!”

Horiki’s voice and complexion had changed.
Horiki had just staggered downstairs when, in an instant, he came back up again.

“What?”

Abnormally tense with murderous intent, the two descended from the rooftop to the second floor, and midway down the stairs leading from there to his own room on the lower floor, Horiki halted.

“Look!”

He whispered and pointed.

The small window above my room was open, allowing a view inside.
The light was still on, and there were two animals.

Swaying dizzily, I muttered to myself between ragged breaths—This too is a human form, this too is a human form; there’s nothing to shock me here—forgetting even to help Yoshiko, standing frozen on the stairs.

Horiki cleared his throat loudly.
I fled alone back up to the rooftop once more, lay down, and gazed up at the rain-laden summer night sky. The emotion that assailed me then was neither anger nor disgust, nor even sorrow—it was overwhelming terror.
And it was not the fear one might feel toward cemetery ghosts, but rather an ancient, primal terror—the kind one might experience encountering a sacred deity clad in white amidst a shrine’s cedar grove—a terror that brooked no argument.
My premature white hair began that night, and I lost all confidence, came to doubt others beyond measure, and became eternally severed from any expectation, joy, or resonance with the world’s endeavors.
Truly, that was the decisive event of my life.
I had been split straight through my forehead, and ever since that day, the wound throbbed with pain whenever I approached any human being.

“I pity you, but you must’ve learned your lesson by now.”
“I’ll never come to this place again.”
“It’s hell…—but you should forgive Yoshiko.”
“You’re no saint yourself anyway.”
“I’m out of here.”

Horiki was not so dim-witted as to linger indefinitely in an awkward situation.

I sat up, drank shochu alone, and then began wailing.
I could cry endlessly, endlessly.

Before I knew it, Yoshiko was standing blankly behind me, holding a plate heaped with broad beans.

“But I said I wouldn’t do anything...”

“Enough. Don’t say anything.”
“You never knew how to doubt others.”
“Sit down.”
“Let’s eat the beans.”

They sat side by side and ate the beans.
Ah—is trust a sin?
The man was an uneducated, small-statured merchant around thirty who would have me draw manga before condescendingly leaving behind trifling sums.

Though that merchant never returned afterward, what seethed within me during sleepless nights wasn’t hatred toward him, but rather resentment and rage toward Horiki—who upon first discovering the scene had neither coughed conspicuously nor done anything else, but simply turned back to summon me to the rooftop—causing me to groan aloud.

There was no question of forgiving or not forgiving.
Yoshiko was a genius when it came to trust.
She did not know how to doubt people.
Yet that very trust became her tragedy.

I questioned God.
Is trust then a sin?

What became for me a seed of anguish so profound I could barely keep living—persisting long after—was not that Yoshiko had been defiled, but that her trust had been violated.
To someone like me—disgustingly fidgety, forever reading others' expressions, my capacity for trust shattered—Yoshiko's pure-hearted faith had seemed as bracing as a waterfall cascading through young leaves.
Overnight, it had turned to foul yellow water.
See how Yoshiko grew watchful of her every expression from that night onward.

“Hey,”
When I called out to her, she started and seemed utterly at a loss where to look.
No matter how much I tried to make her laugh with clowning remarks, she would only grow flustered, startle nervously, and begin using overly polite language with me.

Is pure-hearted trust indeed the very wellspring of sin?

