The Second Journal
A score or more of towering, black-barked cherry trees lined the shore, so close to the water that the waves seemed to lap at their roots. At the start of the new school year their blossoms burst forth, a dazzling pink against the blue of the sea and the rust brown of sticky, newly sprouted leaves. The countless blossoms scattered in a blizzard of petals to form a heaving tapestry atop the surface of the sea, pulled away with each wave only to come crashing back to shore again. Despite neglecting my studies I had somehow managed to gain admittance to a middle school in Japan’s northeast, and this petal-strewn beach was part of its grounds. The figure of these flowers blossomed on the badge of our school caps and even on each button of our uniforms.
One of the reasons Father chose this school of sea and cherry blossoms for me is that distant relations lived all but next door to it. I was left in their care. I was a lazy student in general and, living so close to the school, I always waited until the last minute before rushing off at the sound of the morning assembly bell. Even so, thanks to my clowning I grew more and more popular among my classmates with each passing day.
This was my first experience of living in an “unfamiliar land,” and I decided that life in a foreign place was far easier than in one’s own hometown. This might be put down to the fact that my clowning had by then become second nature and didn’t require nearly so much effort. But I think it was due more to the gap in difficulty between performing for one’s parents versus complete strangers, between one’s hometown and a foreign place. Surely even the most gifted actors, even Jesus Christ the Son of God, was sensitive to that difference. Don’t they say that the actor’s most difficult stage is his hometown? Wouldn’t even the most famous actor hesitate when confronted with a room filled with parents, siblings, wife, and children? Still, I managed it. What’s more, my performances met with considerable success. Surely someone as cunning as I need not fear even the most unlikely of missteps in such a distant town.
My terror of people hadn’t receded in the slightest—it may have even grown—and though fear still writhed deep in my breast I became so adept in my performances that I was forever making my classmates laugh. Even my homeroom teacher, who often complained about how much better the class would be if only I weren’t in it, had to hide his grins behind his hand. I could even make the military drill instructor, with his barbaric shouting and voice like a thunderclap, collapse in laughter with the greatest of ease.
Just when I began to think I had finally managed to conceal my true nature entirely—just as I heaved a sigh of relief—to my utter astonishment I felt a knife pierce me from behind. The one doing the stabbing was, as you might expect, the scrawniest boy in the class. He had a pale, bloated face and wore baggy, hand-me-down robes that must have come from his father or an elder brother. The absurdly long sleeves made him look like Prince Shōtoku from an ancient scroll painting. He got terrible grades in all his classes and always sat on the sidelines during P.E. or military drill practice, and we naturally thought he was a bit simple. It never occurred to me that I should be on my guard even around him.
It was during P.E. and Takeichi (I can’t remember his surname but I think his given name was something like Takeichi) was sitting on the sidelines as usual while we practiced the high bar. When it was my turn I deliberately arranged my face in a determined expression. I gave a great shout as I leapt but, instead of jumping up to grab the bar, I went straight ahead in a long jump, crashing down on my bottom with a thump in the sandpit. It was a completely planned failure. As I had intended, everyone burst out laughing, and I climbed to my feet, brushing the sand away with a sheepish grin. It was then that I felt a poke in my back and saw that it was Takeichi, suddenly standing behind me.
“Show off,” he muttered.
I shuddered. That Takeichi, of all people, should see through me, see that my blundering was all an act—it was all too unexpected. For a moment I felt as though the whole world had turned red, that I burned in the crimson fires of hell. It was only with the greatest of effort that I managed to suppress the mad shriek welling up inside me.
The days that followed were filled with anxiety and terror.
On the surface, I continued to play the hapless clown, making everyone around me laugh, but from time to time a heavy sigh would escape as I realized that, no matter what I did, Takeichi had seen through me, and everything turned to ash. Certain that he would expose me to everyone who would listen, an oily sweat broke out across my brow and I glared about me, eyes rolling wildly with the vacant gaze of a madman. If I could have managed it, I would’ve spent every moment at Takeichi’s side—watching him twenty-four hours a day to make sure he didn’t let my secret slip. I would spare nothing to convince him that it was not an act, that my clowning was real. I wanted to become his dearest friend if I could. Should that fail, I thought, I would have no choice but to pray for his death. Yet, amid all of this, it never once occurred to me to actually try to kill him. Throughout my life I have wished more times than I can remember that someone might kill me, but I have never considered killing somebody else. Doing so, I thought, might only grant those terrifying people a measure of happiness.
In my quest to tame Takeichi I put on a “benevolent” grin, not unlike the smile of a fake Christian, and, head tilted to the left, I gently clasped his thin shoulder, inviting him to come to my house to play, my voice soothing, honeyed. He merely looked back at me in vacant silence. But then one day, near the start of summer I think, a sudden downpour turned the air white with rain just as classes ended, and everyone was milling about near the exit, wondering what to do. I lived just next door so the rain didn’t bother me, and, just as I was about to make a run for it, I noticed Takeichi standing disconsolately in the shadows by the shoe locker. Come on, I’ll lend you my umbrella, I grabbed his hand even as he flinched from me, pulling him out into the rain and running to my house. After asking my aunt to dry our jackets, I succeeded in getting Takeichi to visit my room on the second floor.
There were only three other people in the house. My aunt in her fifties, her elder daughter, about thirty, wearing glasses, tall and sickly looking (apparently she’d been married once but had since returned home. I followed the others’ example and called her Sis) and, lastly, the younger daughter called “Setchan,” who had only just graduated from a women’s college and who, unlike her sister, was short and round-faced. They ran a small shop on the first floor that sold stationery, balls, and bats and the like, but most of their money came from the rent on the five or six row houses that my aunt’s late husband had left them.
“My ears hurt,” Takeichi said, standing in the middle of my room. “They got wet and now they hurt.”
Looking more closely, I saw that both of his ears were in a terrible state. They were so full of pus they looked ready to overflow at any moment.
“Oh, how terrible!” I cried in exaggerated surprise. “That must really hurt!”
“I’m so sorry I pulled you out into the rain,” I spoke tenderly, in an almost womanly manner, as I made my “gentle” apology. I ran downstairs to fetch alcohol and cotton balls and made Takeichi rest his head on my lap as I carefully cleaned his ears. Not even Takeichi saw the evil intent behind this hypocritical act. He even made an attempt at ignorant flattery as he lay there.
“You know, I bet girls will fall for you.”
Many years later and to my regret, I was to discover that these words were a prediction. A prediction so terrible I doubt even Takeichi was aware of it. The words themselves are silly: to “fall for” someone, to have someone “fall for” you. Crude and absurdly foppish, no matter how ostensibly “austere” one’s surroundings, their mere utterance is enough to cause the walls of even the most depressing temple to collapse before your eyes, leaving you feeling blank and empty. Yet it is a peculiar thing. If we move away from such crude notions as how difficult it is to have girls falling for you and instead, to phrase it in literary terms, consider the anxiety of being loved, then those depressing temple walls remain intact.
