The Second Notebook

At a certain middle school somewhere in the northeast, where more than twenty large mountain cherry trees with black trunks stood in a row along a shore so close to the sea it might as well have been a wave-swept beach, and where when the new school year began, the mountain cherries would open their gorgeous blossoms against a backdrop of blue sea along with sticky brownish young leaves, and when it was time for the blossoms to scatter, the petals would fall in great numbers into the sea and drift across its surface, carried by the waves back to the shore, so that the sandy beach covered in cherry blossoms served as the school grounds — at this school I somehow managed to pass the entrance exam without having studied much. The badge on the school's uniform cap and the uniform's buttons both bore the design of a cherry blossom.

　Right next to this middle school was the house of a distant relative of my family, and partly for that reason my father had chosen this school of sea and cherry blossoms for me. I was placed in their care, and since the school was right nearby, I was a rather lazy middle school student who would hear the morning assembly bell ring and then run off to school — but even so, through my usual clowning I was gaining popularity in the class day by day.

　It was the first time I had gone to a place away from home, so to speak, but to me that other place felt far more comfortable than my own hometown. That is because my clowning had by now become fully a part of me, so it no longer required as much effort as before to deceive people — that explanation would do, but more than that: is there not, between family and strangers, between one's hometown and a place away from home, an insurmountable difference in the difficulty of acting, for any genius, even for the Son of God himself? For an actor, the hardest place to perform is the theater in one's hometown, and in a single room where all six degrees of kin are seated — not even the greatest actor could perform properly. Yet I had performed. And I had done so with considerable success. There was no way, then, that such a schemer, going out into a new place, could fail.

　My fear of human beings was raging just as fiercely as ever in the depths of my chest, if not more so, but my acting had become genuinely free and easy — in the classroom I always made my classmates laugh, and the teachers, while saying in words that the class would be so much better if only Ōba weren't in it, covered their mouths and laughed. I was able to make even the military instructor with his thunderous savage voice burst out laughing with the greatest of ease.

　Just when I was beginning to feel relieved that I had perhaps managed to completely conceal my true self, I was stabbed from behind in a truly unexpected way. As is typically the case with the type who stabs from behind, it was a student with the feeblest physique in the class, with a puffy pale face, wearing an upper garment with sleeves as long as those of Prince Shōtoku — clearly a hand-me-down from his parents — who never did well in his studies and always sat out gym class and military drills as if he were an idiot. Even I had not thought it necessary to be on guard against such a student.

　That day, during gym class, this student (I can't remember his surname now but I recall his given name was Takeichi) — Takeichi, as usual sitting out, while the rest of us were made to practice on the horizontal bar. I made a point of putting on the most solemn face I could, then yelled "Heave!" and leaped at the bar, only to fly forward as if doing a long jump and land with a thud on the sand. All of it was planned failure. Sure enough, everyone burst into laughter, and as I got up with a wry smile and was brushing the sand from my trousers, from nowhere Takeichi appeared behind me and poked my back, whispering in a low voice:

"That was on purpose. On purpose."

　I was shaken to the core. That Takeichi of all people had seen through my deliberate failure — it was the last thing I had expected. I felt as if the entire world had burst into the hellfire before my eyes in an instant, and fought desperately to suppress the urge to scream and go mad.

　And then the days of anxiety and fear that followed.

　On the surface I went on performing my sad clowning and making people laugh as before, but now and then a heavy sigh would escape me, and thinking that everything I did had been completely seen through by Takeichi, and that he would surely go around telling everyone sooner or later — cold sweat would form on my forehead and I would glance around with the frantic eyes of a madman. If at all possible, I wanted to stay at Takeichi's side morning, noon, and night, watching him every moment to make sure he didn't let slip the secret. And while I was hovering around him, I wanted to make every effort to convince him that my clowning was not "on purpose" but genuine, and if possible, to become his closest friend — and if none of that was possible, I had gone so far as to think that there was nothing left but to pray for his death. Yet even so, I never felt the urge to kill him. In all my life I have many times wished to be killed by someone, but never once wished to kill someone. I thought that would be doing a dreadful opponent the favor of giving them happiness.

　To tame him, I first made a show of wearing the smile of a fake Christian — a "gentle" coaxing smile — tilted my head about thirty degrees to the left, put a light arm around his small shoulders, and in a sweet, coaxing voice like the sound of someone stroking a cat, I frequently invited him to come and play at the house where I was boarding, but he would always just stare blankly and say nothing. One day, however, it must have been in early summer — a white summer shower was falling, and the students seemed at a loss about how to get home, but since my lodgings were right nearby I was about to head out casually, when I spotted Takeichi standing dejectedly behind the shoe lockers. I said "Come on, I'll lend you an umbrella" and pulled the hesitating Takeichi by the hand, and we ran together through the shower. We arrived home, I asked the landlady to dry our upper garments, and I succeeded in luring Takeichi into my second-floor room.

　In that house lived an aunt past fifty; a tall, sickly-looking daughter in her thirties who wore glasses (this woman had once married out and then come home again; I called her Anesa, following the custom of the people in the house); and a younger daughter named Setchan who had apparently just graduated from girls' school, unlike her sister she was short and round-faced — just the three of them. The shop downstairs displayed a little stationery and some sporting goods, but the main income seemed to come from the rent on five or six row houses the late husband had built and left behind.

"My ears hurt," said Takeichi, still standing.

"They started hurting when I got caught in the rain."

　Looking, I saw that both ears were badly suppurating. The pus was about to overflow the outer ear.

"This is serious. That must hurt," I said, feigning exaggerated surprise.

"I'm sorry for dragging you out in the rain."

　Using feminine-sounding language, I apologized "gently," then went downstairs to get some cotton and alcohol, and laid Takeichi with his head on my lap and carefully cleaned his ears. Even Takeichi, apparently, did not notice this was an act of hypocritical cunning, for he said from where he lay on my lap:

"You'll definitely be popular with girls."

　A foolish bit of flattery.

　In later years, however, I came to realize that this had probably been an awful demonic prophecy even Takeichi himself was not conscious of making. "Fall in love" and "be fallen in love with" — those words are decidedly vulgar and frivolous and have a somehow conceited feeling about them, and however "solemn" an occasion might be, if even one of these words showed its face, one felt the solemn temple of melancholy crumble and become merely flat — and yet, if instead of the vulgar colloquial "to be fallen in love with" one used the literary expression "the anxiety of being loved," somehow the temple of melancholy did not necessarily crumble, which strikes me as curious.