I searched for and read various books containing stories about married women being violated.
But I thought there was not a single woman who had been violated in as miserable a manner as Yoshiko.
Fundamentally, this wasn’t a story at all.
Had there been even a semblance of affection between that small-statured merchant and Yoshiko, it might have somehow eased my anguish. But there was only this: one summer night when Yoshiko trusted him—and nothing more. Because of that single act, my forehead was split straight through, my voice grew hoarse, premature white hair began to spread, and Yoshiko had to spend her life in anxious confusion.
In most stories, the emphasis seemed to lie on whether the husband would forgive his wife’s “act,” but to me, that did not appear to be such an agonizingly grave issue.
How fortunate are those husbands who retain the right to forgive or not forgive! If one truly cannot forgive, why make such a fuss? Simply divorce the wife and take a new one—if that proves impossible, then “forgive” and endure it. In any case, everything could be neatly settled through the husband’s disposition alone—or so it even seemed to me.
In other words, such incidents might indeed deliver a tremendous shock to the husband—but it was merely a “shock,” I thought, unlike ceaselessly crashing waves. It seemed more like a disturbance that could be resolved through the anger of a husband who held that right.
But in our case, the husband had no rights, and when I thought about it, everything seemed to be my own fault—far from being able to get angry, I couldn’t even utter a single word of reproach. Moreover, that wife had been violated precisely because of the rare virtue she possessed.
Moreover, that virtue was none other than the pure-hearted trust—an irresistibly endearing thing—that the husband had long yearned for.

Is pure-hearted trust a sin?

Even toward the sole virtue I had relied upon, I harbored doubts; I had become utterly unable to comprehend anything at all, and my only recourse was alcohol.
The expression on my face grew utterly vulgar; I drank shochu from morning onward, my teeth crumbled away, and the comics I drew became little more than obscene sketches.
No, I will state it clearly.
From around that time, I secretly sold copies of erotic pictures.
I wanted money to buy shochu.

Whenever I saw Yoshiko fidgeting anxiously, avoiding my gaze—this woman who lacked all sense of caution—I wondered: Had that merchant been with her more than once? And what about Horiki?
No—or perhaps even someone I didn’t know? Such suspicions bred more suspicions, yet I lacked the courage to confront her outright. Writhing in my usual anxiety and terror, I drank shochu until drunk, timidly attempting servile leading questions as if conducting an interrogation—foolishly swinging between hope and despair within while clowning excessively on the surface—and then inflicted abominable hellish caresses upon Yoshiko before collapsing into sleep like mud.

At the end of that year, I returned home late at night dead drunk and wanted to drink sugar water. Since Yoshiko seemed to be asleep, I went to the kitchen myself, found the sugar jar, opened the lid, and discovered there was no sugar inside—only a small, black, elongated paper box.
I absentmindedly picked it up and looked at the label affixed to the box—then froze in shock.
The label had been more than half scraped off with fingernails, but the portion with Western letters remained, and there it was clearly written.
DIAL.

DIAL.
At that time, I drank almost exclusively shochu and didn't use sleeping pills, but since insomnia had become something like a chronic condition for me, I knew most hypnotics well.
This single box of DIAL undoubtedly contained more than a lethal dose.
The seal remained unbroken, but she must have hidden it here with determination—even scraping off part of the label—preparing for someday.
Poor thing—she couldn't read the Western letters on the label, so she must have thought scraping half off with her nail would suffice.
("You bear no guilt.")

I quietly filled a glass with water without making a sound, then slowly opened the box’s seal, tossed all the contents into my mouth at once calmly drank down the water turned off the light and went to sleep just like that.

For three days and nights I was said to have been as though dead.
The doctor reportedly deemed it an accident and delayed reporting it to the police.
As he was regaining consciousness the first delirious words he muttered were reportedly “I want to go home.”
As for what he meant by “home” even he himself did not fully understand but regardless he reportedly said those words and wept bitterly.

Gradually, the fog cleared, and when I looked, Hirame was sitting by my pillow with an extremely displeased expression.

“Just like last time—it was around year-end too. We’re all dizzyingly busy as it is, yet he always aims for year-end to pull these stunts. It’s enough to drive me to my grave.”

The one listening to Hirame’s story was the Kyobashi bar madam.

“Madam”

“Madam,” I called out.

“Hmm? What?”
“Are you awake?”

Madam spoke while veiling her face with a smile.

Tears fell from me in droplets.

“Let me separate from Yoshiko.”