When Takeichi proffered this absurd flattery, saying that girls would fall for me, I just smiled and blushed as I cleaned his ears and did not say a word. Yet, in fact, I did have an inkling—if only faintly—that there might be something to what he said. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t write “there might be something to what he said” in that absurd, self-satisfied, boastful sense that such uncouth expressions as “girls will fall for you” typically evoke. That would be too much, even coming from one of the dissolute young men who appear in rakugo stories. Clearly, I did not think, “there might be something to it” in this kind of ridiculous, smirking manner.
Women were a hundred times more difficult for me to understand than men. There were more women than men in my family and, even among my more distant relatives, there were many girls. There were also the maids who had “violated” me, and it is no exaggeration to say I grew up playing exclusively with girls. Yet, despite that, when I was with women I always behaved as though I were walking on thin ice. They seemed to me almost completely beyond understanding. I stumbled about blindly, sometimes accidentally treading on the tail of the tiger and suffering a terrible mauling as a result. Unlike the beatings I received at the hands of men, however, these wounds did not show. Like a kind of internal bleeding, they attacked me from the inside and in the most unpleasant manner imaginable. Such wounds were long and difficult to heal.
Women clasp me to them only to thrust me away. When others are around they scorn me and treat me cruelly, but the moment we are alone they cling to me. They sleep deeply, like the dead. I sometimes wonder if women live only to sleep. I’d made many observations about women, even when I was young. Though they were of the same species I could not help but think of women as altogether different from men, and, oddly, these enigmatic, mercurial creatures cared for me. To say that they “fell for me” or that they “loved me” would not, in my case, be accurate. It is more apt, I think, to say they “cared for me.”
Women were even more at ease with my clowning than men. When I acted the clown around men, they did not, as you might imagine, cackle away, on and on and on. I knew that taking my performance too far around men would end in failure, so I was always careful to wrap things up at just the right moment. Women, though, do not understand moderation. They drove me on and on, demanding more and more of my clowning, calling for one encore after another until I was utterly exhausted. Women really do laugh a lot. They are capable of gorging themselves on pleasure much more than men.
When I was in middle school both the elder and the younger sister would visit my room on the second floor whenever they had a free moment. Each time I heard them at my door I jumped up in fright.
“Are you studying?” a tentative voice would ask.
“Nope,” I’d reply, grinning as I closed my book. “Today, at school, Gramps, he’s our geography teacher . . .” and I’d make myself start rattling off another funny story.
“Yō-chan, put these glasses on,” Setchan said one night, after she and Sis had come to my room and forced me to give one performance after another.
“Why?”
“Never mind why, just do it. Take Sis’s glasses.”
They were always ordering me about in this brusque manner. So the clown did as he was told and put on the glasses. The second I did so the two sisters burst out laughing.
“It’s him! It’s Lloyd! He looks just like him!”
Harold Lloyd, a foreign movie star known for his comedies, was very popular in Japan at the time.
I stood up, one hand raised.
“Ladies and gentleman,” I began, “I would like to take this opportunity to tell all my fans in Japan . . .” This made them laugh all the harder and from then on I made sure to go to the theater whenever they screened a Lloyd film so I could secretly study his mannerisms and expressions.
Another time, I was lying in bed reading a book one autumn evening when Sis came flying into my room like a bird and threw herself onto my bed, collapsing in a fit of tears.
“Oh, Yō-chan, you’ll save me, won’t you? Of course you will! We should leave this wretched house—just the two of us. Oh, save me! Save me!”
She went on and on like this, raving and weeping in turn. This wasn’t the first time I’d been exposed to a woman in such a state, so I wasn’t terribly surprised at the violence of her words. On the contrary, I found her trite, empty theatrics rather tedious, and, slipping out from under my blankets, I walked over to my desk, peeled a persimmon, and handed her a slice. She sat up at this, sniffing and hiccoughing as she ate, and said, “Do you have any good books? Give me one.”
I took down a copy of Sōseki’s I Am a Cat and passed it to her.
“Thanks for the persimmon,” she said with an embarrassed smile and walked out of the room. She wasn’t the only woman who confused me. All women did. Trying to figure out what was going through their minds as they led their lives was more complicated, more troublesome, and more unsettling than trying to discern the thoughts of an earthworm. All I knew, as experience had taught me from a very young age, was that when a woman suddenly burst out crying like that, the best thing to do was give her something sweet. She’d start to feel better once she ate.
Sometimes the younger sister, Setchan, would even bring her friends to my room. As usual, I’d entertain one and all equally, but once they went home she invariably started criticizing them. You’d better watch out for that one, she’s no good, she’d proclaim. In that case why go to all the trouble of bringing her up here? Thanks to Setchan, almost all of my visitors were women.
However, Takeichi’s prediction, that women would “fall for me,” had not yet been realized. I was still nothing more than northeastern Japan’s Harold Lloyd. It would be several years yet before Takeichi’s ignorant flattery came vividly to life, revealing itself as an ominous, disturbing foretelling.
Takeichi proffered one other, magnificent gift.
“Look! It’s a monster!” He exclaimed when he came to my room, proudly showing me a color print, the frontispiece of some book.
What’s this, I thought. Years later I became convinced that it was in this precise instant that the path I later stumbled down was determined. I recognized the picture. It was merely Van Gogh’s famous self-portrait. French impressionists were all the rage at the time, and, as art appreciation classes typically started off with these kinds of paintings, even middle school children in small country towns like mine could recognize works by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, and the rest. In my case, I’d seen many Van Gogh prints and been struck by his unique touch and his bright, vibrant colors, yet not once had it occurred to me to think of them as paintings of monsters.
“Well then, how about this one? Is this a monster, too?” I pulled a collection of Modigliani’s paintings down from my bookshelf and showed Takeichi his famous portrait of a nude, her skin like burnt copper.
“Whoa!” Takeichi exclaimed, his eyes wide and round. “It looks like one of the horses of hell!”
“So it is a monster, then.”
“I want to draw those kinds of monster pictures, too.”
Contrary to what you might expect, just as timid and easily frightened people long all the more for a raging storm to grow stronger still, those who live in utter terror of human beings develop a psychological need to see, clearly and with their own two eyes, ever more frightening and terrible monsters but, alas, these artists, so wounded by that monster called humanity, are so terrorized that, in the end, they believe in visions, and monsters appear vividly before their eyes under the merciless glare of nature’s noonday sun. What’s more, they don’t attempt clowning deceptions, they try to depict things precisely as they see them, resolutely drawing “monsters,” just as Takeichi said. Here, I thought, are my future comrades, growing so flushed with excitement that hot tears trickled down my cheeks.
“I’ll paint them, too. I’ll paint monsters. I’ll paint the horses of hell,” I told Takeichi, my voice inexplicably dropping to a faint whisper.
