Along the shore, close to the water’s edge, stood twenty or more rather tall cherry trees with ink-black trunks. Around the start of the school

year in April, moist, reddish-brown new leaves would show against the blue sea, along with a glorious array of pale pink blossoms, and soon a storm of petals would arise and tumble into the water, where they would drift on the surface until waves carried them home. Despite having scarcely studied for the entrance exams, I somehow made it into a school whose territory included this petal-strewn beach. Stylized cherry blossoms bloomed on the emblem of the school cap and the buttons of the school uniform.

Distant relatives of ours lived around the corner, which was one reason Father kindly chose that school of sea and cherry blossoms for me. I went to live with them in a house so close to the school that even after the morning

bell rang I could make it on time if I ran. As this shows, I was a pretty lazy student, but thanks to my usual clowning, my popularity grew day by day.

I was living away from home for the first time, and life felt much easier. Perhaps this was because being a cutup had become second nature to me; I didn’t have to work as hard at deceiving people. But more important, I think, was the deep-rooted difference between performing for family at home and for strangers in a strange place, a difference felt even by Jesus, the son of God. For an actor, the most challenging stage is in a hometown theater, especially with one’s closest relatives in front-row seats; under those conditions, even a great thespian would be hard pressed to perform well. Yet I had performed well under those conditions, had achieved considerable success. How could anyone with that record of achievement possibly fail away from home?

Deep down, my dread of human beings still festered, but my clown act was smoother than ever. In the classroom, I was getting steady laughs, and although the teacher reprimanded me and said what a good class it would be if only I weren’t there, behind his hand he was chuckling. I even got the military officer attached to the school, who had a gruff voice like thunder, to guffaw.

Just as I was beginning to feel relief at having successfully concealed my

true self, I was stabbed in the back. As one might expect of a back-stabber, he was the class runt, with a gray puffy face and an outsize jacket that must have been a hand-me-down, the sleeves long and droopy like a throwback to ancient times, a dunce who was a flop at academics, a perennial bystander at military drill and in athletics class. I saw no reason to be on my guard around him.

That day, the boy (whose family name I can’t recall, though I think his given name was Takeichi) sat looking on as usual while the rest of us were put through our paces on the horizontal bar. I deliberately affected the most solemn expression I could muster, let out a war whoop and rushed toward the bar, only to fly on past as if doing a broad jump and land with a thud on my butt in the sand. It was a calculated failure. Everyone roared with

laughter, exactly as I’d planned.

As I got up with an embarrassed smile and brushed the sand from my pants, Takeichi came up behind me—how long had he been hanging around there?—and poked me in the back. “On purpose,” he whispered. “You did that on purpose.”

I was severely shaken. Never had I dreamed that Takeichi, of all people, would be the one to perceive that I had deliberately flubbed it. In that moment, the world seemed to be engulfed in the flames of hellfire before my very eyes. It took all my strength to keep from crying out in a burst of madness.

Anxiety and fear ate at me in the days that followed. On the surface I kept up my wretched clowning and made everyone laugh, but now and again, I would sigh with the painful realization that no matter what I did, Takeichi would see straight through me, that before long he was bound to start letting everyone in on the truth. These thoughts brought on a panicky sweat, and I stared ahead with the vacant, roving eyes of a madman. If I could have, I would have liked to stick close to Takeichi morning, noon and night, keeping watch to prevent him from telling my secret and making every effort to convince him that my antics were not “on purpose” but genuine. I would even have liked to become best friends with him if I had the chance. And if none of that were possible, then I could only hope and pray that he would die. I have to say I never felt like killing him, though. Throughout my life, I have wished any number of times for someone to kill me, but never have I felt like killing someone. I always thought that challenging a formidable opponent with murder in my heart would only make the other fellow happy.

To win Takeichi over, I would put on a “nice” smile like a fake Christian and then, my head tilted at a disarming angle, put an arm around his small shoulders and in a syrupy, wheedling voice invite him over to play after school. He always looked at me blankly and said nothing. However, one day after classes, right around the beginning of summer, there was a sudden downpour. The other students were milling around, unable to leave, but

since I lived so close by I decided to make a dash for it. Then I happened to spot Takeichi standing disconsolately in the entranceway.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ll lend you my umbrella.”

