THE THIRD JOURNAL

Part One

One of Takeichi’s predictions came true, the other did not. The one empty of honor, that women would fall for me, came true, while the more felicitous prediction that I would become a famous artist was never realized.

At best, I managed to become a third-rate, nameless cartoonist, publishing in lowbrow magazines.

I was expelled from school as a result of the Kamakura incident and spent my days in a tiny three-mat room on the second floor of Flounder’s house. Each month a meager allowance arrived from home, but even that didn’t reach my hands directly as it was sent in secret to Flounder (my brothers, it seemed, were sending it without my father’s knowledge). All other ties with my family had been completely severed. Though I did my best to ingratiate myself with Flounder, he was forever in a bad mood and never even smiled at me. That people should prove so fickle and change so utterly at the drop of a hat seemed to me more comical than despicable.

“Stay inside. Just stay in your room.” That’s all he ever said to me.

I suppose he was afraid I would commit suicide. Believing I might try to follow the woman into death and throw myself into the sea, he forbade me from going outside. In truth, he needn’t have worried. Confined to my tiny room, spending my days and nights curled up under a blanket and reading old magazines like a halfwit, unable to drink or smoke, I’d completely lost the energy to kill myself.

Flounder’s house was near the medical school in Okubo, not far from Hongō. Though his enthusiastically lettered sign boldly announced the presence of a purveyor of fine arts and antiques, the “Garden of the Green Dragon,” his business was in fact nothing but one of two shops in a tiny row house, with a cramped doorway and, inside, shelves lined with useless rubbish, all covered in a thick layer of dust. (Flounder did not rely on the rubbish in his shop to support himself but rather earned his crust as a go-between—facilitating the transfer of one gentleman’s treasures to another.) Flounder was hardly ever in the shop. He left early each morning with a scowl on his face, and, while he was gone, a shop boy of about seventeen or eighteen was responsible for keeping an eye on me. He spent every spare moment playing catch in the street with the other boys from the neighborhood. I was just a loafer on the second floor, an idiot or a madman, and he subjected me to any number of pompous lectures. Being averse to conflict, I meekly endured his pronouncements with an attitude that alternated between interest and exhaustion. It seemed he was Shibuta’s—Flounder’s—illegitimate son, but the situation was complicated and the connection not openly acknowledged. That Shibuta had never married may have been due in part to these complications. I seemed to recall hearing gossip to that effect when I was living at home but the affairs of others didn’t hold much interest for me, so I don’t know any of the details. Still, the set of the boy’s eyes did have something of the look of a fish about them, so perhaps he really was Flounder’s son. . . . If so, theirs was a cold and lonely relationship. Sometimes, they ordered soba noodles late at night and—without inviting me—ate in wordless silence.

It was the boy’s job to prepare the meals, so, three times a day every day, he climbed the steps to the second floor, carrying a tray specially prepared for the pest who lived upstairs. He and Flounder would eat in the damp four-and-a-half mat room downstairs, and I could hear the clattering of dishes as they rushed through their meals.

One evening, toward the end of March, Flounder, who must have come into unexpected funds or perhaps had some other scheme in mind (it may have been a combination of the two, or any number of other possibilities that hadn’t occurred to me), called me down from my room on the second floor and bade me join him at his table upon which, most unusually, there was tuna—not flounder—sashimi, and a bottle of warm saké. The master of the table, full of admiration at the luxury of his own banquet, absently offered me a dribble of saké.

“So, what exactly are you going to do with yourself?”

I didn’t say anything but rather picked at a dish of dried sardines. I felt the warmth of mild intoxication wash over me as I gazed into the silver eyes of the dried fish. I longed for a return to the days when I caroused about town and even felt a certain nostalgia for Horiki. A desire for “freedom” began to build inside me, and at any moment I felt that tears would start trickling down my face.

Since arriving at Flounder’s house I’d lost even the energy to play the clown and meekly surrendered myself to the scorn of Flounder and his boy. For his part, Flounder seemed keen to avoid long, frank talks with me, and I felt no desire to go chasing after him to plead my case. My transformation into a half-witted, freeloading houseguest was all but complete.

“Now look, this suspended indictment thing—it seems it won’t leave any kind of record. Well then, you’ve got a chance to make a fresh start, if you make the effort. If you mend your ways and confide in me—I mean really confide in me—I’ll give it some thought too.”

Flounder—but no, not just Flounder but everyone, or so it seemed to me—spoke with a vague, wary edge to his words and with an odd complexity, perhaps due to the liberal sprinkling of verbal loopholes. It seemed a pointless, excessive caution. His endless, petty, annoying rhetorical acrobatics never failed to confound me and I soon gave up trying to follow him, either using my clowning to treat it like a joke or just sitting there, nodding my head in a silent attitude of utter defeat and letting him have his way entirely.

I didn’t realize it until many years later, but had Flounder only outlined the situation as it really was everything could’ve been resolved without a fuss. His unnecessary caution or, rather, the incomprehensible pretension and posing that is all too common in this world, brought about indescribable misery.

All he had to do was say the following:

“We don’t care if it’s a national school or a private school but, come April, make sure that you are going to school. Do this and your family will take care of the expenses.”

As I discovered much later, that is precisely how things stood. Had I known, I certainly would’ve done as I was told. It was Flounder’s wary, roundabout manner of speaking that made everything sound strangely complicated, and, as a result, the direction of my life changed completely.

“Of course, if you have no intention of confiding in me then there is very little that I can do.”

“Confide in you . . . about what?” I truly had no idea what he was getting at.

“About what’s in your heart, surely.”

“Such as?”

“Such as? Such as what you are going to do with yourself.”

“You mean . . . You think I should get a job?”

“No, tell me what you think.”

“But even if I wanted to go back to school . . .”

“Then you’d need money, of course. But the real problem isn’t money. It’s your feelings.”

Why didn’t he just tell me that the money would be sent from home? That would’ve settled my mind entirely, but instead I stumbled about aimlessly, lost in a fog with no idea which way to go.

“Well, how about it? Don’t you have any goals? Any dreams for the future? I don’t suppose the person being looked after has any idea how much trouble it is to take care of someone else all the time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m really worried about you. Now that I’ve gone and taken on the job of looking after you I don’t like to see this kind of apathy. I want you to show me you’re determined to make a new start for yourself. A grand start. Now, if you come to me and, in all sincerity, confide your goals and plans for the future in me—why, I’ll do everything I can to help. Now, it’s only poor old Flounder here, so if you have any notions of returning to your old life of luxury you’d better give them up. But if you’re determined, if you’ve set a clear course for the future, and if you confide in me then I have every intention of doing what I can to help, meager though that help might be. Do you see what I’m trying to say? Do you understand? What, precisely, do you, plan to do with yourself?”

“Well, if I can’t stay here I’ll get a job and . . .”

“Honestly? Is that what you’re really thinking? These days even people from imperial universities . . .”

“Oh, no—I didn’t mean a job at a company.”

“What, then?”

“As an artist.” I said with sudden resolve.

“Whaa-?”

I will never forget how Flounder looked at that moment, neck scrunched up as he laughed, a sly shadow across his face. Scornful yet also not. If I were to liken it to the sea, I suppose it would be akin to that strange, fluttering shadow that hovers over the deepest waters. In his laughter, I thought I had caught a flashing glimpse of the essence of adult life.

No, no, no, that simply won’t do, you’re not showing the slightest determination, think it over, take the night, think it over carefully. Thus instructed I hurried back upstairs, as though chased. I lay awake in bed but nothing came to me. So, sometime around dawn, I ran away.

I’ll definitely be back by tonight. I’m going to discuss my future with a friend at the address below. No need to worry. Honest.

With pencil and stationery, I scribbled the note in large letters and, adding Horiki’s address, snuck out of Flounder’s house.

I wasn’t running away because I felt humiliated by Flounder’s lecture. I ran away because I was of his mind entirely. I did lack determination. I had absolutely no idea what I should do with myself and, what is more, I genuinely felt sorry for Flounder. I was a constant irritation to him and a burden to his household. Even if, by some miracle, I should manage to rouse myself and resolve on a new course of action, when I thought of Flounder, poor as he was, sending me money each month, it pained me so much that I couldn’t possibly stay any longer.

I wasn’t really intending to discuss my so-called “plans for the future” with the likes of Horiki. I only wrote that to put Flounder’s mind at ease, even if only for a little while (not in the hope of “throwing him off my scent” like you’d see in a detective novel—well no, I’m sure that must have been a consideration, though only a very slight one—rather, better to say I was terrified that Flounder, shocked by my sudden disappearance, would grow confused, violently agitated. It was a typical, pathetic tendency of mine. I know from the start I’ll be found out but I’m too timid to tell the truth so I always dress it up. I’m not unlike those creatures that society reviles as “liars,” but I hardly ever seek to conceal the truth out of a desire for personal gain. I almost always act out of desperation, on the spur of the moment, when a sudden chill descends on a room and I feel like I’m suffocating. I know I will pay for it later but when my desperate “need to please” rears its head I’m suddenly adding some strange, feeble, idiotic embellishment or other. I’ve been much criticized for this by the so-called “honest people” of the world), and Horiki’s name just popped into my head so I scribbled it in the margins—there was nothing more to it than that.