　When Takeichi had the pus from his ears attended to by me and said his foolish flattery about being popular with women, I at the time only blushed and laughed without saying anything — yet in truth there was something that vaguely struck a chord. But to write that hearing that vulgar phrase "be fallen in love with" and the frivolous atmosphere it creates, "something rings a bell" — that is so foolish it would not even qualify as a line from a rakugo young master, and I certainly did not mean it in that kind of frivolous, conceited way.

　For me, human women were several times more incomprehensible than men. In my family, there were more women than men, and among my relatives there were also many girls, and with the maidservant of the "crime" — so from childhood it would not be an exaggeration to say I grew up playing mostly with women, and yet I had been associating with those women as if treading on thin ice. Mostly I had no idea what to make of them. I was lost in a thick fog, and from time to time I would step on a tiger's tail and suffer a terrible blow — and that blow, unlike being struck with a whip by a man, was an internal bleeding kind of extremely unpleasant wound that festered inside and was very hard to heal.

　Women pull you close and then push you away; or women belittle and treat you coldly in public and then embrace you tightly when no one else is around; women sleep with a deathlike deep sleep — perhaps women live to sleep; and various other observations about women I had already made since childhood, but they seemed to me a completely different kind of creature from men, though belonging to the same species, and moreover this incomprehensible and unpredictable creature strangely fussed over me. "To be fallen in love with" or even "to be liked" seemed not quite appropriate for my case — "to be fussed over" might be a more accurate description.

　Women seemed to relax even more than men in the presence of a clown. When I performed clownery, men eventually stopped laughing, and I also knew that with men if I played the clown too much I would fail, so I always made a point of cutting it off at just the right point — but women did not know what moderation was, and kept demanding my clowning on and on forever, and I, responding to that endless encore, would be completely exhausted. They really do laugh a lot. In general, women seem able to stuff their cheeks with more pleasure than men.

　The elder daughter and the younger daughter of the house where I stayed during middle school, whenever they had a free moment, would come up to my second-floor room, and each time I would be startled nearly out of my wits, utterly terrified, and yet put on a smile and say:

"Studying?"

"No,"

　closing the book with a smile.

"Today at school, you know, the geography teacher called Konbō said..."

　And comic stories I didn't mean a word of would flow out of my mouth.

　"Yō-chan, put these glasses on and see."

　One evening, Setchan and Anesa came to play in my room, and after making me perform clownery at length, Setchan said this.

"Why?"

"Just try them. Borrow Anesa's glasses."

　As always, she commanded me in this imperious tone. The clown obediently put on Anesa's glasses. Instantly, both girls collapsed with laughter.

"He's the spitting image. Spitting image of Lloyd!"

　At the time, there was a foreign film comedian called Harold Lloyd who was popular in Japan.

　I stood up, raised one hand:

"Ladies and gentlemen,"

　I said, and

"On this occasion, to the fans of Japan..."

　tried a speech, made them laugh even harder, then after that went to see every Harold Lloyd film that came to the theater in that town and secretly studied his expressions.

　Also, one autumn night, while I was lying in bed reading, Anesa darted into the room like a bird and suddenly collapsed on top of my quilt and cried:

"You'll save me, won't you, Yō-chan? Yes, you will. We should just leave this house together. Save me. Please save me."

　She said such wild things, then cried again. But since it was not the first time a woman had shown me this kind of behavior, I was not particularly startled even by Anesa's extreme words — rather I felt my interest fade at their triteness and emptiness, quietly slipped out from under the quilt, peeled an apple from the desk, and handed a slice to Anesa. Anesa then ate the apple slice while sobbing.

"Don't you have any interesting books? Lend me one."

　I selected Sōseki's "I Am a Cat" from the bookshelf and handed it to her.

"Thank you for the hospitality."

　Anesa laughed bashfully and left the room, but not only Anesa — thinking about what mood any woman was living in seemed to me more complicated, more troublesome, and more eerie than trying to fathom the thoughts of an earthworm. Only from childhood experience did I know that when a woman suddenly burst into tears like that, if you handed her something sweet, she would eat it and recover her good humor.

　Also, the younger daughter Setchan would even bring her friends up to my room, and I would as usual make everyone laugh impartially, and when the friends went home, Setchan would always speak badly of them. She would invariably say "that girl is a delinquent, be careful." If that were the case, she needn't have brought her, but as a result almost all visitors to my room were women.

　But that was by no means the fulfillment of Takeichi's flattering prophecy of being "fallen in love with." I was nothing more than the Harold Lloyd of northeastern Japan. It would be several more years before Takeichi's foolish prophecy came alive as a dreadful prediction and took on its ominous form.

　Takeichi had also given me one more important gift.

"It's a picture of a monster," he said.

　One day when Takeichi came to play in my upstairs room, he showed me a brightly colored frontispiece he had brought, with a proud look, and explained it thus.

　Oh? I thought. In that instant, looking back in later years, I feel as though my path forward in life was decided. I knew. I knew it was nothing more than one of Van Gogh's famous self-portraits. In our boyhood, the French Impressionist painters were tremendously fashionable in Japan, and most people took their first step in appreciating Western paintings somewhere around there, so painters like Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Renoir were known even to country middle school students through their photographic reproductions. I too had seen quite a few color reproductions of Van Gogh and had taken pleasure in the interest of the brushstroke, the vividness of the color — yet I had never once thought of them as "pictures of monsters."

"Well, what about something like this?"

　I took out a Modigliani art book from the bookshelf and showed Takeichi one of his famous nudes with skin the color of scorched copper.

"Wow," said Takeichi, opening his eyes wide in admiration.

"Like a horse from hell."

"Is that also a monster picture?"

"I wanna paint monster pictures like that too."

　The psychology of those who fear human beings so much that they come to want all the more desperately to see something far more terrifying — actual monsters — with their own eyes; the psychology of the nervous person easily frightened by things who prays all the more for the storm to grow stronger — ah, these artists were wounded and threatened by the monster called humanity, and in the end came to believe in visions, seeing monsters clearly among ordinary natural daylight scenes, and moreover they did not disguise this with clownery but strove to express what they saw as it appeared — they boldly painted "monster pictures" as Takeichi said — here were companions for my future self — I thought, moved to tears with excitement:

"I'll paint them too. I'll paint monster pictures. I'll paint horses from hell."