Even I was startled by the words that emerged.

Madam raised herself up and released a faint sigh.

Then I made yet another remark—a gaffe so indescribably comical and foolish that it defied all attempts at characterization.

“I’m going to a place without women.”

First Hirame bellowed with laughter. Then the Madam tittered. I, too, forced a bitter smile, tears streaming down my face as I flushed crimson.

“Yeah, that’s probably for the best.”

Hirame kept laughing endlessly and sloppily,

“You should go to a place without women.
When there are women around, nothing works right.
A place without women—now there’s a stroke of genius.”

A place without women.
However, this idiotic rambling of mine would later come to be realized in an exceedingly grim manner.

Yoshiko seemed to have convinced herself that I had drunk poison in her stead, for she became even more fidgety around me than before—never laughing at anything I said, barely able to speak properly. The apartment room grew stifling to me, and I would inevitably end up going out to gulp down cheap alcohol as always.
However, ever since that DIAL incident, my body had grown alarmingly emaciated; my limbs felt leaden, and I became neglectful of my manga work. The money Hirame had left behind at that time as a get-well gift (though he presented it with great ceremony as "Shibuta’s goodwill," pretending it came from his own pocket when in fact it was likely sent by my brothers back home)...
By that time—unlike when I had fled from Hirame's house—I had come to dimly perceive through his pompous theatrics, and so I too cunningly pretended not to notice, dutifully expressing my gratitude for the money directly to Hirame. Yet I couldn't shake this strange feeling—something between comprehension and bewilderment—about why Hirame and the others would go through such convoluted schemes. With that money, I boldly attempted solitary trips to hot springs in South Izu and such, though I was in no state for such leisurely spa visits. Tormented endlessly by thoughts of Yoshiko, far from any tranquil state of mind to gaze at mountains from my inn room, I didn't even change into proper livery coats or enter the baths—instead rushing out to dive into grubby teahouse-like establishments where I drank shochu as if bathing in it, only worsening my physical condition before returning to Tokyo.

It was a night when heavy snow had fallen in Tokyo.
Drunk, I wandered through Ginza's back alleys, whispering repeatedly like an incantation—"Here's a homeland hundreds of miles away, here's a homeland hundreds of miles away"—as I kicked through accumulating snow with my shoe tips until suddenly I vomited.
That was my first hemoptysis.
A large Hinomaru formed in the snow.
I squatted down, scooped up clean snow with both hands from an untouched patch, and washed my face while crying.

How about this narrow path here?

How about this narrow path here?

The pitiful girl's singing voice reached me like an auditory hallucination, faint and distant.
Misfortune.
One could say this world contains every variety of unfortunate person—no, it would not be an exaggeration to claim it consists entirely of them. Yet their misfortunes permit open protest to what we call society, and this "society" readily comprehends and sympathizes with their grievances.
But my misfortunes all spring from my own sins, leaving me no recourse for protest. Were I to stammer out even a single protesting word—not just Hirame, but all members of society would surely gape in disbelief at my audacity. I cannot tell whether I am what they label "self-indulgent" or conversely too feeble-willed—in any case I appear to be a congealed mass of sin, perpetually sinking deeper into misfortune with no concrete means of arrest.

I stood up and, thinking I should get some medicine for now, entered a nearby pharmacy. The moment I met eyes with the owner’s wife there, she jerked her head up as if hit by a flash, her eyes widening, and stood frozen. However, in those widened eyes there was neither shock nor disgust; instead appeared a look that seemed to seek salvation—almost yearning. Ah, this woman must be an unfortunate soul too—for those who are unfortunate are sensitive to others’ misfortunes—I thought, when suddenly I noticed the owner’s wife standing unsteadily on crutches. Suppressing the urge to rush over, I continued meeting her gaze until tears began to flow. Then from her large eyes too, tears came streaming out in great drops.