I walked a little ways to Shinjuku and sold the books I’d taken with me. That done, as you might suppose, I had absolutely no idea what to do next. I got along with almost everyone, but I’d never known true “friendship.” Drinking friends like Horiki aside, all my interactions with other people were nothing more than exercises in suffering. I played the clown in the hopes of mitigating that suffering, but the clowning itself left me exhausted. If I saw someone on the street with whom I had even the slightest acquaintance, or even someone who looked like an acquaintance, I gave a sudden start; a shudder of disgust rippled through me, leaving me dizzy. I was well liked by others, but it seems I lacked the ability to love them back. (Or rather, let’s say I have grave doubts as to whether or not anyone in this world possesses the ability to “love.”) It was only natural, then, that a person like me would not have any “close friends.” It was all but impossible for me to even “visit” people. The gates of another’s house were more disturbing to me than the gates of hell in The Divine Comedy. Somewhere, I knew, in those depths beyond the gate, a terrible beast lurked, a dragon writhed, filling the air with the stench of rotting meat.

I had no friends. I had no place to go.

Horiki.

I’d meant it as a joke but in the end I did just as I wrote in my letter. I went to see Horiki in Asakusa. This was the first time I’d actually gone to see him at home. Before I’d just sent telegrams, telling him to come and meet me, but now I begrudged even the telegram fee and, disgraced as I was, I wasn’t certain that a telegram would be sufficient to bring him out. So I resigned myself to doing what I disliked most and decided to pay Horiki a visit. With a heavy sigh I climbed aboard a streetcar, and, when it occurred to me that the sole ray of hope left to me in this world was none other than Horiki, a terrible wave of foreboding swept over me, sending shivers down my spine.

He was at home. His was a tiny two-story house at the end of a filthy alleyway. He lived in a six-mat room that occupied the entirety of the second floor while his aged parents and a young craftsman sewed and pounded away on the first floor, making thongs for geta sandals.

On that day Horiki showed me a new aspect of his “city boy” persona. It was his cunning. A display of such cold, calculated egotism as to leave a simple country boy like me utterly astounded. He was not, it seemed, someone who simply drifted aimlessly through life as I did.

“You’re hopeless! Has your father forgiven you yet? No?”

I couldn’t tell him that I’d run away.

As was my wont, I lied. Though I knew Horiki would discover the truth at any moment, I lied.

“Oh, it’ll work out one way or another.”

“Hey, this is no joke. I’m warning you—you’d better wise up. Even an idiot knows when enough is enough. Look, I’ve got things to do—I’m really busy these days.”

“Things? What kind of things?”

“Hey! Stop that! Don’t pick at the cushion!”

I’d been unconsciously fingering the threads at the seam or hem or whatever it’s called—that bundle of threads on the corner of the cushion—and yanking on them. When it came to his own possessions Horiki despised the loss of a single thread. Far from being embarrassed at his own outburst, he glared at me in rebuke. I suddenly realized that, over the course of our association, Horiki had not lost so much as a single thing.

His mother came up the stairs, carrying a tray with two bowls of sweet adzuki bean soup and rice cakes.

“Oh, thank you!” Horiki spoke with such unnatural politeness and reserve that one could almost believe him to be a true, filial son.

“Thank you so much—adzuki and rice cake, is it? Oh, that’s too much! You really shouldn’t have put yourself to so much trouble. I have to go out soon. No, no—please leave it. After all, it is your famous adzuki soup and it would be a shame to waste it. Thank you. Here, you have some too—Mother made it especially for us. Ah, now this is excellent. Wonderful!”

He was so delighted and ate with such relish that I couldn’t think it entirely an act. I sipped at the soup, but it smelled of boiled water and, when I took a bite of the rice cake, I realized it wasn’t rice cake at all but something I couldn’t identify. I am certainly not scorning their poverty. (Indeed, at the time I thought the soup wasn’t bad, and I was touched by his mother’s consideration. Though I lived in terror of poverty, I don’t think that I scorned it in others.) The soup, and Horiki’s obvious delight in it, showed me the frugal character of the urbanite as well as the true nature of the Tokyo family, with its clear distinction between insider and outsider. I describe this scene simply to record the profound feeling of loneliness and confusion that swept over me as I sat there, plying my chipped and worn chopsticks. I alone had been left behind, a fool, forever fleeing from human society, with no regard for the distinctions of insider and outsider, abandoned even by Horiki.

“Sorry, but I’ve got things to do,” Horiki said, standing up and putting on his jacket. “Got to go. Sorry.”

At that moment a female visitor arrived for Horiki, and the direction of my life changed completely.

Horiki brightened suddenly. “Oh, I’m sorry—I was just about to go and pay a visit on you but then this one here showed up. No, no, not at all—please come in. Have a seat.”

Horiki seemed very agitated. I’d gotten up from the cushion I’d been sitting on and, turning it over, held it out for the visitor, but Horiki, snatching it from me, turned it over again before offering it to the woman. There were only the two cushions in the room, Horiki’s and the one for guests.

The woman was tall and thin. She sat politely beside the cushion, in the corner of the room by the doorway.

I listened absently to their conversation. She apparently worked for a magazine that had commissioned a print or the like from Horiki and she’d come to pick it up.

“We are in rather a hurry.”

“It’s done—I finished it ages ago. Here you are.”

A telegram arrived.

Horiki’s good humor faded as he read, his smile replaced by a scowl.

“Dammit—what’ve you done now?”

The telegram was from Flounder.

“Anyway, just go home. I ought to take you there myself but I’m too busy for that now. What were you thinking, sitting there looking so pleased with yourself when you’ve just run away from home!”

“Where do you live?”

“In Okubo,” I replied without thinking.

“Well, that’s not far from my office.”

She was twenty-eight, from Kōshū, amid the mountains. She lived in an apartment out in Kōenji with her five-year-old daughter. It had been three years since her husband died, she said.

“You look like you went through a lot growing up. You’re so sensitive, poor thing.”

That was my first time living as a kept man. When Shizuko (for that was her name) left for work at the magazine in Shinjuku I stayed home, dutifully caring for her daughter, Shigeko. Before I came along she’d play at the superintendent’s apartment while her mother worked, but now she seemed wholly taken with this new, “sensitive” man who’d shown up to be her playmate.

I’d been there for a week or so, idly whiling the time away. Power lines ran near the window and a kite decorated with a colorful drawing of an old-fashioned houseboy had become entangled in them, tossing this way and that, torn in places by the strong, dusty spring winds. Still, it clung tenaciously to the wire, bouncing back and forth as though bobbing its head in agreement. I grimaced and reddened each time I saw it. It even appeared in my dreams, making me groan in my sleep.

“I want . . . some money.”

“How much?”

“A lot. . . . It’s true what they say, you know. When poverty comes in, love flies out.”

“Don’t be silly. That’s just old-fashioned nonsense. . . .”

“Is it, though? How can you tell? If things stay like this I might run off one of these days.”

“Which of us is poor? And which of us is going to run off? You’re being silly.”

“I want to earn my own money to buy liquor—no, cigarettes. I think my paintings are a lot better than Horiki’s.”

At times like this, memories of the self-portraits I’d painted in middle school—what Takeichi called my “monster paintings”—rose up, unbidden, from the depths of my mind. My lost masterpieces. They’d vanished over the many times I’d moved, but I couldn’t help thinking that they in particular had been truly superb. I had painted any number of pictures since, but those remembered masterpieces seemed now so impossibly distant I was left feeling hollow and plagued by the dull ache of loss.

A half-empty glass of absinthe.

That is how I secretly described that eternal, irreparable sense of loss. Whenever people talked about paintings, that half-empty glass of absinthe flitted before my eyes and I grew restless. I writhed with the desire to show them my lost paintings, to convince them of my talent.

She snickered. “Really? It’s so cute the way you joke with a straight face.”

I’m not joking! It’s true! Oh, I wish I could show you. After a moment’s idle anguish, however, I gave up and changed tack. “Cartoons, then. At least I can outdo Horiki when it comes to cartoons.”

I was ignored when I was serious, and only when I was clowning and deceiving, as now, did my words seem to carry a ring of truth.

“That’s not a bad idea. I was impressed, to be honest. I’ve seen the ones you’re always drawing for Shigeko and they even make me laugh. How about it? Want to give it a try? I can talk to the editor at work.”

Her company published an obscure monthly magazine for children.