　And for some reason, lowering my voice greatly, I said this to Takeichi.

　From elementary school I had liked both painting and looking at paintings. But the pictures I painted did not earn as good a reputation from those around me as my compositions. I had never trusted human words at all, so compositions were for me nothing more than a clownish greeting, and from elementary school through middle school they had driven the teachers into raptures, but I myself found them completely uninteresting — in painting alone (leaving aside cartoons), I put some effort into expressing the subject, even in my crude amateur way. The model drawings for school art class were boring, and the teacher's paintings were clumsy, so I had to try all kinds of methods of expression entirely on my own, entirely at random. When I entered middle school I had a full set of oil painting materials, but seeking a model for my brushwork in Impressionist style, what I produced was flat as paper craft and showed no promise at all. Yet through Takeichi's words I realized that my approach to painting until then had been completely wrong. The sweetness, the foolishness, of trying to express what one felt as beautiful, in a beautiful way. The masters created beauty subjectively out of nothing special, or without hiding their interest in ugly things even while feeling nauseous at them, reveling in the joy of expression — in short, they seemed not to be relying on others' opinions at all. From Takeichi I received this primitive primer of painting — and, hiding it from the usual female visitors, I began little by little to try making self-portraits.

　Even I was startled — such gloomy pictures resulted. But I secretly affirmed: this is my true self, hidden deep in my breast — on the surface I laugh cheerfully and make others laugh, but in reality, I carry this depressive heart — it can't be helped. Yet those pictures I showed to no one but Takeichi. I feared that the gloom beneath my clownery would be seen through and I would suddenly be treated with narrow suspicion, and I also worried that it might not even be recognized as my true self, but seen as a new kind of clowning trick, and I would be laughed at — that would be most painful of all — so I immediately hid those pictures deep in the closet.

　Also during school art class, I hid my "monster-style method" and painted in the same mediocre brushstroke as before — drawing beautiful things beautifully.

　I had always shown Takeichi my easily-wounded nerves without pretense, and now showing him these self-portraits without hesitation, I was greatly praised, and painted two, then three more monster pictures, and received from Takeichi yet another prophecy:

"You'll become a great painter."

　The prophecy of being popular with women, and the prophecy of becoming a great painter — these two prophecies were stamped on my forehead by the fool Takeichi, and then I came to Tokyo.

　I had wanted to enter art school, but Father had long since intended to put me in a higher school and eventually into government service, and had told me as much, so unable to talk back even once, I vaguely went along. Told to take the fourth-year exam, and since I had had enough of the school of cherry blossoms and sea, I left without advancing to the fifth year, passed the entrance exam for a higher school in Tokyo, and immediately entered dormitory life — but disgusted by its filth and crudeness, and not being in a state to clown, I had a doctor write a diagnosis of pulmonary infiltration and moved from the dorm to Father's villa in Ueno Sakuragichō. I simply cannot manage communal living. And the words "youthful passion" or "young person's pride" made me shudder when I heard them — I simply could not follow what was called the "High School Spirit." Both the classroom and the dormitory made me feel like a dumping ground for warped lust, and my nearly perfect clowning was of no use there.

　Father was in residence at that house for only about one or two weeks a month when the Diet was not in session, so when he was away, I was alone in the quite large house with just an elderly caretaker couple. I often skipped school — yet had no interest in sightseeing in Tokyo (I will apparently never see the Meiji Shrine, the bronze statue of Kusunoki Masashige, or the graves of the forty-seven samurai at Sengakuji) — and spent all day at home reading books or painting. When Father came to Tokyo, I would hurriedly go off to school each morning — but I was also sometimes to be found at the private painting studio of the Western-style painter Yasuda Shintarō in Hongō Sendagichō, spending three or four hours practicing sketching. Once I escaped from the higher school dorm, even when I attended school classes, I felt something vaguely false about myself, a feeling of being a special auditor — perhaps it was my own self-conscious distortion — and going to school became all the more tedious. Throughout primary school, middle school, and higher school, I never managed to understand what it means to love one's school. I never even tried to learn a school song.

　Eventually at the painting studio I was introduced to alcohol, cigarettes, prostitutes, pawnshops, and left-wing thought by a certain student of painting. A strange combination, but it was the truth.

　The art student's name was Horiki Masao; he was born in the shitamachi district of Tokyo, six years older than me, had graduated from a private art school, and since he had no studio at home, was continuing his study of Western painting at this studio.

"Can you lend me five yen?"

　We had only barely acknowledged each other's faces and had not exchanged a word until that point. I fumbled and handed over five yen.

"Good, let's drink. I'm treating you. What a fine fellow."

　I could not refuse, and being dragged to a café near the painting studio in Hōraimachi was the beginning of our friendship.

"I've had my eye on you for a while. That bashful smile of yours — that's the expression peculiar to a promising artist. Cheers to getting acquainted! Kinu-san, isn't this fellow handsome? Don't fall for him. Since he started coming to the studio, I've unfortunately become the second handsomest."

　Horiki had a dark, well-formed face and, unusual for an art student, wore a proper suit, had conservative taste in ties, and his hair was parted down the middle with pomade, plastered flat.

　As it was an unfamiliar place, I was just terribly frightened, clasping and unclasping my arms, smiling nothing but a bashful smile — but after drinking two or three cups of beer, I felt a strangely liberated lightness.

"I was thinking of entering art school, but..."

"No good. That place is no good. Schools are no good. Our teachers lie in nature! Pathos toward nature!"

　But I felt not the slightest respect for what he said. He's a fool, I thought, his painting must be clumsy too — but he might be good company for playing around. In other words, what I saw at that moment was, for the first time in my life, a genuine Tokyo ne'er-do-well. The form was different from mine, but he too had completely drifted away from human endeavor and was at a loss — only in that much were we undeniably the same kind. And the difference in essence from me was that he performed his clownery unconsciously and was completely unaware of the misery of that clownery.

　Though I always looked down on him, at times even felt ashamed of my association with him, while walking around together with him, I was in the end beaten even by this man.