Ever since elementary school I’d enjoyed both looking at pictures and painting my own. Yet my paintings never received as much attention as my written compositions. Since I placed no faith whatsoever in the language of human beings, my compositions were nothing more than a simple form of clowning. Throughout elementary and middle school they sent my teachers into paroxysms of laughter. But they meant nothing to me. It was only in my paintings (cartoons are a different story) that I struggled to express something in my own way, immature though it may have been. The model sketches from textbooks bored me, and the teacher’s drawings were execrable, so I was left to my own devices, haphazardly cobbling together random styles of painting in an attempt to discover one for myself. By the time I started middle school I’d acquired a complete oil painting set, but though I tried to emulate the touch of the impressionists, my paintings always ended up looking flat and blank, the figures like paper dolls. I was at a loss. Thanks to Takeichi, however, I realized my approach had been completely wrong. In my naiveté and ignorance I’d taken things I thought were beautiful and tried to replicate that beauty in my paintings. True masters, however, took the most unremarkable objects and, through their own interpretation, created something beautiful. Or they took the ugliest objects and, through their unabashed fascination, imbued them with the joy of expression, even as the sight of them made their stomachs turn. In short, the true master is not swayed in the slightest by the expectations of others. It was Takeichi who bestowed this secret, this primitive treatise upon me, and, little by little, away from the eyes of my female visitors, I set myself to the task of composing self-portraits.
So dark and gloomy were these paintings that even I shrank from them. Yet, I told myself encouragingly, this is my true self, the one I so assiduously conceal in the depths of my heart. I smile cheerfully on the surface and make others laugh, but in truth mine is a melancholy soul. There was no point in denying it. Even so, I never showed my paintings to anyone other than Takeichi. I was afraid that people might see through my clowning and glimpse the misery it concealed, and I didn’t want to be forced to be on my guard all the time. And I feared they might not realize that the paintings were an expression of my true self but rather see them as some new extension of my clowning and treat them as a hilarious joke. That would be far too much to bear, so I concealed my paintings in the deepest corner of my closet as soon as I finished them.
I also kept my “monster technique” secret at school. In art classes I continued to paint as before, with a mediocre touch, drawing beautiful things beautifully.
Takeichi was the only person I’d felt comfortable sharing my vulnerable, sensitive nature with, so I didn’t worry about showing him my self-portraits. He praised them extravagantly, and when I had drawn two or three more monster paintings, he bestowed his second foretelling on me.
“You’ll be a famous artist someday.”
With these two predictions branded onto my forehead by poor, simple Takeichi—that girls would fall for me and that I’d someday become a famous artist—I soon made my way to Tokyo.
I’d rather have gone to art school, but Father had long since decided to send me to higher school with the aim of making me a government official. As usual, I was incapable of uttering a word of protest when this decision was handed down, and, without giving it much thought, I did as I was bid. I was told to give the entrance exam a try a year earlier than usual, and—being thoroughly sick of my school of sea and cherry blossoms—I passed the exam for a Tokyo higher school in my fourth year and so skipped my fifth year. I lived in a dormitory at first but was repulsed by its filth and brutality. There was no room for clowning in such a place, so, persuading a doctor to write a letter diagnosing me with pulmonary tuberculosis, I left the dormitory and moved into my father’s Tokyo villa in Sakuragi. I could never live in a communal environment. Whenever I heard people going on about the “sincerity and enthusiasm of youth” or the “pride of youth” and that kind of thing I couldn’t suppress a shudder. That kind of talk, that kind of “school spirit” was utterly alien to me. Classroom and dormitory alike seemed to me a midden heap of twisted sexual desire where my near-perfect clowning was of no avail.
When the Diet wasn’t sitting Father only spent a week or two each month in Tokyo, and while he was away there were only three of us in the large house—me and the elderly couple who looked after the place—so I was able to skip classes now and then. Yet I never felt any desire to go out and see the sights of Tokyo (even now it seems I will end my days without ever having seen the Meiji Shrine or the bronze statue of Kusunoki Masahige or having visited the graves of the forty-seven samurai at Sengaku Temple) and instead spent the whole day at home reading and painting. When Father was in Tokyo I rushed off to class early each morning, but I sometimes stopped at Yasuda Shintarō’s Western-style painting studio in the Sendagi district of Hongō instead, spending three or four hours at a time practicing my sketching. Ever since I’d escaped from the dormitory, even when I did show up to class I felt strangely distant from my classmates, as though I were just an auditing student. Perhaps this was a result of my own biases, but it became painfully obvious to me, and I grew increasingly reluctant to attend classes. Throughout my entire time at elementary, middle, and higher schools I never managed to understand what they meant by “school spirit.” I never even bothered to learn any of my school songs.
Not long after I began frequenting the Yasuda studio an art student introduced me to the world of liquor, cigarettes, whores, pawnshops, and Marxism. An odd combination, to be sure, but it’s true.
His name was Horiki Masao. Born in an older part of Tokyo, he was six years older than me and a graduate of a private fine arts academy. Since he didn’t have an atelier at home, he visited the studio so he could continue his study of Western art.
“Hey, lend me five yen, will ya?”
I’d seen him around but we’d never spoken. Flustered, I thrust out a five-yen note.
“Excellent! You’re a good kid. Let’s have a drink—my treat.”
Incapable of refusing, I let myself be dragged to a café district near the studio. That was the beginning of our acquaintance.
“Y’know, I’ve had my eye on you. For a while now. That! That shy smile, right there! That’s the look of someone with the potential to be a real artist. To our new friendship, then—cheers! Hey Kinu, what do you make of this one? He’s a pretty one, don’t you think? Don’t go falling for him, though. Since he started coming to the studio I’m only the second prettiest boy and more’s the pity.”
Horiki had a sallow complexion with sharp, chiseled features, and, unusual for an art student, he wore a suit, favored somber neckties, and parted his pomaded hair straight down the middle.
Unaccustomed to such places, I was in a constant state of terror. I kept crossing and uncrossing my arms, and, indeed, all I could manage was that shy smile. But after two or three glasses of beer, strangely, I began to experience a feeling of lightness, not unlike liberation.
“I wanted to go to art school but . . .”
“No, it’s a bore. Boring! School is boring. Our teacher is nature herself! The pathos of nature!”
I didn’t pay the slightest attention to his words. I thought he was a bit of an idiot, and no doubt his paintings would be terrible too. For all that, though, he might be a useful companion when it came to having fun. In short, for the very first time in my life, I’d met a real, live city scoundrel. Though we looked different—insofar as we were both cut off from the workings of this world of human beings, inasmuch as we were both confused— we were the same. The essential difference separating us was that, unlike me, his clowning was wholly unconscious and he was completely ignorant of its tragic nature.
We were just having fun. He was just someone to go out and have a good time with, I told myself. I scorned him and was even ashamed of our friendship sometimes as we walked about town together. Yet, in the end, I was destroyed even by the likes of him.
In the beginning, however, I thought him a fine fellow indeed. So fine a fellow one hardly saw his like, and, terrified of people though I was, even I was put off my guard as I found myself thinking I had discovered the perfect guide to Tokyo. To be honest, left to my own devices, I was even terrified of the conductors when I set foot on a train. I yearned to see a Kabuki play but was frightened of the young, female ushers who lined either side of the red carpet leading up the theater steps. At restaurants I was scared of the busboys, lurking silently behind me, waiting to clear my plate. And when it came time to pay the bill—oh, how I fumbled. I grew dizzy when it came time to hand over the money. My head spun, the world went dark, and I thought I was going half mad. Not out of parsimony, you see, but because I was so nervous, so embarrassed, so anxious and terrified. Far from trying to haggle the price down, not only would I often forget to take my change, it was so bad that I often even forgot to take the thing I had just purchased. It was utterly impossible for me to go walking about Tokyo on my own. That was the real reason I spent whole days lazing about at home.