When women see you . . . We can’t help ourselves. We feel compelled to do something, to help. . . . You’re always so timid and yet still a comedian. . . . Sometimes, you get so lonely and depressed but when women see this, we only want to help you all the more.

Shizuko often said things like that, flattering and coaxing me. Yet, when it occurred to me that her remarks possessed the unwholesome quality specific to words addressed to a kept man they had the opposite effect and I found myself sinking even further, unable to rouse even a glimmer of spirit. I wanted money, not women. I secretly yearned and schemed for some means to support myself, enabling me to escape from Shizuko, but, in the end, these schemes only made me more reliant upon her. She took care of the mess I left behind when I ran away just as she took care of everything else. This woman from Kōshū was more formidable than any man, and it wasn’t long before I had to “tremble” before Shizuko too.

She set up a meeting between herself, Flounder, and Horiki where it was decided that all remaining ties with my family would be severed and Shizuko and I would live openly as husband and wife. Furthermore, thanks to Shizuko’s deft maneuverings, my cartoons were bringing in surprisingly large amounts of money. Even as I spent that money on liquor and cigarettes, my feelings of loneliness and gloom only grew worse with each passing day. I’d sunk so low that there were times when, drawing “The Adventures of Kinta and Ota” for Shizuko’s magazine, I would suddenly find myself so overwhelmed by longing for my family back home that my pen ceased its scratching and, my head hanging, tears began to spill from my eyes.

At such times Shigeko was my faint salvation. She’d already taken to calling me “Daddy” without the slightest self-consciousness.

“Daddy, is it true? If you pray to God he’ll give you whatever you want?”

If so, I’m the one who should be praying, I thought.

Oh Lord, grant me cold determination. Grant me understanding of the nature of “humans.” It is no sin even to shove another aside. Oh God, grant me the mask of anger.

“Yes, that’s right. God will give you anything you ask for, but I don’t think it’ll work for me.”

I was terrified even of God. I couldn’t bring myself to trust in God’s love, I could only believe in His wrath. Faith. To me, that meant standing before the judgment seat, head hung low, waiting to be scourged by His whip. I could believe in hell readily enough but the idea of heaven was beyond me.

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t obey my parents.”

“Really? But everyone says you’re good.”

That’s because I’m deceiving them. I knew as well as she did that everyone in the building was fond of me. But I was terrified of them all, and the more terrified I was the more they liked me. The more they liked me, the more terrified I became. I wanted to escape from all of them. But it was far too difficult to explain this unfortunate malady of mine to Shigeko.

“What will you ask God for?” I asked, casually changing the topic.

“I, I want my real daddy.”

I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach, my vision swam. An enemy. I don’t know if I was Shigeko’s enemy or if she was mine, but in the end here too was yet another terrifying adult, threatening me. A stranger, an incomprehensible stranger, a stranger full of secrets. That is how Shigeko appeared to me then.

At least I have Shigeko, or so I had thought. Yet, in the end this one too had a tail that could “crush the life from a horsefly with a single blow.” From that point on I trembled before even her.

“Hey, pervert! You there?”

Horiki started visiting again. He’d caused me such profound sadness the day I ran away, but still I couldn’t refuse him, and I greeted him with a weak smile.

“So, looks like your cartoons are quite the thing. That’s the world for you, I guess—fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Must be true. Don’t let it go to your head, though—your sketching is still a joke.”

Who did he think he was, putting on airs as though he were a master? How would he react if I showed him one of my monster paintings? Even as I lapsed into my usual, idle writhing I replied, “Now, don’t say such things. You’ll only make me scream.”

He seemed to grow smugger still.

“Well, when your only talent is for getting ahead in the world people will see through you eventually.”

A talent for getting ahead in the world? Honestly, I could only grimace in reply. Me? A talent for getting ahead in the world! Yet, perhaps there was something to what he said. Perhaps people like me, those who live in terror of human beings, who seek to avoid them at any cost, who deceive them—perhaps, in some strange way, these things worked in our favor. Perhaps we look like people who conscientiously observed that cunning old saying, “let sleeping dogs lie.” Oh, people don’t know the first thing about one another. They think themselves the very best of friends even as they utterly fail to understand each other. They live their whole lives thus, never realizing their mistake, and when one of them dies, they weep as they give the eulogy.

Horiki (reluctantly, I’m sure, and only at Shizuko’s prodding) helped clean up the mess after I ran away from Flounder’s, so, perhaps because of this, he had convinced himself that my new start in life was all thanks to him. As though he were the one who had united me with Shizuko. So, he solemly subjected me to lectures, showed up drunk in the middle of the night searching for a place to sleep, or came over to borrow five yen (always five yen).

“Well, I hope you’ve put your womanizing days behind you now. Society won’t tolerate any more of it, you know.”

What exactly was society? A plurality of people? Where, precisely, was the material form of this thing called society located? I’d lived my whole life in terror of society, imagining it to be something strong, forbidding, frightening. Yet, as Horiki spoke, it suddenly came to me.

“When you say society, you mean you, right?”

The words rose to the tip of my tongue but I swallowed them, not wanting to anger Horiki.

(Society won’t tolerate it.)

(It’s not society. It’s you who won’t tolerate it, right?)

(If you go on doing things like that, society won’t go easy on you.)

(It’s not society, though, is it? It’s you.)

(Society will bury you alive.)

(It’s not society. It’s you who will bury me, isn’t it?)

Know thyself. Know thy terrifying, strange, wily, villainous, crone-like self!

Such thoughts flitted across my mind, but, in the end, I merely wiped the sweat from my brow with my handkerchief and, laughing, said, “You’ve got me in a cold sweat!”

Ever since this encounter I’ve maintained this quasi-philosophical belief (is not society nothing more than the individual?).

And, having arrived at the realization that society is nothing more than the individual, it became much easier for me to act in accord with my own wishes. Or, in Shizuko’s words, I became a little more selfish and less timid. Or, in Horiki’s words, I grew stingy. Or, in Shigeko’s words, I didn’t play with her as much.

I passed each day in grim silence, looking after Shigeko, filling orders for cartoons (I occasionally received orders from other publishers too but they were all third-rate magazines, even cruder than Shizuko’s). I drew “The Adventures of Kinta and Ota” or “The Happy-Go-Lucky Priest”—a brazen copy of “The Happy-Go-Lucky Dad”—or other, silly cartoons such as “Hasty Pin-chan,” which even I didn’t understand. Deep in my melancholy I drew sluggishly (I draw very slowly), my only thought being to earn money for drinking. The moment Shizuko got back from work I rushed out the door, as though it were the changing of shifts, and headed straight for the cheap standing bars near Kōenji Station where I drank cheap, strong liquor until I began to feel a bit more cheerful. Then, going home,

“You know . . . The more I look at you the stranger you look. Did you know your face was the inspiration for the Happy-Go-Lucky Priest? I got the idea watching you sleep.”

“Well, you look really old when you sleep. Like you’re in your forties.”

“It’s your fault. You suck the life right out of me. Like the rushing of waters, so go lives of men.” I sang, “Why do you fret so? As the willow on the banks of the streeeam.”

“Stop making such a racket and go to bed. Or would you like something to eat?” She was always so calm, as though she wasn’t paying any attention to me at all.

“I’ll have a drink if we have anything. Like the rushing of water, so go lives of men. Like the rushing of men . . . no, water, so goes the life of water.”

Shizuko undressed me as I sang and, head pressed to Shizuko’s breast, I fell asleep. Such was my routine.

And thus we begin again the next day,

Under the same, settled rules of the past

If only we might avoid great, violent joys

So too will we escape great sorrows.

As the toad hops around

The stone blocking his path.

When I first read this translation—originally from a poem by Guy Charles Cros, I think—I flushed a crimson so deep my face seemed to burn.

A toad.

(That’s all I am. It makes no difference if society forgives me or not, if it buries me or not. I am lower even than a dog or a cat. A toad. Just plodding along.)

I began to drink more and more. I no longer confined myself to the bars around Kōenji Station but ventured out to Shinjuku and Ginza, sometimes not coming home until the following day. All I wanted was to avoid the “settled rules of the past.” I played the scoundrel in bars, kissing every girl I saw, reverting to the same wild drunk I’d been before the love suicide. No, I was worse. I even started selling off Shizuko’s clothes when I ran out of money.

One night, over a year after I found myself grimacing at the tangled kite outside the window, just after the cherry blossoms had scattered, I smuggled some of Shizuko’s underrobes and obi out of the house and pawned them. With money in my pocket, I went drinking in Ginza and stayed out for two nights running. But by the third night, even I couldn’t help feeling a little bad, and I went back home. Walking with unconscious stealth, I went up to the door to Shizuko’s room. Shigeko and Shizuko were inside, talking.

“Why does he drink?”