　At first, though, I took him entirely for a good fellow, a rare good fellow, and even I, fearing human beings as I did, completely let my guard down, thinking I had found a good guide to Tokyo. The truth was that alone I found the streetcar conductor frightening, and wanting to enter the Kabukiza theater but frightened of the usher girls standing on both sides of the staircase covered with the crimson carpet at the main entrance, and frightened of the waiter who stood silently behind me in a restaurant waiting for my plate to be empty, and especially frightened when paying the bill — ah, my awkward hands, when I handed over money for a purchase not out of stinginess but out of such extreme tension, embarrassment, anxiety, and fear that the world would go dark and I would be in a state of near-frenzy, so that far from haggling I would forget to take the change, and at times had even forgotten to take the thing I had bought — so I could not walk the streets of Tokyo alone, and consequently had been spending all day rolling around at home.

　But going around with Horiki, handing him my wallet, Horiki would haggle hard and exhibit a talent for spending — playing well, extracting the maximum effect from a small amount of money — and avoiding expensive taxis, he would utilize streetcars, buses, river steamers each as appropriate, reaching the destination in the shortest time, and on the way back from the prostitutes in the morning would stop at a certain restaurant for a bath and light sake with tofu in the morning, showing through practical demonstration that this was luxurious feeling at low cost, and also explaining that cheap food stall gyūdon and yakitori were nutritious at low prices, guaranteeing there was nothing that got one drunk faster than Denki Bran — in any case regarding expenses he never once caused me anxiety or fear.

　Furthermore, what was a relief in associating with Horiki was that Horiki, completely ignoring the listener's feelings, went on talking nonsense twenty-four hours a day in whatever direction his so-called pathos happened to burst — or perhaps passion means ignoring the other person's position — and there was absolutely no fear of that uncomfortable silence falling between two people walking and getting tired. Originally I, whose mouth was heavy, had been desperately clowning at every turn to ward off that terrifying silence whenever it appeared, but now this fool Horiki was unconsciously and voluntarily playing that clowning role himself, so all I had to do was barely reply and occasionally say "really?" and laugh.

　Alcohol, cigarettes, prostitutes — I gradually came to understand that all of these were quite good methods for at least temporarily easing the fear of human beings. I came to feel I would not regret selling all my possessions in order to obtain them.

　To me, prostitutes looked like neither humans nor women — like imbeciles or madwomen — and in their embrace I could on the contrary feel completely at ease and sleep soundly. They were all pitifully without any desire whatsoever. And sensing in me something like the fellow-feeling of their own kind, the prostitutes always showed me a natural goodwill to an unembarrassing degree. Goodwill with no calculation, goodwill not forced upon one, goodwill toward someone who might never come again — there were nights when I actually saw the halo of the Virgin Mary around those imbecile or mad prostitutes.

　But as I went there to escape the fear of human beings and seek a brief night's rest, and played around with those prostitutes who were "my kind" — at some point I seemed to have unconsciously acquired a certain odious atmosphere hovering around me, an "extra bonus" I had not foreseen at all, and as this "bonus" gradually surfaced more clearly, Horiki pointed it out to me, and I was appalled, and felt uncomfortable. Seen from the outside, in vulgar terms: through the prostitutes I had received training with women, and recently had made remarkable progress, and they say training with women is strictest and most effective through prostitutes — and already clinging to me was the scent of what one might call "skill with women," and women (not only prostitutes) were instinctively picking up that scent and sidling close — this vulgar and dishonorable atmosphere was what I had received as my "extra bonus," and this seemed to be far more noticeable than my mere rest.

　Horiki said it half as flattery, but there were things that weighed on me too — for instance, I recalled receiving a clumsy letter from a café girl, and the daughter of about twenty of the general next door to the Sakuragichō house was going in and out of her family's gate with light makeup on, apparently without any particular errand, every morning at my departure time for school, and when I went to eat beef, the waitress there without my saying anything... and from the tobacco shop girl where I always bought cigarettes, in the box of cigarettes she handed me... and when I went to see kabuki, the person in the next seat... and late at night on the city streetcar when I was drunk and sleeping... and unexpectedly a desperate-sounding letter from a cousin in my hometown... and some unknown girl, while I was out, left what appeared to be a handmade doll... Since I was extremely passive in all things, none of them went further — just fragments, nothing developed — but that some atmosphere that made women dream clung somewhere to me, that was undeniable, not empty boasting or anything of the sort. I felt a bitter humiliation, something like degradation, at having this pointed out by someone like Horiki, and at the same time I suddenly lost interest in consorting with prostitutes.

　Horiki also, from his pretentious modernity (I still cannot think of any other reason in his case), one day took me to what was called a communist reading circle (I think they called it R.S. or something — my memory is vague), a secret study group. For someone like Horiki, a communist secret meeting was probably just one more item in his "Tokyo tour." I was introduced to the "comrades," made to buy a pamphlet, and received a lecture on Marxist economics from a young man with an extraordinarily ugly face sitting at the head of the table. But to me it seemed like something I already understood. It was surely as they said — yet in the human heart there were things more incomprehensible and terrifying. What could be called desire — and yet the word "desire" doesn't capture it; "vanity" doesn't capture it; "lust and greed" together still don't capture it — I don't know what it is myself, but it seemed there was something strangely ghost-story-like at the bottom of human society beyond mere economics, and since I was completely terrified of those ghosts, I could naturally affirm the so-called materialism as water flows to low ground, yet it could not liberate me from my fear of human beings, open my eyes to the green leaves, and make me feel the joy of hope. Nevertheless, I never once was absent from that R.S. (I think that's what they called it, though I may be wrong), and finding it comical that the "comrades" were, as if it were a great matter, approaching with stiff faces the study of theory as elementary as "one plus one equals two," through my usual clowning I made efforts to loosen the atmosphere of the gathering, and perhaps because of that, the cramped atmosphere of the study group gradually eased, and I had apparently come to be regarded as an indispensable popular figure at the meetings. These seemingly simple people may have thought of me as simply like themselves, a simple, cheerful joker "comrade" — but if so, I had been deceiving them from first to last. I was not a comrade. Yet I attended those meetings without fail and provided clowning service for everyone.

　It was because I liked it. It was because those people suited me. But it was not necessarily the affection formed by Marx.