Without another word, I left the pharmacy, staggered back to my apartment, had Yoshiko make salt water for me to drink, and lay silent in bed. The next day too, I lied about catching a cold and stayed in bed all day. That night, unable to bear the anxiety over my secret hemoptysis any longer, I got up, went back to that pharmacy, and—laughing this time—confessed with complete candor to the owner’s wife about my physical condition up until then, seeking her advice.

“You must give up drinking.”

We were mere mortals.

"I might be turning into an alcoholic."
"I still crave it even now."

"You mustn't."
"My husband had TB too—kept saying he'd kill the germs with alcohol. Drank himself to an early grave."

"I can't stand this anxiety."
"I'm too frightened. I can't go on."

"I'll prepare medicine for you."
"But you must stop drinking."

The owner's wife—a widow whose son had entered medical school in Chiba or some such place only to soon contract the same illness as his father and now lay hospitalized, while her stroke-paralyzed father-in-law occupied their home, she herself having lost all use of one leg to childhood polio at age five—clattered her crutches across the floor as she gathered medications for me from shelves and drawers.

“This is a blood-building medicine.”

“This is a vitamin injection.
This is the syringe.”

“These are calcium tablets.
To protect your stomach—diastase.”

“What is this?”
She had lovingly explained five or six medications when I asked, but even this unfortunate woman’s affection felt overwhelming to me.
Finally, she said “This is for when you absolutely must drink,” swiftly wrapping a small box in paper.

It was a morphine injection.

The owner’s wife had said it was less harmful than alcohol, and I believed her. Moreover, I had reached a point where even alcohol’s intoxication felt unclean to me, and there was also the joy of being able to escape that Satan called alcohol after so long. Without any hesitation, I injected that morphine into my own arm.
Anxiety, restlessness, shyness—all were cleanly stripped away, and I became an exceedingly cheerful conversationalist.
And when I administered that injection, I would forget my physical frailty, throw myself into my manga work with vigor, and conjure up such bizarre ideas that I’d burst out laughing while drawing them.

What began as one dose per day became two, then four—until I had reached a point where I couldn't work without it.

“You mustn’t. If you become addicted, it’ll be catastrophic.”

When the pharmacy owner’s wife said this to me, I began feeling like I had already turned into a full-blown addict—(I’m terribly vulnerable to others’ suggestions. Even if told “Don’t use this money—but then, it’s you we’re talking about,” I’d fall into this strange delusion that not using it would be improper, that I’d be betraying their expectations—and inevitably end up spending it immediately.) This very anxiety about addiction drove me to request ever more medicine.

“Please! One more box.”
“I’ll pay by month’s end for sure.”

“The payment isn’t an issue, but the police are being difficult.”

Ah, no matter when, that murky darkness—the suspicious aura of societal rejects—always clung about me.

“Find some way around it, I beg you, ma’am.”
“I’ll give you a kiss.”

The owner’s wife flushed red.

I pressed harder:
“Without medicine, my work doesn’t progress at all.”
“For me, it’s like a vital tonic.”

“In that case, perhaps a hormone injection would be preferable.”

“Don’t mock me.
It’s either alcohol or that medicine—I can’t work without one or the other.”

“You mustn’t drink.”

“You see?
Since I started using that medicine, I haven’t drunk a single drop.
Thanks to that, my body’s in perfect shape.
I don’t plan to keep drawing these awful cartoons forever either. From now on, I’ll quit drinking, get healthy, study hard, and become a proper painter—you’ll see.
This is the critical juncture.
So please, I’m begging you.
Shall I give you a kiss?”

The owner’s wife burst into laughter,

“You’re impossible.
I won’t be responsible if you get addicted.”

Clattering her crutches, she took out the medicine from the shelf,

“I can’t give you a whole box.
You’d use it up right away.
Half.”

“Stingy, aren’t you? Well, guess there’s nothing to be done.”

Upon returning home, I would immediately give myself a shot.