“Daddy doesn’t drink because he likes it. It’s just that he’s too good so, so . . .”

“Do all good people drink?”

“Well, no, it’s not that but . . .”

“I bet Daddy’ll be surprised, won’t he?”

“He might not be very happy. Look, now, he’s jumped out of the box.”

“He’s just like Hasty Pin-chan, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he is.” Shizuko said with a soft, contented laugh.

I slid the door open a crack and peeked inside. A tiny white rabbit jumped here and there as mother and daughter chased after it.

(They are happy. These are happy people. And here I am, an idiot, blundering into their midst, destroying everything. Simple joy. A good mother and daughter. Oh Lord, if you listen to the prayers of people like me, just once, just once in my life, I beg you.)

I felt like dropping to my knees and clasping my hands in prayer right there. Silently, I slid the door shut, went back to Ginza, and never again returned to that apartment.

So it was that I came to take up residence on the second floor of a downtown standing bar in Kyōbashi, a kept man once again.

Society. I felt I was beginning to understand it, if only vaguely. It was a struggle between one individual and another, and it was a struggle that took place at a specific moment in time, and all you needed to do was to win in that moment. No one person can conquer another entirely, and even a slave can manage a slave’s servile riposte, so all we can do is bet everything on a single throw of the dice, an all-or-nothing bet, right then and there. There’s no other way to go through life. People sing the praises of honor and loyalty, but the sole focus of all human endeavor is the individual. Beyond the individual there is but another individual. The inscrutability of society, the sea is not society—it is the individual. In this way I was somewhat liberated from my terror of that mirage, that vast ocean of the world. I no longer felt compelled to display the same infinite consideration toward all matters, behaving instead with a degree of casual disregard for others as the situation and moment required.

I abandoned the apartment in Kōenji, went over to the Madam of the standing bar in Kyōbashi and said, “I’ve left her.”

That was all I said and that was all that needed to be said. I had won the all-or-nothing bet, and, perhaps a bit too aggressively, had made a place for myself on the second floor of the bar. Yet, society—that “society” I was supposed to regard with such trepidation—did not inflict the slightest injury upon me. Nor did I attempt to defend or justify myself to “society.” So long as the Madam was willing, that was all that mattered.

I was part customer, part owner, part errand boy, and part relative. To an outsider I suppose I must have seemed an odd creature indeed, but “society” didn’t pay the slightest heed to me, and the regulars were all terribly kind, calling out, “Yō-chan, Yō-chan” and buying me drinks.

The sense of caution I had maintained toward the world gradually began to fade. It might not be such a terrifying place after all. The terror that had so consumed me before seemed now more like superstition. Like the “scientific myths” that the spring winds carry millions of whooping cough germs, or that the public baths teem with bacteria that make you go blind, the millions of germs in a barbershop that cause baldness, handle straps in trains contaminated with scabies, undercooked pork and beef, sashimi infested with tapeworm, flatworm and so on, that if you stepped barefoot on a tiny shard of glass it would find its way into your bloodstream and put out your eye. “Scientifically,” I am sure there are millions of bacteria floating and swimming about wherever we go. I came to realize, however, that all we needed do was ignore these facts entirely and they lost their hold over us, vanishing entirely in the end, reduced to nothing more than “scientific ghosts.” Just as when people go on about how if you throw away three grains of rice with your lunch and ten million other people do the same then so many bushels of rice are wasted, or when they say that if ten million people conserved just one tissue each day then so many tons of pulp would be saved, and so on. How terrified I used to be of this kind of “scientific accounting.” Whenever I wasted so much as a single grain of rice, each time I blew my nose I was haunted by visions of a mountain of rice, of mountains of pulp going to waste. I grew despondent, as if I’d committed some terrible crime. Yet, in the end, these were but “scientific lies,” “statistical lies,” “mathematical lies.” Nobody was going to go around and collect each of those three grains of rice. Even purely as an intellectual exercise in mathematics it was a silly, primitive notion—no better those idiotic statistics exercises where one calculates the probability of a person tripping in the dark and falling into the toilet or the number of passengers who would get a leg stuck in the gap between train and platform. They sound plausible enough, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting hurt by falling into the toilet. I was gradually learning to see the world for what it was, and I wanted to laugh at myself for having lived in such terror of these hypotheticals, of these “scientific facts” that had been drilled into me and which I had taken as real.

All that was true, but people still scared me and I had to fortify myself with a drink before meeting them, even customers in the bar. After all, I’d seen terrifying things. Yet I still went out to the bar each night, drank with them, and even argued absurd theories of art with them. I was like the child who, frightened of an animal, will run up to it and hug it all the tighter for all that.

A cartoonist. Ah, I was but an unknown cartoonist with neither great joy nor great sadness. I secretly ached for a great, violent joy and to hell with whatever sadness might follow, no matter how terrible it might be. But my only joys, if they can be called such, were getting embroiled in pointless debates with the customers and drinking their liquor.

This tedious life at Kyōbashi continued for nearly a year, and I was now selling my cartoons to other magazines too—not just children’s magazines. I drew for the cheap, dirty magazines you find at station newsstands. I drew coarse nudes under the absurd pen name of “Jōshi Ikita” (a homophone for “survived love suicide”), appending a verse from The Rubaiyat to each.

Why not abandon your futile prayers

And cast off those worries that invite tears

Come now, let’s drink and talk of fond memories

Forgetting a while our cares.

People who menace with worry and terror,

Trembling before their imagined sins

Forever scheming and plotting

Against the spirits’ vengeance.

Yester eve, stomach full of wine and heart full of joy

The morn stirs, so bleak and desolate

How treacherous the night

To thus my feelings break.

Forget the damnation to come

That haunts us with dim fear

Like the echo of a distant drum

The tallying of petty sins behooves none.

Is it righteousness, then, that is man’s compass?

Yet, what justice then lies

In the blood-soaked battlefield

Or on the tip of an assassin’s knife?

Where have the guiding principles gone?

What profound wisdom now lights the way?

It is both beautiful and terrible, this floating world.

We but delicate children, forced to bear the unbearable.

Always the seed of desire is planted, yet with it we can do naught.

Good, Bad, Sin, Punishment, so we are cursed.

Always wandering, helpless.

Never permitted the strength of will to crush it.

Where and why do you wander?

What do you censure, survey, remember?

Ha! It is but an empty dream, a feeble illusion

Aha! We forget our wine, all is idle musing.

Gaze up now at the boundless sky!

There, a tiny speck floating within.

As if we could know why the earth spins.

Spin, whirl, or roll over—it shall do as it likes.

Everywhere I go, I sense unrivaled power.

On every land, in every people,

I discover the same humanity.

Could it be that I am the heretic?

All misread the holy book

Else they lack wisdom and sense,

To forbid the wine, to forgo the pleasures of living flesh,

Do as you will, Mustafa. Such things I detest.

It was around this time that a young girl urged me to stop drinking.

“You can’t go on like this. Drunk by noon every day.”

Her name was Yoshiko, though I called her Yoshi-chan, and she worked at a tiny tobacconist across the street from the bar. About seventeen or eighteen, she was pale-skinned with slightly crooked teeth. She smiled and offered the same warning each time I went to buy cigarettes.

“Why not? What’s wrong with it? As they said in ancient Persia, ‘Drink all the wine, dear child, and dispel hatred—Away! Away!’ Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The jade chalice of oblivion, as the poet says, is the only hope for this heart, heavy and worn with sorrow. You see?”

“Nope.”

“Why you—keep it up and I’ll kiss you.”

“Go on then,” she said with a pout, not looking remotely abashed.

“You idiot. No notion of chastity . . .”

Yet from her expression, it was clear that she remained a virgin, untouched by any man.

On one particularly cold night after New Year’s I got drunk and went to buy cigarettes when I fell into an open manhole right in front of the tobacconist. I cried out to Yoshi-chan for help, and she pulled me out and tended the cut on my right arm. “You drink too much,” she said, unsmiling, her voice thick with emotion.

The thought of dying didn’t bother me in the slightest, but when it came to injuries, bleeding and the like, I wanted none of it. As she cleaned the cut on my arm I started to think that perhaps I really had better stop drinking.

“I’ll give it up. From tomorrow. I won’t touch a drop of the stuff.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. I’ll quit. And if I do you’ll be my bride, right?”

I’d meant the bit about her being my bride as a joke.

“OC!”

“OC” was short for “of course.” Like “mobo” for modern boy and “moga” for modern girl, abbreviating things was all the rage back then.

“All right, shake on it then. I’m definitely quitting.”

Of course, I’d started drinking again by noon the next day.

That evening I stumbled outside and made my way over to Yoshi-chan’s shop.

“Yoshi-chan, sorry! I got drunk again.”

“What’s this? That’s not very nice, pretending to be drunk!”

I gasped. I even started to feel sober.