　The illegal. There was something faintly enjoyable about it for me. Rather, it felt comfortable. The legal side of the world seemed even more frightening (in it one sensed bottomless power), its machinery incomprehensible — I simply could not sit in that windowless, drafty cold room, and even if the outside was an ocean of the illegal to swim and eventually die in, that seemed easier to me than the legal room. The man in the shade — there is such an expression. It seems to refer to miserable, defeated, dissolute people in human society, but I always felt I had been born a man in the shade, and whenever I encountered someone pointed at as being in the shade, I always became gentle in spirit. And that "gentleness" was a kind that left even me enchanted with its sweetness.

　There is also the phrase "criminal consciousness." I was tormented by this all my life in this human world, yet it was like a wife sharing my hardships, a beloved companion — playing forlornly alone with just it was also one of my poses in life. And the common phrase "having blood on one's shins" — that wound appeared on one of my shins as if naturally from birth, and far from healing as I grew up, it only deepened, reaching to the bone, the nightly agony ranging through every variety of hell — yet (this is a very strange way to put it) the wound gradually became more intimate to me than my own flesh and blood, and the pain of the wound felt like the living emotion of the wound, or even the whisper of love — for such a man, the atmosphere of that underground movement's group felt oddly peaceful, comfortable, and the movement's texture rather than its actual purpose suited me. In Horiki's case, it was simply a fool's joke — he only took me to one meeting for the introduction and never came back, saying something like a poor pun about how Marxists need to inspect the consumption side as well as study the production side, and always tried to lead me only to that consumption-side inspection. In those days there were various types of Marxists. Some like Horiki, calling themselves such out of pretentious modernity; and some like me, simply attracted by the smell of illegality and settled in. If these real characters had been seen through by true Marxist believers, both Horiki and I would have been raged at and expelled as vile traitors on the spot. However, neither I nor even Horiki was dismissed, and in particular I could behave in that illegal world even more freely and in what one might call a "healthy" manner than in the world of legal gentlemen, and I came to be trusted and entrusted with various alarmingly secretive errands as a promising "comrade." And in fact I never refused such errands, went along with anything cheerfully, never made the mistake of being viewed suspiciously as a "dog" (that was their slang for the police) or subjected to questioning, laughing and making others laugh while accurately carrying out those "dangerous" (the people in the movement were extremely tense as if it were a great matter, even going so far as to imitate detective novels in the most clumsy way, using extreme caution, and the tasks they asked me to do were truly astonishingly trivial — yet they were greatly at pains about the danger of those tasks) as they called them, tasks. My feelings at the time were that even if I were caught as a party member and spent the rest of my life in prison, it didn't matter. Better the prison than groaning nightly in the hell of insomnia while fearing what they called the "real life" of the world.

　Father was at the Sakuragichō villa for only about one or two weeks a month, and even when we were in the same house we might go three or four days without seeing each other, but even so, finding Father suffocating and frightening, and thinking of finding lodgings somewhere — while being unable to say so — I heard from the elderly caretaker that Father seemed to be planning to sell the house.

　Father's term as Diet member was nearing its end, and there must have been various reasons, but he appeared to have no intention of running for election again, and had even built a retirement home in his hometown and seemed to have no attachment to Tokyo — perhaps he thought it wasteful to maintain a mansion and servants for the sake of a mere higher school student (Father's heart too, like other people's feelings, was beyond my comprehension) — in any case, the house soon changed hands, and I moved into a dim room in the old boarding house called Senyūkan in Hongō Morikawachō, and immediately found myself short of money.

　Until then, Father had handed me a fixed monthly allowance, and even when it was gone in two or three days, cigarettes, alcohol, cheese, fruit were always at home, and books, stationery, clothing and other necessities could always be charged at the nearby shops, and when I treated Horiki to soba or tendon, if it was a shop Father patronized in the neighborhood, I could simply walk out without paying.

　Now suddenly alone in a boarding house, having to manage everything with a monthly remittance, I was at a loss. The remittance too disappeared in two or three days, I was horrified, growing frantic with loneliness, sending telegrams and detailed letter-solicitations in alternation to Father, to elder brothers and sisters (in those letters the circumstances I described were all clownish fabrications — I thought it was the best strategy to make the recipient laugh first when asking someone for something) while also, guided by Horiki, beginning to frequent the pawnshop regularly, and even so was always short of money.

　In the end, I simply had no ability to "live" alone in a boarding house with no connections. I found it terrifying to sit quietly alone in the room, feeling as if someone would attack and strike me at any moment, and I flew out into the streets, helping with the movement's work, or drinking cheap sake with Horiki, abandoning both studies and painting practice, and in November of my second year at higher school I started a love-pact drowning incident with a married woman older than myself, and my circumstances changed completely.

　Although I was always absent from school and did not study subjects in the least, I had a strangely efficient touch in exam answers, and somehow managed to deceive my hometown family up to that point — but by then it seemed that reports of my absences and other matters were being sent secretly from the school to Father in my hometown, and my eldest brother, as Father's representative, had begun sending me long letters written in imposing language. Yet more immediately, my direct suffering was: the lack of money, and that the movement's work had become so intense and busy that it could no longer be done half-heartedly. I had become the action squad leader of Marxist students from all the schools in what I think they called the Central District — Hongō, Koishikawa, Shitaya, Kanda, that area. Hearing about "armed uprising," I bought a small knife (looking back, it was a flimsy knife that wouldn't even sharpen a pencil) and put it in my raincoat pocket and rushed around making what they called "connections." I wanted to drink sake and sleep soundly, but had no money. Moreover from P (that's what I remember them calling the Party, though I may be wrong) orders kept coming one after another with no time to breathe. It seemed it would soon be impossible to manage with my frail body. Since I had only been helping that group out of interest in its illegality in the first place, and since it had become, as if the impossible had become possible, annoyingly busy, I could not suppress a feeling of irritation toward the P people — this is not your kind of thing, why not have your direct people do it — and I ran away. Having run away, I naturally felt no good about it, and decided to die.

　At that time there were three women who showed special affection toward me. One was the daughter of the Senyūkan boarding house where I was staying. This girl, whenever I returned from the movement's work completely exhausted and went to bed without eating, would always come to my room carrying writing paper and a fountain pen, saying:

"I'm sorry. Downstairs, my younger brothers and sisters are noisy and I can't write a letter in peace."