He hesitated, so I grabbed him by the hand and we ran together through the rain. I asked my aunt to dry our wet clothes and then got him up the stairs to my room.

My widowed aunt, who was in her fifties, lived in the house with her two daughters. The elder daughter, Anesa, was a tall, bespectacled woman of about thirty whose health was poor (she had gone off once to be married but was now back again). The younger daughter, Setchan, had just graduated from a women’s college and was her sister’s opposite, short and moonfaced. The three of them ran a shop on the first floor selling stationery, sporting goods and whatnot, but their main source of income was rent money from the row house my uncle had left them.

“My ears hurt,” Takeichi said, standing there awkwardly. “They got wet in the rain and started hurting.”

I took a look. Both ears were badly infected and bursting with pus. “Oh no!” I said with an exaggerated show of surprise. “That must hurt a lot.” I took the blame, apologizing gently, like a girl: “I’m so sorry I dragged you out in the rain.”

I went downstairs and asked my aunt to give me some cotton balls and alcohol, then had Takeichi lie down with his head in my lap while I gave his ears a thorough cleaning. The hypocrisy and scheming behind my actions seemed to go right by him this time.

As he lay there with his head in my lap, he paid me this ignorant compliment: “I bet lots of girls’ll fall for you.”

In later years I was to discover what Takeichi could not have known, that this was a horrific, satanic prophecy. To “fall for” someone, to have them “fall for” you: either way, the expression sounds vulgar, facetious and grossly conceited. However solemn the occasion, once this expression rears its head, the temple of melancholy crumbles before your eyes, leaving a flat and featureless terrain. Yet replace “the pain of having someone fall for

you” with a more literary expression, say, “the anxiety of being loved,” and the temple of melancholy remains intact. It’s all very peculiar.

When I cleaned the discharge from Takeichi’s ears and he paid me that stupid compliment, I turned red and laughed it off without comment, but his words struck a faint chord within me. To admit that sounds appalling. It suggests an empty vanity, unworthy even of the young hero in a comic rakugo story. I don’t mean to imply that Takeichi’s words stirred any such absurd self-satisfaction.

Human females were many times harder for me to understand than males.

They outnumbered males in my immediate family as well as among more distant relatives, and counting also the criminal maids, it’s fair to say that from the time I was small, my playmates all were girls; yet in fact, with girls I always felt I was on thin ice. I never knew what was coming. I’d be lost in a fog, and then I’d make some awful mistake and pay the price. Unlike the whipping a boy might mete out, the wound a girl inflicted was more like an internal hemorrhage, striking inward with extreme discomfort and slow to heal.

Girls drew you close and then pushed you away, or when other people were around they despised you, gave you a hard time, and then when everyone went away held you tight. Girls slept like the dead––sometimes I thought they lived to sleep. Since childhood I had observed all this and more. Though girls were evidently fellow members of the human race, they struck me as being utterly different from boys; and yet those inscrutable, untrustworthy creatures cared about me. To say that they “fell for” me or even that they “liked” me would be totally off the mark; the closest I can come is that they “cared about” me.

Girls, even more than boys, seemed at ease around a clown. When I pulled one of my stunts, boys didn’t go on laughing forever, and because I knew that if I overdid my clowning I’d fail, I was always careful to quit at an appropriate point. Girls, however, knew no moderation. They wanted me to keep clowning endlessly, and I would take up the challenge, providing encore after encore until I wore myself out. They really loved to laugh.

Girls had a greater capacity for fun than boys, it seemed to me.

The sisters would come up to my room every chance they got, and invariably I was startled and jumped in fear.

“Are you studying?” one of them would ask.

“No,” I’d say with a smile and close my book. “Today at school our geography teacher, old Kombo . . .” I’d be off and running, telling funny stories even though my heart wasn’t in it.