“But it’s true. I’m not pretending—I really am drunk.”

“You shouldn’t tease me, it’s not nice,” she said, guilelessly.

“But all you have to do is look at me. I started drinking at noon today, too. Forgive me?”

“You put on a good act, don’t you?”

“I’m not acting, you idiot! Keep it up and I’ll kiss you!”

“Go on, then.”

“No, I don’t have the right to. I must abandon my plan of taking you as my bride. Look at me—my face is red, right? I’m drunk.”

“That’s just from the sunset. You can’t fool me. You promised to stop drinking yesterday so you can’t be drunk. We even shook on it. I don’t believe you. You’re lying. Lies, lies, lies!”

I stood there gazing at her pale, smiling face, glowing in the dim light of the shop. How precious, I thought. This unsullied virginity. I’d never slept with a virgin younger than myself before. We should marry. Let whatever sadness comes, come, I don’t care how terrible it is. Just once in my life I want to feel a great, violent joy. I’d always thought that “beautiful virginity” was simply a sentimental conceit employed by feeble-minded poets, but now I could see that it really did exist. In that instant I decided we’d marry, and in the springtime we’d ride our bicycles to a waterfall deep in the forest. It was an all-or-nothing bet, so, without a moment’s hesitation, I stretched out my hand and snatched the flower.

We married soon thereafter, and while the joy I gained was modest, the sadness—no, even the word misery falls short of the mark— that came after was terrible beyond all imagining. “The world,” it seems, really was an infinitely terrifying place after all. It is certainly not the amiable sort of place where everything is decided with a single throw of the dice.

Part Two

Horiki and myself.

To scorn one another, to reduce one another to mediocrity. If this is what is meant by “friendship” then Horiki and I were the epitome of “friends.”

Thanks entirely to the chivalry of the Madam from Kyōbashi (it may sound odd to speak of chivalry in a woman but experience has taught me—at least in the city—that women possess the quality of what I can only call chivalry in far greater quantities than men. Men, as a rule, are cowardly, trembling creatures who care for nothing but appearances and are stingy to boot), I succeeded in making Yoshiko my common-law wife. We rented a small room in eastern Tokyo on the first floor of a tiny two-story apartment in Tsukiji, near the Sumida River. I quit drinking and dedicated myself to what was, it seemed, becoming my chosen path—cartoons. After dinner we went to the movies and on the way home stopped at a coffee shop or bought a flower pot and so on. More than anything, I loved to simply listen to her and to gaze at her, this woman who trusted me to the very core of her being. It was around then that I started to think that I might, just possibly, be turning into something that resembled a human being. I began to feel a faint, warm hope that I might avoid a miserable death after all, when Horiki reappeared at my doorstep.

“Hey pervert! Well, now—what’s this? Could you be turning respectable? I come bearing tidings from the Lady of Kōenji,” he began but suddenly dropped his voice. He gave a jerk of his chin in the direction of Yoshiko in the kitchen, as though to see if it was safe to talk.

“It’s fine. You can say whatever you like,” I replied calmly.

Indeed, I think Yoshiko had a divine gift for trusting people. She never suspected anything about my relationship with the Madam from Kyōbashi, and even when I told her about the Kamakura incident she didn’t believe there had been anything between Tsuneko and me. Not because I was a particularly gifted liar. Sometimes I even made a point of speaking as frankly and candidly as I could, but she just dismissed everything as a joke.

“Well, I can see you’re doing well for yourself—same as always. In any case, it’s nothing important. She just wanted me to tell you to come and visit her sometime.”

Just as I am on the verge of forgetting, that winged monster dives, its beak ripping open the scab of memory. Vivid images of past sins and past shames suddenly unfold before my eyes and I grow so terrified that I want to scream. I can’t sit still.

Me: “Go for a drink?”

Horiki: “Sure.”

Me and Horiki. Cast from the same mold. We are, I sometimes thought, all but indistinguishable from one another. This only held true when we were together drinking cheap liquor; when we went out we transformed into the same dog with the same coat of fur, sniffing around the snowy alleys of the red-light district.

From that day we rekindled our old friendship, we’d go back to the tiny Kyōbashi bar, too and, in the end, we two drunken dogs would find our way back to Shizuko’s apartment in Kōenji, sometimes even spending the night there before heading home in the morning.

I will never forget. It was a hot, muggy summer evening. Sometime around sunset Horiki showed up at our apartment wearing a threadbare yukata. Due to “various circumstances” he’d pawned his summer clothes, but there would be trouble if his mother found out so he needed to redeem them as soon as possible and would I lend him the money? Unfortunately, we didn’t have any money either, so, as was my usual practice, I sent Yoshiko off to pawn some of her clothes and, as the sum she received was slightly more than what Horiki required, I had her buy some shōchū liquor with the rest and we went up to the roof where we bathed in the feeble, muddy breeze that occasionally wafted in from the Sumida River and held a thoroughly squalid summer banquet.

We played a game of my own invention that consisted of categorizing nouns as either “comic” or “tragic.” Just as nouns were divided into masculine, feminine, neutral, and so on, I thought it only proper that they should also be divided into the comic and the tragic. For example, steamer and steam locomotive are both tragic nouns whereas bus and streetcar are comic. Why? If you have to ask then clearly you are not qualified to discuss such weighty matters of art. Just as a playwright who allowed so much as a single tragic noun to find its way into a comedy would be scorned, so too would a tragedy that contained a comic noun.

“Ready? How about tobacco?” I asked.

“Trag (our abbreviation for tragedy),” Horiki said almost before I finished.

“Medicine?”

“Powder or pills?”

“Injections.”

“Trag.”

“Really? It might just be a hormone injection.”

“No, trag. Absolutely trag. Come on, it’s the needles—could anything be more trag?”

“All right, you win. But, you know, medicine and doctors—they’re actually com (our abbreviation for comedy). What about death?”

“Com. Pastors and Buddhist priests, too.”

“Bravo. So, I suppose that life is trag.”

“No, that’s com too.”

“No, if we do that then everything will be com. All right, I’ll try one more, then. Cartoonist. Surely that can’t be com.”

“Tragedy, tragedy. An epic tragedy.”

“What’s that? Surely you’re the epic tragedy.”

There was nothing remarkable about our feeble wordplay but, at the time, it seemed to us a most refined amusement, the likes of which had never graced the finest salons of the world—and we were absurdly proud of it.

Around the same time I’d invented another, similar game where the players had to guess the antonyms for words. The ant (an abbreviation for antonym) for black was white. However, the ant for white was red and the ant for red, black.

“What’s the ant for flower?” I asked.

Horiki frowned slightly as he considered. “Well, there’s a restaurant called ‘Moon and Flowers’ so it must be moon.”

“No, no. That’s not an ant. If it’s anything, it’s a synonym. Among the poets even stars and violets are synonyms, right? Not ants.”

“OK, OK. Then, let’s see . . . bees!”

“Bees?”

“‘Atop the peonies . . . ’ as the poem goes. . . . Or was it an ant?”

“Come now, that’s a motif—you can’t fool me.”

“I’ve got it! ‘Gathering clouds obscure the flowers . . . ’”

“It’s supposed to be ‘Gathering clouds obscure the moon.’”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. A wind scatters the flowers. It’s the wind. The ant of flowers is the wind.”

“I don’t like it. It sounds like something you’d get from a wandering minstrel. Your true colors are starting to show.”

“No, I’ve got it—it’s the loquat. Same shape as your minstrel’s lute.”

“That’s even worse. The ant for flowers . . . What is the one thing in the world that is most unlike flowers? That’s what you need to find . . .”

“In that case . . . hang on. I’ve got it! It’s ‘woman.’”

“And while you’re at it, the synonym for woman is?”

“Tripe.”

“You, it seems, are wholly ignorant of the art of poesy. Give us the ant for tripe, then.”

“Milk.”

“That’s not half bad. One more in that vein, then: shame. What’s the ant?”

“Shameless. The famous cartoonist, Jōshi Ikita.”

“What about Horiki Masao?”

Our laughter gradually began to fade as we succumbed to that mood particular to shōchū, that gloomy drunkenness, where your head feels like it is filled with shards of broken glass.

“Don’t be a smart aleck. At least I’ve never been marched across the city with a rope tied about my waist.”

I froze. It suddenly dawned on me that, all this time, Horiki had never really seen me as having turned over a new leaf. To him I was still nothing more than a shameless, stupid ghost who had even managed to fail at dying, a “living corpse.” When he could use me for his own amusement, he did so. That was the extent of our “friendship.” As you might expect, this realization did nothing to cheer me but, given the circumstances, it was only natural that Horiki should feel this way. Ever since I was a child I’d failed at being human so it was only right that I be scorned, even by the likes of Horiki.

“Crime. What’s the antonym for crime, I wonder? This is a tough one,” I said, feigning bland indifference.

