Vita Sexualis

Mr. Shizuka Kanai is a philosopher by profession.

The notion a man is a philosopher is accompanied by the thought that he is writing a book. Philosopher by profession though he be, Mr. Kanai is not writing anything. They say that when he graduated from the College of Literature, his thesis was on the unusual topic of a comparative study of non-Buddhist Indian philosophy and pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. He hasn't written anything since.

However, because of his occupation he gives lectures. Having received a professorship in the history of philosophy, he offers lectures that deal with the history of modern philosophy. Students claim Kanai Sensei's lectures are more interesting than those of his colleagues who have written a great many books. His lectures are based on immediate perception, at times strongly illuminating some particular topic. At such moments his students gain indelible impressions. Often his listeners are startled into comprehension when he explains a certain phenomenon by applying something utterly foreign to it, something that has nothing to do with the problem under consideration. They say Schopenhauer kept in his notebooks ordinary topics, like those items of general interest found in newspapers, and used them to illustrate his philosophy, but Mr. Kanai employs everything and anything as material for explaining the history of philosophy. At times his students are surprised when in the middle of a serious lecture, he clarifies his point by quoting from some current novel popular among the younger generation.

He reads a good many novels. When he picks up a newspaper or magazine, he doesn't look at any of the controversial articles, only at the fiction. Still, if the authors of these stories knew why he was reading them, they'd be quite angry. He doesn't read them as works of art. Since he demands a very high standard for anything to qualify as a work of art, such commonplace newspaper stories fail to meet his requirements. What interests him in these stories is the psychological condition under which the authors wrote. And that is why when he discovers an author has written with the intention of creating something sad or pathetic, it strikes him as quite funny, and when the intention of the author is to be humorous, he feels instead quite sad about it.

Every once in a while it occurs to him to write something himself. Though a philosopher by profession, he has no intention of establishing his own system of philosophy, so he has no interest in writing along this line. Instead, he would like to write a novel or a play. But because of those high demands he imposes on works of art, it is not easy for him to begin.

In due course of time Soseki Natsume began writing his novels. Mr. Kanai read them with great interest. And he felt stimulated by them. But then in rivalry to Soseki's I Am a Cat, something came out called I Too Am a Cat. A book appeared entitled I Am a Dog. Mr. Kanai was quite disgusted on seeing these stories and ended by not writing anything himself.

In the meantime, naturalism was well under way in Japan. When Mr. Kanai read the works of this school, he was not particularly stimulated. But what he found interesting in these novels was extremely interesting. At the same time he felt them interesting, he thought there was something odd about them.

Each time he read a naturalistic novel, he discovered that the author never failed to use every occasion in daily life to represent his hero in reference to sexual desire and that the critics themselves acknowledged these novels accurately depicted life. At the same time he was wondering if such representations were actually true to life, he suspected that perhaps unlike the rest of the human race he might be indifferent to such desires, that he might have an extraordinary natural disposition which might be called frigiditas. Especially when he read Zola's novels could he not deny that this thought about himself was probably justified. The suspicion about himself had occurred when he came to a passage in Zola's Germinal in which the hero secretly observes intercourse between a man and a woman in a village of laborers living under conditions of utmost adversity. His thought at the moment was not that such a scene was probably impossible, but why the author had deliberately taken the trouble to depict it. A situation of this sort was probably true to life, but he wondered why the author had described it. That is, he wondered if the author's focusing on sexual desire itself was not abnormal. Novelists or poets probably have an extraordinary capacity for sexual desire. This problem has some connection to what Lambroso expounded in his theory about men of genius. It is also grounded in the supposition that Mobius and his school make in their sweeping criticism of famous poets and philosophers as mattoids. However, the naturalistic school so popular in Japan of late presented a quite different phenomenon. All at once a great many authors began writing on the same subject. Criticism kept acknowledging that human life involved sex. And when it seemed psychiatrists were saying that every aspect of a man's life is tinged with sexual desire, Mr. Kanai became even more suspicious.

Meanwhile, the Debakame affair came to light. A workman by that name had the habit of spying on women in their section of the public bath, and one day he followed someone on her way home from the bathhouse and raped her. Such an event is a quite common occurrence no matter what the country. If it had been mentioned in a European newspaper, the item would have taken up no more than two or three lines along the corner of a page. But all at once throughout Japan the case expanded into an enormous problem. It was linked with the so-called naturalist movement. A new term, debakame-ism, was used as a pseudonym for naturalism. The verb debaru became fashionable. Mr. Kanai could not help suspecting that either people in general had become erotomaniacs or he himself was abnormally frigid.

One day during this period he noticed a student in his class had a small volume with him entitled Einleitung in Die Philosophie by Jerusalem. When his lecture was over, Mr. Kanai picked up the book and asked his student what he thought of it. "I found it at Nankodo's bookstore," the young man said. "I bought it thinking it might be a good reference. I haven't read it yet, but please take it, Sensei, if you want to look it over." Mr. Kanai borrowed it and, free that evening, read it. When he came to the section on aesthetics, it really caught him by surprise. Written were these surprising comments: Each and every art is Liebeswerbung. It seduces. It demonstrates to the public sexual desire. When art is viewed in this manner, in much the same way that the menstrual flow is at times disoriented and emerges through the nose, sexual craving becomes embodied in drawings, engravings, music, novels, and plays.

Mr. Kanai was startled, yet at the same time he felt the author was quite witty. However, he wondered why, as long as the author was being so clever, he had not pushed his theory a bit further and maintained that every incident in life is a manifestation of sexual desire. If he had carried his doctrine this far, he probably could have used the same reasoning to demonstrate that sexual desire permeates everything. Even religion can most easily be explained by it. A common way of referring to Christ is as a bridegroom. There are many nuns who have been revered as saints, but who in reality have merely manifested their sexual desires perversely. Many among those who have dedicated their lives to self-sacrifice and good works are sadists and masochists. If we observe life through the lens of sexual desire, the driving force behind every human act is no more than sexual yearning. Cherchez lafemme can be applied to every personal and social aspect of life. Mr. Kanai felt that if he observed human life from this viewpoint, he probably could not have escaped being a social outcast.

So his long-cherished desire to write something began to be oriented toward a strange direction. He considered the problem in this way: There were very few documents to refer to that measured the steps by which sexual desire appears in human life and the ways in which it affects that life. Just as many erotic drawings appear in the fine arts, so pornography exists in every country. There are salacious books. But these are not the books one takes seriously. In the vast field of poetry, many poems are written about love. But love is not the same as sexual desire even though love may be closely related to it. Judicial and medical records contain some entries on this question, but these are mostly concerned with sexual perversion. Rousseau's Confessions are written boldly and bluntly on all aspects of sexual desire. During his childhood when he forgot what he had been taught, the daughter of his clergyman grabbed hold of him and thrashed him on the buttocks. Because Rousseau found the beating indescribably delicious, he deliberately pretended he did not know what he actually knew so that giving the girl the wrong answers, he received a beating from her. Rousseau wrote that when the girl reached the age where she knew what love was, she stopped beating him. This was her first move toward sexual desire, but never toward a first love. There are other accounts of sexual desire during Rousseau's younger days. But since his book was not written mainly for the purpose of explaining sexual desire, Mr. Kanai found it wasn't satisfying enough.

Mr. Kanai felt Casanova was the perfect man about whom it could be said an entire life was devoted to sexual desire. His Memoirs was one of the world's great books, the majority of its content from first to last nothing more than sexual desire, yet a sexual desire not to be confused with love. In the same way, however, that it would be difficult to use Napoleon's autobiography as reliable information for a research project on man's desire for fame, due to the fact that Napoleon's extraordinary passion for fame far surpassed that of the ordinary man, so too would Casanova's book, the world's greatest reference work on sexual desire, be unsuitable for research on that question. And to take another example, the Colossos of Rhodes and the great image of Buddha at Nara would be inappropriate objects of study on the human form. Mr. Kanai felt he wanted to write something, but he didn't want to imitate his predecessors. He wondered if this was not exactly the right moment to attempt a history of his own sexuality. To be perfectly frank, he had never carefully thought about the way his sexual desires had germinated or the way they had developed. Might he not probe those desires and write about them? If he set them down clearly in black and white, he might understand them himself. Then he would probably know whether or not his sexual life was normal. Of course, before attempting to write it, he could not tell what the results would be. And so he did not even know if it would be something he could show to others or even to the public at large. He thought, at any rate, he might try writing about it little by little when he was free.

While he was indulging himself in these thoughts, a parcel of books arrived from Germany. As usual they had been sent to him from the same bookstore there. Among the publications was a report on the problem of sexual education investigated at a certain conference. The word "sexual" did not seem to him appropriate. The word "sexual" was related to sex generally, not directly to sexual desire. But because the Chinese character for "sex"  has various meanings, he found unfortunately that in order to translate the title of the report into Japanese he had to add to it the Chinese character for "desire" . At any rate, in the realm of education was the problem of whether or not sex education was necessary, and in the event they concluded it was, was it at all possible to educate one in this way? The conference had selected authorities concerned with this issue, an educator, a clergyman, and a medical doctor, and their views having been solicited, these had been published in the report. Whereas the approach of each of the three authorities was different, all of them had answered "Yes" to the question "Is sex education necessary?" and "Yes" to the question "Is sex education possible?" One man was of the opinion that it was better to give that education at home. Another said it should be done at school. At any rate, it was worth trying and was certainly possible. Of course, it should be given to children after they had reached the age where they could use discretion. Just before marriage young people are shown certain kinds of pictures, a custom that takes place in Japan too, but the report suggested a somewhat earlier age for sex education. To wait until just previous to marriage might lead to some problems before that time. The discussion began by taking up the subject of the reproduction of lower creatures and gradually expanded to the propagation of the human race. Though they had begun with lower forms of life, merely with the stamen and pistil of plants, and though they had concluded that human reproduction was similar, they decided this approach was not particularly helpful. They said it was absolutely necessary to give detailed explanations about the sexual life of man.

After reading the report, Mr. Kanai, arms folded, sat and thought about it a long while. That year his eldest son would graduate from high school. Supposing he had to teach his own son, he wondered what the best way to approach him would be. He felt it would be extremely difficult. The more concretely he thought about it, the more words failed him. Finally he wondered if he might not be able to solve the problem by writing the history of his own sex life, which he had been thinking of attempting. He would try it and at least find out what the results would be. Rather than seeing if what he wrote would be worth showing to other people or to the public at large, he wanted to discover if it would be worth showing to his son. Speculating on the problem in this way, he picked up his pen.

When I was six . . .

We lived in the Chugoku district in a small castle town which had been ruled over by a feudal lord. With the abolition of the clans and the establishment of prefectures, the prefectural office was set up in an adjacent province, so our town suddenly became a solitary place.

My father stayed in Tokyo with his former lord. Because my mother thought that I—Shizuka—was getting much more grown up, she felt she ought to instruct me in a few things, so every morning she taught me the kana syllabary and made me practice my penmanship.

Though my father had been only a foot soldier at the time of the feudal clans, we were living in a house furnished with a gate and surrounded by an earthen wall. In front of the gate was a moat, and on the opposite bank stood a clan government storehouse.

One day after my lesson was over, my mother began her weaving. "I'm going out to play!" I said, and I ran from the house, my voice trailing behind me.

We lived in a section of town composed of government-owned houses, so even in spring we couldn't see any willow trees or cherry blossoms. Only some red camellias could be viewed beyond the wall surrounding our house, and next to the rice granary citrus plants were seen sprouting their pale green buds.

To the west of our house was a vacant lot. Among the stone tiles scattered along the ground were flowering clover and violets. I began picking some clover. After gathering them a while, I remembered that on the previous day a boy in our neighborhood had said it was a strange habit for a boy to be gathering flowers, and suddenly looking around, I threw the flowers down. Fortunately no one had seen me. I stood there in something of a daze. The day was clear and bright. I could hear the sounds from my mother's weaving—giiton! giiton!

Across the vacant lot was the Ohara house. The husband had died, and the widow, who was about forty, lived there alone. All of a sudden I felt like calling on her, and I ran around to the front of the house and rushed inside.

Kicking off my straw sandals and clattering open the sliding doors, I hurried in, only to find the widow and a young woman I had never seen before examining a book together. The girl's kimono was adorned with red patterns, her shimada hairdo in the style of an unmarried woman. Even though I was only a small boy, I knew that she came from the center of town. They looked up at me as if I had really startled them. The face of each was deep red. I was merely a child, but I felt their behavior was unusual, quite strange. When I happened to glance down at the page of their opened book, I noticed it was beautifully printed in color.

"Madam, what kind of picture book's that?"

I walked straight up to them. The girl laid the book face down and looked at the widow and laughed. The cover of the book was also in colored print, and I happened to notice on it the large face of a woman.

The widow snatched the book from the girl, opened it, and holding it out in front of me pointed to something in the picture.

"Shizu, what do you think this is?" she said.

The girl's laugh was even louder this time. I glanced at the page, but the position of the persons in the picture was so complicated I couldn't make it out.

"This is a leg, isn't it?" said the widow.

Both the widow and the girl laughed together out loud. I realized it couldn't possibly have been a leg. I had the feeling they were treating me with contempt.

"See you again, Madam!"

Without even listening for the widow to tell me to wait, I ran out the door.

I had no way of knowing how to judge what the picture was the two women were looking at. But I felt their words and actions were quite strange, quite disagreeable. I didn't know why, but I was afraid to tell my mother anything about this event.

***

When I was seven . . .

My father came home from Tokyo. I began attending a school built on the site of the former school that had been set up under the clan government.

In going to class from our house, I had to pass through a wicket at the western end of the moat in front of our gate. A guardhouse at the wicket was still standing, an old man about fifty years old living there. He had a wife and a son. The boy was about my age. He was always dressed in tattered clothes, two lines of mucus always dribbling from his nose. Each time he walked by me, he would stick his finger in his mouth and stare at me. I would pass him with a feeling of disgust and even of awe more or less.

One day as I was going through the wicket, I didn't see the boy standing outside as I usually did. Wondering if anything had happened to him, I was about to go by. Just at that moment I heard the old man's voice inside the guardhouse.

"Hey! Told ya you couldn't play with that, didn't I?"

Stopping dead in my tracks, I looked toward the direction of that voice. The old man, sitting cross-legged, was making straw sandals. The scolding just then was due to the fact that his son was about to carry off the mallet used for beating straw. Putting the mallet aside, the boy looked in my direction. So did the old man. His face, swarming with dark brownish wrinkles, had a large twisted nose and hollow cheeks. He was goggle-eyed, and some parts of the whites of his eyeballs were red, some yellow.

"Little master," the old man said to me, "d'ya know what your father and mother do at night? I don't think so' cause you're such a sleepyhead!" And he laughed.

The old man's laughing face was really quite grim. The boy joined in too, his face all wrinkled up from laughing.

Without replying, I walked past as if running away. I could still hear traces of the laughter of that old man and his son.

While walking along, I thought about the old man's remark. I had known that when a man and woman married, they could then have children. But I didn't know how they actually could have them. The old man's words seemed to have something to do with that. I thought some secret lay concealed there.

Even though I wanted to know what the secret was, I didn't feel like lying awake in the dark as the old man had said, lying awake and watching my mother and father. Even to a mere child like me, the old man's words were a profanation. I felt as if they were blasphemous. It was the same as if I had been ordered to wear my wooden clogs past the bamboo blinds of the temple. I really hated that old man for his words.

These thoughts occurred to me whenever I passed through the wicket. But a boy is always so consciously receptive to new facts and situations I couldn't go on thinking about the subject for very long. Usually by the time I reached home, I had forgotten it.

When I was ten . . .

My father began teaching me English a little at a time.

Occasionally there was talk we might have to move to Tokyo. At such moments when I was all ears, my mother would tell me not to mention this to anyone. If and when we did decide to go, we could not take any unnecessary things with us, so we had to pick and choose carefully, and that was why my father was often doing something in the storehouse. Rice was stored downstairs, oblong chests and other items placed upstairs. When any guests called on my father, he immediately stopped whatever work he was doing there.

Wondering why it was wrong to tell anyone about our moving to Tokyo, I asked my mother about it. She told me everybody wanted to leave for Tokyo, so it wasn't good to mention it to others.

One day when my father wasn't at home, I went into the upstairs section of the storehouse to look around. I found an oblong chest with its cover open. Various items were scattered about. An armor case which had always been put on display in the alcove when I was much smaller had, for some reason or other, been dragged out to the middle of the room. The armor had lost its value when the Choshu clan had been conquered by the Tokugawa shogunate about five years ago. It seemed to me my father had dragged the case out and had put it there with the intention of selling it to some junk dealer.

Quite innocently I opened the cover to the armor case. I found a book had been placed on the armor. When I opened that book, I discovered it had pictures printed in beautiful colors. A man and woman in those pictures were in strange positions. I realized it was the same kind of book I had seen in the Ohara house when I was much younger. But because my knowledge had increased considerably since I had first been shown that book, I could now understand much more than I had at that time. It has been said Michelangelo used bold perspective in drawing the characters in his murals, but since the persons in these Japanese drawings were quite different in that they had been made to assume very unusual poses, it was quite excusable for a boy to have difficulty in distinguishing an arm from a leg. This time, however, I could easily make out arms and legs. And I realized this was the secret I had previously tried to penetrate.

Fascinated, I looked repeatedly at a number of these pictures. But I must say this: At the time I didn't realize in the least that this kind of human behavior had any connection to human desire. Schopenhauer says: No person with an awakened consciousness wants to have a child; no man wants to attempt to propagate his own species. And so nature made propagation go hand in hand with pleasure and incarnated it into desire. This pleasure, this desire, is the trick, the bait, nature has devised to force human beings to breed. Lower forms of life have been given no such bait, in fact, have no objections to multiplying. Nor, Schopenhauer has said, have they any wakened consciousness. I was totally ignorant that the behavior of the persons in this type of drawing was equal to this kind of bait. The reason I enjoyed looking at those drawings again and again came merely from the pleasure I had found in discovering something I had not known before. It was nothing but Neugierde. Nothing but Wissbegierde. I was looking at these pictures with eyes completely different from those of that girl in the youthful hairdo, the girl who had been shown these pictures by Mrs. Ohara.