One evening they came to see me and, after making me clown around for quite some time, begged me to put on a pair of glasses.

“What for?”

“Just do it, will you? Put hers on,” said Setchan, who was always issuing curt commands.

The clown did as he was told. Instantly, the two of them went into a fit of giggles.

“He looks just like him! He looks just like Lloyd!” Harold Lloyd, a foreign film comedian, was then popular in Japan.

I stood up and struck a pose. “Ladies and gentlemen! I would just like to say to all my fans in Japan . . .” They laughed even harder. From then on, every time a Harold Lloyd film came to town, I would go see it and secretly study his expressions and mannerisms.

One evening in the fall, I was lying down reading a book when Anesa came flying into my room like a bird and collapsed, sobbing, on top of my futon.

“Yo-chan, you’ve got to help me! You will, won’t you? I’d be better off leaving this awful place with you. Help me. Help me!” She babbled hysterically and then dissolved in tears again.

This wasn’t the first time I had seen a woman in such a state. I wasn’t particularly surprised at her emotional outburst; its very banality and insignificance cooled any interest I might have had. Cautiously I got up, peeled and cut up a persimmon on my desk and handed her a slice.

She ate it and said, hiccuping, “Have you got any amusing books? Let me borrow one.”

I selected Soseki’s I Am a Cat from the shelf and gave it to her. She thanked me with an embarrassed smile and left the room.

For me, trying to imagine the feelings not just of my cousin but of women in general was more confusing, troublesome and vaguely unsettling than probing the psyches of earthworms would have been. All I knew for certain, based on a lifetime of experience, was that when a female bursts into tears like that, if you give her something sweet, she’ll eat it and recover her spirits.

Setchan, the younger one, would bring her friends to my room, and after I

had as always entertained them without showing any partiality and they had gone home, she would unfailingly lay into them. “So-and-so is a juvenile delinquent, so watch out for her.” (Then why bring her to my room in the first place?) In any case, thanks to Setchan, almost all of the visitors to my room were female.

This was by no means a fulfillment of Takeichi’s prediction. No, I was merely the Tohoku version of Harold Lloyd. Several years would pass before Takeichi’s ignorant compliment predicting my future popularity with the opposite sex took on new life, proving itself a sinister prophecy.

Takeichi gave me one other important gift. One time when he came over, he proudly showed off the full-color reproduction of a frontispiece he had brought along. “It’s a picture of a monster.”

His words took me by surprise. In later years I would became convinced that my path in life was settled in that moment. I knew very well that this was van Gogh’s famous self-portrait. When we were boys, French Impressionist works were hugely popular, serving as stepping-stones to an appreciation of Western art. Even provincial middle schoolers like us were generally familiar with photogravure reproductions of the works of Van Gogh, Gaugin, Cézanne, Renoir and others. I had seen plenty of color reproductions of the paintings of Van Gogh, and I was attracted to the vitality of his touch and the brilliance of his colors, but never once had I thought he painted monsters.

“What about this? Is this a monster, too?” I took down a Modigliani

album from the shelf and showed Takeichi the famous painting of a nude woman with skin the color of burnt gold-copper.

“Wow!” he exclaimed, eyes popping. “She’s like a horse from hell, with a human face.”

“So, a monster?”

“I want to draw pictures of monsters like these,” said Takeichi.

People terrified of other human beings want to feast their eyes on monsters that are even more terrifying, the way nervous and easily intimidated people pray for the storm to rage ever more wildly. This group of painters, having been wounded and threatened by human monsters, finally believed their fantasies, saw them vividly in broad daylight and sought to express exactly what they had seen, not resorting to clowning but, as Takeichi had said, resolutely drawing “pictures of monsters.” These were my future comrades, I thought to myself in tearful excitement.

“I’ll draw them, too,” I told Takeichi in a half whisper. “I’ll draw pictures of monsters, the horses of hell.”