“Law, of course.” His response was so blasé that I looked up, considering him. The flickering red glow of the neon light from a nearby building gave his expression a particularly grim look, and the flinty, pitiless features of a detective. I was utterly taken aback.

“That’s not what crime is, you know. Not at all.”

Law? The antonym of crime! Yet, perhaps that kind of simplistic thinking is typical of people in society. The belief that crime flourishes when there are no detectives around.

“Well what, then? God? You do have the stink of a Christian priest about you, after all. A bit disgusting, really.”

“Now let’s not be so hasty. We should put our heads together for this one. It’s an interesting problem, no? I suspect we might learn all there is to know about a man by the way he answers this question.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The ant for crime is . . . virtue. A virtuous citizen. That is to say, someone like me.”

“Enough joking. Anyway, virtue is the ant for evil. It’s not the ant for crime.”

“So crime and evil are different, then?”

“Yes. I think so. Virtue and evil are human concepts. They’re moral terms arbitrarily made up by human beings.”

“You never shut up, do you? All right, then, it must be God after all. God, God, God. You can’t go wrong by putting everything on God. Damn, I’m hungry.”

“Yoshiko’s boiling some broad beans for us now.”

“Excellent. Love ’em.”

He lay back, arms crossed behind his head.

“It’s almost as though you don’t care about crime at all.”

“Of course not. I’m not a criminal like you, after all. I like to have a good time and all but I don’t go around getting women killed or stealing their money.”

Deep in my heart an echo, faint and desperate, welled up in protest. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t steal anyone’s money. As usual, however, my resolve soon wavered. It was my fault, after all.

I was incapable of a straightforward argument. The gloom brought on by the shōchū made me more irascible by the minute, and it was all I could do to keep my anger in check. I started muttering, as though talking to myself.

“Just being thrown in jail isn’t a crime. If we can figure out the ant for crime then we can grasp the essence of crime. . . . God? Salvation? Love? Light? But Satan is the ant for God and I suppose that suffering would be the ant for salvation. Hate for love, darkness for light, evil for virtue. Crime and prayer, crime and regret, crime and confession, crime and . . . Ah, I give up. They’re all synonyms. What is the ant for crime?”

“The opposite of crime is revenge. Sweet like revenge. I’m starving here. Go get me something to eat.”

“Go get it yourself!” For what may very well have been the first time in my life, I roared in anger.

“Fine. I’ll just wander downstairs and commit some crimes with Yoshi-chan. A hands-on experiment will reveal more than any amount of debate. The ant of crime is sweet beans. No, broad beans.”

He was so drunk by then he could barely speak without slurring.

“Do what you like. Just get the hell out of here!”

“Crime and hunger, hunger and beans—no, they’re synonyms,” he continued to mutter nonsense as he clambered to his feet.

Crime and punishment. Dostoevsky. This thought grazed the edge of my consciousness and I gasped with sudden realization. What if we looked at Mr. Dost’s Crime and Punishment not as synonyms, but reconfigured them as antonyms? Crime and punishment . . . Utterly at odds with one another, chalk and cheese. Dost’s crime and punishment as ants . . . Dost’s fetid swamp, a pond teeming with algae, the very depths of chaos . . . Ah, I was on the verge of realization but no, still . . . It was then, just as these thoughts were racing through my head like the shadows of a spinning lantern . . .

“Hey! Terrible beans! Get down here!” Horiki was standing over me. His voice sounded strange, his pallor off. He’d just stumbled off downstairs but he was back already.

“What’s wrong?”

There was a strange tension in the air as we went down the stairs to the second floor. Halfway down the next flight of stairs Horiki stopped.

“Look!” He whispered urgently, pointing.

The small window above my room was open and we could see inside. The light was on, two animals were inside.

I felt dizzy, my vision blurred. It’s just what human beings do, that’s all. No cause for surprise, I whispered to myself, gasping for breath. I stood rooted to the spot, forgetting even to go to Yoshiko’s aid.

Horiki cleared his throat loudly. I fled, springing up the stairs to the roof where I threw myself down, face to the drizzling summer night. What I felt then was not rage, hatred, or even sadness but rather an overpowering terror. It was not the terror of a ghost in a graveyard. It was the terror of encountering a spirit, clad all in white, amid the towering cedars of a Shintō shrine. A ferocious, ancient terror that robbed me of speech. My hair began to turn gray that night. I lost confidence in everything. I was suspicious of everyone. I was forever alienated from all notions of hope, sympathy, or joy in the workings of the world. This was truly a decisive moment in my life. It was as though my head had been split open and, from that moment on, any interaction whatsoever with human beings caused that wound to throb.

“I feel bad for you but maybe now you’ll know better. I’m not coming back here. This place . . . It’s hell. But you should forgive Yoshi-chan. You’re no prize yourself, after all. Well, I’m off.”

Horiki was no fool. He wasn’t one to linger when things grew awkward.

I sat up, drank the shōchū, crying bitterly. I thought I could go on weeping forever.

At some point Yoshiko had come up to the roof. She stood behind me, holding a dish heaped with broad beans, a vacant expression on her face.

“He said . . . he wouldn’t do anything. . . .”

“No. Don’t say anything. It’s never occurred to you to doubt people. Sit down. Have some beans.”

We sat next to one another, eating beans. Could it be that trust is a crime? He was a shopkeeper, a small, stupid man of about thirty who commissioned cartoons from me, always making a great show of reluctance when it came to paying me the few coins that were my fee.

The shopkeeper didn’t dare come around again after that, but, for some reason, I found I hated Horiki even more than the shopkeeper. Horiki, who’d discovered them at it but, rather than coughing or clearing his throat to interrupt them, just left and came back up to the roof to tell me. On sleepless nights this hatred and rage had me writhing and groaning in my bed.

It was not a question of forgiving or not forgiving. Yoshiko had a gift for trusting people. She didn’t know to be suspicious of them. Therein lies the tragedy.

I ask you, God. Is trust a crime?

It wasn’t that Yoshiko had been defiled but that her trust had been violated. This caused me such unbearable pain I thought I couldn’t go on living. For someone like me, mean and trembling, forever humoring those around him, whose ability to trust had already been irrevocably shattered, Yoshiko’s pure and innocent trust was as clean and refreshing as a waterfall deep in the woods. In one night it had turned to filthy, yellow sewage. Do you see? Ever since that night Yoshiko trembled before even my slightest smile or frown.

If I called out to her she gave a start and looked around nervously. No matter how hard I tried to make her laugh, no matter how much I played the clown she always seemed to be quivering with fright. She started talking to me with excessive politeness.

Is innocent trust, in the end, the root of all crime?

I read every story I could find featuring wives who were violated. Yet, not one of them had been so cruelly violated as Yoshiko. There was nothing, not the slightest element of fiction about it. My suffering might have been eased somewhat had there been anything even faintly resembling love between Yoshiko and the shopkeeper, but, in the end, it came down to one summer night when Yoshiko trusted someone and that was all there was to it. And so my head seemed to shatter, my voice grew hoarse, my hair turned gray before its time, and Yoshiko trembled in fear the rest of her life. Most of the stories I read focused on whether or not the husband would forgive his wife’s “deeds,” but that wasn’t such a terribly important point for me. Happy indeed, I thought, is the husband who has the right to decide whether or not to forgive. If he deems the offense unforgivable there’s no need for a fuss, he simply divorces her out of hand and finds a new wife. Or, if he can’t do that, he “forgives” her and endures. In either case, everything is arranged to suit the husband’s feelings. That is, while it no doubt comes as quite a shock to the husband, in the end it is for all that nothing more than a “shock”—not something one returns to over and over again, endlessly, like the pounding of waves on the shore. It is, I thought, the kind of problem that, one way or the other, could be resolved by a husband’s righteous anger. Yet, in my case, I possessed none of the rights of the husband, and the more I considered it, the more it seemed to me that everything was my fault. Far from being angry with her, I dared not utter the slightest word of reproach. Indeed, it was because she possessed such rare virtue that she had been violated. It was that virtue, that pure and innocent trust, long admired, that her husband had found so unutterably endearing.

Is innocent trust a crime?

Even that sole, saving virtue was now clouded with suspicion. Nothing made sense to me anymore. My only refuge was alcohol. I drank shōchū from the moment I got up, my features coarsened beyond recognition, several teeth fell out, my cartoons devolved into little more than pornography. No, I’ll be honest. I’d started copying erotic prints and selling them in secret. I needed the money for shōchū. Whenever I looked at Yoshiko, trembling and too frightened to meet my gaze, I recalled how completely trusting she’d once been, and I couldn’t help wondering if that little shopkeeper had been the only one. Maybe Horiki? Or maybe a complete stranger? Suspicion gave rise to suspicion, yet, still, I lacked the courage to come out and ask her directly. So I got drunk on shōchū, and, writhing in my usual terror and anxiety, I made timorous attempts at confronting her, plying her with contemptible leading questions. Like a fool, I alternated between joy and sorrow even as, on the surface, I continued to play the clown to the hilt. I subjected her to despicable, torturous, loving caresses, and then passed out, dead drunk.