While I kept glancing at them over and over again, some doubts occurred. One part of the body was drawn with extreme exaggeration. When I was much younger, it had been quite natural for me to think that this part of the body was a leg when it actually wasn't. Drawings of this type can be discovered in any country, but only in Japan do we find them with such monstrous proportions for this part of the body. This was an invention of the ukiyoe artists of our country. The ancient Greek artists, in creating the figure of a god, enlarged the brow and made the lower portions of the face smaller. Because the brow was thought to be the dwelling place of the soul, they enlarged it in order to emphasize it. The lower parts of the face—the mouth and the teeth in the upper and lower jaws used for masticating—were made small because these portions were thought to be baser parts of the body. If Greek artists had shaped these parts of the face larger, the human face would gradually have come to resemble that of a monkey. Then anthropologist Peter Camper's description and analysis of facial angle (in which the wider the angle made by the line from one's brow to one's upper jaw and the line drawn from the base of the nose to the ear cavity, the greater the intelligence) would have indicated smaller and smaller capacity. Furthermore, the Greeks made the breast comparatively larger than the stomach. That the stomach bears the same relationship as the jaws and teeth need not be particularly explained. The function of breathing is superior to that of eating and drinking. Moreover, the ancients believed that the breast or, to put it more precisely, the heart, did not have the function of circulating the blood but of stimulating the spirit. For the same reason that the Greeks enlarged the brow and breast, the Japanese ukiyoe artists enlarged some parts of the body when they created drawings of this sort. That had been somewhat difficult for me to understand.

The Flesh Mattress is an indecent, licentious book written by a Chinese. What is more, the author, as is customary with Chinese writers, has forced into the structure of his tale the ethical retributions of good and evil. Actually it's quite a silly book. A passage describes the hero Miosei going around spying on others when they are urinating because he believes one part of his body is smaller than that of other men. In those days I also took a look whenever I happened to see someone urinating along the road. Even in our castle towns at that time there were no public latrines, so everyone urinated along the roads. Because everyone's seemed to me to be small, I con eluded that the pictures in that book were false. I fancied myself as having made a joyous, miraculous discovery!

This was one of the observations I made about the real world after seeing those strange drawings. Another discovery occurs to me now, one somewhat difficult to put down here, but for the sake of truth I have forced myself to write about it. I had never seen with my own eyes that part of a woman's body. In those days there were no public baths in castle towns. When I took a bath at home or even at the house of a relative with someone else helping me wash, I was the only one in the nude, the person assisting me always wearing her kimono. Women never urinated along the roads. So I was quite puzzled about them.

At school the girls were taught in special classrooms, and we could not even play together. If a boy said anything to a girl, his friends immediately ridiculed him. And so we had no girl friends. Some of my relatives were small girls, but though they came on the annual festival days or to the Buddhist memorial services, all they did was appear in their best holiday kimonos with make-up on their faces, eat very gracefully, and then go back home. There was no girl with whom I could feel at ease. Behind our house, though, lived a family of very low rank at the time of the clan government. They had a daughter about my age. Her name was Katsu. Occasionally she came over to our house to visit, her hair done up in the butterfly coiffure of young girls. She had a white chubby face. She was a mild, gentle person. It was a pity I made her the object of my experiment.

It happened after an early summer shower had just cleared up. As usual my mother was at her weaving. It was hot and muggy just after the noon hour, and the old woman who did needlework for us and who helped my mother around the kitchen was taking a nap. Only the batten for my mother's loom resounded through our quiet house.

I had fastened a string to the tail of a dragonfly and was sending it flying in our backyard in front of our storehouse. A locust on a crape myrtle tree bursting with flowers began its shrill cry. I peered into the tree and found it, but at that high a spot I couldn't have caught it. Just then Katsu came by. Since the members of her family were also taking a nap, she felt lonely and had gone out.

"Let's play!"

That was how she greeted me. In no time at all I had worked out my plan.

"All right. Let's have some fun by jumping off the veranda!"

With these words I discarded my straw sandals and climbed onto the porch. Katsu followed, removing her leather-soled sandals with red straps and climbing up. First, I jumped down barefooted on the garden moss. So did Katsu. Again I climbed onto the veranda. I tucked up the skirt of my kimono from behind.

"If I don't do it like this, my kimono gets in the way and I can't make a good jump."

I made a vigorous leap down. Looking at Katsu, I saw she was hesitating.

"Come on! You jump too!"

For a while she made a face as if she were troubled, but because she was an innocent gentle girl, she finally tucked up her kimono skirt and jumped. Wide-eyed, I peered at her, but I could discover nothing except two white legs joined to a white abdomen. I was quite disappointed. My narrative, though, is very innocent when I think about those gentlemen at the ballet, their opera glasses used to catch a glimpse between the thighs of the dancing girls merely to find themselves disappointed in seeing only glittering gold threads woven through silk gauze.

***

Autumn of that year . . .

My province was one in which the Bon Festival dancing was quite popular. As the Feast of Lanterns drew near according to the lunar calendar, a rumor was circulating the dancing was to be prohibited that year. But the prefectural governor, who had been born in another district, thought it a bad policy to oppose our custom, so he looked the other way and let it pass.

The center of our town was only two or three blocks from my house. A dancing platform had been erected there, and in the evening the music accompanying the dances could be heard all the way to our house.

When I asked my mother if I might see the dancing, she said I could if I returned early. I hurried into my straw sandals and ran out.

I had often been there before. When I was much smaller, my mother had taken me with her to let me see the dances. It was thought that only the tradespeople participated in public, but because each person danced with his face concealed by a kerchief, many of the sons of samurai went to dance. Among the dancers were men dressed as women. And there were also women dressed as men. Those who did not wear kerchiefs wore paper masks called hyaku-manako. In Europe carnivals are held in January, but even though the time of the festivals is different, human beings have quite naturally invented the same kinds of celebrations everywhere. In Europe too they have special dances at harvest time, but I guess masks are not worn.

The crowds form into a circle and dance. Some who have come in their masks merely stand around watching. While they are observing, if they happen to see someone who is quite good in his movements, they are usually able to break into the ring to be next to that person.

While I was watching the dance, I happened to overhear some masked dancers talking to one another. Apparently the two men knew each other.

"Last night you went to Atagoyama, didn't you?"

"What you making that up for?"

"Oh no? Someone said you did."

While they were arguing in this way, another man beside them cut in:

"If you go up there early in the morning, you can find a lot of stuff left behind."

A burst of laughter followed. Feeling as if I had touched something dirty, I stopped watching the dance and returned home.

***

When I was eleven . . .

My father took me with him to Tokyo. My mother remained behind. The old woman who always came to our house to help moved in, and they lived together. My mother would join us a little later. I assumed she had to remain until our house was sold.

At Mukojima was an estate that belonged to our former feudal lord. My father and I lived there in a tenement building which had been left vacant. We employed an old lady to cook our meals.

Every morning my father went out, and every evening he returned. He promised to find a school I could attend. Whenever my father left, a married woman about twenty years of age came to our kitchen door and returned with her apron bulging. Our old woman employee was stealing rice, giving it to her daughter to cart off for her. When my mother joined us later, she found out about it and turned the old woman out of the house. I guess I was a very stupid boy.

I had no friends to play with. I knew someone two years younger, the son of a steward, but when he suggested the first day we met that we fish for carp in the artificial pond on the estate, I lost interest and decided to have nothing to do with him. The steward also had two or three daughters, the eldest twelve or thirteen, but when the girls caught sight of me, they pointed at me from the distance, whispering, laughing about something. I found them equally disagreeable.

Sometimes I went into an anteroom in the lord's mansion. Two or three stewards would be waiting there. Usually they were smoking, engaged in small talk. They didn't find me much of a nuisance. So I asked them about various things.

Among the names of places they mentioned most frequently during their discussions were Yoshiwara and Okuyama, the red-light districts. Yoshiwara was the paradise they were always dreaming about. And the grandeur of that paradise was more or less kept sacred by the influence and power of the estate of their master. The stewards lent their master's money at high rates of interest to certain persons in Yoshiwara. It was in this connection apparently that whenever these stewards went there, they were warmly received. So one after another they rambled on about their experiences at Yoshiwara. Even though I listened carefully, I couldn't understand half of what they said. And the half I did understand wasn't the least bit interesting. Once one of these men said to me:

"Next time, should I take you with me? A pretty strumpet will fondle you!"

When he said that, everyone laughed.

Okuyama never entered the conversation without their bringing in the name of a man called Hanno. Almost each one of these stewards had a pockmarked face, a pug nose, and buckteeth, their features leaving much to be desired! Quite unlike any of them, this Hanno was tall, his complexion white, his long pomaded hair parted down to his nape. I didn't know what kind of position he had, but I assumed he was superior in rank to our stewards, perhaps drafting letters or something of the sort. The stewards offered statements like the following:

"If they made as much of a fuss over us as they do Hanno, we'd head straight for Okuyama, but even though we pay to 'draw our bows,' they don't even want to talk to us. We're really a worthless lot!"

To those fellows Hanno was an Adonis. Before long I was to have the chance to see many girls, Aphrodites and Persephones, serve this man.

Once during that time of day when the locusts in the garden gradually become noisier and as I was idling away the hours during my father's absence, a steward called Kuriso shouted out to me:

"Shizu, are you at home? I'm off on an errand. Come on along. I'll take you to Asakusa Kannon, to the temple dedicated to Kannon."

My father had once brought me to see this Kannon. Joyfully I slipped into my wooden clogs and went out with him.

We crossed Azuma Bridge, came out on a road lined with trees, and did our shopping. Then we retraced our steps and strolled leisurely along a street lined with shops on both sides. Holding many toys shaped like tortoises suspended on strings, one fellow kept calling, "Moving turtles! Take whichever one you want, whichever you want!" The neck, tail, and four legs of the toy animal quivered as they moved. Kuriso paused in front of a shop that sold prints. While I was looking at the colored prints of the Satsuma Rebellion, he picked up a book covered with a paper wrapper on display at the front of the shop. "Madam," Kuriso said to the elderly attendant, "are there still some poor souls tricked into buying this kind of thing?" And he laughed.

"Now and then we sell some. Though what's written inside is quite dull." And she laughed too.

"How about selling me the real thing?"

"You're joking! These days the police are very strict."

Printed on the cover of this volume wrapped in paper was a woman's face and above it in large letters were the words A Funny Book. In the print shops in those days were many such books that dupe the customer. Inside were short stories or something of the sort, the volume deliberately wrapped in paper to make it appear as if it contained something secret. These books were sold to those eager for erotic drawings.

Even though I was only a child, I could roughly understand the meaning behind their words. But what attracted my attention much more than the implications behind their dialogue was the way Kuriso made free use of Tokyo expressions. I wondered why at home he used our dialect when he spoke so well with a Tokyo accent. Of course it was quite natural for people from the same province to communicate in their own dialect. But it seemed to me that Kuriso did not employ these two kinds of speech merely for that reason. I wondered if he was using our provincial speech under the pretense of showing his loyalty to his superiors. I had reached the age in which I could speculate about such matters. Sometimes I felt quite stupid, but then again in some ways I wasn't the least bit innocent.

We climbed the steps to the temple. Eager to learn about everything, I focused my eyes on those deep dark places beyond the black lattice, almost impenetrable even by candlelight. Passing behind old men and women on bended knees, their bodies bent like lobsters as they muttered their incomprehensible prayers, we turned toward the eastern end of the temple and descended the steps, hearing behind us the occasional clink of coins tossed into the offertory boxes.

This section of Tokyo had many beggars. Removed from them was a man displaying drawings made in sands of five colors. In a somewhat wider area a swordplayer was hemmed in by a crowd of spectators. For a while I watched with Kuriso as the man performed. A number of swords were hanging on racks. The lower the rack, the longer the sword. Though the man kept on talking about various things, he did not draw his weapon. Suddenly Kuriso moved off, and without knowing why he had, I followed him. Turning back, I noticed a man collecting money headed toward the place where we had been standing.

We came out on a narrow street lined with archery shops. I was amazed to find in each of these shops a woman whose face was covered with white paint. My father had never taken me to this section. A strange observation occurred to me about the faces of these women. Their faces were not those of ordinary persons. Unlike the faces of women I had seen up to that time, these were a kind of stereotype. If I can express what I felt then with words I might use now, it was that the faces of these women had a congealed expression. This was how I felt as I stared at them. I wondered why their faces were so uniform. When a child is asked to look pleased, his face takes on a strange expression. These women looked exactly like a child under such circumstances. Their eyebrows had been sketched on as high as possible, sometimes even up to the borders of their hair. Their eyes were strained open as wide as possible. Even when they talked or laughed, they tried not to move that part of the face above the nose. I wondered why the faces of these women looked as if they had been prearranged. Though I didn't understand what I was witnessing at that time, I later learned that these faces were for sale. These were the faces of prostitutes.

The women called out in loud voices, most of them saying, "Hey, Master!" Some clearly enunciated, "I say there!" but most only shouted, "Hey!" There were even some who cried out, "Oh, Master in the dark blue tabi!" Kuriso wore socks this color.

"Good heavens! It's Mr. Kuriso!"

A remarkably high-pitched voice yelled these words. Kuriso entered the woman's shop and sat down. Since I merely stood where I was, a look of disgust on my face, Kuriso waved me in to take a seat. The woman was round-faced. From between her thin lips when she talked, I could see patches where the blackened dye on her teeth, applied for cosmetic effect, had faded somewhat. She lit the tobacco in the bowl of a long-stemmed metal pipe, and wiping the mouthpiece with her kimono sleeve and without moving that part of her face above her nose, she offered the pipe to Kuriso.

"Why did you wipe it?"

"Well, I didn't want to be rude."

"You don't offer it to anyone except Hanno without wiping it, do you?"

"Oh, even for Master Hanno, I always wipe it in offering it to him."

"That so? You really do wipe it for him and give it to him?"

They spoke in this way. Their words had two kinds of meaning. Kuriso never considered I would be able to conceive the second meaning behind their words. The woman also treated me as if I were nonexistent. Not that I was complaining however. I found her quite disagreeable. I didn't want to have her talking to me.

Kuriso suggested I try drawing a bow, but I told him I didn't want to.

Before long he left the shop with me. Then passing through Saruwakacho, we crossed the river by ferryboat and returned to the estate at Mukojima.

What follows happened about that time. Among the acquaintances of our stewards was an acupuncturist by the name of Ginbayashi, and sometimes he visited their quarters to talk to them. Though he came to give medical treatment to our master, he was not a native of our province. He was a real Tokyoite. Almost all our stewards were in their thirties, but this man was past forty. In comparison to the stewards he was, I thought, much more intelligent.

One day Ginbayashi offered to take me to the Ginza since he was going there. Finishing his business, he took me to the storyteller's hall near Kyobashi.

Since it was a matinee, there weren't many spectators. In addition to the few elegant wives of merchants who brought their daughters with them, most of the audience consisted of journeymen.

The storyteller was on the stage giving his recital. A lad by the name of Tokusaburo had gone out to play chess. After returning home late at night, he found himself locked out. A girl in the neighborhood was also locked out of her house. She began talking to the boy. When he told her there was nothing for him to do but go to his uncle's house and ask for shelter, the girl pleaded with him to take her along. Paying no attention to her request, the boy walked off without a moment's delay, but the girl followed. The uncle of the boy was a "man about town." It seemed to me that a "man about town" was someone lax in morals. The uncle jumped to the conclusion that his nephew had brought a sweetheart along with him. The uncle presumed the boy was justifying himself in whatever he did because he had been embarrassed. And as for the girl, who was falling in love with the boy, she was thinking everything that had happened was quite providential. That was why the two young persons let themselves be forced upstairs by the uncle. There was bedding on the floor for only one person. Vertically placing along the center of the bed the obi the girl had unbound from her waist and as if dividing in two the territory of Saghalien (though my metaphor is by now an anachronism since I am writing this account long after that historical event), the two persons went to sleep. Opening their eyes after sleeping in one bed, and so on and so on . . .1 was not yet accustomed to the language of Tokyo, so it seemed to me the storyteller was speaking quite rapidly. I had been listening with undivided attention in the same way I had first heard the lecture of a foreigner long after this event, but I happened to notice Ginbayashi watching me, smiling at me.

"How about it? Do you understand it?"

"Well, for the most part."

"That's quite enough if you got most of it!"

When the storyteller who has been performing stands up, bows to the audience, and leaves from the side of the stage, the next performer makes his appearance on the platform. He humbly says, "It's my turn, but I'm a poor substitute." Immediately he leaps into his subject: the pastime of gentlemen is whoring. Then the storyteller proceeds to recite the tale of an artisan who leads his innocent friend to Yoshiwara. It's a lecture which might be entitled "A Yoshiwara Primer." I listened with wide-eyed admiration, feeling Tokyo was the most convenient spot in the world in which to acquire knowledge on any subject. At that time I committed to memory a strange phrase, "favored with cuntie." However, having never again encountered this expression anywhere else except at storytelling halls, I found it one of those phrases which imposed a useless burden on my memory.

***

Around October of that same year I entered a private school located at Ikizaka in Hongo where German was taught. That was because my father thought he would let me specialize in mining.

Since the school was too far for me to commute to from Mukojima, my father had me lodge in the home of the famous Professor Azuma, who lived in Ogawacho in Kanda, and from this house I went off to school everyday.