From the time I was in elementary school, I had always liked drawing and looking at pictures, but the pictures I drew didn’t attract as much praise as my essays. Because I put no faith whatever in human language, I saw my essays as merely a clown’s hello, a way of tickling my teachers, devoid of personal interest. I did, however, take pains in my own childish way with the pictures I painted (manga were another matter). The drawings we were given to copy in art class were boring and the teacher’s work was lousy, so I was forced to experiment randomly on my own using a variety of artistic methods. In middle school I acquired all the tools I needed for oil painting, but although I turned to the Impressionists for guidance, my paintings came out as flat and expressionless as paper cutouts and didn’t amount to anything.

Then Takeichi’s comments made me realize that my whole approach to

art was wrong. In striving to represent things that I thought beautiful as precisely that, beautiful, I had been naïve and foolish. The masters used to create beauty out of insignificant things, relying on their own

interpretations, and while revolted by ugly things, they did not hide their fascination but reveled in the joy of creativity. In short, they didn’t rely in the least on others’ expectations. After Takeichi granted me this primitive guide to artistic expression, little by little and in secret from the female visitors to my room, I worked on a self-portrait.

The finished painting was shockingly gloomy, even to me. Yet this was the true self I kept hidden away. On the surface, I laughed cheerfully and entertained people, while all the time my heart was dark and brooding––so naturally the self-portrait was, too, I told myself in secret affirmation. Still, I showed it only to Takeichi. I didn’t want others to discover the gloom lurking beneath my clowning exterior and become suddenly wary of me. I was apprehensive that instead of seeing my true self, they might see my self-portrait as a new form of clowning and make it the butt of their jokes— excruciating thought—so I quickly stuck the painting in the back of my closet.

In art class, I kept the “monster method” to myself and went on representing beautiful things beautifully, with the same mediocre result as before.

I had always shown Takeichi my vulnerable, hypersensitive side without any hesitation, and I showed him the self-portrait in a relaxed mood. He praised it highly. I kept on drawing a few more pictures of monsters and was rewarded with this prophecy: “Someday you’ll be a great painter.”

With two prophecies from that ninny Takeichi emblazoned on my brow

—“lots of girls’ll fall for you” and “someday you’ll be a great painter”—I set off for Tokyo.

I wanted to go to art school, but Father had long wanted to send me to university with an eye to my becoming a government official. He told me this and I—unable as ever to talk back to him—obeyed in a daze. He urged me to apply early, and since I was tired of the sea-and-cherry-blossom school, I went to Tokyo a whole year before graduating, sat for the university entrance exam and passed. I moved straight into the dormitory, but it was so disgustingly dirty and uncivilized that I had a doctor issue a

medical certificate stating I had TB and relocated to my father’s house in Ueno. Group life was beyond me. Also, references to the thrills or pride of youth left me cold; I couldn’t work up any school spirit. The classrooms and dormitory both struck me as dumps for a twisted kind of sexual desire, places where my expert clowning served no purpose.

Father stayed in that house only a week or two when the Diet wasn’t in session, and while he was away I had the spacious house nearly to myself, along with an elderly caretaker couple. I skipped school a lot but didn’t feel much like sightseeing in Tokyo, either (in all likelihood I will die without having seen Meiji Shrine, the statue of Kusunoki Masashige or the graves of the forty-seven ronin), and spent my days at home, reading or painting. When Father was in town I would scuttle off to school every morning—not to the university but to the painting school of the Western-style painter Shintaro Yasuda, in Hongo, sometimes spending as much as three or four hours there practicing sketching. After moving out of the school dormitory, even if I went to class I felt like someone in a special position, an auditor, although that could have been a preconceived notion on my part. I came to feel like a barefaced hypocrite, and going to school seemed more trouble than it was worth. Throughout elementary school, middle school and college, “school spirit” was beyond my comprehension. I never even tried to learn a school song.

Eventually, Masao Horiki, a fellow student at the painting school, introduced me to drinking, smoking, prostitutes, pawnshops and leftist thought. A strange assortment, but that’s the real list. Horiki, who hailed from Tokyo’s old downtown area, was six years older than me; he had graduated from a private art school but had no studio at home and was now continuing his study of Western-style painting at Yasuda’s school.