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

Yoshiko timidly asked me.

“It does hurt. But to increase my work efficiency, I have to do this even if I hate it. I must seem full of energy lately, don’t I? Now then, time to work. Work, work!”

I would act boisterously like this.

There were times when I knocked on the pharmacy's door late at night.
In her nightclothes, clattering her crutches, the owner’s wife came out—I suddenly clung to her, kissed her, and pretended to cry.

The owner’s wife silently handed me a box.

By the time I fully realized that the medicine was just as loathsome and unclean as shochu—no, even more so—I had already become a complete addict.
Truly, I had reached the height of shamelessness.
I began copying pornographic pictures once more—solely to obtain that medicine—and even formed a literally ugly relationship with the disabled pharmacy owner's wife.

I wanted to die—no, I had to die. There was no undoing it now. No matter what I did, no matter what I tried, it only made things worse—just layered more shame upon shame. A bicycle ride to Aoba Falls? Such hopes were beyond me. Disgraceful sins piled atop wretched sins; my anguish only swelled sharper and more crushing. I wanted to die—I needed to die. Living itself was the seed of sin. Yet even as I resolved myself thus, I remained trapped in that half-mad state, shuttling between my apartment and the pharmacy.

No matter how much I worked, the amount of medicine I used only increased accordingly, so the debt for the medicine reached a terrifying sum. Whenever the owner’s wife saw my face, her eyes would well up with tears, and I too would weep.

Hell.

With a resolve that staked the very existence of God—this final means of escaping hell, knowing that if it failed there would be nothing left but to hang myself—I decided to write a long letter to my father back home confessing all the realities of my circumstances (though when it came to matters involving women, I couldn't bring myself to write them down).

But the outcome was even worse; no matter how long I waited day and night, there came no reply, and driven by that gnawing impatience and anxiety, I only ended up increasing my dosage of the medicine.

On that afternoon when I had secretly resolved to inject ten vials at once that night and then throw myself into the O River, Hirame appeared with Horiki as if guided by demonic intuition.

"I heard you coughed up blood."

Horiki sat cross-legged before me and spoke those words, smiling with a gentleness I'd never witnessed from him before.
That tender smile filled me with such overwhelming gratitude that I turned my face away and let tears flow.
With that single gentle smile of his, I found myself utterly shattered and annihilated.

I was loaded into a car.
"You must enter the hospital—leave everything else to us," Hirame urged in a solemn tone (so calm it might even be called compassionate). Like a creature stripped of will or judgment, I simply sniffled and obeyed their every instruction without resistance.
Including Yoshiko, the four of us endured endless jostling in the car until twilight's approach found us arriving at the entrance of a massive hospital deep within the woods.

I had thought it was nothing but a sanatorium.

I underwent an examination by a young doctor whose manner was excessively gentle and polite, then the doctor said,

"Well, you'll be resting here for a while,"

with an almost bashful smile. Hirame, Horiki, and Yoshiko ended up leaving me behind to return home. However, Yoshiko handed me the furoshiki bundle containing my change of clothes, then silently produced from her obi the syringe and remaining portion of that medicine.
Had she still believed it was merely an aphrodisiac?

“No, I don’t need it anymore.”

It was truly a rare occurrence. To have been offered something and refused it—in my entire life up to that point, it would not be an exaggeration to say this was the only time. My misfortune was the misfortune of one who lacked the ability to refuse. Were I to refuse something offered, I would be paralyzed by the terror that irreparable cracks—glaring fissures—would form in both the other person's heart and my own. Yet at that moment, I naturally refused the morphine I had been desperately seeking in near madness. Had I been struck by what might be called Yoshiko's "divine ignorance"? In that instant, had I not already ceased to be an addict?

But then I was immediately led by that bashfully smiling young doctor into a ward, where the lock clicked shut with a metallic clang.
It was a mental hospital.