When Horiki and I went out, I just handed him my wallet and let him do all of the haggling. He was quite adept at having fun. He could extract the greatest amount of pleasure from the smallest amount of money. We eschewed one-yen taxis, relying instead on his familiarity with the complex network of trains, buses, steamers, and every other cheap means of transport to get us to our destination in the shortest possible time. On the way home after a long night at the brothels he knew which inn to stop at for a bath, boiled tofu, and a quick drink—though cheap, it felt almost luxurious. He equipped me with a practical education. He extolled the virtues of yakitori and beef bowls as cheap and nutritious. He avowed that there was nothing better for getting drunk fast than an electric brandy cocktail. And when it came time to pay the reckoning, he never once gave me cause for anxiety.
Horiki’s true value, however, lay in the fact that he never paid any attention to his listener’s thoughts or feelings. He just went on and on, spouting his “pathos,” with never a break in his banal chatter (perhaps that is the definition of “passion”—the ability to ignore the opinions of one’s listener). When I was with Horiki there was never any danger that, exhausted from walking, we might lapse into one of those awkward silences. Whenever I was around others I was constantly on my guard in case one of those terrifying silences should suddenly appear. Though taciturn by nature, I felt obliged to press on with my clowning, desperately, as though some grand victory or terrible defeat hung in the balance. That fool Horiki, however, assumed the role of clown for himself without even realizing it, so I hardly ever had to speak at all. It was enough for me to smile from time to time and interject the occasional exclamation.
It didn’t take me long to discover that liquor, cigarettes, and prostitutes were wonderfully effective ways to banish my fear of people, if only temporarily. It got to the point where I began to think that selling all I owned would not be too high a price to pay in order to continue these pursuits.
To me, prostitutes were neither human beings nor women but more like lunatics or idiots, and I could find solace in their embrace. I slept soundly when I was with them. They were so utterly lacking in anything like greed it was almost pitiable. Perhaps sensing a kindred spirit, they displayed a natural, though not oppressive, affection toward me. Theirs was an affection free from calculation, an affection devoid of ulterior motives, the affection you feel for a person you might never meet again. Some nights I actually saw the Madonna’s halo hovering over their heads, those idiots and lunatics.
Yet, while I visited the brothels in search of some meager respite from my terror of humanity—if only for a night—and as I entertained myself with my kindred spirits, I started to undergo an unexpected change. An inauspicious aura began to coalesce about me, eddying and swirling. It was, I suppose, a kind of “gift” that prostitutes bestowed on a favored customer, though not one I had expected to receive. The contours of this gift gradually became visible and grew increasingly distinct so that, when Horiki finally pointed it out to me, I was both astonished and, I must admit, disgusted. To put it in objective though somewhat vulgar terms, the whores had been training me. They had been teaching me how to interact with women. Worse still, being prostitutes, they were relentless when it came to the study of this particular field, and their training had already effected quite a change in me. I’d become quite the adept. Already, it seemed, I’d acquired the scent of a “Don Juan” and women (not just whores) seemed to pick up on it instinctively, converging on me. This lascivious and disreputable air, it seems, was the “gift” they’d granted me, and that gift, more than my pursuit of respite, was starting to attract an uncomfortable amount of attention.
Horiki probably intended the remark as a compliment, at least in part. Yet I couldn’t help but feel something disturbing and oppressive in it. For example, there was the naive, childish letter sent by a woman at a café. There was the general’s daughter of about twenty who lived next door to me in Sakuragi; each morning around the time I left for school, she would be loitering near her gate, wearing makeup, for no apparent reason. There was the time I went to a steakhouse and one of the maids—though I hadn’t so much as said a word to her . . . And when I bought cigarettes at the local tobacconist’s, inside the box she handed me . . . The woman sitting next to me at the Kabuki play . . . The night I got drunk and fell asleep on the train . . . When, completely out of the blue, I received a brooding letter from the daughter of a relative back home . . . Or when a girl—I have no idea who—left a handmade doll for me at my house when I was out. I am extraordinarily passive, so none of these incidents developed into anything more, they were mere fragments, yet it’s difficult to deny that some kind of aura seemed to linger about me, ensnaring women. I’m not joking or boasting of my romantic prowess—it is simply the truth. But that someone like Horiki should point it out to me caused a pain not unlike humiliation, and with that my desire to seek the company of prostitutes cooled markedly.
One day, perhaps thinking to appear fashionably modern (being Horiki, it is difficult to imagine any other reason), Horiki took me to a secret gathering, a kind of communist reading group (I think they called it the “R-S” but my memory is vague). For Horiki, this kind of thing was no doubt nothing more than another stop on his “grand tour of Tokyo.” I was introduced to the “comrades,” forced to buy some pamphlets, and then subjected to a lecture on Marxist economics by the leader of the group, a young man with a profoundly ugly face. I couldn’t help but think that everything they said was nothing more than common sense. It was true enough, but there is more to the human soul than just that. There is also something incomprehensible, something terrifying. Desire is too weak a word for it, as is vanity. Even if we combine Eros and desire it’s still not quite enough. I’m not sure myself what it is, but I am certain that the foundation of human society is not economics. It’s something more, with the uncanny air of a strange and scary folk tale. Living in abject terror of that strange folk tale as I did, I was able to accept theories of materialism as easily as I accepted the fact that water runs downhill, but these theories did not liberate me from my dread of humans, they did not arouse in me a sense of joy or the hopefulness of a man whose eyes have been opened to the newly sprouted, green leaves of spring. Nevertheless, I attended every single meeting of the “R-S” (again, I think that was the name but I may be mistaken). It was all I could do not to burst out laughing at their debates. They were all so tense and grave as they became engrossed in their absurd, obvious attempts to demonstrate the theoretical equivalent of one and one making, in fact, two. I used my clowning to try to make the meetings a bit more relaxed, and, perhaps as a result, the atmosphere did grow a bit less stuffy. I was soon so popular I’d become an indispensable member of the group. These naive people must have taken me for one of their own, a naive youth like them. A happy-go-lucky, clowning “comrade.” If so, they were deceived from start to finish. I was not their comrade. Still, I attended every meeting without fail, entertaining all with my antics.
I went because I liked it. Because I was fond of the people. That is not to say, however, that our intimacy was born out of our mutual devotion to Marxism.
“Illicit.” It aroused a faint thrill in me. Or rather, I found the concept almost comforting. For it was the legitimate parts of the world that terrified me (I sensed in them something infinitely strong). Their workings mystified me, and I couldn’t endure sitting in that freezing, windowless room. Though the outside might be nothing but an ocean of lawlessness I thought it better by far to dive in and swim until I should die.
There is a word: “pariah.” In human society this word is used to indicate those who have failed, the pathetic, the immoral. Ever since I was born, I felt I was a pariah, and whenever I met someone that society had also deemed worthy of being so branded I always felt a deep sense of compassion. So deep was my compassion that I sometimes caught myself in silent admiration of it.