Having just returned from abroad, the professor was very particular about his diet, but with the exception of having plenty of meat at mealtimes, he was not especially extravagant. Only in drinking did he let himself go. It was after he returned from his office and had completed his translating at ten or eleven at night that he drank. His wife seemed to me to be heroic. Now that I think about it, it's rare among high public officials these days to see a family governed by such domestic bliss. It was wonderful that my father had placed me in a fine home.

During the time I lived at Professor Azuma's, I was never pressured by sexual desires. If I force myself to trace back those memories, I can recall only this event: My study was located between the parlor and the kitchen. One day the maid had not yet come in to light my lamp even though it was already dark outside. I suddenly stood up and went toward the kitchen. There I discovered the houseboy and maid talking. He was explaining to her something like the following: A woman's machinery can be put to use at any time. It can go into operation without any relation to feelings. A man's machinery is at times serviceable, at times not. If a man takes a fancy to something, his machinery springs forward. If he feels something distasteful, it gives a poor showing. The maid was listening with crimson ears. Disgusted, I returned to my room.

My lessons at school did not seem very difficult. Since I had studied English under my father's instruction, I had been using a dictionary by a man named Adler. It was in two volumes, one German-English, the other English-German. Whenever I was bored, I would amuse myself by looking up such a word as member and then finding its equivalent Zeugungslied or by looking up the word pudenda and finding Scham. But it was not because such words were interesting enough to have any effect on my sexual desires that I amused myself in this way. I found myself fascinated by such words simply as hidden expressions which could not be used in public. That is why I remember looking up the word Furz at the same time I had looked up the word fart. One day our teacher, a German, was instructing us in introductory chemistry and demonstrating how to make hydrogen sulfide. He asked us if we knew any substance which contained this gas. One of the students answered, "faule Eier." Certainly rotten eggs do have this same sort of smell. He asked us if we knew any others. Standing up, I shouted out, "Furz!"

"Was? Bitte, noch einmal!"

"Furz!"

Finally our teacher understood, his face turning red. He was kind enough to instruct me not to use this type of word.

Our school had its own dormitory. After classes were over, I dropped in to look around. It was there that I first heard about sodomy. My classmate, Kagenokoji, who came to school everyday on horseback, was the object of the tender passions of dormitory students who could not have girls they could love. He was not able to do well in his lessons at school. He was a handsome boy with a plump, pale reddish face. That the word "boy" had the meaning of being an object for sodomy was something I had not known before. The student who had asked me to drop into the dorm on my way back home was also looking upon me as a "boy." The first two or three times I stopped, he offered me some refreshment and apparently wanted only to talk in a friendly way. He treated me to parched beans and baked sweet potatoes, called respectively at that time by the students "confetti" and "jellied bean paste." From the beginning, though, I felt his kindness was a little too tenacious, so I didn't like it, yet fearing to be impolite to a senior, I merely tolerated our association. Before long he was grabbing my hand. He even pressed his cheek against mine. It was annoying, unbearable. I had no genius as an Urning, as a sodomite. Yet even though I found it unpleasant to stop in on my way home, I had to out of force of habit due to our acquaintance. One day when I called on him, I discovered the bed prepared. His behavior was much more importunate than it had ever been before. The blood rushed to his head, his face turned red. Finally he said to me, "Please get in bed and sleep with me if only for a second!"

"I don't want to."

"You shouldn't talk that way. Come on!"

He grabbed my hand. The more passionate he became, the greater became my dislike and fear.

"I don't want to. I'm going home."

While we were arguing in this way, a voice called out from the room next door.

"Is it hopeless?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll help you."

He rushed out from his room into the corridor. Clattering open the tattered sliding door to the room, he burst in. He was a rough guy, and from the first I had not wanted to associate with him. At least, though, he acted the way he looked; the one who had lured me into that room was the real hypocrite.

"If he won't listen to what an upperclassman tells him, let's teach him a lesson by blanketing him!"

His hands moved simultaneously with these words. My head was covered with the bedding. I was desperately trying to push it aside. They were pinning me down from above. Because of the row we were making, a few students came to have a look. I heard someone say, "Cut it out! Stop it!" The hands pressing down on me slackened a bit. Finally I managed to spring up and flee from the room. At that moment, though, I made off with a bundle of books and a bottle of ink, flattering myself I had been quick and shrewd. After that I never went into the dorm.

In those days every Saturday I would leave Professor Azuma's house to spend the night with my father at Mukojima, returning Sunday evening. At the time, my father was a minor official in one of the ministries. I told him what had happened at the dorm. I expected he would be quite surprised, but he wasn't in the least.

"Yes. There are fellows like that. From now on be careful."

My father was very calm as he said these words. So I realized this was one of the hardships I had to undergo in life.

***

When I was thirteen . . .

The previous year my mother came over from our district and joined us.

I gave up German, which I had been studying since the first of the year, and entered the Tokyo English Academy. The change was due partly to the revision of the educational system by the Ministry of Education, partly to my having pleaded with my father to let me study philosophy. Though I felt I had wasted time and energy in studying German for the short interval after my arrival in Tokyo, I found it quite helpful afterwards.

I lived in the school dormitory. Though the youngest students were about sixteen or seventeen, most were in their twenties. Almost all the students wore the hakama, the formal skirt made of duck cloth, and they also wore dark blue tabi. Unless they tucked up their kimono sleeves to their shoulders, they were thought effeminate.

Permission was granted to the owner of a lending library to trade in the dormitory. I was one of his regular customers. I read Bakin. I read Kyoden. When I found someone had taken out Shunsui and was reading him, I even borrowed that book "secondhand" from him and read it. As I was reading Umegoyomi, I experienced for the first time in my life an impression of how good it would feel if I had been the hero Tanjiro and someone like Ocho had loved and respected me. At the same time I felt I would never be loved by a woman, for I was ugly, and even among those students who wore such plain, inexpensive clothing as the duck-cloth hakama and dark blue socks were boys with white complexions and fine-cut features. Ever since those days I have secretly been obsessed with this awareness about myself, and I've never been able to feel sufficiently proud of myself. Furthermore, handicapped by being younger, I was always overwhelmed by the tyranny of my fellow students, no matter what I tried to do, so my behavior became one of submitting openly while secretly resisting. Clausewitz, the military strategist, once said passive resistance ought to be the tactic resorted to by weak nations. Congenitally I was a person who was to be disappointed in love, a weak creature molded by circumstance.

When I consider the question of sexual desire, my fellow students in those days consisted of the "mashers," who were dandies and affected elegance of dress and manner, and the "queers," who were more manly and casual in their dress. The mashers belonged to that group which enjoyed looking at those strange drawings I've already mentioned. The keeper of the lending library at that time would gather up a pile of books and walk around carrying them on his back like a pannier. At the base of the pack he carried was a box with an attached drawer. It was in this drawer that those odd drawings were always kept. In addition to borrowing such pictures from the circulating library, some students owned their own collections of erotic sketchbooks. The queers never looked at these books. The one thing they could hardly wait to devour, each waiting his turn, was a handwritten manuscript about a boy named Sangoro Hirata. It was said that at private schools in Kagoshima, this story was to be the very first one read on the first day of the new year. It described the history of a love affair between Sangoro, who wore his hair in bangs, and an older man, his hair in the forelock style, shaved except for a small portion above each ear. It was about their jealousy and rivalry in love. I believe the closing chapter finds the two men, one after the other, dead on the battlefield. The manuscript also had illustrations, but they were not particularly indecent.

The mashers were superior in number for the simple reason that the queers were made up mostly of men from Kyushu. Because there were few men from Kagoshima in the college preparatory schools at that time, Kyushu students were composed mainly of people from Saga and Kumamoto. They were joined by some students from Yamaguchi. The rest of the students were mashers who came from places as far as those extending over the whole of Chugoku and up to the Tohoku districts.

And yet it seemed as if the queers had the real characteristics of students and that the mashers went about more or less with a guilty conscience. Although the student outfit of the skirt of duck cloth and the dark blue socks was the basic costume of the queers, the mashers imitated it. And in spite of the fact that the mashers put on the same clothing, they did not tuck up their kimono sleeves as high as the queers did. The mashers moderately perked up their shoulders. Even when they walked along with canes, these were thinner. When a masher went out to celebrate the holidays, he secretly wore a silk kimono and white socks.

And where do you think these feet in white socks were headed? Toward those archery "shops" at Shiba and Asakusa and the houses of ill-fame in Nezu, Yoshiwara, and Shinagawa. When the mashers went out in their usual dark blue socks, they often frequented the bathhouses. Not that the queers failed to go to the public baths, but they never went upstairs. The mashers counted on taking that trip upstairs. Without fail women would be there waiting. In those days some students even promised to marry such bathhouse women. It goes without saying that these women were creatures one step lower than boardinghouse daughters.

I was victimized by the queers, for the simple reason that in our dormitory at the time my classmate Shonosuke Hanyu and I were the youngest members. Hanyu was the son of an oculist in Tokyo. His complexion was white, his eyes bright and clear, his lips pure red, his body supple. My skin was dark, my body awkward, and to make matters worse I had been raised in the country. Yet contrary to what I expected, the queers dangled after me, not Hanyu. I concluded to myself that Hanyu was a born masher and so he was safe.

I had entered the school in January and had been assigned an upstairs room in the dorm. Yuzuru Waniguchi was my roommate. He had started his education rather late in life, so he was one of the oldest in my class. His long white face was full of pockmarks, his pointed chin sticking out in front. He was lean and tall. If he belonged to the queers, I felt I'd never be safe.

Luckily Waniguchi didn't. He was more of a masher than not, for he seemed to be an authority on female charm. Yet he was not the usual type of masher. Ordinary mashers tried to win a woman's heart. Even if Waniguchi had made an attempt to, it was certain he couldn't have succeeded, for he looked on women as so much roadside dust. To him a woman was no more than a machine for gratifying his sexual desires. He grasped every opportunity to satisfy these desires. Until he was satiated, his calm piercing eyes were on the lookout for women in the same way a snake waits to pounce on a frog. Those occasions that were there to be taken, Waniguchi would cleverly seize. That was why in spite of his ugliness he was never short of women. The way he expressed it, women could easily be bought with money, so it wasn't necessary to be loved by them.

Waniguchi didn't make fools of women only. He ridiculed everything and anything. In his eyes nothing at all was sacred. Every now and then my father visited me at the dorm. When he greeted Waniguchi by asking him to help me out since "my son is no more than a child," Waniguchi merely said, "Yes, yes," and proceeded to pay no further attention to the request. He simply listened quietly while my father gave me a lecture. Later he imitated my father's voice: "Just study hard. Listen to whatever Mr. Waniguchi or any other upperclassman says to you. If you fail to comprehend at times, tell them you do not and ask them to kindly teach you what they meant and why you should do it. Now I must return. On Saturday I await you at home. So come!" And then Waniguchi laughed.

After that Waniguchi addressed my parent as "Come." "Maybe your Come will come to see you today," he would say. "And I'll get treated to some beanjam wafers again!" He never had any consideration for one's feelings about a parent or anything else. "Your Come coupled with your mother and made you," he once said laughing. He was no better than that old man at the wicket in our province.

In the classroom Waniguchi's performance was about average. One of our teachers, a German, made it a practice to force students unable to answer his questions to stand at attention in front of the blackboard. On one occasion Waniguchi couldn't respond, so the teacher ordered him to stand there. Leaning against the board, Waniguchi assumed an air of complete indifference. The blackboard rang with a clattering sound. Our teacher was hot with anger. Finally he spoke to the school manager and had Waniguchi placed in confinement. But after that time the teacher was afraid of him.

And because the teacher himself feared Waniguchi, there wasn't a single classmate of his who didn't fear him. Waniguchi did not really offer me any protection, but no one came to our room and so I was left unharmed. Whenever Waniguchi was leaving, he'd say to me, "If they find I'm out, some fool or other might come snooping around this hole, so you be careful!"

I was. Since our dormitory was built in the style of a tenement, it had exits on both sides. If the enemy happened to approach from the right, I was ready to run to the left. And if the foe came from the left, I was set to escape toward the right. But since I still felt uneasy, I secretly carried off a dagger from our house at Mukojima and kept it hidden in my kimono.

Around February the good weather continued for quite a while. Every day after classes were over, I went out into the school playground to have some fun with Hanyu. When a few other students saw us practicing sumo wrestling on a pile of sand, they teased us, telling us we were acting like pups. "Look!" they would shout, raising their voices in passing. "Blackie and Whitey are quarreling. Hey, Whitey, don't go down in defeat!" Though Hanyu and I amused ourselves in this way, we had nothing in particular to talk about. I kept reading books at random from the lending library and like a child lived in a daydream world. Outside the classroom Hanyu was very restless, so he didn't read any books. If we played together, it was just about limited to sumo.

One intensely cold day something happened. Hanyu and I had gone to the playground and run a race to try to keep warm. I returned to my room to find a few classmates gathered discussing something with Waniguchi. It had to do with eating between meals. Usually our snacks consisted of parched beans or baked sweet potatoes, the students taking up a collection and sending off the school servant after giving him a small tip. That day was to be different, for they had decided on something quite extravagant, what they called mekurajiru, "blind soup." That is, each of the participants would go out separately, buy something and return, throw it into a common pot, and eat what came out after all the ingredients had been cooked. One of the students looked over in my direction and asked, "What about Kanai?" Glancing at me out of the corner of his eye, Waniguchi said, "This isn't like buying sweet potatoes! It's better for little boys not to join us."

Looking the other way, I pretended I hadn't heard. For a while they considered which students to take into their party and which to exclude, and before long all of them left.

I was well acquainted with Waniguchi's character. He wouldn't yield to authority. He never agreed with anyone. As far as these points were concerned, he was all right. But because he recognized nothing as sacred, others were sometimes forced to suffer. In those days I felt he was cruel and brutal. I suppose a powerful factor in my view of his character was his being well versed in Chinese literature as well as his keeping a copy of Kanpishi on his desk. When I think now about his character, my comments on his coldbloodedness were far from hitting the bull's-eye. He was really a cynic. Later in my life while I was reading Theodor Vischer's Cynismus, I was continually thinking about Waniguchi. The word cynic comes from the Greek word kyon meaning dog. Since the Japanese equivalent of cynic is kengaku, "the science of dogs," it's probably correct to say kenteki, "doglike." In the same way that a dog enjoys poking its nose into dirt, a doglike man won't be satisfied until he has stained everything. That's why such a man cannot regard anything as sacred. And because a human being is blessed with many sacred things, he is bestowed with as many weak points. He suffers a great deal. I'm incapable of confronting a doglike man.

Waniguchi always knew how to cause others pain. As a result, he thought nothing about the pain of another person. That was the source of his cruelty. A strong man who looks at one who is weak finds him ludicrous. And when he sees that person as ludicrous, he also finds him interesting. Apparently doglike men take a keen interest in the pain of others.

To sit alone in something of a daze while watching that crowd gather, cook its meal, and begin to eat would have been quite painful for me. Knowing how I would feel, Waniguchi, half for the fun of it, had refused to let me join the party.

I wondered if I ought to go outside while they were eating. But if I did, it would be like retreating. To let them have their own way and to retreat even though they were in my own room would have been mortifying. And yet if I merely let the spit in my mouth grow hot and swallow it down, I knew they'd laugh at me. I went out and returned with some beanjam wafers I bought for ten sen. Ten sen in those days would fill a large bag with these wafers. After I threw the bag under my desk, I lit my lamp and began reading a book.

Meanwhile, one after another the members of the group returned. They poured oil on the charcoal to build up the fire. One of the students went to the dining hall for a pot, another to steal some soy sauce. Some peeled off slivers of dried bonito they had bought. The soup came to a boil. One by one the things they had purchased were tossed into the pot. Each time something was thrown in, it brought forth a burst of laughter. Someone said, "It's already cooked!" Another cried out, "Not yet!" Inside the pot a hand-to-hand fight with chopsticks began. As for drinking, they had bought some gin at a foreign goods store where it was sold in those days. The spirits were contained in a black bottle shaped square like the position of the shoulders when one is in a rage. It was probably an inferior drink because I had heard someone say the price was low.

Every now and then they glanced in my direction. Looking quite unconcerned, I continued to pull out wafers, one after another, from the bag under my desk and to eat them.

Gradually the gin began to have its effect on all of them. The blood rushed to their heads. Their talk fell to a new low. Both queers and mashers were at this mekurajiru party. Miyaura, a masher, said to Henmi, a queer, "Hey, Henmi! you so-and-so! If you look down to the bottom of a privy, you'll be as transported with joy as I am when I catch a flicker of scarlet crepe petticoat under a kimono! Right?"

I thought Henmi would be angry, but quite the contrary he replied seriously, "Well, sometimes I do enjoy looking at it, thinking the stuff comes from that private part blessed with passion!"

Miyaura laughed, saying, "When I negotiate for it with a woman, I grab her hand, but how about when you negotiate with a 'boy'?"

"It's the same. I hold his hand. Like so!"

He grabbed Miyaura's hand and with his finger pressed down on the masher's palm. Henmi explained that when a boy agrees, he grabs hold of the finger, and when he doesn't agree, he doesn't grab it.

Someone urged Henmi to sing. And he began: "A devil thrust his arse through a rift in the clouds and let out a long sonorous fart!"

Someone sang a lively folk song. Someone recited a poem. Someone imitated a prologue delivered at a peepshow. Someone mimicked. Meanwhile, the pot and the bottle gradually emptied. One of the mashers said he'd discovered something nice not too far away. Another said if such was the case, they ought to go investigate. He said the other day he had been prevented from going because only five minutes remained before the closing of the dormitory gate, but since they still had fifteen minutes left, there'd be time enough to go out. Once they did leave, it would be all right for they could return the next day with signed affidavits from their guardians. They concluded they could go out, for the affidavits were already in their possession stamped with their guardians' seals.

The entire mekurajiru party left in an uproar. Waniguchi also left with them.