Toward the end of that year I came home late one night, stinking drunk. I wanted a glass of sugar water but Yoshiko was already asleep, so I went to the kitchen and dug around for the sugar jar, but when I opened it I discovered that instead of sugar there was only a small, slender black box. I picked it up absently and was astonished when I saw the writing on the box. Most of the letters had been scratched off, probably with someone’s fingernail, but the English writing remained. “DIAL.”

Dial. I was drinking so much shōchū those days I’d stopped using sleeping pills, but, as I’d always been plagued with insomnia, I was familiar with most of the brands. And in that single box of Dial was certainly more than enough for a fatal dose. The seal was intact but she must’ve tried to erase the letters and then hid the box in the sugar jar because, some day, she’d want it and it would be there. Poor girl, unable to read the Roman alphabet, she’d only scratched part of the English writing off before deciding it was enough. (You have committed no crime.)

Careful not to make a sound, I filled a glass with water and, slowly breaking the seal on the box, I tipped its contents into my mouth and calmly drank the glass of water down in one go before turning out the lights and going to bed.

I slept like the dead for three days and nights. The doctor put it down as an accidental overdose so they were able to hold off reporting it to the police. Apparently the first thing I said upon regaining consciousness was that I wanted to go home. Where, precisely, I meant by “home” wasn’t clear even to me, but they told me I broke down in tears after I said it.

The fog gradually lifted, and, opening my eyes, I saw Flounder, looking disgruntled, sitting by my pillow.

“Last time it was the end of the year too, you know. It’s always the end of the year with him. The one time we’re busiest, running around like mad. It’s our health he’s putting at risk with stunts like this.”

He was talking to the Madam of the Kyōbashi bar.

“Madam?” I called out.

“Yes? What is it? Are you awake?” She looked down at me, her smiling face seeming almost to cover my own.

Tears streamed down my cheeks.

“Let me divorce Yoshiko.” The words were out before I realized what I was saying.

I heard a faint sigh as she straightened.

It was then that I let slip something so truly outlandish, something so comical and so idiotic it defies description.

“I, I want to go someplace where there aren’t any women.”

Flounder reacted first, roaring with laughter. Madam began to giggle, and soon I too flushed and grinned wryly, tears still running down my cheeks.

“Yes indeed, a fine idea,” Flounder said. His coarse laughter seemed to go on forever. “You should go someplace where there aren’t any women. You fall to pieces when there are women around. No women—that’s a fine idea.”

Someplace without women. This silly, flippant wish would later be realized in the most dismal manner imaginable.

Yoshiko had somehow convinced herself that, in taking the pills, I’d been sacrificing myself for her, that I’d been taking her place. As a result she became even more timid, never smiling at anything I said, hardly speaking at all. It was too depressing at home, so I was forever going out, drowning myself in cheap liquor again. Ever since the Dial incident, though, I’d gone as thin as a rail. My arms and legs felt heavy and I fell behind in my cartoon work. Flounder left me some money when he came to see me at the hospital (he’d called it a “small gift from Shibuta” when he handed it over, acting for all the world as if it were coming out of his own pocket, but it seems that it too was from my brothers. Unlike when I ran away from his house, I saw through Flounder’s play-acting now—if only vaguely—and when he started putting on airs I played my part too, pretending not to suspect a thing, muttering my meek thanks. There were times I almost understood why Flounder insisted on these convoluted deceptions and times I did not. It was all very strange to me), so I spontaneously decided to use it for a solitary tour of the hot springs in southern Izu. But I was unsuited for a leisurely trip to the spas. I grew inconsolable when I thought of Yoshiko, and the reflective state of mind you need to contemplate mountain landscapes eluded me entirely. I didn’t bother changing into the quilted jacket provided by the inn, nor did I bother with the baths. Instead I rushed outside and, bursting into a grimy coffee shop, bathed myself in shōchū instead. By the time I went back to Tokyo, I was in even worse shape than when I’d left.

It had snowed heavily in Tokyo. I was stumbling about, drunk, in one of the back alleys of Ginza, quietly singing the refrain, “How many hundreds of leagues from home,” over and over again, kicking the tips of my shoes at the snow that had accumulated when I suddenly vomited. That was the first time I’d ever vomited blood. I’d made a giant rising sun flag in the snow. For a while I just squatted there, scooping up clean snow in both hands and washing my face with it as I wept.

Whaaat narrow alley is thiiis?

Whaaat narrow alley is thiiis?

The forlorn voice of a young girl singing the nursery rhyme seemed to drift out from the darkness, so faint I thought my ears might be playing tricks on me. Misery. The world had all sorts of miserable people—I doubt it would be much of an exaggeration to say it was filled with miserable people. Yet their misery was of the sort where they could unabashedly protest their misery to “society.” “Society,” in turn, immediately understood their protest and was sympathetic to it. My misery, on the other hand, was entirely the product of my own guilt, so there was nobody I could turn to. Should I venture even the most tentative of objections it wouldn’t just be Flounder sneering at me, despairing at my nerve, but all of society as a whole. Was it simply that I, as the saying goes, thought “the whole world revolves around me”? Or was it the opposite? Was I too timid? I myself had no idea. I was nothing more than a lump of guilt, capable only of making myself ever more miserable, with absolutely no idea how to stop.

I stood up and my first thought was to get some sort of medicine, so I went to the nearest pharmacy. My gaze met that of the lady of the shop. Instantly. She lifted her head, eyes widening as though bathed in a flash of light, standing rooted to the spot. Yet her eyes widened not in loathing or fear but rather in pleading, as though yearning for salvation. Ah, she is miserable too. I’m certain of it. Those who suffer misery can sense it in others. Just as this thought crossed my mind I saw her totter as she leaned heavily on a pair of crutches. I had to suppress my sudden urge to rush to her side. Tears spilled from my eyes as I gazed at her. Her large eyes began to overflow with tears as well.

That’s all. Without a single word, I turned and left, stumbling back to my apartment. I had Yoshiko make me a glass of salt water and, drinking it down, went to bed without a word. The next morning I lied and said that I felt a cold coming on so I could spend the day in bed. By the time night fell, I had grown so anxious I could endure it no longer and I went back to the pharmacy, this time smiling as I explained my condition in detail and asked the woman for advice.

“You have to stop drinking.”

She spoke familiarly, as though we were relatives.

“But I think I might be an alcoholic. Even now I want a drink.”

“You mustn’t. My husband got TB and drowned himself in liquor. Said it’d kill off the bacteria but it ended up killing him instead.”

“I’m too frightened, I can’t. I’m too scared.”

“I’ll give you some medicine. But you must stop drinking no matter what.”

The woman (a widow with a son who’d gone to medical school in Chiba or someplace like that but, as soon as he got accepted he came down with the same illness that killed his father and now he was on leave, convalescing in hospital. She had a bedridden father-in-law at home and one of her legs had been useless ever since she came down with polio when she was five) stumped around the shop on her crutches taking things from this shelf and that drawer as she gathered up various medicines for me.

This one will replenish your blood.

These are vitamin injections. The syringe is here.

These are calcium supplements. Diastase to settle your stomach.

This one for this, that one for that—she went on, lovingly explaining five or six different kinds of medicines, but, in the end, even this miserable woman’s love was too much for me. Finally, she said, deftly wrapping a small box, this is for when you can’t take it anymore and absolutely must have a drink.

It was morphine.

She said it wouldn’t be as bad as liquor, and I believed her. What’s more, it had gotten to the point where even I had come to think there was something unclean about the way I drank. For the first time in a very long time I felt a sense of joy at the prospect of being able to escape from the Satan of liquor. So without any hesitation I promptly injected the morphine into my arm. Instantly, all my anxiety, irascibility, and timidity melted clean away. I was garrulous, cheerful. One shot of morphine and even my worries about my declining health vanished. I poured myself into my cartoons, coming up with ideas so odd and so amusing that I burst out laughing even as I drew.

I meant to limit myself to one injection a day but before long one became two and by the time two became four I couldn’t work without it.

“You have to stop. If you get addicted . . . Well, that would be terrible.”

When the woman said that I figured that I must already be well and truly addicted (I was extremely susceptible to the suggestions of others. Somehow I’d managed to convince myself of the odd notion that I was obliged to disappoint people. If someone handed me money and said, “You really shouldn’t spend it but, being you, you’ll probably spend it anyway,” I felt that I had to spend the money, that it was my duty to disappoint them, and I would rush right out and spend every last coin), but the idea that I might be addicted only made me more anxious and this, in turn, caused me to crave the drug all the more.