There is another phrase: “guilty conscience.” I’ve lived my whole life plagued by my conscience yet, at the same time, it has been a faithful companion—like a devoted wife standing by me through thick and thin as the two of us frolic in our gloom. There’s also the saying “to have skeletons in one’s closet.” For me, those skeletons appeared the moment I was born, and, instead of disappearing as I grew up, they became stronger and more solid until they weighed so heavily upon me that I suffered the torments of a million different hells each night. Even so (no doubt this will sound very odd), they gradually came to be more familiar to me than my own flesh and blood. Their weight, like the pain of an open wound, was like whispered protestations of love. To such a man as me, the mood of the underground political meetings I attended was thus strangely relaxing and oddly comfortable. In the end, it wasn’t the movement’s goals but its nature that attracted me. The only reason Horiki went was to mock them as a bunch of idiots, and, after the initial introduction, he never returned. Their mission might be to research production, he would say, but mine is to research consumption, and, with that lame jest, he never went back, henceforth inviting me only to participate in his research of consumption. Now that I think back on it, I see there were several different kinds of Marxists. Some were like Horiki, people who became self-proclaimed Marxists in a pique of vain modernity, and then there were those like me who, drawn by the scent of the illicit, merely settled themselves in their midst. Had the true believers among the Marxists ever guessed at our real natures I don’t doubt that their anger would have been as a raging inferno. They would have condemned us as contemptible traitors and expelled us on the spot. Yet neither I nor even Horiki were ever expelled. I, especially, felt more relaxed and was able to behave in a “healthier” manner in that illicit, underground world than I could among the gentlemen of polite society, and it wasn’t long before the others came to see me as a promising young “comrade,” entrusting me with all sorts of tasks, each enshrouded in such an absurd degree of secrecy that it was difficult not to laugh. What’s more, I never refused any task, I accepted all with equanimity, I never got rattled or attracted the suspicion of the “dogs” (that’s what the comrades called the police). I never blundered or did anything that would get me taken in for questioning. Laughingly—and making everyone else laugh—I undertook all kinds of dangerous missions (members of the movement would grow terribly tense, as if they were attempting something of monumental importance. Like in a second-rate detective novel, they used such extreme caution in the execution of tasks so insignificant I could not help but feel a bit bewildered by it all. Nevertheless, when it came to making my errands sound perilous, they spared no effort), or so they called them, without flaw or mishap. At the time, the prospect of being arrested as a party member and imprisoned, even if it was for life, didn’t trouble me in the slightest. Compared to the terror I felt toward “real life” in human society and the hellish torments of my nightly insomnia, I sometimes thought that life in prison might be an improvement.
Though Father and I lived in the same house, between his visitors and his going out it wasn’t unusual for us to go three or four days without seeing one another. Still, his was a formidable, terrifying presence and I contemplated moving out—perhaps to some sort of boarding house—but even as I tried to muster up the courage to discuss it, the old caretaker informed me that Father was planning to sell off the house.
Father’s term of office was coming to an end and, no doubt having his own reasons for it, he’d decided not to stand for re-election. He’d drawn up plans to add a new wing to our estate at home as a retreat for his retirement and, not having any remaining ties to Tokyo, he must’ve thought it wasteful to maintain an entire house, complete with servants, for the sake of a mere student (Father’s mind, like the minds of everyone else in human society, was a mystery to me). So the house soon passed into the hands of another, and I moved into a gloomy room in a boarding house called “The Hermitage” in the nearby Hongō district, where I immediately found myself struggling to make ends meet.
Before, I’d been receiving a monthly allowance from Father, and, even if I spent it all in two or three days, there were always cigarettes, liquor, cheese, fruit, and so on to be had around the house. When it came to things like stationery, books, and clothes I could go to any of the local shops and put them on my father’s account. If Horiki and I went out for noodles or a tempura rice bowl, I had only to go to one of the restaurants my father patronized. I could leave without paying and nobody said a word.
Now, suddenly living on my own at the boarding house, I had to make do with the allowance alone. I was at a complete loss. Naturally, my money vanished in two or three days. I was horrified, and, growing so wretched that I thought I might go mad, I sent telegram after telegram to Father, to my brothers and my sisters in turn, begging them to send money, saying I would explain in a letter to follow (the circumstances I explained in those letters were, each and every one, mere empty clowning. I thought that if I was going to ask for something I should at least try to make them laugh). Under Horiki’s tutelage I diligently commuted to and from the pawnshops yet, even so, I was forever short of funds.
In the end, I simply didn’t possess the ability to make it on my own, alone in a boarding house without any connections to help me. I was too frightened to simply stay at home. I would be overcome by the fear that a complete stranger might burst in at any moment and attack me, so, as though dodging a blow, I fled into the city, helping out in the movement or drinking at cheap bars with Horiki. I’d all but abandoned my studies and my painting and, in November of my second year of school, I became embroiled in a love suicide with an older, married woman, and my life changed forever.
I skipped all my classes and never studied for any of my subjects, but I seemed to have an odd knack for exams so, one way or another, I was able to maintain the deception with my parents. However, unbeknownst to me, the school had contacted my parents directly, telling them that I would soon surpass the limit for absenteeism. Soon, at Father’s direction, my eldest brother started sending me long letters full of stern warnings. Yet, what really troubled me—far more than school—was my lack of funds and the fact that my work for the movement had gotten so demanding I could no longer treat it as a joke. I’d been promoted to the head of the Marxist Student Corps for the Central District or something like that. In any case, I was in charge of Hongō, Koishikawa, Shitaya, Kanda, and all the surrounding areas. People started talking about an armed uprising, so I bought a small pocketknife (thinking back on it, it was such a flimsy thing I doubt it would’ve served to sharpen a pencil) and took to carrying it about in the pocket of my raincoat as I ran about town making “contacts.” All I wanted to do was get drunk and sleep like the dead, but I didn’t have any money. And the “P” (that was our code word for the party. Or at least I think it was—I may be mistaken) kept sending me out on mission after mission, never giving me enough time to catch my breath. Given my delicate health it was highly unlikely I’d be able to keep it up for much longer. I’d only started in the movement because I was attracted to the “illicit,” so I couldn’t help feeling annoyed when it began to occupy so much of my time. Privately, I came to the conclusion they’d picked the wrong person for the job and should give it to one of their true believers instead. So I ran away. As you might expect, that didn’t make me feel very good, and I resolved to die.
At the time, there were three women who were particularly fond of me. One was the boarding-house owner’s daughter. After I got home at night, bone-tired from my work for the movement, heading straight to bed without even bothering to eat, she would invariably come knocking at my door saying, “I’m sorry but my brother and sister are making so much noise downstairs that I can’t concentrate on this letter.” And with that she’d settle herself at my desk to write for an hour or more.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if I could have just ignored her and gone to sleep but it was obvious she wanted me to talk to her, and, as usual, this sparked my passive need to please. Worn out as I was, I wasn’t interested in exchanging so much as a single word with her, yet, even so, I gathered up my remaining energy and, rolling over onto my stomach, lit a cigarette, saying, “I hear there’s a man who heats his bath with the love letters he gets.”