While reading my book and getting sick and tired of eating those beanjam wafers, I heard footsteps stealing up the stairs. A bird accustomed to listening for the sound of a hunting gun never allows the hunter to draw near. Blowing out my lamp, I opened a window, climbed onto the roof, and quietly closed the window. I didn't know if it was from the dew or frost, but I found the tiles wet and slippery. Grouching in the shadow of a shutterbox, I held firmly to the hilt of the dagger in my kimono.

All the dormitory shutters were closed, and only in the room of the school servant did light filter through the sliding screens. Those footsteps entered my room. They seemed to be walking all over the place.

"Thought his lamp was lit until now. Wonder where he went?"

It was Henmi's voice. I was holding my breath. After a while I heard those footsteps leave my room and go down the stairs.

Luckily the incident ended without my using that dagger.

***

When I was fourteen . . .

As usual, my daily lessons still didn't give me any trouble. Whenever I had some free time, I read those books from the lending library. Because I was gradually able to read faster, I finished almost all the works of Bakin and Kyoden. Then I tried reading some other writers, those of the historical romances we call yomihon, but I found them uninteresting. I read some of the so-called ninjobon, novels which describe the love affairs of lower class people, borrowing the books secondhand from my friends. These relationships between men and women flashed through my mind as if in some beautiful dream. But then that dream faded without leaving any deep impression. Yet each time I received this impression, I felt that at least those handsome men and beautiful women were blessed with a splendid appearance, whereas a fellow like me was no match for them. It was a real torment to me.

I still played with Hanyu. One Monday afternoon around the end of January as I went for a stroll with him, he told me he wanted to take me to some nice place. When I asked him where it was, he said he was going to escort me to a small restaurant in the neighborhood. I had already been to noodle and sukiyaki shops, but except for the time my father had brought me to dine at the Ogiya in Oji, I had never been to any place whose hanging signboard was inscribed with the characters for "restaurant," so I was really surprised.

"Can you go to such a place all by yourself?"

"I'm not going alone. I'm suggesting I go with you."

"Of course I understand that. By alone, though, I meant going there without an adult. Have you ever really been there by yourself?"

"Sure I have. Just the other day."

Hanyu looked quite triumphant. The two of us passed under the restaurant shop curtain. One of the maids greeted us, and then looking at us, she pulled another servant by her kimono sleeve and flinging a glance at her began laughing. Embarrassed, I wanted to turn back, but Hanyu, without a moment's delay, went on in, so I followed reluctantly.

He ordered some dishes. He ordered some sake. When I asked him if he could drink, he told me that even though he couldn't, he had ordered drinks anyway. Each time a maid carried in some of the food, she would stand there a while, watching us, smiling at us. I'd become rigid, stiff, merely eating something from one of the side dishes, anything, until Hanyu began talking to me.

"Yesterday I was really happy."

"How come?"

"My father invited me along to one of his New Year parties. Quite a few geisha were there as well as some of the young apprenticed girls, and since none of the other guests had arrived yet, I was idling away my time. Suddenly one of the apprentices asked me to show her the garden. So I went out with her. When we came to a miniature hill of rocks while going around the edge of the pond, she took hold of my hand without saying a word. I walked along leading her by the hand. I was really delighted!"

"I bet you were."

I couldn't help uttering those words of praise. Again that same beautiful dreamlike image flashed through my mind. I felt Hanyu and that pretty apprenticed geisha were a perfect match as he walked along leading her by the hand. Not only was Hanyu a good-looking boy. He was always in an altogether suitable kimono.

At the same time I was absorbed in these thoughts, I felt the event had absolutely nothing to do with me. Strangely enough, I didn't experience any of the pain I had felt while indulging in those idle reveries during my reading of ninjobon novels on lower-class love affairs. Confronting the truth of these assertions, I realized, on the contrary, it was quite natural for me to feel this way.

It wasn't long before Hanyu paid the bill and left the restaurant. Because he had held hands with that young girl, I assumed he had given this banquet to celebrate the event and so had treated me.

When I think back to those days, I find them rather strange. Somehow those beautiful dreams that flashed through my mind when I read a ninjobon or when I talked of Hanyu's stroll with an apprenticed geisha as he led her by the hand had in them some of the seeds of love and affection, but they weren't closely related to sexual desire itself. The word "sexual" is probably not appropriate for these situations. These stirrings of love and affection, it seemed to me, were quite different, somehow quite separate, from Copulationtrieb.

While reading these romantic novels involving commoners, I discovered the kisses described were completely different from those described in European literature. Even someone like me couldn't help but reason that some relationship exists between love and sexual desire. Yet even though I had a longing for love and affection, I didn't feel, as one normally would have expected, any real sexual drive.

One event branded on my memory seems to directly prove this statement. In those days I picked up a bad habit. I find it very difficult to record, but if I don't, the writing I'm doing will be worthless, and so I must set this down. A regulation in European dormitories requires all young students to sleep with both hands on top of the covers as a precaution against this habit, so dormitory supervisors on their nightly rounds must pay particular attention to the position of hands. I can't remember exactly how I came to acquire the habit. I won't deny that Waniguchi, who loved to talk about anything dirty, was always mentioning it. Furthermore, there were many people who each time they came across the face of a new boy asked him if he had this habit, and whenever the youngster happened to be a girl, they never failed to inquire if hair grew on a certain part of her anatomy. Such questions were inevitable, especially if the examiners were men of humble origin with no formal education. Yet many of these men looked as if they were gentlemen. In fact, quite a number of them were upperclassmen living in our dorm. The question about this habit became a household word used to tease small boys like me. I decided to try it out. But I found it wasn't as enjoyable as others had claimed. It left me with a severe headache. Over and over again I tried it out by forcing myself into imagining those weird drawings I had seen. The next time I did it, not only did I end up with a headache but with a wild pounding of the heart as well. Since then I have rarely indulged in it. Ultimately, I suppose, I received no real pleasure from it because I hadn't been stimulated by any inner desire. Because others had suggested it to me, the whole process was merely a borrowed superficial exercise.

One Sunday I went home to Mukojima. On my return I found my father looking unusually annoyed about something without saying a word to me. My mother also seemed worried and withheld any of her gentle and kind words I so very much wanted to hear. Having come back in the best of spirits, I was quite disappointed, and for a while I glanced from one parent to the other.

My father knocked the ashes out of the bamboostemmed pipe he'd been smoking, knocked them out with a much more vigorous pounding than usual, and began the conversation. He didn't smoke cigarettes. He always smoked a brand of tobacco called Kumoi. When I finally heard what my father had to say, I realized he had been told about some "crime" of mine which I had never even considered an offense. It had nothing to do with those dormitory hands I mentioned earlier. It was about my friendship with Hanyu.

In the class above mine at school was a student called Nunami. I didn't even know him by sight, but apparently he had found it amusing to watch Hanyu and me playing together like pups. Nunami's sponsor at school lived at Mukojima and was my father's go-game companion. During the game my father was told what the sponsor had been told by Nunami.

That is, Kanai—I—so Nunami's recitation to his sponsor goes—is the youngest member of the dormitory at school. He does quite well in his studies. He has a friend called Hanyu. He too does reasonably well at school. However, their personalities are completely different. Kanai is a quiet boy, one expected to make steady progress from this time on, but while Hanyu is precociously talented and overly sharp, his future prospects seem dubious. Apparently the boys are very close friends and enjoy being together, but it seems this congeniality is due to their having no other friends. Recently, though, this association with Hanyu has become quite dangerous for Kanai. Hanyu seems to be Kanai's senior by about two years. Because Hanyu was raised in Tokyo, he's been influenced by those bad aspects of a large city. Recently he's been observed going to restaurants by himself, enjoying the flattery of the maids there. It seems he's even started to drink sakfe. To make matters worse, he once bought an obi for a woman working at one of those "shops" where you can practice archery. He may be morally ruined. Nunami had told his sponsor he wanted to separate Kanai from Hanyu, lest he be morally ruined too.

After giving this account, my father said, "Have you done anything bad with Hanyu? If so, it's better to come out with it. If you confess and say you'll never do it again, everything will be all right. In any event," my father said, "you have to stop associating with Hanyu."

My mother put in a word from the side: "Mr. Nunami didn't say you did anything wrong. He said you'd probably never done anything bad. He said everything would be fine if only you stopped playing with that Hanyu."

I was quite startled. But I proceeded to frankly inform my parents about having been taken to a restaurant by Hanyu. However, because it was too difficult to tell them that the occasion was in honor of Hanyu's own lucky experience, I didn't mention it.

I had thought breaking off my friendship with Hanyu would be very difficult to do, but actually it was carried out almost naturally. It wasn't long before he failed his exams. He withdrew from school. I lost all trace of him.

It was after I had gone abroad, returned, and married that I discovered something about him. One day during my absence a man came to visit me and left his namecard, Shonosuke Hanyu. He went away after leaving a message for me that he was dealing in the buying and selling of shares.

***

I returned to Mukojima during summer vacation the same year.

At that time I found a good friend. He was a boy called Eiichi Bito, who was about my age and who was attending the preparatory course for the Tokyo Medical School at Izumibashi. Eiichi's father did the household accounts for our lord's estate so that he was treated as well as Hanno, who was in charge of drawing up drafts. In fact, they lived next door to one another in the same tenement building.

My father purchased a house with a small lot near our lord's estate, where he enjoyed cultivating various vegetables in our narrow kitchen garden. Beyond the rice paddy was a path overlooking the towboat channel. Whether Eiichi would come along this path to play with me or I went over to his tenement house, we were almost always together.

Eiichi, whose face was flat and yellowish, was morose and taciturn. He was quite good at Chinese literature. He was most enthusiastic about the famous poet and Confucian scholar Sankei Kikuchi. I read his anthology, Seisetsuroshisho, after borrowing it from Eiichi. I read Kikuchi's parody of a Chinese classic, Honcho-gushoshinshi. When I heard that Sankei had published some poems, I went to Asakusa and bought Kagetsushinshi, the magazine they appeared in, came home, and read them. The two of us even attempted composing some poems ourselves. We tried writing short essays in the manner of the Chinese classics. These were the kinds of things we enjoyed doing most.

Eiichi was a petite man of virtue. In talking with Hanyu, I was careless and slovenly, never restrained, but if I happened to use even a little vulgarity or obscenity in speaking with Eiichi, he would immediately flare up. He pictured to himself conditions in which one did not enjoy sensual pleasures until, graduating with a degree and loved by his teacher's daughter or some such type, he makes her his wife. Then, should he become a prominent figure whose name is celebrated all over the land, he could, like the Chinese poet Toba, certainly be loved by a geisha. At that time such a man could print a poem on a silk handkerchief and give it to her.

When I went to Eiichi's house. I occasionally found he was out with his father. Often at those times I happened to meet Hanno, whose long hair was parted in two down to the nape of his neck. As I would be calling Eiichi from outside the house and even before I entered, Hanno would open a sliding door from inside, come out, and then go back in. After that Eiichi's mother would appear at the door and say some nice things to me.

She was Eiichi's stepmother. One day when I was reading Seisetsuroshisho with him, we were reciting a poem about Mama-no-Tekona, who, because she was wooed by many young men, committed suicide by drowning. The poem having suddenly reminded me of Eiichi's stepmother, I asked, "They say your mother isn't your real one. Does she bully you?"

"No, she doesn't," said Eiichi, but it seemed to me it was unpleasant for him to talk about her.

Once at about two in the afternoon on a fine August day, I went over to Eiichi's house. Attached to every tenement building is a small garden surrounded by a bamboo fence. Placed at random in the Bito family garden were four or five plants which I presumed had been purchased at some festival. The sun was blazing down on the sandy soil. I could hear the locusts singing so noisily the sound seemed to fill the area of thickly luxurious plants in the garden of our lord's mansion. It was extremely quiet in the Bito house, its paper sliding doors closed. Opening the small wicket of twigs along the bamboo fence, I called out as usual, "Eiichi!"

There was no reply.

"Isn't Eiichi at home?"

The sliding doors opened. Hanno came out, that same long hair of his parted in two down to the nape of his neck. A man with a white complexion, a tall man with drooping shapely shoulders, he used the pure Tokyo dialect.

"Eiichi isn't at home. Please come over to my place for a while."

With these words he returned inside to his apartment next door. All over the back of his dappled cotton kimono were loud flashy patterns. Eiichi's mother slowly came out to the threshold. Fingering with both her hands the sidelocks of her hair bound into a chignon by a light blue band of silk crepe, she began talking to me. They said she had only just come up to Tokyo, but to my surprise she too was using the pure Tokyo dialect.

"Good heavens! Is it Mr. Kanai? Oh do please come in."

"All right. But as long as Eiichi isn't home ..."

"When he found out his father was going fishing, he decided to tag along. Even though he isn't at home, you needn't worry. There, now you sit right down."

"All right."

Reluctantly I sat down on the veranda. Mrs. Bito again came out slowly, almost indolently, and raising one knee sat down beside me, her body almost nestling against mine. I could smell her sweat, her face powder, the oil she used on her hair. I moved a little to the side. She smiled, though I didn't know why.

"I've no idea why you're so kind as to play so often with a boy like Eiichi. I've never seen such an unsociable child."

She had ridiculously large eyes and a ridiculously large nose and mouth. I even felt her mouth was square-shaped.

"I like Eiichi very much."

"You don't like me?"

She almost seemed to press her cheek against mine as she peered at me from the side. Her breath fell against my face. I felt that breath was strangely hot. And at the same time it suddenly occurred to me that Eiichi's mother was a woman. For some reason or other I became terrified. I might have even turned pale.

"I'll come some other time."

"Oh dear! You can stay here a little longer, can't you?"

Suddenly overcome with confusion and bowing three or four times, I broke into a run. Between the thick growth of plants in the garden of our lord's mansion was a ditch into which water from a small pond ran after passing over a small dam. On the sandy soil at the edge of this ditch where horsetails were growing, tall trees among the thick growth of vegetation were casting lingering shadows slightly to the west. Having run as far as this spot, I threw myself down on the sand and lay on my back.

Directly above me clusters of trumpet flowers were blooming as if aflame. The cries of the locusts were vigorous, energetic. There were no other sounds. It was the hour when the great god Pan still sleeps. I pictured to myself a multitude of images.

Afterwards, even when I talked things over with Eiichi, I never mentioned anything to him about his mother.

***

When I was fifteen . . .

After the final exams at the close of the past year there had been such a great weeding out of students that each class had some members who left school. The majority of these sacrificial candidates were mashers. Even little Hanyu was eliminated along with the others.

Henmi also dropped out of school. But only recently had he suddenly turned into a masher, lengthening his kimono sleeves and his hakama skirt and plastering his hair with perfumed pomade, that hair of his which had formerly pointed to the heavens like the leaves of a palm tree.

In those days I became acquainted with two friends, Koga and Kojima.

Koga was a big fellow with prominent cheekbones on his square ruddy face. Due to the fact that he had taken special interest in a handsome beautiful boy named Adachi, in addition to the way he himself dressed, Koga certainly seemed to be one of the shining lights of the queers. From about the fall of the preceding year he had been trying to get to know me. I couldn't help but keep a firm grip on the handle of that dagger of mine.

However, after the great shakeup in our school, a change occurred in the allotment of dormitory rooms, and I found Koga and I were roommates. Waniguchi said to me, a look of mockery on his face, "Well, go on over to Koga's place and he'll make you one of his pets," and he laughed.

He spoke in that same imitation of my father's voice. And yet this was the man who had never offered to give me the slightest bit of protection. Instead of being troubled by this fact, I considered myself fortunate. Though from first to last I had been made uncomfortable by his cynical words and actions, he was at least an independent spirit. I remember the concluding lines a poet in his class had presented to him:

Quiet evening,

Calm brooding over the bamboo

Beyond your window

As you read

Kanpi.

Many were afraid of Waniguchi, were in fact in awe of him. I realized that had been a form of protection he offered me indirectly.

I was about to lose this indirect protection. And I was about to move into the room of the notoriously dangerous Mr. Koga. I was instinctively terrified.

I moved into that room as if I were entering a lion's den. Once Hanyu had said to me, "Your eyes are triangles with the base line standing up," and I suppose those same reversed triangular eyes of mine were now even more angular. Sitting cross-legged on an old woolen blanket which had discolored into a dirty grey and which he had spread over a broken desk without even a solitary book or anything on it, Koga was staring at me. His perfectly round eyes, too small for his large face, were overflowing with joy.

"Even though you've been so afraid of me that you've been running away all over the place, you've finally come to me, haven't you?" And he laughed.

He broke into a broad grin. His was a strange face, both clownish and dignified. It didn't seem the face of a bad guy.

"Can't be helped since I've been assigned here." My reply was certainly blunt.

"I guess you feel I'm the same type Henmi is, don't you? I'm not."

Without replying, I began to put my section of the room in order. Ever since my childhood, I had had a great aversion to having any of my things scattered about. From the moment I had entered this school, I had precisely and systematically classified my school notebooks and my other concerns. By that time in this period of my life, I already had a great many notebooks, exactly twice the number other students had. The reason I had so many was that I used two notebooks for each subject. Furthermore, I always carried these sets of notebooks to class, and while listening, I would sort out the important facts and the points for future reference and write these down in ink in whichever notebook was appropriate, the opened notebooks piled one over the other. There was no need to make a clean copy of my notes the way the other students did after returning to the dorm. In my room I had only to look up some scientific terms used during the lecture and some Greek and Latin etymologies and annotate these in red ink along the margins of my notebook. That was just about the extent of the work I did outside the classroom.Whenever I heard anyone saying it was difficult and troublesome to memorize these technical terms, I couldn't help feeling amused. I almost felt like asking them why they tried to memorize these words mechanically without looking up their etymologies.