That foolish rambling I’d uttered after taking Jial—about going somewhere without women—had now been realized in the strangest way.
The ward housed only male madmen; even the nursing staff were men, with not a single woman in sight.

I was now no longer a sinner but a madman.
No—I absolutely was not mad.
Not for a single moment had I ever been mad.
Yet ah—they say madmen always speak thus of themselves.
In other words: those admitted to this hospital are called madmen; those not admitted are deemed normal.

I ask God.
Does non-resistance count as sin?

At Horiki’s mysterious and beautiful smile, I wept, forgot all judgment and resistance, got into the car, and was brought here to be declared a madman.
Even were I to leave this place now, I would still bear the brand of a madman—no, rather an invalid—upon my forehead.

Human—disqualified.

Now, I had completely ceased to be human.

I had come there in early summer when crimson water lilies bloomed in the hospital garden's small pond visible through iron-barred windows. Three months passed until cosmos flowers began opening in that garden, when unexpectedly my eldest brother from home arrived with Hirame to retrieve me. In a stiffly earnest tone he told me Father had died of a stomach ulcer last month; that they would no longer interrogate my past nor impose livelihood concerns; that I needn't do anything—but in exchange, though lingering attachments might remain, I must immediately leave Tokyo to begin convalescence in the countryside. As for tidying up the mess I'd made in Tokyo, Shibuta had likely handled most of it already, so I needn't worry.

The mountains and rivers of my hometown seemed to materialize before my eyes, and I nodded faintly.

Truly an invalid.

Ever since learning of Father's death, I had grown increasingly hollow.
Father was gone—that cherished yet terrifying presence that had never left my heart for an instant was gone. It felt as though the vessel containing all my anguish had been drained empty.
I even began to think that perhaps Father had been why that vessel of suffering had felt so unbearably heavy.
All tension had left me.
I had lost even the capacity for anguish.

My eldest brother faithfully kept his promise to me.
About four or five hours south by train from the town where I was born and raised lay a seaside hot spring resort in Tohoku that was unusually warm for that northern region. At the village outskirts, he purchased for me a thatched-roof house with five rooms—so ancient its walls were flaking away, pillars riddled with insect damage, beyond any hope of repair—and provided me with a single maid: a nearly sixty-year-old woman with shockingly red hair and an ugly appearance.

A little over three years passed, during which time I was subjected to several strange violations by that elderly maid Tetsu while my chest illness fluctuated—losing weight then gaining it back, producing bloody phlegm—and occasionally engaging in quarrels resembling those of a married couple. Yesterday when I told Tetsu to buy Calmotin from the village pharmacy, she brought back Calmotin in an unusually shaped box. Without paying it any mind, I took ten tablets before bed yet remained completely unable to sleep. As I was pondering this strangeness, my stomach turned peculiar—I rushed to the toilet only to suffer violent diarrhea, then made three consecutive trips afterward.
Unable to contain my suspicion, I examined the medicine box closely and found it contained a laxative called Henomoquin.

I lay on my back with a hot water bottle on my stomach, thinking I should reprimand Tetsu.

"This isn't Calmotin," I began.
"It's called Henomoquin."

But halfway through, I burst into hollow laughter.
"Invalid"—the term now struck me as darkly comedic.
I'd taken a laxative instead of sedative, one ironically named Henomoquin.

Now I exist beyond happiness or unhappiness.

Everything just passes by.

In this so-called "human" world where I had lived amidst infernal screams, the only thing that seemed like truth was precisely that.

Everything just passes by.

I was twenty-seven that year.
Because my white hair had increased so markedly，most people saw me as over forty.

Afterword

I have never directly known the madman who wrote these notebooks. However, I have some acquaintance with a person who appears to be the madam of the Kyobashi stand bar mentioned in these notebooks. She was petite, with a pallid complexion, narrow upturned eyes, a high nose, and an austere demeanor that suggested less a beautiful woman than a handsome young man. While these notebooks appear to primarily depict Tokyo's landscapes from around the fifth, sixth, and seventh years of Showa [1930-1932], my own visits to that Kyobashi stand bar—where a friend took me two or three times to drink highballs—occurred around the tenth year of Showa [1935], when Japan's military establishment was beginning to openly assert itself. Thus, I could never have met the man who wrote these notebooks.