“That’s horrid! Talking about yourself, I suppose?”
“I did warm up some milk once.”
“My, my, what an honor. Drink up, then.”
I just wanted her to hurry up and leave. The whole pretense of the letter was a joke. I was certain she was just scribbling nonsense.
“Show me,” I said, though I’d sooner die than read it. What? No! No, you mustn’t, she protested with obvious delight. It was so terribly pathetic that any interest I might’ve had quickly vanished. Then I got the idea of sending her on an errand.
“Hey, I’m really sorry but can you do me a favor? There’s a pharmacy down on the avenue by the streetcars—can you pick up some Carmotine for me? I’m so exhausted I’m burning up, and I’m so tired I can’t even sleep. Would you mind? The money . . .”
“Oh, don’t worry about the money,” she said, jumping happily to her feet. As I knew very well, women are delighted when a man asks them to do something for him, it is never a cause for distress.
The second woman was one of my “comrades” who studied in the humanities at a women’s teacher’s college. Since we were both involved in the movement I saw her every day, whether I wanted to or not. Even after the meetings finished she would follow me around for hours on end and was always buying me all sorts of presents.
“You can think of me as your elder sister.”
Though this crude affectation made me shudder I could only reply, “Of course I will,” forcing my face into a faint, melancholy smile. I mustn’t make her angry, I thought, frightened. I had to distract her somehow. I became so focused on placating this ugly, disagreeable woman that I soon found myself entertaining her. I tried to make her laugh with my jokes, and when she bought me presents (they were always in the worst possible taste, and I gave most of them away to people like the old man running the yakitori stall) I forced myself to feign delight. One summer night when she simply wouldn’t leave me alone, I led her into a dark alley and kissed her in the hope it would make her go home. Instead, she grew wild with excitement, and, overcome by a crude madness, hailed a taxi to take us to one of the tiny offices the movement rented secretly, where we raised quite the racket until dawn. I smiled wryly as I wondered just what kind of elder sister she thought herself to be.
Along with the girl at my boarding house, I had no choice but to see this “comrade” every day, and, unlike the other women I’d known, there was no way to avoid them. Before long my usual anxiety took over, and I was running myself ragged in my attempts to keep the both of them happy. I felt trapped, unable to move so much as a finger.
Around the same time one of the waitresses at a large Ginza café did me an unexpected favor. Though I’d only met her the one time, I couldn’t dispel my sense of obligation, so, again I found myself all but paralyzed with worry and imagined fears. I’d learned by then to affect sufficient impudence that I no longer needed Horiki to guide me about town. I could take the train on my own, go to Kabuki plays, and even walk into cafés, dressed though I was in cheap, threadbare clothes. On the inside, of course, I was the same as I’d always been, and the suspicion, terror, and anxiety I felt toward the violence and confidence of human beings was undiminished. Only on the surface had I slowly reached the point where I could greet people with a straight face. Well, no, that’s not precisely true. I invariably employed the wry grin of a defeated clown, but, regardless, though my greetings and small talk might be hopelessly confused, I’d nevertheless managed to cultivate a “talent” for it. Was it thanks to my work with the movement? Or was it women? Or liquor? The main reason I was starting to acquire these new skills, I suspect, is that I was broke. This induced in me a state of constant terror no matter where I was, and I thought the sense of oppression might ease somewhat if I immersed myself in the jostling crowd of drunks, waitresses, and busboys typical of big cafés. So it was that, with ten yen in my pocket, I went alone to a Ginza café and, grinning at the waitress, said, “I’ve only got ten yen, so don’t expect much.”
“Don’t worry.”
She spoke with a faint Kansai accent. And, oddly, her simple words soothed my jangling nerves. No, not because I didn’t have to worry about money; it was because I got the sense that I didn’t have to worry about being with her.
I drank. I felt relaxed around her, and, not feeling compelled to play the clown, I let my true nature show through, drinking in gloomy, taciturn silence.
“Would you like any of these?” she asked, laying a variety of dishes out on the table. I just shook my head.
“Just liquor? I’ll join you, then.”
It was a cold, autumn night. At Tsuneko’s request (I think that’s what she called herself but my memory has faded so I can’t be sure. That says a lot about the kind of person I am. I even forget the name of the person I tried to commit suicide with), I went to a sushi stall in one of the alleys of Ginza and, eating truly terrible sushi (though I can’t recall her name, the sushi—or rather, how bad it was—remains firmly fixed in my memory. I remember the old man running the stand had a crew cut and a face like a Japanese rat snake. He made a show of flailing about as he made the sushi, pretending he actually knew what he was doing. I can see all of this as clearly as if it were right before me. Years later and more than a few times I have caught myself looking at a face that seems oddly familiar before realizing, with a wry smile, that it looks like that old man from the sushi stand. Though the woman’s name and, by now, even her face have faded from my mind, the fact that I can still recall that old man’s face so clearly I could draw it from memory shows how bad the sushi was and how cold and miserable it made me feel. In any case, though I’ve been taken to supposedly famous sushi restaurants, I’ve never enjoyed sushi. The pieces are too big. Why couldn’t they just make them smaller? Why not just make them thumb-sized?), I waited for her to finish her shift.
She lived in a rented room over a carpenter’s workshop in Honjo. I made no effort to conceal my gloomy nature as I sat in her room, drinking tea, one hand pressed to my cheek, as though I had a terrible toothache. Oddly, rather than being repelled, she seemed drawn to this attitude of mine. She too seemed utterly alone. A cold, early winter wind blew about her, with only dead leaves whirling crazily about her.
As we lay there she told me she was two years older than me, from Hiroshima . . . I have a husband, he was a barber back in Hiroshima but we ran off, came to Tokyo last spring, he never bothered with a proper job after that, he got arrested for fraud, he’s in prison now, I visit him every day, I bring him all sorts of gifts, starting tomorrow I’m not going back. On and on she went, telling me the story of her life. I’m not sure why but I always get bored when women start telling me about their lives. Maybe it’s because they aren’t very good storytellers—they emphasize all the wrong parts—but it all goes in one ear and out the other.
Forlorn.
Had a woman but whispered that one word it would have evoked more sympathy from me than the thousands and millions of other words they expended talking about themselves. It seems strange and almost mysterious that I’ve never heard a woman speak that one word. Though Tsuneko never uttered the word “forlorn” aloud, it seemed to eddy about her, like a current of air an inch thick, and when I was near, it enveloped me as well, blending and merging perfectly with my own stinging current of melancholy. Just as “The autumn leaf settles on a stone in water’s depths,” I was able to distance myself from my fear and my anxiety.
The night I spent with this wife of a man imprisoned for fraud was, for me, joyous (I doubt I will again so unhesitatingly employ such bold and positive language in the entirety of my journals) and liberating in a manner completely different from the deep, peaceful sleep I found in the arms of those simple-minded prostitutes (who were nothing if not cheerful).