I always arranged my notebooks and reference books in the same order on the shelf. As a precaution against overturning my bottles of red and black ink, I lined these up with my pens in an empty cake box I set on the far corner of my desk. On the front of my desk I spread a huge sheet of blotting paper. To the left I piled two notebooks with thick bindings. One was my diary in which before going to bed I kept a precise record of each day's events. The other notebook was for memos that had nothing to do with school subjects. For its title I had pretentiously written in pen as seal letters the two scholarly and academic Chinese characters kan and ju_y which can supposedly awaken memory. Under my desk I concealed about ten volumes of Teijozakki with their essays on the samurai. In those days the most elegant and refined miscellaneous essays available in the circulating libraries were in books of this sort, and when one had completed, as I had, all the novels of Bakin and Kyoden, the only thing to do was turn to such essays. Whenever I happened to find anything worthwhile in them, I would make a note of it in my kanju notebook.

Koga, a broad grin on his face, was watching what I was doing, but when he saw me trying to conceal the Teijozakki volumes under my desk, he said, "What sort of books are those?"

"Teijozakki"

"What's in them?"

"On these pages in this volume they're writing about ceremonial costumes."

"What's your purpose in reading that kind of stuff?"

"It's not for any particular purpose."

"Then it's all useless, isn't it?"

"If that's the case, then my, or anyone's, entering this school and pursuing an education is useless, don't you think? You probably didn't enter only to become a government official or a teacher, did you?"

"You mean that when you graduate, you don't want to become a government official or teacher?"

"Well, I may. But I'm not studying just to become one.

"You mean, then, you're studying in order to learn, that is, you're studying for the sake of study?"

"Well. Yes, I guess that's right."

"Well, you're an interesting kid."

Suddenly I felt angry. To talk to someone for the first time and to conclude by saying I was an interesting "kid" was too insulting. I glared at him with those same reversed triangular eyes of mine. Koga was still calmly grinning at me. I felt somewhat disarmed, so I couldn't really hate this innocent strapping fellow.

Toward evening that same day Koga suggested we go for a walk. Even though Waniguchi had shared the same room with me for a long time, he had never said to me, "Let's go for a stroll." At any rate, since I felt I might as well try going out with Koga, I agreed.

It was a pleasant evening of early summer. We walked along the streets of Kanda. When we came to a secondhand bookstore, I stopped to look in. Koga browsed with me. In those days five sen was enough to buy a one-volume collection of any Japanese poet. On first entering Yanagiwara there was a public square. A large umbrella stood open, and under it a pretty girl about twelve or thirteen had been ordered to do a Japanese street dance, the kappore. Later in my life when I was reading Victor Hugo's Notre Dame and saw something written about a little girl with a name similar to that of a precious stone, perhaps Emeraude, I was reminded of this little girl, feeling Emeraude was like the girl I saw dancing the kappore under that umbrella.

"I don't know what kind of child she is," Koga said, "but she's been treated badly, hasn't she?"

"Probably Chinese children are treated more harshly. I once heard that a Chinese baby was placed in a square box, forced to grow square, and then put on display. The Chinese may be capable of that kind of thing."

"How did you come to hear that story?"

"It's in the Gushoshinshi, a Chinese book on biography and anecdotes."

"You certainly read strange things. You're an interesting kid."

That was how Koga, in rapid succession, had repeated, "You're an interesting kid." While we were walking through Yanagiwara toward Ryogoku, he stopped in front of a shop whose paper-covered lantern had on it the characters for eels broiled in soy sauce.

"Do you eat eels?"

"I eat them."

Koga entered the shop. He ordered large ones. When the sake was brought in, he seemed to enjoy drinking it by himself. Before long some phlegm caught in his throat. Suddenly clearing his throat with a loud noise, he sent that phlegm flying into an alley over the bamboo fence surrounding the small garden just off the veranda. I watched with a stupid look of amazement on my face. The eels were brought in. Only once had my father taken me to an eel restaurant, and only once had I eaten eels. I was first surprised that Koga had ordered as many as the amount of money he had taken out could buy, and I was again surprised to see how he ate them. He would draw the skewer from the eel. Then folding a big thick piece double with his chopsticks, he would cram the whole thing into his mouth. I didn't say anything, merely watching him as I thought to myself, "He's the interesting kid!"

That evening Koga returned to the dorm as meek as a lamb. Just before going to bed, he asked me to wake him the next morning, and then he fell into a sound sleep.

It became light out around four in the morning. I would get up at six. After washing, I'd look over some books. At seven they would beat the wooden clappers that breakfast was ready. I woke Koga. The eyes he opened were heavy with sleep.

"What time is it?"

"Seven."

"It's still early."

He turned over in bed and again fell into a sound sleep. I went to eat breakfast. It was seven-thirty. At eight classes would begin. I woke him.

"What's the time?"

"Seven-thirty."

"It's still early."

It was a quarter to eight. About to set out with my notebooks I had prepared the previous night for my daily schedule, I again woke him.

"What time is it?"

"Quarter to eight."

Without uttering a sound, he sprang out of bed. Carrying some toilet paper and a towel, he rushed from the room. He went to the lavatory, washed, ate breakfast, and hurried over to his classroom.

This was the usual daily routine Koga followed. Occasionally his friend Jujiro Kojima came over to visit him. He looked like the famous hero Genji in the colored prints we saw hanging in the print shops in those days. The skin all over his body was a kind of bluish white. He was nicknamed "Blue Striped Snake," though he always became angry whenever anyone called him that. It was quite reasonable for him to get angry because I heard the nickname was fastened on to him after a certain part of his anatomy was seen in the bath. Kojima was not a drinking man. His words and actions seemed like those of a young aristocrat. He was the younger brother of a well-known scholar on Occidental learning, a professor given his rank directly by imperial decree. Due to his being the twelfth child in his family, I heard he had been given the name meaning just that, Jujiro.

I first had my doubts as to why Koga and Kojima were on friendly terms with one another. But after observing them, I gradually discovered something they shared in common.

Koga was quite devoted to his father. It seemed, nevertheless, that his parent treated him as an unworthy child because of his own grief over the premature death of Koga's younger brother, who was something of a child prodigy. The more his father treated him as unworthy, the more Koga felt he had to relieve his father's anxiety by making up for the deficiency over the loss of this child. Kojima's father had died, but his mother was still living. She had given birth to more than ten children. Her thirteenth, a boy named Jusaburo, was quite talented, and apparently she was very much attached to him. In spite of the fact that Jusaburo was quite talented, he was something of a libertine. He stirred up quite a row after a girl employed in the reading room of a certain newspaper fell in love with him, the incident appearing more than once in the papers. The woman was employed by a man who ran the reading room, and after being coerced by him, a man more than thirty years her senior, she had given herself to him and had become his mistress. He was jealous because she adored Jusaburo, so he continually abused her. The woman begged Jusaburo for help. Because he was the young aristocratic son of a professor by imperial decree, he became quite a fashionable topic for the papers. On account of the scandal, Jusaburo, who had been adopted into a fine aristocratic family without sons, had to sever his connections with that family. His mother was very much worried about him. It was Jujiro who was doing his best to console her.

Perhaps you may feel my loose, slipshod, leisurely way of writing about these events has no connection to my sexual life, but actually it has. It has a very important connection.

Gradually I got to be on friendly terms with Koga. And through Koga I became friends with Kojima. So a triple alliance came into existence.

Kojima was a most innocent child. His sexual life was a complete zero.

As for Koga, after he drank some sake, he would usually fall into a sound sleep. But about once a month there would be a turbulent day. On those days before stomping out into the corridor he'd say to me, "Tonight I'm going to kick up a storm, so you'd better go quietly to bed." Once, calling up from outside the dorm to someone's room after finding himself locked out and everyone asleep, he broke open the door with his fists. On such nights he would go into Adachi's room, the handsome boy who was in a lower class at the school. There were even occasions on those stormy days when Koga slept away from the dorm. After returning sad and dejected the following day, he would say repentantly, "Last night I acted like a beast!"

Kojima's beast of sexual desire lay slumbering. Koga's sexual beast was chained, but occasionally it was turned loose and ran amuck. Yet in the same way that some present-day gentlemen eagerly try to preserve the tidiness of at least their own homes, he never desecrated his own room. I was lucky to share this sacred room with him.

The three of us, Koga, Kojima, and I, coldly frowned upon the entire dormitory. Whenever we had any free time, the three of us would get together. Those students who reared the beast of sexual desire and usually unleashed it were mercilessly censured before our triumviri. And among these, those who went out in white socks late Saturday afternoon were spoken about by us as if they were no longer human. The postponement of my sexual life was due completely to this triple alliance of ours. Now, long afterward, when I think about our group, it seems to me that if Koga had not been a member of our alliance, it would probably have been a dismal anemic one. Fortunately, Koga, despite his occasional stormy days, threw in his lot with us, so even when we included one another in our critical judgments, it was impossible to deprive us of our energetic spirits.

I remember one Saturday in particular. The three of us decided to have a look around Yoshiwara, the red-light district. Koga took charge. We went out in those duck-cloth skirts and dark blue socks, our tall Bohemian clogs clattering along the way. After going over the hills of Ueno, we passed through Negishi and then turned right along Torishinmachi, heading along the ditch toward the entrance to the gay quarters. We swaggered along the width and breadth of Yoshiwara. Calamity befell any of the mashers we happened to meet. Together the three of us burst into laughter on gazing after those white socks as they furtively turned down a sidestreet. After leaving my friends, I took the ferryboat at Imado and proceeded to Mukojima.

***

During summer vacation that year, as I had done the previous year, I lived with my parents at Mukojima. In those days the custom of a student's going to a spa or the seashore at the height of the summer had not yet been established. The best a student could do was go back home to his parents. As the son of a government official, I could imagine no greater pleasure than returning home to my parents and enjoying myself there.

As usual I played with Eiichi. No longer was his mother around. Rumors circulated about Hanno and Eiichi's mother, and he was dismissed from his position and went back to his hometown. Eiichi's mother was sent back to her home province.

I competed with Eiichi in our exercises of composing essays in the Chinese manner. When we became more interested in it, we wanted to study Chinese composition with a good teacher.

In those days a teacher named Bunen lived at Mukojima. He had built his home where he could command a view of the banks of the Sumida River across a rice field about five acres wide. To the main wing of his two-storied house was an annex whose study looked out on a pond in the garden. The storehouse was loaded with books imported from China, a student supported by the teacher continually going in and out carrying volumes by the armload. I guess the teacher was about forty-two or forty-three. His wife was around thirty, their two or three daughters quite pretty. All of the women lived in the main wing. The teacher lived in his study, which was connected to the main wing by a covered passageway. He was an official editor of government publications, his monthly salary one hundred yen. He had his own private jinrikisha to take him to his office. My father envied him, telling me, "That man is happiness itself!" In those days a monthly salary of one hundred yen brought one happiness.

After asking my father about our plan and receiving his permission, I was able to go to Bunen Sensei's house to have my Chinese compositions corrected. The student-dependent led me into the teacher's study. No matter how long the composition I brought, my teacher took it, saying only, "Let's have a look." He corrected it with a brush dipped in red Chinese ink. He punctuated it one line after another. And while punctuating it, he revised it. The reading and revising were done simultaneously. Whenever he found a key word, though, he always put a good mark by it, and seldom did he break up any harmonious phrases in the composition.

After several visits I happened to meet a girl about sixteen or seventeen serving my teacher dinner, her hair worn in the shimada style. After returning home, I said to my mother, "Today I saw my teacher's eldest daughter," but my mother said, "She's the maid." Later I found out the word maid had a special meaning.

One day I happened to find a Chinese book tucked away under my teacher's desk. It was Kinpeibai, which describes the corruption and debauchery of the Ming dynasty. Though I had read only Bakin's adaptation of this work, I had known the Chinese original was quite different, much more erotic and obscene. It was then that I realized how cunning my supposedly austere and dignified teacher was.

Fall of the same year . . .

Koga was in one of his ugly moods. I assumed he was ill, but that wasn't it. One day we went out for a walk, and as we were strolling along the edge of a pond, he said, "I'm going to have a look around Nezu today. How about coming with me?"

"If we go back together, it's fine with me."

"Of course we will."

While walking along, Koga told me the object of his exploration of the area. Adachi had become intimate with a popular prostitute working in a house called the Yawataro in Nezu. Since the woman was passionately in love with him and continually summoning him, he had just about abandoned all his classes. Adachi's nightgown and everything else were provided in her room. All the woman's possessions were marked with the combined crests of her family and Adachi's. If she didn't see Adachi for a few days, she became hysterical. No matter how much Koga tried to detain Adachi, the woman's magnetism was so powerful that he was drawn to the Yawataro almost unconsciously. Koga had sent a letter to his friend's parents, who lived in Asakusa, cautioning them about Adachi's misconduct. Koga waited for Adachi's return to the dorm and then asked him, "How did it go?" A look of confusion on his face, Adachi said, "It was terrible today seeing my mother cry. It was pathetic to hear my mother crying, saying she wanted to die. But I've also heard my sweetheart in tears, telling me she wanted to die, and so nothing can be done about anything."

Quite angry while telling me about this situation, Koga had tears in his own eyes. While walking along after listening to him, I said, "It certainly is hard and unjust." Yet even while coming out with these words, I couldn't feel the least bit outraged. Ever present but dormant in my consciousness was that beautiful dream of love. Just after I had read Ume-goyomi for the first time, having borrowed it from someone who had borrowed it from the lending library, I became friends with a student majoring in Chinese literature, and he advised me to read Sentoyowa. I read Enzangaishi. I read Joshi. I was envious, burning with jealousy over the naive love affairs between young men and women described in these Chinese books. And because I had not been born handsome, I felt as if those beautiful experiences were ideals beyond my grasp. I experienced constant dissatisfaction, a continual pain in the innermost depths of my mind. And so naturally I couldn't prevent myself from thinking that Adachi was certainly happy, that even though he was undergoing pain, it was probably a sweet pain, not that bitter pain I felt lying dormant in me.

At the same time I also came up with the following thought: Koga's exceedingly simple and pure character was in itself lovable. Still, when I reflected on the underlying basis for his own anguish about Adachi, it didn't seem deserving of the slightest sympathy. Rather, Adachi had extricated himself from an unnatural embrace and had rushed toward the bosom of a natural one. If Koga had told Kojima about this situation, Kojima himself might have shed tears along with him. Of course I felt no greater joy existed than obedience to one's parents. And for the sake of this obedience it was a fine thing to restrain one's sexual desires as much as possible. It was not strange, however, to find that some human beings were unable to. Kojima treated his carnal desires as so much excrement drawn into the bottomless pit. Koga regarded these desires as an outhouse receptacle which occasionally had to be cleaned out. Was it really to my credit that in becoming part of this alliance with these two I had not sought to gratify my sexual desires either? That was quite doubtful. If I had been born handsome like Kojima, I would probably not have been a Kojima. Before the altar of our sacred alliance, I indulged myself in this kind of heretical reflection.

For the first time in my life I crossed the Aizome Bridge as I followed Koga. He entered a small house on the west side and began talking to one of the employees. I stood on the threshold. The house was a restaurant in the licensed quarter. Koga was checking on exactly which days Adachi came to the restaurant. The man was reluctant to answer. After a while Koga came out sad and dejected. We started back without saying anything.

It wasn't long before Adachi was expelled from school. About a year later I heard a rumor that a handsome policeman in a section of Asakusa was quite the gay blade among many nurses and widows, Several years later Koga was at Okuyama in Asakusa and happened to meet a man dressed in a wadded garment made of taffeta, his face sinister, his cheeks hollow. They said that was the miserable end of Adachi, who was being kept by a female acrobat performing in a cheap Okuyama tent show.

***

When I was sixteen . . .

At this time I graduated from the English Academy, the preparatory school for helping students enter the university, so I became a university student in the department of literature.

After summer vacation I lived in a boardinghouse. Almost every night I went out with Koga and Kojima to some storyteller's hall. I got into such a bad habit that sometimes I couldn't fall asleep unless I had gone to one of these halls. After I lost interest in professional storytellers, I listened to the comic tales with their special emphasis on wordplay. And after having had my fill of these, I went to hear the female reciters of ballads. On the way back from the hall, we would feel hungry and stop at one of the noodle shops so that occasionally we happened to see some brothel pimps followed by quite a few streetwalkers. Some of those scenes under the street lamps were so scandalous that we instinctively shuddered. Even though the drivers of jinrikishas to the red-light districts told us "It'll be cheap," we never rode in them.

Probably Kojima and I were the only virgins to graduate from the English Academy. And even after entering the department of literature at our university, we kept the moral sanctions of our triumvirate intact so that Kojima and I remained innocent.

That year passed without any further events worth writing about.

When I was seventeen . . .

That year my father, through the kindness of a friend, became an official in the prison at Kosuge in Tokyo. My father had held a humble post in one government agency, but no position was vacant for him to be promoted to. Officers at the prison had an official residence, so if we lived there, we could rent our house at Mukojima. The monthly pay would also be slightly better. My father decided to make the move to Kosuge. So on Saturdays I went to Kosuge and on Sunday nights I returned to my boardinghouse.

I was still under the moral sway of our triple alliance. Each time I returned to our house at Kosuge on Saturday, I passed through Torishinmachi. On the south side of the street immediately after turning toward Yoshiwara was a shrine surrounded by a stone wall. On the north side was a curio shop. The paper sliding screens of the shop were always half closed. Pasted in a corner of these sliding doors was a rectangular sheet of paper, and on it were the characters for "Akisada," written as if a sign painter had done them. Each time I went to Kosuge on my way there and back, I felt a joy in passing those sliding doors. And once when I saw a girl standing in the open space between the doors, I felt, for about a week, some undefinable satisfaction. When I found the girl wasn't there, I felt, for a week, a vague dissatisfaction.