“Please, I’m begging you. Just one more box. I’ll pay what I owe you at the end of the month, I promise.”

“It’s not the bill that concerns me, you can pay that whenever you like. It’s the police I’m worried about.”

Ah, it seems I am doomed forever to have a cunning, gloomy, shadowy aura trailing about after me.

“You’ll find a way to get around them. I’m begging you. Shall I give you a kiss?”

She blushed, and I saw my opening.

“Look, without the medicine I can’t get any work done at all. It’s like a stimulant.”

“In that case you’d do better with a hormone injection.”

“Don’t make fun of me. If I can’t drink then it’s got to be the medicine. I can’t work without either of them.”

“But you mustn’t drink.”

“Right? And ever since I started taking the medicine I haven’t touched a drop. Thanks to you I’m feeling much better. I’m not going to spend my whole life drawing lousy cartoons, you know. I’ll stop drinking, get my health back, work hard, and one day I’ll become a famous painter, you’ll see. This is a critical time for me. Please, I’m begging you. Here, I’ll give you a kiss.”

At that the woman burst out laughing. “You’re hopeless, you know that? Don’t blame me if get addicted though.”

She thumped across the floor with her crutches and took the drug from a shelf.

“I can’t give you the whole box. You’ll go through it in no time. You can have half.”

“Stingy, aren’t you? Still, it’s better than nothing, I suppose.”

I injected an ampule as soon as I got home.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” Yoshiko asked timidly.

“’Course it hurts. But I’ve got no choice. If I’m going to get through all this work, I’ve got to do it, whether I like it or not. I’m a lot better these days, right? Now I’ve got work to do. Work, work, work.” I chattered away cheerfully.

Once I even showed up in the dead of night, pounding on the shop door. When she came tottering out on crutches, still in her nightclothes, I grabbed her, kissing her, and pretending to cry.

Wordlessly, she handed me a box.

By the time I realized that the drug was just as vile as shōchū—no, even worse—I was a full-blown addict. I had truly reached the depths of degradation. Desperate for the drug, I’d started copying erotic prints again, and it wasn’t long before the crippled woman and I began, quite literally, an ugly affair.

I want to die. Now more than ever, I want to die. There is no going back. There is nothing I can do. Nothing can help. I can only add more layers of shame. Dreams of bicycle rides and forest waterfalls are not for me. My lot is to lay one filthy, contemptible crime atop another, to suffer ever more violent anguish. I want to die. I have to die. Life itself is the root of all crime.

Near mad and consumed with these thoughts, I nevertheless continued to spend each day running back and forth between my room and the pharmacy.

The more I worked, the more I needed the drug, and before long I’d accumulated a terrifying debt. Whenever the lady from the pharmacy saw me tears welled up in her eyes even as they trickled down my cheeks.

Hell.

This was my last chance to escape from hell. If it fails, I thought, there is nothing left for me but a noose around my neck. Thus resolved, as though wagering everything on the existence of God, I wrote a long letter to Father. In it I confessed everything (except for the woman. Even I couldn’t bring myself to write about that) about my current state.

The outcome was even worse than I had imagined. Days passed one after another yet no reply came. I grew restless and anxious and this, in turn, made me take even more of the drug.

Tonight, I secretly resolved, tonight I’ll inject ten ampules and jump in the river. That very afternoon, as though possessed of the devil’s own intuition, Flounder showed up, Horiki tagging along behind him.

“I hear you’ve been coughing up blood?”

Horiki sat cross-legged in front of me. So kind and gentle was his smile that I thought I’d never seen its like before. I was overwhelmed with gratitude and so overjoyed by his kindly smile I had to turn away lest they see the tears streaming down my cheeks. That one, gentle smile utterly destroyed me. I was buried alive.

I was put in a car. The most important thing is to get you to a hospital. We’ll take care of everything else, Flounder urged quietly (so gentle were his words I could almost describe them as compassionate), and, as though all will and judgment of my own had vanished, I wept softly as I obeyed every command, the very soul of meekness. Yoshiko climbed in the car too, and the four of us jostled and swayed as we drove for what seemed a very long time. Just as the sky began to darken the car stopped at the entrance to a large hospital deep in a forest.

A sanatorium. I was certain of it.

A young doctor subjected me to a disconcertingly courteous, tender examination.

“Well, I think you should rest here for a little while,” he said with an almost shy smile. Flounder, Horiki, and Yoshiko were to return home, leaving me there all on my own. As they turned to go, Yoshiko handed me a cloth bundle containing a change of clothes and then, wordlessly, held out the syringe and remaining ampules of morphine. It seems she really had believed me when I said it was just a stimulant.

“No, I don’t need it anymore.”

This was truly remarkable. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this solitary instance was the only time in my entire life I rejected something offered me. Mine was the misery of one who cannot say no. I was terrified that, should I refuse, an irreparable, eternal crack would snake through the both of us. Yet, at that instant, though half-mad with cravings, I refused the morphine without a second thought. Perhaps I’d been moved by Yoshiko’s “divine ignorance.” I wonder if my addiction did not cease at that precise moment.

After that the young doctor with the shy smile showed me to one wing of the hospital, and then I heard the lock clang shut. I was in a lunatic asylum.

I want to go someplace where there aren’t any women. That careless remark, uttered after the Dial incident, had been, it seems, realized in the most peculiar manner. My wing of the hospital held only men who were insane. Even the nurses were men. Not a single woman to be seen.

I was no longer a mere criminal. I was mad. But no, I certainly wasn’t insane or anything like it. I’d never, not for a moment, gone mad. Ah, but I suppose that’s the sort of thing a lunatic would say. I suppose that if they put you in this hospital it means you’re crazy, and if they don’t, it means you’re normal.

I ask you, God. Is it a crime not to resist?

I was moved to tears by Horiki’s strangely beautiful smile, I abandoned all judgment and resistance, I got in the car, I was brought here, I became a lunatic. Even were I to leave right now, I would still be branded a lunatic. No. Not a lunatic. A cripple.

A human, failed.

I had, utterly and completely, ceased to be human.

When I arrived it was early summer, and, peering through the bars of my window, I could see the red blossoms of lilies floating atop the small pond in the hospital garden. Three months later the cosmos were starting to bloom, and, my eldest brother, with Flounder in tow, appeared out of the blue to get me out. Father had died of a gastric ulcer at the end of last month. We don’t care about your past. We don’t want you to worry about money. You don’t have to do anything. In exchange, you have to leave everything, get out of Tokyo right away, and go to the countryside to recover. We know you still have unfinished business in Tokyo but Shibuta has already taken care of most of the loose ends so you don’t need to worry about it. My brother spoke in his characteristically tense, somber manner.

I could almost see the mountains and rivers of my hometown floating before my eyes. I gave a weak nod.

Truly, a cripple.

My last pillar crumbled when I heard that Father was dead. He was no more. That presence, comforting and terrifying, had always been with me. Gone. It was as though the vessel of anguish had run dry. I even wondered if it was because of Father that this vessel had weighed so heavily upon me. All motivation fled me. I’d lost even the ability to suffer.

My brother was true to his word and did all that he promised. Four or five hours south of my hometown by train there is a hot springs region near the sea that is unusually warm for northeast Japan. He bought me a house on the outskirts of a small village there. It had five rooms, crumbling walls, and pillars chewed away by insects. It was so dilapidated as to be almost beyond repair. He also provided me with a servant, an ugly woman of almost sixty years with horrible rust-colored hair.

I’ve been here a little more than three years now and have been subjected to any number of odd violations by that old servant, Tetsu. Sometimes we argue like an old married couple. Sometimes my lung disease worsens, sometimes it improves. I grow thinner and I grow fatter. Sometimes I cough up blood. Yesterday I sent Tetsu to the pharmacy to buy me a box of Carmotine, my usual sedative. The box she brought back was different from the usual one, but I didn’t take particular note of it. Though I took ten tablets before going to bed I still didn’t feel at all sleepy. Just as I started to wonder at this, my stomach suddenly started rumbling, and, rushing to the toilet, I suffered a terrible attack of diarrhea. I had to run to the toilet three more times that night. Growing suspicious, I looked at the box more carefully and saw that it was actually Crapotine, a laxative.

I lay flat on my back in bed, a hot water bottle atop my stomach, thinking about what I would say to Tetsu.

“Look here, this isn’t Carmotine at all—it’s Crapotine!” But before I could go any further, I started to giggle. I guess, in the end, “cripple” is a comic noun. The cripple tries to sleep but takes a laxative instead. To top it off, the laxative is called “Crapotine.”

I am beyond joy or misery now.

All things pass.

That is the only truth I have encountered in all the days I’ve spent in this cold hell of a world of so-called “humans.”

All things pass.

I will be twenty-seven years old this year. My hair has turned gray and most people would say I look over forty.