Yet, it was only the one night. When I woke in the morning, I jumped up and once again dressed myself in the guise of the frivolous clown. The true coward is frightened even by happiness. He is bruised even by cotton wool. He is wounded even by joy. Panicking, I wanted to escape, quickly, before I got hurt, so I surrounded myself in the familiar smoke screen of the clown.
“You know that old saying? ‘Love flies out by the window when poverty comes in by the door’? Most people have it all wrong. It doesn’t mean the woman leaves when the man runs out of money. It’s, when a man runs out of money he . . . he loses heart, he’s no good. He gets so weak he can’t even laugh, he gets this strange inferiority complex, he gets desperate, and he’s the one who pushes the woman away. At that point he’s half mad and he starts pushing and shoving and shoving until he breaks free. Well, at least that’s what it says in a book I read. Sad, isn’t it? Alas, I know the feeling all too well.”
I seem to recall saying something stupid along those lines, making Tsuneko burst out laughing. “Well, there’s no point in dawdling,” I said, and with a “thanks for everything,” I left without so much as washing my face. My silly story about “love flying out when poverty comes in” created unexpected complications later.
A month or so went by before I saw my benefactor of that evening again. With each passing day the joy I had experienced faded and the fleeting kindness she’d shown filled me with a growing sense of dread. Even the most mundane things, such as when Tsuneko paid my bill at the café, aroused in me a terrible sense of obligation, and this came to distress me more and more. Before long I started thinking of Tsuneko much as I thought of the girl from my boarding house or the “comrade” from the women’s teacher’s college. I came to see her only as a threat and, though she was far away, I lived in constant terror of her. To make things worse I couldn’t help thinking that, should I run into a woman I’d once slept with, she would suddenly explode in a furious rage. The prospect of meeting my former lover was thus extremely disagreeable to me, and I kept a respectful distance from Ginza. Now, this attitude of mine was not born of cunning but from the simple fact that I had yet to come to terms with one of the stranger aspects of women. I could not comprehend how a woman could sleep with me and then wake up the next morning as though her memory had been wiped clean and, in the most splendid manner, go on with her life as if the world of night and the world of day were completely cut off from one another.
Toward the end of November Horiki and I were drinking at a cheap stand bar on the side of the road in Kanda. When we left, my disreputable friend insisted we go somewhere else and keep drinking. Let’s drink, let’s drink, he kept saying over and over again, although neither of us had any money. I was fairly drunk by this point and, feeling particularly daring, said, “All right, then. I’ll take you to the land of dreams. Prepare yourself! I’ll take you to a feast, to lakes of liquor, to forests of food. . . .”
“A café?”
“Yup.”
“Let’s go!”
And with that we hopped on a streetcar. Horiki, in high spirits, announced, “I’m starving for a woman! Can I kiss the waitress?”
Horiki knew that I disliked it when he played the vulgar drunk, so he persisted, trying to gain my permission.
“I’m really going to do it. You wait and see—whoever sits next to me, I’m going to kiss her. You’ll see!”
“Do what you like.”
“You are too kind. I’m starving for a woman.”
We got off at Ginza 4-chōme and, putting all our faith in Tsuneko’s generosity, walked into that massive café, that veritable lake of liquor and forest of food despite not having a single coin between us. We stopped at the first empty booth we saw, and Horiki and I sat down facing one another. Tsuneko and another waitress came running up to us. The other woman sat next to me. I let out a faint gasp when Tsuneko dropped down next to Horiki. She was about to be kissed.
I didn’t feel any regret. I wasn’t a particularly possessive person and, even should I feel the occasional glimmer of jealousy, I lacked the spirit to fight for my claim. So much so that, later, I would even stand and, without a single word of protest, watch my common-law wife being violated.
I wanted to keep as far away from the squabbling of human beings as I could. I was terrified of being drawn into that maelstrom. My relationship with Tsuneko had been limited to that one night. She didn’t belong to me. There was no reason for me to feel regret or any other kind of arrogant desire. Nevertheless, I gasped.
It was a gasp of pity, of pity for poor Tsuneko, about to be roughly kissed by Horiki, right in front of me. Defiled by Horiki, she would no doubt feel obliged to break with me and I, I lacked the necessary passion to stop her. Though I gasped at that moment, at Tsuneko’s misfortune, thinking that everything was over now, I was also filled with a sense of resignation, as pure as water, and I smirked as I looked from Horiki to Tsuneko and back again.
To my surprise, however, things turned out much worse than I expected.
“I can’t!” Horiki exclaimed, his mouth twisting. “Not even I could kiss such a dreary woman.” He grimaced, as though at a complete loss, and, arms crossed, he stared at Tsuneko.
“Bring us something to drink. We don’t have any money,” I muttered to Tsuneko. In truth, I wanted to drown myself in liquor. In the eyes of a philistine, Tsuneko might be nothing but a glum, penniless woman, not even worth the kiss of a lecherous drunk. This thought hit me, unexpectedly and unintentionally, like a thunderclap. That night I drank and I drank, I drank more than I’d ever drunk before. I drank until I could barely stand. Tsuneko and I gazed into one another’s eyes, smiling sadly. No, there was no denying it. She was an oddly frayed woman, she reeked of poverty. And yet, even as I thought this, I felt an affinity with her, the affinity of one poor person for another (I am convinced that, hackneyed though it may be, the fundamental incompatibility of the rich and the poor remains one of the great, timeless dramatic themes), and that, that intimacy, filled my heart. A fondness for her began to grow in me and, for the first time in my life, I sensed the stirrings of what was, for me, a passionate, though somewhat feeble, love. I vomited. I can’t remember anything before or after that point. It was the first time I’d drunk so much that I completely lost myself.
When I awoke Tsuneko was sitting beside my pillow. I was in her room above the carpenter’s shop.
“I thought you were joking, all that talk about love flying out when poverty comes in, but you were serious, weren’t you? You never came back. Not a very clean break, though, was it? What if I make enough for the both of us? Would that work?”
“No.”
Then she lay down next to me. It was around dawn when she first spoke of death. It seemed that she too was weary of living the life of a human being and, for my part, when I thought of my own terror of the world, with all its complications, of money, of the movement, of women, of school—I didn’t see how I could possibly go on. So I blithely assented to her plan.
None of it seemed real to me at the time, though. The true import of her words, “let’s die,” had escaped me. They seemed to conceal an element of “play.”
Later that morning we were wandering around the sixth ward of Asakusa. We went to a coffee shop and I drank a glass of milk.
“Can you get the bill?”
I stood and, taking my coin purse from the sleeve of my kimono, I discovered that I had only three copper coins. I was assailed not so much by shame as by horror. Instantly the desolate scene of my room at the boarding house appeared before my eyes, nothing but a bed and my school uniform. Not a single item left to be pawned, my only other possessions the clothes on my back. This is my life. The realization forced itself on me. I could not go on.
Seeing my confusion, Tsuneko stood up and peered into my purse.
“Oh, is that all you’ve got?”
She spoke innocently enough, yet even so, pain pierced me to the bone. It was the first time that the mere voice of someone I loved caused me pain. Whether or not it was all I had didn’t matter. Those three coins weren’t money. They were a special kind of humiliation, one I’d never tasted before. An unendurable humiliation. I suppose that I hadn’t yet managed to get away from thinking of myself as a “rich boy.” At that moment, now fully aware of what it meant, I resolved to seek my own death.