Probably she wasn't that much of a beauty. Her pinkish face, though, was as fresh as dew that has just emerged, her bright clear eyes with a charm impossible to describe. In her hair, just washed and set in the shimada style, was no red ribbon or ornament. During the summer she would have on a cotton kimono in a gay, lively pattern. In winter she was dressed in a kimono of common silk with a replaceable neckband. She always wore a clean apron.

From that time until long past my graduation from the university—no, that's not so—until the day I went abroad two years after my graduation, this girl was quite definitely the heroine of my beautiful dream. Whenever the charm of spring or the loneliness of fall happened to bring on some tender emotion, the name Akisada unexpectedly escaped from my lips. Actually it was all quite foolish. Why? Because Akisada was no more than the name of the shop and of the emaciated old man occasionally seen inside wearing a blue apron. I didn't even know the young girl's name. But there was something mysterious about her. In the five years since I had come to recognize her, she had remained unmarried. In my own idle daydreams I didn't find this strange, but it was odd that she had stayed unmarried in real life. I even thought in this same beautiful dream of mine that she might be waiting for my jinrikisha to stop and for me to begin talking to her. However, I wasn't that much of a poet to actually believe in this dream. Many years later I happened to hear about the girl's real character. The chief priest of a temple in the neighborhood was sending her living expenses.

Let me take this opportunity to relate one more little anecdote of the same sort. A girl about thirteen years of age lived next door to my father's official dwelling at Kosuge. She was taking lessons on the koto. Her koto mistress, who was living at Shitaya, was a woman called Sugisei, but because it was quite some distance away, one of her young female disciples would come to give the lesson in her place. On hearing the girl next door and the substitute teacher playing the koto, my mother got the impression that they made the same unpleasant sounds on the koto. One day, though, my mother heard a completely different sound. Let me put it this way: If the sounds she had heard up to then had a drowsy quality, the ones she was listening to this time had a beautiful melody, the quality of eyes opening wide from sleep. When my mother mentioned the difference to the girl's mother, she said the person performing this time was not a professional koto player. The girl, a disciple of the koto mistress Sugisei, was living on Gokencho. Because the substitute teacher was ill, this other girl had kindly consented to give the lesson. Eventually the girl who had played the koto so skillfully heard she had been praised by my mother, so she said she would come over to play for us some time.

Afterwards she occasionally visited us so that at times I happened to meet her when I came home on holidays. Judging from the shape of her head, I suspected she had suffered from hydrocephalus during childhood. Her hair was somewhat thin, she was pale, and her lower eyelids were tinged purple. Still, she was quite strong-willed. She was a naturally endowed koto virtuoso. If she had wanted to establish herself as a professional, she would have been expelled by her koto mistress and might have set up her own special school.

Having gradually come to be on good terms with my mother, the girl indirectly hinted, though actually quite boldly in a way, that she wanted to become my wife. When my mother said, "After my son graduates from the university, he will definitely study abroad, but depending on his rank at graduation, we don't know if he can do so at government expense," the girl replied, "If I have enough money, I'll give him all I have for his schooling."

My mother was impressed by the girl's cleverness. And so she even made inquiries into the girl's background. Galled Orei, she was the daughter in a family descended from a samurai who had held a fairly high post, but after her father died, she lived with her mother in a rented house on Gokencho. Strangely enough, a young man who seemed to be her elder brother lived with them. Apparently he was too good-natured and was treated by Orei as if he were her servant. The fact was he had been adopted as a son-in-law to take the family name, but in spite of this, Orei did not want to marry him, so she had said to him, "I'll give you our house, and I'll go somewhere else and get married." We also heard her ambition was to have at least a university graduate as her husband. That was why she had singled me out.

My mother wasn't pleased with the fact that this "elder brother" was living with the girl and her mother. I didn't especially dislike this clever, active girl, but because I had no interest in marrying that early, nothing came of the entire episode, falling through like water absorbed in sand.

Of course this wasn't a sexual problem. It couldn't be called a love problem either. It was, so to speak, nothing more than a marriage proposal that happened to spring up and then fade away, and having remembered it, I decided to jot it down. I learned that Orei attained her desire to become the wife of a university graduate and that she was living somewhere in Yokohama.

***

When I was eighteen . . .

Something happened during summer vacation. Since the graduation exams were drawing nearer, I thought of going to some quieter place to study for them. Fortunately our house in Mukojima was empty as we hadn't been able to find a tenant. It occurred to me to go there and take my books with me. My mother would come for a few days and help me get set up. All she had to bring me were the necessary ingredients and I could do my own cooking. My mother told me she was doubtful it would work out.

The man living next door to us, a gardener, heard us talking about it. He was on friendly terms with my father because whenever my parent wanted to grow something, he consulted with him. The gardener's wife was kind enough to make the following suggestion: They had a fourteen-year-old daughter called Ocho. Though she was big enough to look as if she was already about sixteen, she was really only a child. She couldn't even cook a decent meal. But she would probably be better than I would be. The gardener's wife said they would lend Ocho to me. My mother agreed. From the very first I was against the idea of having a girl around, but since I knew that Ocho, herself only a runny-nosed girl, had been trusted to carry a child on her back, I felt she'd be reliable and innocent, so I consented.

Ocho came every morning and left in the evening. She was a plump girl with small eyes and a small nose on her large face. No longer did her nose run. She arranged her hair in the shimada style. Apparently because of her becoming my maid, she was willing to set her hair in this way, but the manner in which the small chignon of her shimada lay atop her large face was quite funny.

During each meal she waited on me. As I watched her movements, I couldn't help thinking that unlike the meaning of her name she was by no means a butterfly but rather a moth. Without any intention of looking at her, I found myself doing just that. Under her slightly vertical eyebrows were her horizontal eyes so that the space between looked strangely limited. With her head bent and those eyes looking up at me, she seemed full of a love and respect which had something amiable and funny about it.

She worked quite hard. I needed her only to serve my meals, and I didn't care at all what she did afterwards. When she came to ask me, "What should I make?" I said, "Anything will do, so whatever you make at home, make here." About two weeks passed in this way.

One day Eiichi, who I had heard was living with some relatives that year, dropped in to see me. I was sick of reading my course books, so it was a real pleasure to talk to him, but he was quite depressed. I wondered why.

"Something's wrong, isn't there?"

"I'm not going to enter the undergraduate program at the university."

"Why not?"

"To be quite frank, I had thought of going back to my hometown without even meeting you. But when I went to say goodbye to my father and heard you were here, I simply wanted to see you and so I came."

Ocho brought in some tea. Emptying his cup in one gulp, Eiichi continued his talk. His school expenses had not come from his father's pocket. They were from his uncle, who had a new shop on Kobikicho. Since his uncle's business had taken a downward turn, Eiichi felt more and more that he had to abandon his studies. He felt he would return to his hometown and become an elementary school teacher. However, even if he did become a teacher, he wanted to study something else on the side. Supposing he were to pursue his interest in European culture, not only was he lacking in background on the subject, but it would be equally difficult for him to buy the latest books in the field. As a temporary expedient, therefore, he had used the greater portion of the money his uncle had given him and had bought some Chinese classics. He would confine himself to his hometown and read these books.

I couldn't help feeling moved. But I had no way of putting these feelings into words. If I offered him some meaningless words of consolation, he would not have hesitated to show his anger. All I could do was remain silent.

Before long Eiichi said he was leaving. And then as he was about to stand, he quite suddenly began again.

"The basic cause for my uncle's not being able to make a living is on account of my aunt."

"What kind of person is she?"

"She was his maid when he was single."

"I see."

"She won't ever bring herself to leave him. Though it's probably unnatural for a man to call on his wife for help in his business, it must be the greatest source of unhappiness in life to have a woman with an obscure background who insists on clinging to her mate, don't you think? Sayonara."

Eiichi left that abruptly. It was with a stupid look of amazement that I gazed after him. Through the rattan blind hanging at the main entrance, I could see my friend as he went past the roofed gate. In his white cotton kimono and his straw hat, he was receding in the distance, his short black shadow cast in the afternoon sun along the bright shining road of Chinese hawthorne hedges.

As his parting gift Eiichi had offered me an insinuating warning. I felt somewhat offended. It seemed to me there was no need to have anyone hear this kind of talk. At least it depended on the person he was revealing it to. For Eiichi, who was rather dense about everything when compared with myself, to speak in this way was, I felt, much too forward. Besides, had he meant to imply something about Ocho? Had I ever thought of her as a woman? If he thought I had, he certainly didn't know the person he was talking to. I felt as if he had made a grossly false charge against me.

I turned to my desk and opened the book I'd been reading. But I still felt uneasy about Eiichi's remarks. I didn't care a straw about Ocho. But how did she regard me? Since she and I had almost never spoken to one another, I had no real memory of anything she had ever said. When I tried hard to recall whether she had ever said anything to me, I suddenly remembered what had happened that morning. I had gone out for a walk. As I was leaving, she was folding my mosquito net. When I realized I had been out thirty minutes and decided to return, I found her sitting absentmindedly looking off into space, the folded mosquito net still before her. I was quite surprised, for I thought she had put it away long ago. It occurred to me just then that she was becoming a little lax in her duties. I wondered what she had been thinking about during those thirty minutes. With these thoughts in mind I felt as if I had made some sort of discovery.

From that time on I came to take much more careful notice of Ocho. I observed her with different eyes. When she served my meals, I paid special attention to her facial expressions. When I looked at her closely, I made the following observations: At the start of the meal she would be looking down, but occasionally she would glance at me. And yet of late she wouldn't look at me at all. Her attitude had definitely changed.

Hitherto, when I took a stroll in the garden, I had never looked in the direction of the kitchen even if I happened to hear her puttering around inside, but I now found myself glancing that way as I passed. I would notice her standing perfectly still, staring off into space, her hands resting in the middle of whatever she had begun to wash. Apparently she was absorbed in something.

As usual she would serve me my meals. My observant eyes gradually became sharper. Though she neither spoke nor raised her face, I felt some subtle influence of her delicate feelings. I felt as if her body were some physical substance storing electrical energy or something of the sort. Gradually I grew quite restless.

Even while reading, if I happened to hear a sound from the kitchen, I wondered what Ocho was doing. If I called her, she came immediately. It was quite natural for her to come when called, but I felt she was really waiting for me to call her. When evening came, she would bid me farewell and go into the kitchen. Until she put on her wooden clogs and shut the back door, I would be straining to hear everything. I felt as if the entire procedure had lasted much too long. I wondered if she wasn't waiting for me to call her back as she was starting for home. My uneasiness was increasing by the minute.

These were my feelings in those days. Eiichi Bito was not a sensitive person. But when he was living with his father or with his uncle, the atmosphere in those places was quite different from that of the house I was in. So even in the short glance he had taken of Ocho as she brought in tea, he might have discovered something strange in her behavior.

One day my mother visited me. I told her I was thinking of returning to Kosuge because I was getting tired of Mukojima. "In that case," my mother said, "why didn't you send me a postcard?"

"I was just considering sending you a letter," I said.

Actually I had suddenly hit on the idea, thanks to my mother's visit. After begging her to have Ocho and her family put my things in order, I took two or three books and left at once for Kosuge.

In the final analysis I ended up not knowing whether this change in Ocho's mind or nervous system had been brought about by love or sexual desire or even by the mere working of my own imagination.

***

When I was nineteen . . .

In July, I graduated from the university. On noticing my officially announced age of twenty, someone said it was rare for a person that young to be a university graduate. Actually I wasn't even twenty yet. I graduated from the university without finally having had an experience with a woman. That of course was certainly due to Koga and Kojima's influence. As for Kojima, though he was older than I was, he apparently hadn't had a woman yet either.

For some time we had an excessive number of graduation parties. The Matsugen, a restaurant in Ueno, was popular among the students in those days. On one occasion all of us graduates invited our professors there for a party.

We called in many geisha and apprenticed geisha from Sukiyamachi and Dobocho. That was the first time I had ever seen geisha at a party.

Even now students who are about to graduate have parties in honor of their professors. But thinking back to the event of that time, I believe the behavior of both guests and geisha was different from what it is nowadays.

When one becomes a university graduate today, he is shown neither any special favor nor any severe rudeness. In those days, though, I found that some geisha didn't even regard us graduates as human beings.

I still have a clear recollection of the party that evening at the Matsugen. Each graduate, one by one, went over to exchange cups of sake with his professors, who sat in a row in front of the alcove. Some of the professors made it a point to come over to their students and, sitting down with their legs crossed, talk with them. The room came to take on the appearance of something wild and jumbled. As I was sitting in blank amazement, someone to my left offered a cup of sake under my very nose.

"My dear ..."

It was the voice of a geisha.

"Well thanks."

I was about to take the cup from her. All of a sudden the hand of the geisha holding that cup drew back.

"It's not for you!"

Her slight glance at me was like a reprimand as she offered the cup to the person across from me to my right. It hadn't been done as a joke. It didn't have even the slightest outward semblance of a joke. The person sitting across from me to the right was a professor. With almost his entire back turned toward the geisha, he had been talking to the person to his right. The crest on the professor's haori of silk gauze was quite visible to me. Finally noticing the geisha's offer, the professor accepted the cup. No matter how absentminded or stupified I might have been, I could never have grabbed a cup of sake which had been offered to somebody else. Never in my wildest dreams had I felt anyone would offer a cup of sake to the crest of a haori!

From that very moment I felt as if I were completely awake. I felt, for example, as if I were looking at violent waves after I had been flung on the seashore from inside a swirling maelstrom. All the members of the party were mirrored in my eyes with perfect objectivity.

One professor who in the classroom always had a serious expression on his face was grinning like a Cheshire cat. A geisha who was trying to captivate the graduate sitting beside me was saying, "I say, my name's Boru. I'll be angry if you forget me!" I thought her name was Otama, which means "ball" in Japanese. All the younger apprenticed geisha at the party had stopped serving sake and were happily dancing. No one was watching them. Someone was catching a sake-cup after getting another person to throw it to him. Someone dashed up and thrust himself into the group of apprentice geisha and was dancing with them. One geisha, seeing that her samisen was about to be trampled on, was putting it away in haste and confusion. The geisha who had rebuffed me a short while ago seemed to be the senior geisha, frequently raising her loud voice, bustling about, poking her nose into everyone's business.

Sitting two or three persons away to the left of me was Kojima. He seemed absentminded. He didn't look much different from the state I had been in before my awakening. A geisha was sitting in front of him. The balance of her well-knit body was perfectly ordered, and her face was equally beautiful. If she had made the borders of her eyes more conspicuous, she would have appeared more like the

Vesta seen in Western painting. From the moment she had come in to distribute our small dining trays, she had attracted my attention. My ears were so poised I even heard her fellow-geisha call her Koiku. She was making several attempts to engage Kojima in conversation. As for Kojima, he was replying quite reluctantly. Even without trying to listen, I could hear their exchange:

"What is it, my dear, you like best?"

"Mashed sweet potatoes with sweetened chestnuts tastes delicious to me."

His was a serious response. Wasn't that an odd reply from a handsome, rather imposing twenty-three-year-old youth? Certainly among the graduating students at the thank-you party that evening, not one could rival him. Having become this strangely cool-headed, I felt awkward and ridiculous.

"Oh you do?"

Koiku's gentle voice trailed behind her as she got up from where she had been kneeling. I was watching the development of this affair with a certain amount of interest. After a while she brought in a fairly large porcelain bowl and put it in front of Kojima. It contained mashed sweet potatoes with sweetened chestnuts.

Kojima kept eating these until the end of the party. Sitting directly in front of him, Koiku watched each single piece disappear behind Kojima's beautiful lips.

I left the party early without telling Kojima, hoping, for Koiku's sake, he would eat as much of that mixture as possible and as slowly as possible.

From what I heard later, Koiku was the most beautiful geisha in Shitaya. And yet all Kojima did was eat the kinton which this beautiful geisha had carried in for him. Now Koiku is the wife of a famous politician belonging to a certain political party.

***

When I was twenty . . .

In due time my fellow graduates went hunting for jobs, many of them off for the country districts to become teachers. Since my class standing when I graduated was good, it was rumored I might be permitted to study abroad at government expense. However, since it was far from being settled, my father was worried. I wasn't, so lying on my bed in my four-and-a-half mat room in our official residence at Kosuge, I read my books.

Almost no one dropped in to visit me. Koga became a counselor in some government agency, got married, and lived in his wife's family home from which he went to his office. Even before Koga had found a regular job, Kojima was working in the office of a company in Osaka and so he had left Tokyo. When I went to the train station at Shinbashi to see Kojima off, Koga, who was still a bachelor at the time, whispered to me, "Someone wants to be my wife. Strange, isn't it?" Koga wasn't being modest. Even though he knew a good deal about the ways of the world when compared to Kojima, he still formed a corner of our triple alliance and so he was, as might be expected, quite innocent and naive. I didn't feel Koga's remark the least bit strange.

I too had an offer of marriage. It was my mother's idea that even if I were permitted to go abroad to study, it would be better for me to marry first. My father had no definite opinion. And so my mother was the one who prevailed on me to marry, but I kept giving her evasive answers. She didn't understand what I had in mind. Though I had an opinion of my own, I didn't want to reveal it to her. Even if I had decided to explain, I felt it would have been extremely difficult to. My mother persisted in asking me to. One day, after finally being driven into a corner, I said something like the following:

I would, in any event, be married at some time or other. When I did, I would really be troubled if I married someone I didn't like. It would be easy to decide if I liked her or not. However, it would even be hard for the woman to marry a man she didn't like. Perhaps it sounded disrespectful for a son to be saying this to his parent, but I couldn't the least imagine any female liking me once she had seen my face. Of course it wouldn't be impossible for a plain woman who was wise enough to know her plainness to be able to endure me even after she had seen my face. Still, it wasn't necessary to endure me. In such a situation I myself would be glad to do the declining! Then what about marriage in terms of my soul? I didn't think I happened to possess a very palatable soul either, but from my contacts with a great many people up to then, I didn't believe I had to feel that much ashamed of it to have to keep it concealed. If I had to take an examination on my soul, I didn't think I was bound to fail. When I took into account the current customs involved in marriage, though, I realized there was a marriage interview between the parties in terms of looks, but not in terms of souls. In fact, even this interview for examining looks wasn't necessary once the go-between told the other party the information beforehand. The woman herself did not say whether she liked the candidate or not. Only the male had to indicate his likes or dislikes. It was as if the parents of the daughter were selling her while the groom was doing the buying. The daughter was treated as if she were a commodity. If she were set down in Roman law, the word res would be used, the same as our word for slave. I had no interest in going out to buy a beautiful toy.

