Afterword

The following is what I should call an afterword.

　I myself am not Yōzō. I am not Yōzō — yet I found his manuscripts and photographs, and I am writing what I know in these pages because I believe they should be made public.

　It was in the spring of the twentieth year of Shōwa (1945). (I avoid giving the exact month out of a vague sense of caution that the censors may feel unease at a certain element of the timing, which would prevent publication entirely.)

　In the town of Funabashi in Chiba Prefecture, I came upon the madam of a bar who I knew from a small stand bar in Kyōbashi, Tokyo. After the air raids had grown fierce, many of the Kyōbashi bar operators had fled out here; the madam seemed to be one of them. After a great deal of reminiscing together, the madam brought out a parcel wrapped in cloth.

　"A customer left these behind. If you have any use for them, please take them."

　There were three photographs and three notebooks.

　Judging from the photographs, the face in them gave me the impression of something other than a human being — not, of course, the face of a demon or god, but the face of an animal I have never seen. Is this a monkey? — I thought for an instant, but then something of sadness, something that stirred an obscure feeling of sympathy, wafted up from those photographs, and I could not look away.

　I have never seen a human face with an expression like that.

　That same night, I returned to my lodgings and read through the notebooks. In a single night.

　After reading them, I could not help but think: The author of these notebooks is different from a bad person — is not even worthy of the word "bad." If he had been born in a happier household, he might have been known by those around him as a cheerful good fellow. For isn't it the case, I could not help thinking, that for a person with that kind of disposition, to part ways from every human being, to live in doubt, terror, and constant pretending — that would, of itself, have been unendurable suffering.

　I wanted, for once, to meet this person.

　At the same time, I thought: I ought not to rewrite these manuscripts. Even if I rewrote them in a form more agreeable to the reader, a work that has been rearranged by another person's hands cannot be called a "work." For that reason, I have refrained from rewriting these notebooks and am publishing them precisely as they are.

　The next morning, I went to the madam's house and borrowed the three notebooks, promising to return them.

　"Is this person — Ha-chan — still living somewhere, do you think?" I asked.

　"I don't know," the madam replied.

　"Where did these notebooks and photographs come from?"

　"About ten years ago, someone mailed these to the Kyōbashi bar address. There was no return address, and when I wrote back to Kamakura — where I thought there might be something — it came back undeliverable. I did think I should look into it further, but then the air raids started and things got like this — but the notebooks and photographs somehow survived the raids. When I was evacuating here, I carried them along."

　"Did Ha-chan come to the Kyōbashi bar often?"

　"Often. We knew him as someone very gentle, very perceptive about things. If only he hadn't drunk, he would have been — no, even drinking, he was like a god, such a good child."

　"But the notebooks tell of some rather dreadful things."

　"It's his father's fault."

　The madam said this in a flat tone.

　It's his father's fault — it isn't entirely a wrong thing to say, I suppose, from one point of view. But having read those notebooks, it seems to me that the madam's words too, as a final verdict on a human being's life, are rather too simple.