“Lend me five yen, please,” he said one day. We knew each other by sight only and until then had never exchanged a word. Flustered, I handed him the money.

“Great. Let’s go drinking. It’s my treat. You’re a good kid.”

Unable to fend him off, I let him drag me to a nearby hostess bar, and that

was the start of our friendship.

“I’ve had my eye on you for some time. That’s it, yeah, that shy smile, that’s the expression of a promising young artist. Here’s to new friends. Cheers! Kinu,” he said to the hostess, “isn’t he handsome? Don’t fall for him, now. Ever since he started coming to the painting class, I’ve sadly become second handsomest.”

Horiki had a dark complexion and even features; unusually for an art student, he wore a proper suit with a conservative necktie and his hair was parted in the middle, slicked down with pomade.

The unfamiliar place terrified me, so I folded and unfolded my arms with what probably did look like a shy smile frozen on my face, but after a couple or three beers I felt a lightness, an odd sense of liberation.

“I’ve been thinking of enrolling in art school for real,” I said.

“Don’t waste your time. Places like that are a waste of time. School’s a waste of time. If we seek a teacher, we must look to Nature! Ah, what pathos there is in our response to Nature!”

I took little account of what he said. I thought he was a fool and surely not much of an artist, but possibly someone good to go out on the town with. For the first time in my life, I had encountered a genuine city wastrel. In a different way from me, Horiki, too, was completely detached from the doings of ordinary human beings, had lost his bearings; in that respect, we were kindred spirits. Yet there was an essential dissimilarity between us: he was a buffoon without realizing it and was, moreover, completely unaware of the wretchedness of his buffoonery.

I felt scornful of him, always telling myself that I was with him only to go out on the town, that he was someone to pass the time with, no more; I was even ashamed of my friendship with him. But as he and I spent more time walking around together, he, too, finally broke me down completely.

In the beginning, though, I was convinced he was a fine fellow— singularly fine—and despite my habitual fear of human beings I let down my guard around him, pleased to have found a guide to the city. Alone, when I rode the train I was afraid of the conductor, when I went to see

kabuki I was afraid of the usherettes standing on either side of the red- carpeted staircase at the entrance, and when I went to a restaurant I was afraid of the waiter standing silently behind me waiting for me to clean my plate. Above all, when I went to pay the bill, my gestures were unbearably awkward. Anytime I handed over money for a purchase, I became dizzy not from stinginess but from an attack of nerves, shame, anxiety, terror: everything went dark, and I would be in such a panic that far from haggling over the price, I would forget my change, forget even to take my purchase with me more often than not. Navigating Tokyo on my own was impossible, and instead I would stay home all day, lying around doing nothing.

But when I handed my wallet over to Horiki and went around town with him, he haggled mightily and took charge of our adventures with aplomb, demonstrating an impressive ability to use a slight amount of money for maximum effect. He avoided expensive taxis, preferring the train, bus, riverboat and so on, always seeing to it that we arrived at our destination in minimum time. On the way home from a brothel early in the morning, at his recommendation we would stop off at an inn where I absorbed the practical lesson that a morning bath, a dish of simmered tofu and vegetables, and a bit of sake could make you feel as though you were living a life of luxury while costing next to nothing. He also taught me that roadside stalls sold cheap, nutritious foods like yakitori and gyumeshi, rice covered with beef and vegetables, and he swore that nothing got you drunk faster than Denki Bran, a cocktail of brandy, gin, wine, curacao and assorted herbs. Never once did he make me feel anxious or scared about the bill for our adventures.

Horiki had another saving grace: during our rambles about town, he

showed complete disregard for my opinions and constantly went on about what he called “pathos” (perhaps pathos entails ignoring the feelings of one’s companion?) in stupid, endless rants that eliminated any need for me to fear that as we tired of walking we might fall into awkward silences. In my interactions with people, fear of those horrendous silences—a fear all the greater because I spoke slowly—had driven me to play the clown in

desperation, as if my life depended on it, but now stupid Horiki took on that role without even realizing it, allowing me to listen without concentrating on what he said. All I had to do was keep smiling and slip in an occasional “No kidding!”