This was a rough approximation of what I explained to my mother in order to help her understand my feelings. It was a great disappointment to her that even though I wouldn't fail an exam on my soul, I was likely to fail one on my looks. "I've no recollection," she said as if unable to endure her indignation, "of having brought you into the world a cripple!" I couldn't help feeling embarrassed. Furthermore, my mother would not accept my view of the marriage interview that if it was fair for the man to choose the woman, it was equally fair for the woman to choose the man. According to my mother, that sort of view, in all probability, came from the same source as those advocating equality between the sexes. From early times the daughters of tradesmen had occasionally refused the prospective groom at the marriage interview. But the daughters of samurai married samurai because they were fully confident of the manly and spiritual aspects of these men so that to raise objections about a man's features was hardly to be expected. Even if this custom existed only in Japan, my mother felt that if it resulted in good, it had sufficient justification. But she had once heard an account from my father that even in Europe the king sends his retainers to neighboring countries to have them look for a bride for him. If so, she might as well assume that even in Europe the way a king selected a wife was the same as the method used in Japan. I was somewhat confused by my mother's dragging in an example from Europe and going on and on about it, especially since I was trying as much as possible not to mention European customs.

I had many more things I wanted to say in defense of my own position, but feeling it improper to contradict my mother, I said nothing further.

Shortly after this discussion an acquaintance of my father, a Doctor Annaka, came for a visit and recommended a match with a young lady in a titled family whose antecedents went back to a feudal lord. The girl was living in Bancho in the home of an artist named Ichijo. It would be all right for me to see her at any time. As usual, my mother urged me to go.

Suddenly I had a whim to see her. It was quite incongruous of me to. It wasn't that I really wanted to observe what the young lady looked like—it was that I merely wanted to attempt the experience of going through a marriage interview. It was somewhat irresponsible of me to do this, but it didn't mean I had already made up my mind not to marry any woman. Should I feel inclined to marry this one, I thought, I could easily do it.

It was about March, the weather still cold. Led by Doctor Annaka, I went to Ichijo's house in Bancho. It was a gloomy dwelling with a black-roofed gate. We were shown into an eight-mat room which seemed to be the artist's den. As I was sitting with Annaka around the brazier chatting with him, the artist came in. About fifty years of age, he seemed unaffected and candid. He talked about painting. After a while his wife appeared with the young girl.

The husband and wife kept the party lively by bringing up various subjects. They told me to talk as long as I liked, and if I wanted some sake, they would bring some in. I told them I didn't drink. The husband said, "In that case, what can we treat you to for dinner?" and he cocked his head to one side in thought. Because at the time I had been plagued with a tooth which was decaying, I had been living on buckwheat mash. And so I suggested, "If there's a noodle shop in the neighborhood, I'd be glad to have some buckwheat mash." Laughing, the host said, "That's an interesting request." The artist's wife called their maid and gave her the order.

Sitting quietly to the right of the wife all this time was the young girl, her hands on her knees. She had a full round face, the corners of her eyes somewhat slanted. Looking straight ahead, never looking down, she did not appear to be the least bit timid. There was no definite expression on her face. Yet when she heard me ask for buckwheat mash, she couldn't help breaking into a smile.

After requesting the dish, I had to admit it was as inferior as Kojima's request for mashed sweet potatoes with sweetened chestnuts, and I laughed inwardly at myself. For a while the conversation flourished on the topic of buckwheat mash. The artist had also eaten it at one time. Once when he was ill, he had consumed it an entire month because he couldn't eat anything heavy. "At that time," the artist's wife said, "I was really disgusted with him," but suddenly realizing her slip of the tongue, she apologized to me.

I returned home after eating the buckwheat mash. I was seen off at the main entrance by the man and wife and young girl.

On our way back Annaka pressed me for a definite answer about the girl, but I wasn't able to say anything. That was because I myself didn't know how to reply. I didn't feel she was very beautiful. Still, I did think she was quite nice. Certainly she had charm. I couldn't tell about her real personality, but I felt there wasn't a bit of stubbornness or peevishness in her. She seemed gentle. But when I asked myself if I wanted to marry her, I hadn't the least desire to. In no way did I dislike her. If she had been someone who had no connection to my future and I had to comment on her, I would have said she was the type of person I liked. But I couldn't bring myself to marry her. She was certainly a very nice girl, but such girls could be found anywhere. I wondered why I had to marry just that one in particular from among them. I refuted my argument by thinking that if I felt this way, I would never bring myself to marry anyone. Nevertheless, I still didn't feel like marrying her. I wondered how other young men made their decisions on such occasions. I sus pected that some probably decided under the stimulus of sexual desire. Because I was deficient in this area, I guessed that even if I felt the young lady was quite nice, the deficiency was probably why I didn't want to marry her.

Seeing I was worried, Annaka said, "I'll come again and inquire." We parted at Kudanzaka.

When I returned home, my mother was waiting for me. "How was it?" she asked. I hesitated.

"Well, what did she look like?"

"Let me see. Her looks were quite decent. Eyes a little slanted. I don't know anything about kimonos, but hers was sort of black with a white neckband under it. She reminded me of the kind of woman who might carry a dagger concealed in her obi to protect her honor."

The figure of speech I had suddenly come out with pleased my mother very much. My saying the girl seemed likely to be carrying a dagger made my mother feel she was chaste and reliable. Thereupon my mother earnestly recommended her. Annaka also came two or three times for an answer. Yet I couldn't give him anything definite.

Later the girl became the wife of an official I knew, a man in the Department of the Imperial Household, but about a year after her marriage she died from some illness.

***

Beginning of winter that same year . . .

There was talk I would finally go abroad to study next year. As usual I idled away my time in our house in Kosuge.

In Senju we had a poetry-writing group, each member taking turns having the monthly meeting at his house. One day at one of our gatherings I became acquainted with the poet Seiha Miwazaki. He told me he was in charge of writing the poetry column for the Jiyu newspaper and asked me if I wouldn't write something for him, anything I wanted. I begged off. But he kept urging me to. When I asked him if I could write anonymously, he said that would be fine. I agreed on condition he rigidly adhere to his promise.

After returning home that evening, I lay on my bed wondering what would be good to write, but I couldn't come up with anything. The next day I forgot about it. The following morning, as I was reading the Yomiuri newspaper, which I had subscribed to at home ever since Masao Suzukida became its editor, I came across my name in the paper. They had written that I, Shizuka Kanai, having graduated from the university with honors in philosophy and so on and so forth, would write for the Jiyu. I was startled as I thought back to that previous night. I remembered I had promised to write with the understanding that the other party would keep my name secret. And now that he had not done so, I felt no need to write anything.

Then Seiha sent me a letter urging me to comply. I replied that since the terms of our agreement had been broken, I wouldn't. Finally Seiha himself came to see me.

"I'm really sorry about that item in the yomiuri. Please overlook it and write something for us. If you don't, I'll have to eat my words in front of the entire staff!"

"I see. But after all I said to you, why on earth did you advertise me to the yomiuri?"

"What makes you think I'm the one who did the shouting?"

"Then how come my name appeared there?"

"It's like this. I talked about you at the paper. Of course before I said anything to you, I discussed it at the office. When I mentioned I had met you at the poetry meeting I'd been invited to, the president of the paper was the first to ask me to have you write something for us. Without even hesitating, I guaranteed him you would. Then when I spoke to you, I found you were quite touchy. I talked you into it with the eloquence of a Demosthenes. That's why on returning to my office, I reported on my mission so triumphantly. I guess someone on our paper let the Yomiuri in on it. I don't know for sure. I'm willing to bear that crown of thorns. I'll prostrate myself before you. Only please write for us!"

"Well all right. I'll do it. But I don't understand the way you newspaper people think. My name came out in the papers either because I was the youngest ever to graduate from the university or because I graduated with honors. I suppose they just wanted to let me write something, anything, no matter what. They couldn't care less whether I write skillfully or miserably. What's sensational would probably be sensational anyway. But don't you as a member of the managing staff of a newspaper think that's an awfully shortsighted thing to do? I'm not talking about what's good or bad for me. I'm talking about what's at stake for your newspaper. It's better to let my article appear anonymously without comment. If it's clumsily done, it'll die out in its own way. No matter how clumsy my article may be, I doubt your paper will be that much criticized for letting it appear. And if by chance it's good, your readers might want to know who the writer was. At that time it would be all right to introduce me by name. So if it turns out that some person in your company happened to discover me, then maybe that would be to the credit of your company, wouldn't it? Not that I think things will go this smoothly! Still, I'm speaking this way because I don't believe it's the business of your paper to put any so-and-so on display simply because he's a bachelor of arts!"

"Yes, you're absolutely right in everything you've said. But that's the same as trying to force the rulers of warring states to set up codes on etiquette and music."

"You think so? It seems to me there are unexpectedly great numbers of stupid men swarming around newspaper offices."

"O my! Thanks for the compliment!" And he laughed.

Seiha returned after our talk. Immediately following his departure, I sat at my desk, wrote an article long enough to fill about two newspaper columns, and sent it off by mail. In a way, I couldn't deny feeling some sort of pride in writing this kind of article without even thinking it necessary to polish my draft.

The next morning I received the newspaper in which my article appeared on the front page. Later I learned that because my manuscript had reached them at night, they had gone to a great deal of trouble to arrange it. Seiha's letter of thanks was sent along with the paper.

I expect the copy of that newspaper is even now somewhere among my possessions, but even if I felt like reading it at this moment, I wouldn't be able to find it. I still remember I wrote something quite odd in that article. It had neither a beginning nor a conclusion. In those days every newspaper had a column of miscellaneous items. The Choya was selling quite well because of the miscellany of the famous Ryuhoku Narushima. In with his serious research were mixed puns and witticisms. He was always careful to keep his discussion original. He aimed at sentences that were sharp, pointed. Occasionally his epigrams were on everybody's lips. At that time I had been reading Eckstein's book on the history of the feuilleton, a book I had borrowed from a professor, and so I had written my article in the form of a miscellany but with the additional flavor of European feuilleton.

What I wrote attracted some attention. In two or three newspapers some anonymous notices came out, blindly following each other's lead. What I had written was part lyrical, part novelette, part scholarly. If I had written it at the present time, the critics would have called it a chapter in a novel. And after arbitrarily calling it that to satisfy themselves, they'd have probably said it was inferior to a miscellany. Though the word "passionate" had not yet been coined in those days, if it had been, they would have said it had no passion. And even though the word "pedantic" was not yet in fashionable use, if it had been, they would have used that term in this instance. Furthermore, the word "self-vindication" used in conjunction with persons charged with crimes had not yet been coined. I don't believe any work of art can escape the label "self-vindication." For man's life is his attempt at vindicating himself. For the life of each and every living creature is a self-vindication. A tree-frog resting on a leaf is green, but a tree-frog resting on a wall is sallow. A lizard appearing and disappearing in a cluster of bushes has a line of green along its back. A lizard living in the desert is sand-colored. Mimicry is self-vindicating. Writing is self-vindication for the same reason. Fortunately I didn't receive any criticism of that sort. My writing managed to get by without any doubts being cast on its right to exist. That was because in those days there hadn't yet been any of the so-called "criticism," which was so hard intellectually and emotionally that it denied any creative writer his due and which could not even justify its own existence.

About a week passed when Seiha visited me again one afternoon. He asked me to accompany him since the head of his newspaper wanted to treat me to dinner to thank me for my recent article. Seiha said the poet Ansai Haraguchi would be a fellow-guest and that he himself would serve as a substitute host for the president.

I hired a jinrikisha and followed Seiha's. We came to a restaurant near the Kanda Myojin Shrine and went in. Ansai had come earlier and was waiting for us. Sake was brought in. Geisha entered. I couldn't drink any of the sak£. Nor could Ansai. Seiha drank by himself and created his own happy uproar. Each of us looked like a cross between a political henchman and a dependent-student, though the one who seemed most like the henchman was Seiha and the one who looked most like the typical dependent-student was Ansai. Both men were wearing a haori over their wadded kimonos, which were dark blue with a pattern of white splashes. Ansai was modest, but he was clever, and even though he didn't join in Seiha's boisterous merrymaking, he did talk with the geisha. He even exchanged cups of sake with them.

I was the one left out of the party. In those days, part of my everyday clothing consisted of a crested black silk coat which my father had worn on formal occasions in his native province, the coat having become mine after my mother had tailored it to fit me, its cloth, she said, being quite durable. It was in this coat that I had been led to the restaurant by Seiha. I had brought along an iron smoking pipe about two feet in length. When I had come to feel no further need to carry along that protective dagger I mentioned earlier, I had this pipe made as a kind of self-protection device the moment I started smoking. So from my pouch, which looked like a bag containing tinder, I dragged out some Kumoi tobacco, and I began smoking. I wasn't drinking any sake. Nor was I saying a word.

Because the Kobusho geisha of those days were accustomed to meeting eccentric students, they were not particularly surprised by my conduct. With their loud voices, all of them were having a noisy enjoyable time with Seiha.

It got to be about eleven-thirty. A maid came in to tell us that all our jinrikishas were ready. I thought her statement odd, but I didn't take any further notice of it. Seiha led the way to the front gate and got into his. Ansai and I got into our separate ones. "To Kosuge beyond Osenju," I told the man, but without replying he lifted the shafts.

Seiha's jinrikisha started running first. Then Ansai's next and mine in the rear as the three vehicles rolled along as if in flight. Shouting to keep time, their paper lanterns swaying, the jinrikisha pullers went toward Ueno through Onarimichi. Most shops on both sides of the street were closed. Occasionally I could see the flickering lights in the paper-covered lanterns of the eating houses or the candles through those small shutters inlaid in the wooden doors of the chandler shops, and it seemed to me as if those lights were in reverse. The streets were almost deserted. The people we happened to come across turned to look at our jinrikishas as if their doing so had been prearranged.

My jinrikisha was obviously heading somewhere. Though I had no experience with jinrikisha men, I knew what the answer would have been if I had asked mine where he was going by running in this manner.

When we turned the corner toward Nakacho after passing Hirokoji, Ansai looked back at me from his jinrikisha up ahead of mine and said, "Let's get out of here!" His jinrikisha turned towards Nakacho.

Ansai had inherited some sort of chronic disease. His body wasn't as strong as that of other men. He couldn't have gone to the type of place we were headed for.

I said to my jinrikisha man, "Follow that one." If I wanted to get back to Kosuge, it was no good for me to be turning toward Nakacho, but if I could at least break away from Seiha, I thought I could manage it later. My runner hesitated, but he turned the shafts toward Nakacho.

At that moment Seiha's vehicle had crossed Mihashi Bridge to the north, but it turned back. Seiha cried out from his seat, "Hey! You can't get away like that!"

My jinrikisha followed Seiha's. He repeatedly looked back at me, keeping his eye on my jinrikisha.

I didn't dare try to escape again. If I forced him into a quarrel, he would certainly not have behaved rudely toward me. But certainly he would have done his utmost to try to drag me along with him. I had no desire to argue with him on the streets of Ueno. Furthermore, I was quite obstinate, unyielding in spirit. It was unpleasant to be made a fool of by him. This unyielding obstinacy of mine was a very dangerous thing capable of dragging me to the depths of any sin. It was in fact on account of this unyielding spirit of mine that I was heading toward a place I had no desire to go to. Nor can I forget another factor which forced me to follow him. And that was the same old familiar Neugierde I have mentioned, which pulls one toward the strange and unknown.

Our two jinrikishas passed through a large gate. When Seiha's runner said, "Which house?" Seiha shouted out a name as if scolding the man. The name, at any rate, was that of an animal in the Astacidea family, an animal with a hard skin.

It was way past midnight. All the houses on both sides of the street were closed. Our jinrikishas stopped in front of the locked door of a large house. When Seiha knocked, a small private side door opened and a man appeared who was very adept at stretching and contracting himself into respectful bows. He spoke in whispers to Seiha about something to do with the house. After bandying words a while, the man guided the two of us inside.

When we got upstairs, Seiha went off somewhere. A woman approaching middle age appeared and led me into a room. Both sides of the long narrow room had sliding doors, these opening onto corridors. On one side of a wide area a black lacquered chest of drawers with hinged doors was enclosed in a kind of closet, the entire bureau heavily adorned with brass fittings. In the light of the vermilion-lacquered paper lantern, the lacquer and brass took on a bright glow. On the other side of the wide area were four sliding doors. The lantern was beside a brazier enclosed in a wooden frame, and suspended over a low fire in the brazier was a large earthen teapot.

After leading me into this room, the middle-aged woman went off somewhere. Wearing that same coat of black silk with its faded color and holding that long iron pipe in my hand, I was sitting cross-legged on a cushion in front of the brazier.

Since I had been forced at Kanda into drinking five or six cups of distasteful sake, I was thirsty. Touching the earthen teapot with my fingers, I found it just cool enough. After I poured the liquid into a teacup I noticed by my side, I discovered the drink was strong coarse tea. I drank it at a gulp.