　And for over an hour she would write something at my desk.

　I too could have simply pretended to sleep, but since the girl seemed to want to say something to me, I exercised my usual spirit of passive service — truly wishing I didn't have to say a single word, my body completely exhausted — I summoned a "Um" of effort to lie on my stomach, light a cigarette, and say:

"I hear there was a man who heated his bath with love letters from women."

"Oh no, that was you, wasn't it?"

"I did once warm up milk to drink with one."

"How flattering — drink mine."

　I just want this person to go home already — she says she's writing a letter, but it's so obvious — she's probably just writing the hiragana alphabet.

"Show me,"

　I said with all the will in the world not to see it, upon which: Oh no, oh no she kept saying, and the way she rejoiced was so undignified and killed my interest. So I thought: I'll give her some errand.

"I'm sorry, but could you go to the pharmacy across the street and buy some Calmotin? I'm so tired I've got a fever and can't sleep on the contrary. Sorry about that. For the money..."

"That's all right, I don't need money."

　She happily got up. I knew perfectly well that giving a woman an errand does not make her dejected — on the contrary, women are pleased when a man entrusts them with a task.

　Another one was a so-called "comrade" from a women's higher normal school's literature department. Since the movement's work required me to see her every day whether I liked it or not, after the meeting was finished she would keep following me around and buying me all sorts of things without end.

"You can think of me as your real older sister."

　Shuddering at the affectation, I answered with a melancholy smile:

"I'm counting on it."

　With only one thought — I must not anger her, must somehow manage her — I increasingly served this ugly, unpleasant woman, having things bought for me (always in terrible taste, and I would usually immediately give them away to the yakitori shop man) while making a face of happiness, cracking jokes to make her laugh, and one summer night when she absolutely would not leave and I kissed her in a dark spot on the street just to get her to go home, she was shamelessly aroused as if in frenzy, called a taxi, and took me to a narrow Western-style room in a building that seemed to have been secretly rented for the movement — what a sister, I smirked to myself.

　Both the boarding house daughter and this "comrade" were people I had to see every day no matter what, so unlike the various women before, I couldn't avoid them skillfully, and ended up being hopelessly entangled with both of them, desperately trying only to keep their good humor.

　Around the same time, I received an unexpected kindness from a café girl in Ginza who gave me no end of worry and dread even though I had met her only once. By that time I had acquired, without relying on Horiki's guidance, some degree of boldness to ride a streetcar alone, to enter the Kabukiza, or to walk into a café wearing an indigo-splash cotton kimono. Still inwardly distrusting and fearing and agonizing over human confidence and violence, outwardly I had little by little acquired the "skill" of greeting others with a real face — no, that's wrong, I still could not greet anyone without the painful laughter of the clown's defeat — but at any rate a "competence" of somehow fumbling a greeting, owed perhaps to running around for the movement, or to women, or to sake, or mainly to the hardship of money.

　Feeling frightened wherever I was, and thinking perhaps if I could blend and be lost in a large café with many drunk customers and waitresses and waiters my ever-pursued heart might calm down, I went alone to that large café in Ginza with ten yen, laughing:

"I only have ten yen, so bear that in mind."

"Don't worry."

　There was a touch of a Kansai accent in her voice. And that one phrase strangely calmed my trembling heart. No — not because the money worry was gone, but because I felt there was no worry in being near this person.

　I drank sake. At ease with this person and not inclined to perform clownery, I made no effort to hide my naturally taciturn and gloomy side, and drank sake in silence.

"Do you like this kind of thing?"

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

"Just sake? I'll drink too."

　It was a cold autumn night. As instructed by Tsuneko (I think that was her name, though my memory has faded and I am not certain — I am someone who has even forgotten the name of the woman with whom I attempted a suicide pact), I ate sushi I didn't find at all good at a sushi stand in the back streets of Ginza (though I've forgotten her name, strangely I clearly remember only the badness of that sushi. And I vividly remember the round-headed man with a face like a rat snake, waggling his head as if showing off while pressing the sushi, and many times afterward on a streetcar I would think "I've seen that face somewhere" and realize "it's like that sushi man from that time" and give a wry smile. Even now when her name and even her face have faded from memory, I remember only the face of that sushi man well enough to paint — suggesting the sushi must have been truly dreadful and caused me cold and suffering. I myself never once found good sushi delicious even when taken to good sushi restaurants — they were always too large. I always thought: if only they could make them about the size of a thumb. I) was waiting for her.

　She rented the second floor of a carpenter's house in Honjo. In that upstairs room I showed without the slightest concealment my usual gloomy state, holding one cheek as if attacked by terrible toothache, and drank tea. And that posture of mine seemed to appeal to her. She too was a woman who felt a cold winter wind around her, where nothing but fallen leaves whirled, feeling completely isolated.

　Lying together, she told me she was two years older than me, from Hiroshima, and that she had a husband — a barber in Hiroshima, and last spring they had run away together to Tokyo, but her husband, not finding proper work in Tokyo, had been charged with fraud and was in prison. She had been going to the prison every day to deliver things, but was stopping as of tomorrow — and so she told her story, but I am the type who finds no interest whatsoever in women's life stories, whether because of the women's poor storytelling, or because they misjudge where to put the emphasis — in any case, for me it was always in one ear and out the other.

　Lonesome.

　I always expected that rather than a woman's thousand words of life story, a single murmur of that one word would move my sympathy — but I had never heard that word from any woman in this world, strange and mysterious as it seemed. Yet this woman, without saying "lonesome" in words, carried a voiceless terrible loneliness in the layer of air about an inch wide outside her body, and when I drew close to her, that layer of air enveloped my body too, mixing pleasantly with my own somewhat prickly and gloomy layer of air, and like "a fallen leaf settling to a rock on the river bottom," I was able to distance my self from fear and anxiety.

　Quite unlike the sense of sleeping soundly in the bosom of those imbecile prostitutes (and in the first place, those prostitutes had been cheerful), the night spent with that wife of a fraud convict was a happy (I intend no more than once in this entire memoir to use such a grand word without hesitation in affirmation) released night for me.