Drink, tobacco, prostitutes: I soon came to see that these were all excellent ways of dissipating, however briefly, my dread of humans. I even came to feel that selling off all my possessions in the pursuit of these dissipations would be worth it.

Prostitutes seemed to me to be neither people nor women, but idiots or lunatics. In the arms of a prostitute I could sleep soundly, completely at ease. Prostitutes were utterly, painfully, lacking in wants. And perhaps they sensed that I was one of them, a kindred spirit, for they invariably showed me a warmth that was never oppressive. A warmth without calculation or hidden agenda, a warmth toward someone who might never return: some nights, I saw the halo of Mary hovering over those prostitutes akin to idiots or lunatics.

Seeking to escape my dread of humans and just find a night’s rest, I took to spending more and more time with those kindred spirits of mine and thereby unknowingly acquired a completely unanticipated “extra”—a certain scandalous aura. It was Horiki who made me aware of the change, his comments leaving me astonished and disgruntled. Any objective observer could see that my schooling in women came from prostitutes and that my skills with women had recently shown great improvement—hardly surprising, he assured me, as the rigorous training of prostitutes produced the best results. I now gave off the heady aroma of “lady-killer,” an aroma that women (not only prostitutes) instinctively picked up on and gravitated toward. This indecent and inglorious atmosphere, the “extra” I had acquired, far eclipsed the restorative effects of my training.

Horiki said these things partly to flatter me, I suppose, but I pondered his

words with a heavy heart, feeling their truth. A woman in a hostess bar had written me a clumsy letter; every morning as I set off for school, the daughter of the general next door, a young woman of about twenty, would

go in and out of her gate for no apparent reason, wearing a touch of makeup; when I went out for a steak, without a word of encouragement from me the waitress would . . . ; the girl in the tobacco shop I frequented handed me a pack of cigarettes that contained . . . ; when I went to a kabuki performance, the girl in the seat next to mine . . . Then there was the time I was drunkenly dozing on the streetcar late one night and . . . ; the time when out of the blue I received a passionate letter from the daughter of relatives back home; the time when some girl anonymously left me a doll she had made herself. Since I was passive in the extreme, nothing came of any of these incidents, but there was no denying that something about me caused women to dream dreams; I was neither boasting nor making coarse jokes in acknowledging this. That someone like Horiki first brought this to my attention flooded me with a bitterness close to humiliation and dampened my enthusiasm for frequenting prostitutes.

Another time, to show off his “modernity” (I couldn’t then and can’t now think of any other reason why Horiki would do this) he took me to a secret Communist meeting (it was called a Reading Society or something; I don’t really remember). He may have simply lumped secret Communist meetings in with all the other sights of Tokyo. I was introduced to the “comrades” and made to buy a pamphlet, after which we heard a lecture on Marxist economics by the guest of honor, a young man with extremely ugly features whose every word struck me as patently obvious. What he said was no doubt true, and yet I knew the human heart was far more unfathomable, more terrifying than that. Greed wasn’t the half of it, nor vanity. Lust and greed together didn’t come close to an explanation.

Though my thoughts were imprecise, I sensed that the bedrock of human society wasn’t simply economics but something weirdly monstrous. I found this idea so disturbing that while I accepted materialism as naturally as water finds its own level, my dread of human beings did not therefore diminish nor did I take to gazing wide-eyed at new leaves with a joyous welling of hope. But I faithfully attended meetings of the Reading Society (if that’s what it was called; I could be wrong). I looked on with amusement

at comrades absorbed in the study of economic theories on the level of “one plus one equals two,” their expressions so grave you’d have thought they were debating matters of life and death. Resorting to my usual antics, I tried to lighten the mood, and gradually the oppressively formal meetings loosened up. I actually became quite popular and indispensable to the group.