Just then the sliding door behind me opened quietly, and a woman came in and stood by the lantern. She was like a high-class prostitute, an oiran I had once seen in a play: the large chignon in her hair had large ornamental combs and hairpins, her trailing skirt of special silk was almost all in red. Her white face with its pleasant features looked small. Following her in was that same middle-aged woman, and when the latter arranged a cushion, the oiran sat down on it. Without a word she sat there smiling, watching me. I too remained silent, and with a serious look on my face was watching the oiran.

The middle-aged woman noticed the cup I had used to drink my tea in.

"Did you help yourself from this teapot?"

"Yes. I had some."

"Oh my!"

When the middle-aged woman gave the oiran an odd look, she came out with a beautiful smile this time. Her small white teeth glittered in the lantern light.

"What sort of taste did it have?" the elder woman asked.

"It was good."

The women exchanged glances again. Once more the oiran smiled her dazzling smile. Again her teeth sparkled. I suspected the stuff inside the teapot wasn't tea. Even now I don't know what I drank. Probably some medical concoction. It certainly wasn't a medicine to be used externally.

The middle-aged woman removed the oiran's ornamental hairpins and combs and laid them aside. Then standing up, the elderly woman took a long outer robe from the black-lacquered chest of drawers and dressed the oiran in it. It was a gorgeously ornate gown of striped crepe with a purple neckband of satin. This elderly woman was what they call a banshin, an assistant to an oiran. Without a word the latter slipped her arms through the sleeves of the garment. Her hands were extraordinarily thin, extraordinarily white.

"My dear, it's already quite late," the assistant said to me. "So please move over here a bit."

"Are you asking me to go to bed?"

"Yes."

"I don't need any sleep."

For the third time the women exchanged glances. And for the third time the oiran came out with her radiant smile. And for the third time those teeth glittered. Suddenly the assistant came right up next to me.

"My dear, now for your tabi"

The performance of this old woman in the art of peeling off one's clothes as she removed my blue socks was something that honestly called forth my admiration. Then she led me gently, without even a struggle, beyond the sliding door.

I found myself in an eight-mat room. At the front was an alcove against which a koto wrapped in a cloth bag was leaning. A black-lacquered clothesrack, some of it in gold lacquer, served as a screen to divide the room in two, half of which had a bed already laid out. So gently did the middle-aged woman make me lie down it seemed impossible for me to resist. I must confess something: her skill was a tremendous feat. However, it had not been absolutely impossible for me to offer any resistance. What had paralyzed my resistance was certainly my sexual desire.

Without concerning myself about Seiha, I had them order me a jinrikisha and returned home. When I got back to Kosuge, I found the doors locked, the house all hushed inside. When I knocked, my mother immediately appeared and opened the door for me.

"It's awfully late, isn't it?"

"Yes, I'm quite late."

A peculiar expression appeared on my mother's face. But she said nothing further. I have never been able to forget the expression on her face at that moment. Saying only "Goodnight," I went into my room. According to my watch it was three-thirty. I crawled into bed just as I was and fell into a sound sleep.

When I was eating breakfast in the morning, my father told me Seiha was rumored to lead such a dissolute life that unless he drank sake all night long, nothing was of any interest to him. If that was the case, my father said it would be better for me not to associate with him too much. My mother remained silent. I told my father I had no intention of being on close terms with him because our personalities didn't match. I honestly believed that was so.

After going back to my four-and-a-half mat room, I thought about the previous night's events. Was that the satisfaction of sexual desire? Was the consummation of love no more than what had been achieved then? How ridiculous, I thought. At the same time, contrary to my expectations, I didn't feel even a trace of regret. Not even a pang of conscience. Of course I thought going to that kind of place was wrong. I don't believe anyone ever left the threshold of his own house with the expectation of visiting such a place. My accidental visit was one that simply could not have been avoided. Consider this example: It's not good to quarrel with others. No one goes out with the express purpose of quarreling. But once a person has gone out, it may be that he feels compelled to quarrel with someone. I believe my situation was exactly like that. Concealed at the bottom of my heart was, afterwards, a kind of uneasiness. It concerned the question of whether or not I might pick up some awful disease. Sometimes one suffers an invisible wound in a quarrel; only after a few days does the bruise appear and begin to hurt. If I picked up a disease from the woman, it would be irreparably serious. It even occurred to me that this misfortune would be bequeathed to my descendants. This was the extent of the psychological fluctuation I felt on that first morning after, and it was much slighter than I had thought it would be. Moreover, in the same way that the wave-motion air receives becomes fainter as the distance in space becomes greater, so my psychological fluctuations lessened with the passage of time.

It did produce, on the contrary, one change in my emotional life, one that became more evident with each passing day. Somehow, up to that time, without knowing why, I had always been hesitant in meeting girls. I'd become spineless, my face would get red, my words all twisted up. From that time on, though, all of this was rectified. Everyone everywhere has used this kind of metaphor long ago, but I really felt as if I had been "dubbed" a knight.

After this event and for some time later, my mother became unusually concerned about me. I guess she probably felt, as so often happens in life, that I might wholly give myself over to such infatuations. Her fears were quite groundless.

If I weren't writing about actual facts, I should like to declare that was my first and last experience at Yoshiwara. But having said I would write without the least holding back of anything, I have to add something here. It concerns an event which happened much later, an event that took place before I met the woman who would become my second wife, my first having died. One fall evening Koga visited me at my present home. As he was about to leave, I decided to accompany him as far as Ueno. Just as we were going out the front gate, wc met a man by the name of Saigusa, who just then had appeared to pay me a visit. He was a relative of mine, and because he knew Koga, he said he would come with us. And so the three of us ate dinner at the Iyomon Restaurant on Aoishi-Yokocho. Saigusa was proud of his expertise on low life, so he suggested taking us to some of the interesting places in Yoshiwara. Because I was a widower, he was probably being too considerate to me in suggesting it. Smiling, Koga said, "Let's go." Reluctantly I agreed.

We got off our jinrikishas before a large gate. Leading the way, Saigusa walked along at a leisurely pace. We turned into a lane whose name I didn't know. Behind the lattices of all the houses along the way were women talking to men standing outside. These were probably the so-called kogoshi, houses of prostitution of the lowest type. Most of the men were dressed in the short coats of workingmen. Seeing one of these men, Saigusa said, "What a splendid specimen!" The man was the type that might be referred to as "dashing." Apparently to Saigusa the ideal man of great physical attraction seemed to be just such men in these short coats. Saigusa said, "Excuse me a minute," and walked over to an old man parching beans at a narrow crossroad, his sack set down on the road. Saigusa purchased a bag of the beans and put it in his kimono sleeve. Then after walking a slight distance, he looked back at Koga and me and saying, "Here it is!" immediately entered one of the houses. It seemed to be his favorite.

We were shown upstairs. Pinching those beans between his fingers, Saigusa ate them while talking with that same kind of tout who is always bowing. A short time later I was led into a very small room. There I found a lamp and a tobacco tray. A hard thin bed had been laid out on the mats. Because there was no cushion to sit on, all I could do was sit tailor-style in the middle of that bed. I lit a cigarette. Behind me a sliding door opened. A woman came in. She was middle-aged and deathly pale, but she seemed good-natured.

She said while smiling, "Won't you come to bed?"

"I've no intention to."

"My word!"

"You're quite pale, aren't you? Is there anything wrong?"

"Yes. I was in the hospital until a few days ago with pleurisy."

"You were? Then it'll be hard for you to receive customers."

"Oh no. I feel all right now."

"I see."

We looked at each other for a while. Smiling again, the woman said, "You look awfully strange."

"How come?"

"Oh, just sitting here like this."

"If that's the case, let's hand-wrestle."

"I'll be defeated right away."

"Oh no! I'm not that strong either. They say you mustn't make light of a woman's arm!"

"Oh my! That's a nice way of putting it."

"Let's have a go at it."

We clasped each other's right arm, our elbows resting on the thin hard bed. The woman had no strength whatsoever. No matter how much I tried to get her to put more strength into it, it was no use. Without expending any power whatsoever, I easily pinned her down.

Koga and Saigusa called out to me from behind the sliding door. I went home with them. It had been my second visit to Yoshiwara. And it was my last. The time seems convenient to add this postscript.

***

When I was twenty-one . . .

At long last my going abroad to study was decided. However, I hadn't yet received the official announcement of my government appointment. I had been told that for the convenience of my university the announcement would be made in the summer.

During this time my mother was kept in suspense about several offers of marriage to me.

Because Koga said it would help my future, he introduced me to a Mr. Mochizuki, a counselor in one of the ministries. He was the son-in-law of some elder statesman. Mochizuki frequented a house of assignation in Shitaya called the Daishige. I was told that in order to get better acquainted with him, I had better go to that same house. Occasionally I did. I'd call in four or five geisha, engage them in some silly chatter, then go back home. In those days the prices were cheap, so I had to pay only three or four yen to each geisha. Since I had undertaken to translate some documents for the company that employed Koga, I always had money on me. In those days you could get about three yen per page by translating articles on law. I always carried at least fifty yen or so on me. But when I went out with Mochizuki, all he did was drink sake and return home. Koga said to me, "He probably feels reserved with you. I'll see to it that he doesn't!" So one night Koga talked to the madame of the house. The reason I offered no resistance to Koga this time was due to my old friend Neugierde, which was curious to know how a geisha would perform.

I believe it was the end of January. It was a cold night. As usual the three of us called in some pretty, young geisha from Shitaya and engaged them in frivolous talk. The madame came in. Mochizuki's voice took on a strange quality. He had done it deliberately.

"My old mistress!"

"Yes, sir. My dear, your face is getting terribly shiny, isn't it? You'd better wipe it with hot water."

The madame had a maid wring out a hot towel and wipe his face. His sternly handsome features were wiped clean. Since my face would have been none the better even if she had scrubbed it till it glittered, the madame paid no attention to it.

"Mr. Kanai. Just a word with you."

The madame stood up. I followed her out to the corridor. A maid was waiting and took me into another room. A geisha of the type I had never seen before was there. It seemed to me she was of a quite different variety from the type usually sent out for hire. I feel this a little difficult to write about. I realized for the first time in my life that the term "not to undo one's clothes" does not necessarily refer only to those moments when a good woman tends an invalid.

This time I can write without distorting the facts. Even after this incident I went to these houses of assignation, but the event I have just described was my first and last experience of what actually goes on there.

For several days afterward I had the usual feeling of a deep-seated uneasiness. Fortunately, though, nothing wrong occurred.

One day after the weather turned warm, I went with Koga to Fukinukitei Hall to listen to the famous storyteller Encho. Right near me was a fat old man about fifty years old accompanied by a geisha. She was the "good" geisha I had met that night. She and I looked at each other as if we were observing air.

***

That same year on the seventh of June I received the government order allowing me to study abroad. I was to head for Germany.

I went to the home of a German to study conversation with him. My studies during my early days at Ikizaka proved quite helpful.

I boarded a ship at Yokohama on the twenty-fourth of August. It so happened that I left Japan without marrying anyone.

***

Mr. Kanai had written this much that night. The entire house was steeped in silence. An early summer rain was gently falling against the shutters. Amid the dull soft sounds of rain on the thick growth of plants in the garden could be heard the jangling noise of water running along the zinc troughs on the eaves. The traffic on Nishikatamachi had completely died out, and he could hear neither the raindrops against paper umbrellas nor the wooden rainclogs stepping into the mud.

With his arms folded, Mr, Kanai was lost in thought.

The sequel to the record he had started writing drifted across his mind but in a disorderly process. He remembered a small coffeehouse at a spot where one turns west along the Unter den Linden in Berlin. The Cafe Krebs. It was a gathering place for Japanese students studying abroad, a place they called Kaniya, which means "crab" in Japanese. Though he had been there often, he had never made any advances toward the women; yet one night the most beautiful girl in the place, a girl who had said she would never go out with a Japanese, proclaimed she would definitely go out with Mr. Kanai. He would have nothing to do with her. In a fit of passion the woman threw her cup of milange on the floor, shattering the glass.

Then he remembered his boardinghouse on Karlstrasse. Every night the niece of the old landlady came to his room in her chemise and sat down on the edge of the bed he was lying on, talking to him for thirty minutes. "My aunt said that since she was up and waiting for me to come back, she didn't mind my coming in if it was only to talk to you. I guess it's all right? Say you don't think it's not nice." The warmth of her body was transmitted to him through the coverlet. After paying for three months' rent according to some provision in the law on rents, he fled, though he continually received letters from her in which she claimed she saw him every night in her dreams.

He remembered a house in Leipzig with a red light on its door. Each customer drew a woman near him, a woman with curled bright-colored hair powdered in gold, a woman dressed only for form's sake in a red dress from her shoulders to her hips. He cried out, "I've got tuberculosis! Come near me and you'll catch it."

He remembered a hotel in Vienna. A maid there became quite angry because of the advances of a high government official on tour who was at the time being shown around by Mr. Kanai. Piqued by what he took to be her hauteur, Mr. Kanai foolishly said to her on the day before their departure, "I'll come to you tonight."

"My room's at the end of the corridor to the right. I'll be annoyed if you come in with your shoes on!" Her words were as quick as the response of an echo. She waited for the sounds of his stockinged feet along the corridor, her room flooded with enough perfume to make one choke.

He remembered a coffeehouse in Munich. A place the Japanese always came to in groups. Among its regular customers was an uncommonly beautiful girl accompanied by a handsome native of the region who looked somewhat roguish. All the Japanese extolled this girl. One evening while this couple was present, Mr. Kanai went into the men's room. He heard someone behind him hurrying into the room. In almost no time at all two thin arms were clasped tightly around his neck. He felt his lips pressed by the hot kiss of a woman. He found a visiting card being squeezed into his hand. When he saw the woman turn back like a whirlwind and take her departure, he found it was that glamour girl. Written in pencil on the visiting card bearing her address were the words "Eleven-thirty." He felt as if he wanted to spite his fellow countrymen who claimed he was a coward for not having had anything to do with his own vulgar desires. So he decided to launch out adventurously into this rendezvous. He found she had a scar on her abdomen from the time she had once been pregnant. Afterwards he learned she had gone into this escapade with him to recover a pawned dress she needed for a dance. His countrymen were absolutely astounded.

He enjoyed the peccadilloes he committed. But not once were his sexual desires strong enough to make him aggressively assert himself for their satisfaction. The only reason he took to the field was not to lose that desire. Occasionally, however, his innocent Neugierde and his obstinacy made him participate in these skirmishes despite his lack of need for them.

When Mr. Kanai first started writing, he had intended to write only up to his marriage. It was in the fall of his twenty-fifth year that he had returned from Europe. The woman he married shortly following his return died after giving birth to a son. For some time he had lived alone, and when he was thirty-two he married his present wife, who was seventeen years old. He had felt when he first started writing that he would definitely try to record all the events until his twenty-fifth year.

Once he put down his pen, he came to suspect that the writing of these casual encounters, haphazardly repeated, might become mechanical. What he had written was not autobiographical in the usual sense of that term. Then when he asked himself if he really intended to write a novel, that too wasn't so. What to label the proper genre for his writing did not concern him in the least, yet he did not want to write anything that had no artistic value. He did not acknowledge only what Nietzsche called Dionysian as deserving the name of art. He also acknowledged the Apollonian as art. In sexual desire detached from love, however, there could be no real passion so that even he himself could not but realize that a person without passion cannot be a good subject for autobiography.

He definitely decided to discontinue writing And still he thought about it over and over again. The public, regarding him in his present condition, would say he had lost his passion because he had aged. But this lack of passion was not due to that. Because he had had an excessively thorough knowledge of himself ever since he was a boy, that knowledge had completely blasted his passion in its embryo. Yet having been misled by some accidental and silly inducement, he had received his sexual "dubbing." This "dubbing" actually had been totally unnecessary. It would have been much better had he not been "dubbed" until he had married. To carry this consideration one step further: if, as a matter of fact, it was not necessary to be "dubbed" before marriage, it would probably have been better if he had not married at all. Somehow it seemed to him he was an uncommonly frigid person.

Having come this far in his analysis, he at once thought it over again. Of course it had not been necessary for him to get "dubbed." However, he found any analysis superficial which implied that his knowledge about himself had blasted his passion. Even in the bowels of the earth covered with eternal ice, raging flames are furiously thrusting upward from a volcano. Michelangelo quarreled with his friends when he was young and had his nose smashed by their fists and so was forced to give up all hope of love, but when he was sixty years old, he met Vittoria Colonna and miraculously gained her love. Mr. Kanai knew he wasn't incapacitated. He wasn't impotent. People in general let loose the tiger of sexual desire they have kept under leash and occasionally ride on its back until they tumble into the Valley of Ruin. He had tamed his tiger of sexual desire and controlled it. Bhadra was one of Buddha's disciples. He slept beside the tiger he had tamed. His young disciple was afraid of it. The meaning of "Bhadra" is "wise man." His tiger was probably the symbol for sexual desire. It was certainly tamed, but its power to terrify and awe was not at all enfeebled.

Having thought everything over in this way, Mr. Kanai slowly reread his manuscript from the beginning. And when he had read it to the end, he found the night much further advanced. The rain had stopped without his realizing it. Drops of water falling on a rock from the mouth of a water pipe fell intermittently, making a sound like the beating of the chevron-stone of ancient China.

After reading his manuscript, he wondered if he could show it to the public. It would be quite difficult to. There are things which everyone does but which one does not mention to others. Since he was a member of the educated circle governed by the law of prudery, it would be difficult for him to bring out his book. If that was the case, was it possible to let his son accidentally come across the manuscript and read it? He might let him. However, he couldn't tell beforehand what the effect on his son would be. If his son read it and became like him, what then? Would the boy be happy or unhappy? He couldn't tell about that either. A line in Dehmel's poem reads, "Don't obey your father! Don't obey him!" He felt he didn't want to let his son see his manuscript.

He picked up his pen and wrote in large letters in Latin across the front cover of his manuscript, VITA SEXUALIS. He heard the thud of his manuscript as he hurled it inside a storage chest for books.

- THE END -