However, in February of this year, I visited a certain friend who had evacuated to Funabashi City in Chiba Prefecture. That friend was, so to speak, a classmate from my university days and was now a lecturer at a certain women's college. In fact, I had entrusted this friend with arranging a marriage for one of my relatives. Having that errand to attend to as well—and thinking I might procure some fresh seafood for my family—I set out for Funabashi City with a backpack.

Funabashi City was a fairly large town bordering a muddy sea. Even when providing locals with the exact address, I couldn't find my friend's house—he being one of those new residents. Cold and with shoulders aching from my backpack, I pushed open the door of a café drawn by the sound of a violin record playing inside.

I recognized the madam there, and upon asking, discovered she was indeed that same madam from the small Kyobashi bar ten years prior. She too seemed to immediately recognize me. We exchanged exaggerated displays of surprise, laughed, then—though neither had asked—proudly swapped stories about our experiences of being bombed out during air raids, as people customarily do in such situations.

“You haven’t changed a bit.”

“No—I’m an old woman now. My body’s falling apart. You’re still young.”

“Don’t be absurd—I already have three children. Today I’m out getting supplies for them.”

They exchanged these customary greetings of people meeting after a long absence, then began inquiring after mutual acquaintances’ whereabouts. As they spoke, the Madam suddenly changed her tone and asked, “Did you know Yozo?”

When I said I didn’t, she went to the back room and brought out three notebooks and three photographs, handing them to me.

“Perhaps these could serve as material for a novel,” she said.

I was not one to write from materials thrust upon me by others, and nearly thought to return them then and there—(the three photographs, whose strangeness I had already described in the preface)—but drawn by those images, I resolved to take temporary custody of the notebooks. Before departing, I inquired whether she knew the address of a certain Mr. So-and-so in such-and-such district, block number—a lecturer at a women’s college—and as fellow new residents, she did indeed know of him.
It seemed he occasionally visited this café as well.
It was right nearby.

That night, after sharing a few drinks with my friend and arranging to stay over, I spent the entire night without sleeping a wink, utterly absorbed in reading those notebooks.

What was written in these memoirs might have been old stories, but there was no doubt modern readers would find them quite interesting.
Rather than clumsily adding my own embellishments, it seemed more meaningful to have some magazine publisher release this manuscript exactly as it stood.

The only seafood souvenirs for the children were dried.
I shouldered my rucksack, bid farewell to my friend’s place, and stopped by the aforementioned café,

“Thank you for yesterday.
“By the way—”

I immediately pressed on,

“Could I borrow these notebooks for a while?”

“Yes, please do.”

“Is this person still alive?”

“Well, I’m afraid I have absolutely no idea about that.”
“About ten years ago, a package containing those notebooks and photos was sent to our shop in Kyobashi—the sender was undoubtedly Yozo—but it didn’t have his address or even his name written on it.”
“During the air raids, it got mixed in with other things and was miraculously saved. I only just recently read through all of it for the first time, and…”

“Did you cry?”

“No—it wasn’t so much crying… It’s hopeless. Once someone becomes like that, they’re beyond saving.”

“If it’s been ten years since then, he might already be dead.”
“He must have sent this to you as a gesture of thanks.”
“There may be parts where he exaggerated things in his writing, but even so, you seem to have suffered terribly yourself.”
“If all of this were true—and if I’d been this person’s friend—I might have ended up wanting to take him to a mental hospital too.”

"It was his father's fault."

She said it nonchalantly.

“The Yozo we knew was so honest and attentive—if he hadn’t drunk... no, even when he did... he was a divine-like good boy.”