　But it was only one night. In the morning I woke and sprang up, and I had reverted to the former frivolous, acting-clown. Weaklings fear even happiness. Cotton-wool can cause injury. One can be wounded by happiness. Anxious to part before being wounded, I hastily deployed my usual clownery smoke screen:

"'When the money runs out, so does the love' — that phrase, you know, the interpretation is backwards. It doesn't mean a man loses a woman when he runs out of money. When a man runs out of money, the man naturally just loses spirit and goes to pieces, and the laughter in his voice loses strength, and somehow he becomes resentful and eventually desperate, and the man is the one who breaks up with the woman — goes half-mad breaking up and breaking up completely — that's what it means, according to Kanazawa's Great Dictionary. Poor thing. I understand that feeling myself."

　I seem to recall saying something foolish like that and making Tsuneko burst out laughing. No need to overstay one's welcome, I thought with some apprehension, and made a quick exit without even washing my face — yet that random statement about "when the money runs out, so does the love" later produced an unexpected complication.

　After that, for a month, I did not meet my benefactress of that night. As days passed after parting, the joy faded, the momentary kindness began to seem frighteningly binding, I began to feel an arbitrary terrible constraint — even the trivial matter of having let Tsuneko pay the entire café bill that night began to weigh on me, Tsuneko too came to seem, like the boarding house daughter and the women's higher normal school "comrade," like a woman who only threatened me — and though far away, I was constantly frightened of Tsuneko, and on top of that I had a nature that dreaded seeing a woman I had slept with again, feeling at once she might burst into rage — meeting her seemed terribly troublesome, so I avoided Ginza — but that dread of meeting was absolutely not my craftiness; it was simply that I had not yet absorbed the curious phenomenon that women seem to live cutting completely between the moment of going to sleep together and the morning after rising, as if entirely forgetting — allowing not a speck of connection — between the two states.

　At the end of November I drank cheap sake with Horiki at a food stall in Kanda, and this bad friend, after they left the stall, kept insisting on drinking somewhere else even though neither of them had money — "let's drink, come on, let's drink," he kept at it. At that point I was emboldened by being drunk, and said:

"All right, then I'll take you to the land of dreams. Brace yourself — a paradise of wine and women..."

"A café?"

"Right."

"Let's go!"

　So the two of us got on the streetcar, and Horiki, excited, said:

"I'm starving for women tonight. Can I kiss a waitress?"

　I didn't much like Horiki carrying on in that drunk way. Horiki knew that, which is why he pushed me like that.

"Can I? I'm going to kiss the waitress who sits next to me. Can I?"

"Fine, I suppose."

"Wonderful! I'm starving for women."

　We got off at Ginza 4-chōme and entered that so-called paradise of wine and women — the large café — with almost no money, relying on Tsuneko, and the moment we sat down facing each other in an empty booth, Tsuneko and another waitress came running and the other waitress sat down beside me, while Tsuneko sat next to Horiki — I was startled. Tsuneko was about to be kissed.

　It was not a feeling of jealousy. I was fundamentally weak in the desire to possess, and what faint feeling of possession I might occasionally have was never strong enough to claim it boldly and quarrel with someone over it. Later in life, I even once watched my common-law wife being assaulted, in silence.

　I did not want to involve myself in human quarrels. I was frightened of being caught up in that vortex. Tsuneko and I had been together only one night. Tsuneko was not mine. I had no right to feel jealous. Yet I was startled.

　It was because I felt sorry for Tsuneko, about to receive Horiki's ferocious kiss right before my eyes. Tsuneko soiled by Horiki would have to part from me, and yet I had no positive warmth enough to keep Tsuneko — ah, so this is the end, I thought for an instant at Tsuneko's misfortune — then immediately, like water, I resigned myself smoothly and looked back and forth between Horiki and Tsuneko's faces, smirking.

　But events unfolded in a truly unexpected, far worse direction.

"Never mind!" said Horiki, twisting his mouth.

"Even I can't quite... a woman this shabby and poor..."

　He folded his arms looking completely fed up, staring at Tsuneko and smirking.

"Sake. We have no money," I told Tsuneko quietly. I felt like drinking until I was completely drunk. In the eyes of so-called vulgarians, Tsuneko was a woman not even worth Horiki's kiss — merely shabby, shabby and poor. What a shock — struck down like lightning. I drank as much as I wanted, lurching drunk, looked at Tsuneko and smiled sadly — and thinking: come to think of it she's a strangely tired, shabby woman — simultaneously felt rising in my chest the sympathy of two penniless people (the discord between rich and poor, though trite-seeming, I now think is still one of the eternal themes of drama), and feeling that sympathy, I found Tsuneko dear, and for the first time in my life, I consciously felt, however weakly, my own heart moving actively in love. I vomited. I lost all awareness. It was the first time I had ever drunk sake and become so beside myself with intoxication.

　When I came to, Tsuneko was sitting at my pillow. I was in the upstairs room of the carpenter's house in Honjo.

"You said 'when the money runs out, so does the love,' and I thought you were joking — then you never came. Money runs out in a strange way. Can't I earn for you?"

"No."

　Then the woman lay down too, and toward dawn, the word "death" came from the woman's mouth for the first time, and the woman also seemed completely exhausted by what she called human endeavor, and I too — fear of the world, its complexity, money, the movement, women, studies — thinking about it all, there seemed no way I could go on enduring life, and I casually agreed to her proposal.

　Yet at that point I had not yet resolved to "die" as a genuine reality. Somewhere there was still "play" lurking.

　That morning, the two of us wandered through the Asakusa Roku district. We went into a café and drank milk.

"You pay for it."

　I stood up, took my purse from my sleeve, opened it to find three copper coins inside — seized not by shame but by a more devastating feeling, instantly flashing before my mind my room at Senyūkan — only a uniform and a futon remaining, nothing left that could be pawned, a bleak room — and the indigo-splash kimono I was wearing, the coat — these are my reality, I cannot go on living — this I clearly understood.

　As I stood there fumbling, the woman stood too and peered into my purse:

"Oh, is that all?"

　Her voice was innocent, yet those words pierced me so deeply in the bone they ached. Only because she was the first woman I had ever loved did her words hurt. "That all" and "this much" — three copper coins are not money at all. It was a strange humiliation such as I had never experienced. An unbearable humiliation. Perhaps at that time I still had not completely shed the identity of a rich man's son. At that moment, I resolved of my own will, as a genuine reality, to die.