That night, the two of us jumped into the sea at Kamakura. I borrowed this from a friend at the café, she said, unwinding her obi, and, folding it carefully, she placed it on a boulder. I took off my cloak, lay it next to the obi, and we leapt into the sea.
The woman died. I alone was saved.
Being a higher school student and, perhaps because Father’s name possessed some measure of what they call “news value,” the incident was splashed all over the papers and became quite the scandal.
I was admitted to a hospital by the sea, and one of my relatives from home rushed down to handle all of the arrangements. Before he left he told me that everyone at home—Father first and foremost—was furious with me and that I’d be lucky not to be disowned. I didn’t care about any of that, though. I missed Tsuneko and couldn’t stop weeping at the thought of her. Of all the people I’d known, poor, threadbare Tsuneko was the only one I’d truly loved.
I received a long letter from the girl at my boarding house, a composition of fifty poems, each beginning with the peculiar phrase, “Live for me!” Fifty. The nurses too were always stopping by to see me, smiling brightly. Some of them even took my hand, squeezing it tightly as they left.
It was then that they discovered an abnormality in my left lung. This was a wonderfully convenient turn of events for me, as, when the police eventually came and took me in for the crime of abetting suicide, they treated me as an invalid and put me in a special holding cell apart from the others.
Later the night of my arrest, the old policeman standing the night watch in the guard’s quarters next to my cell came over and slid the door open quietly.
“Hey,” he said, calling out to me. “You must be freezing in there. Come on over here—sit by the fire.”
I made a show of shuffling dejectedly out of my cell and into the guardroom, and sat on a chair next to the charcoal brazier.
“You really miss her, don’t you, the girl who died?”
“Yes.” So faint were my words they seemed to vanish.
“Well, that’s love, isn’t it?” The guard was working himself up to something.
“So, where did you first establish relations with her?” He began questioning me, acting for all the world like an officer of the court. He spoke condescendingly, as though I were a mere child and he the chief prosecutor in charge of the investigation. In the end, his real motive was simply to while away the tedium of a long autumn night by getting me to recount all the salacious details. I saw through him at once, and it was hard not to laugh. Of course, I knew I was under no obligation to answer any of the questions in his “unofficial interrogation,” but I went along with his charade to add a bit of spice to the dull evening. I acted like I believed, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he was no less a figure than the chief investigator himself and that my fate lay wholly in his hands. I made up one absurd “statement” after another, all intended to more or less satisfy his prurient curiosity.
“Yes, I see now. I think I understand the situation. You know, we take it into account when people are forthcoming and answer all of our questions honestly.”
“Thank you very much. I am in your debt.”
I have to say mine was a masterful performance. An impassioned performance that did not stand to benefit me in the slightest.
When morning came I was summoned to the chief’s office. Now it was time for the official interrogation.
The moment I opened the door and entered the office the chief exclaimed, “Well now, here’s a fine young man. This isn’t your fault at all—it’s your mother’s fault for having such a handsome young son!”
The chief was a young man with a slightly swarthy complexion and the educated air of one who’d been to university. His sudden exclamation made me feel wretched. I felt hideously disfigured, as if my face were half-covered with port wine stains.
He had the build of someone who practiced judo or kendo and, in stark contrast to the assiduous, lascivious questioning of the old policeman the night before, his interrogation was straightforward and to the point. When he’d finished and was putting the forms together to be sent to the prosecutor’s office, he turned to me and said, “You really have to start taking better care of yourself. Look, you’re coughing up blood, aren’t you?”
I did have an odd cough that morning, and each time I coughed I would cover my mouth with my handkerchief. The handkerchief, spotted all over with blood, looked like it’d been pelted with red hail. But the blood wasn’t from my coughing; it was from a boil on my ear that I’d been picking at the night before. It occurred to me then that things might go easier for me if I failed to correct the chief, so, eyes downcast and voice penitent, I simply said, “Yes,” and left it at that.
The chief finished with the forms.
“It’s all up to the prosecutor now. He’ll decide whether or not to indict, but, in any event, you’d do well to call someone or send a telegram. Ask them to meet you at the Yokohama Prosecutor’s Office so you can be released into their custody. Is there someone you can call? A guardian or someone who can vouch for you?”
I thought of Mr. Shibuta, my guarantor at school. He was a short, fat man, a bachelor of about forty who came from the same village as me. He traded in art and antiques and was forever going in and out of Father’s villa in Tokyo, playing the role of professional sycophant. His face, and his eyes in particular, had the look of a flounder, and that had become Father’s nickname for him. I’d since picked up the habit as well.
I borrowed the policeman’s phone book and, finding Flounder’s number, called him and asked him to come down to the prosecutor’s office. He spoke with an arrogance that was new for him but agreed to do as I asked in the end.
“Hey, you’d better sterilize that phone! He’s coughing up blood, you know.”
I heard the chief’s voice boom all the way back in my holding cell.
Later that afternoon they tied a thin, hemp rope about my waist. I was allowed to cover it with my cloak but, even so, a young policeman gripped the other end of the rope tightly as we boarded the train to Yokohama.
I wasn’t the slightest bit worried. I even felt a little nostalgic for my holding cell and for the old policeman, too. Why am I this way? Here I am, a criminal, all bound up, and this is when I feel calm and relaxed. Even now, writing these words, an easy happiness grows inside me.
Yet, even among these fond recollections, there was one misstep. One mistake so mortifying that I broke out in a cold sweat, a blunder I will never forget so long as I live. I was brought to the prosecutor’s office—a dim, gloomy place—and underwent another, cursory interrogation. The prosecutor was a quiet man of about forty (if “beauty” had ever been ascribed to me, it was, I do not doubt, nothing more than a base, lascivious beauty. The prosecutor, however, had what can only be called a “virtuous beauty,” with its own aura of wisdom and tranquility). He didn’t seem the type to be bothered by trifles, and I let my guard down entirely. I was answering his questions with a distracted air when I had another fit of coughing. I pulled my handkerchief from my sleeve and, thinking that I might as well make use of the opportunity, devised a despicable scheme. I added two more exaggerated, wheezing coughs, glancing out of the corner of my eye as I pressed the handkerchief to my mouth.
“Really?”
It was a gentle smile. I broke out in a cold sweat. I was horrified. No, even now the mere memory of it makes me want to jump to my feet. It is no exaggeration to say I felt even worse than I did in middle school student when that idiot, Takeichi, poking me in the back and calling me a “show off,” sent me plummeting to the depths of hell. These were the two greatest blunders in my life of acting. So mortified was I that I sometimes think I’d rather have been sentenced to ten years in prison than be subjected to the prosecutor’s gentle scorn.
In the end, I was given a suspended indictment. This didn’t make me feel the slightest bit better. I sat on the bench outside the prosecutor’s office, waiting for Flounder to fetch me, more miserable than I would’ve thought possible.
I stared out at the glow of the setting sun through the tall window. A line of seagulls seemed to form the Chinese character for “woman” as they flew past.