　That night, we jumped into the sea at Kamakura. The woman took off her obi, saying "This sash was borrowed from a friend at the shop," folded it neatly and placed it on the rocks. I took off my coat, placed it in the same spot, and we threw ourselves into the sea together.

　The woman died. And I alone survived.

　Being a higher school student and perhaps because my father's name had some news value, it was apparently taken up as a fairly large issue in the newspapers. I was admitted to a hospital by the sea, a relative came rushing from my hometown and handled various affairs, and told me that Father and the entire family were enraged, and it might come to complete severance from my family — and said this and went back. Yet more than any of that, I kept sobbing over the dead Tsuneko. Because she truly was the only one I had ever loved among all those women until then.

　A long letter came from the boarding house daughter, filled with fifty tanka poems. All fifty began with a strange phrase: "Please live." And cheerful nurses came to play in my hospital room, and one nurse squeezed my hand tightly before leaving.

　The doctors discovered a problem with my left lung, which proved very advantageous, and when the time came and I was taken from the hospital to the police as a charge of assisting in suicide, the police treated me as a sick person and placed me in a special protective room.

　Late at night, the elderly officer on night duty in the duty room next to the protective room quietly opened the connecting door and called to me:

"Hey! You must be cold. Come in here and warm up."

　I drooped in purposely and sat on a chair by the brazier, warming myself.

"You must still miss the woman who died."

"Yes."

　I answered in a deliberately faint, fading voice.

"That's only natural human feeling."

　He was gradually assuming a more imposing manner.

"Where did you first have relations with the woman?"

　He was asking in a grave, portentous manner, almost like a judge. He thought I was a child and intended, to pass the idle autumn night, to pose as the lead investigator and draw out confessional accounts bordering on indecent talk from me. I immediately saw through this and it took great effort to suppress the urge to burst out laughing. I knew perfectly well I could refuse to answer any of his "unofficial interrogations," but in order to add interest to the long autumn night, I put on a face of complete sincerity — the look of one who firmly believed this officer was indeed the lead investigator, and that the leniency or severity of punishment depended entirely on this officer's judgment — and gave him appropriately satisfying "testimony" to somewhat satisfy his prurient curiosity.

　"All right, I understand the general situation now. If you answer honestly, we consider that on our end."

"Thank you very much. Please be kind to me."

　It was almost godly acting. And an impassioned performance that gained me not a single advantage.

　At dawn I was summoned by the chief of police. This time it was a formal interrogation. As I opened the door and entered the chief's office, immediately:

"My, what a fine young man. This isn't your fault. It's your mother's fault for giving birth to such a handsome boy."

　He was a rather young chief who seemed to have attended university, with a dark complexion. I was addressed so abruptly that I felt as if half my face were covered with a red birthmark — ugly, deformed, miserable.

　The interrogation by this chief, who looked like a judo or kendo champion, was truly simple, worlds apart from the elderly officer's late-night secretive, maddeningly persistent lecherous "interrogation." When the questioning was done, the chief, drafting documents to be sent to the prosecutor's office, said:

"You'll have to take care of your health. Is that blood-tinged sputum you've been coughing up?"

　That morning I had a strange cough, and each time I coughed I covered my mouth with a handkerchief, and on the handkerchief there were red specks like scattered hail — but that blood was not from the throat; it was blood from a small boil that had formed below my ear which I had been picking at. However, I felt a vague sense that it might be convenient not to clarify this, so I simply answered:

"Yes."

　with downcast eyes, and replied with an expression of virtue.

　The chief finished writing and said:

"Whether you're indicted — that's for the prosecutor to decide, but it would be good to call someone who can take responsibility for you, to the Yokohama prosecutor's office today, by telegram or phone. Someone, you must have a guardian or guarantor."

　I remembered Shibuta, a stocky unmarried man of about forty from the same hometown as our family, who used to frequent Father's Tokyo villa and performed something like a flatterer's role — he was my school's guarantor. His eyes in particular reminded one of a flounder, so Father always called him Hirame (flounder), and I had gotten used to calling him that too.

　I borrowed the police phone book, found Hirame's home phone number, called Hirame and asked him to come to the Yokohama prosecutor's office, and Hirame agreed, though in a ridiculously pompous tone.

"Hey, you'd better disinfect that phone right away. He's been coughing up blood after all."

　After I returned to the protective room, I could hear the chief's loud voice giving orders to the officers. It reached even my ears in the protective room.

　After noon, with a thin hemp rope tied around my waist — I was permitted to hide it under my coat — with a young officer firmly gripping the end of the rope, the two of us boarded a streetcar toward Yokohama.

　Yet I felt not the slightest unease, and the police protective room and the elderly officer were fondly recalled. Ah, why am I like this — when bound as a criminal, I feel rather relieved and calm and composed, and even now writing these recollections, I feel genuinely free and easy. Yet in that time full of fond memories, there was one incident of cold sweat and unforgettable misery. In a dim room at the prosecutor's office I received a brief interrogation from a prosecutor. The prosecutor was a calm man of about forty (even if I were beautiful, mine would undoubtedly have been a sinful beauty — but the prosecutor's face had what I would call a righteous beauty, carrying an air of wise serenity) who seemed not to be a fussy person, so I testified quite carelessly without the slightest guard — when suddenly my usual cough came, I took out the handkerchief from my sleeve, glanced at the blood, and thinking this cough too might be useful for something, despicably brought a calculating thought to mind, added a couple of extra fake coughs with exaggeration, and covering my mouth with the handkerchief glanced furtively at the prosecutor's face — in that split second:

"Is that real?"

　A quiet smile. Cold sweat — no, even now recalling it I want to spin in circles. The feeling surpassed even the time in middle school when fool Takeichi poked my back saying "on purpose, on purpose" and I felt kicked down to hell — I feel I am not exaggerating at all. Those two — those two records of my life's great failures in acting. Sometimes I even think that rather than being subjected to the prosecutor's quiet contempt, it would have been better to have been sentenced to ten years.

　I was given a suspension of indictment. Yet I felt no pleasure at all, and sat in a state of utter misery on a bench in the waiting room of the prosecutor's office, waiting for Hirame, my guarantor, to arrive.

　Through the high window behind me the sunset sky was visible, and a seagull flew in the shape of the character for "woman."