Those simple people may have thought I was just as simple as they were, an optimistic comrade always good for a laugh, but if so I was wholly deceiving them: I was not their comrade. But I attended their meetings without fail and obligingly entertained them as a clown.

I did it because I was enjoying myself. Those people appealed to me. That wasn’t the same as bonding over Marx, however.

Illegality: the notion was faintly pleasurable, even comfortable. I found society’s laws terrifying (suggestive of unlimited power), their mechanism incomprehensible. They made society a windowless room of penetrating cold where I could not bear to remain. Outside might be a sea of illegality, but it seemed a far easier choice to dive into those forbidden waters and swim until I drowned.

People speak of “outcasts,” a term that apparently refers to wretched losers and rogues. I feel I have been an outcast since the day I was born. Whenever I encounter someone whom society has branded an outcast, my heart softens, becomes so tender and mild that I could swoon.

People speak also of a “sense of wrongdoing.” All my life in human society I have suffered from that sense. Like a wife who sticks by her husband through thick and thin, a sense of wrongdoing has been my faithful companion, and our private, cheerless frolicking has amounted to a way of life for me.

I have also heard people speak of the “wound of a guilty conscience.” That wound has been part of me since my birth, not healing as I grew but rather digging down to the bone, plunging me into the nightly hell of endlessly shifting torments, and yet—peculiar though it may sound— gradually becoming dearer to me than my flesh and my blood. In time the

pain has come to resemble the wound’s emotion at being alive, even its whispered endearments.

To such a man as I was, the atmosphere created by that underground group was oddly reassuring and comforting. In other words, I felt at home not with the movement’s intended purpose but with its disposition. Horiki, on the other hand, used the movement only for mindless fun; after the meeting where he introduced me he never went back, making the stupid joke that Marxists needed to study not just the means of production but the means of consumption, too. At any rate, his invitations to me had to do exclusively with the latter.

Looking back, I would say that at the time, Marxists came in a variety of flavors. Some, like Horiki, styled themselves as such out of a vain sense of modernity, while others, like me, were passive participants attracted by the whiff of illegality. Any true believer who saw through us would have flown into a rage, branded the pair of us dirty traitors, and thrown us out on the spot. But neither he nor I was ever expelled from the movement. That illegal world was congenial to me, more so than the world of law-abiding gentlemen, and in it I was able to relax and conduct myself in a “healthy” way that made them look on me as a promising comrade. They took to asking me to run all sorts of errands, always in an excessively hush-hush manner that made me want to burst out laughing. I never refused any assignment and carried them all off with such aplomb that the “dogs” (the comrades’ name for the police) suspected nothing and never so much as hauled me in for questioning. Always laughing and getting laughs, I carried out with precision what the comrades referred to as “dangerous missions.” (Those in the movement treated everything with life-and-death gravity and took elaborate precautions that resembled a bad imitation of a detective story; the jobs I took on were astounding in their insignificance, but everyone made a big deal of them, as if they entailed high peril.)

At the time I felt that even if I were to become a party member, get caught and end up spending the rest of my life in prison, I would be fine. Prison might well be an improvement on groaning night after night in the perdition

of insomnia, fearing the realities of life as lived by humans in this world.

Though Father and I shared the house in Ueno, he was so often out or entertaining visitors that we could go three or four days at a stretch without seeing each other. I found him unapproachable and formidable, and though I wished I could leave and find lodgings somewhere else, I hesitated to broach the topic. Before I had a chance to do so, I heard from the old caretaker that Father intended to sell the house.

He was nearing the end of his term in the Diet, and there were undoubtedly a host of reasons for the decision. He didn’t seem to want to run for office again; back home he was building a retirement retreat; and, having no particular attachment to Tokyo, he possibly considered it wasteful to maintain a household and servants for the sake of a mere student like myself (as with people’s feelings, I couldn’t fathom thought processes either). In any case, the house soon passed into the hands of its new owner, and I went to live in an old lodging-house in Hongo––and promptly ran out of money.

Until then, Father had given me a monthly allowance that I used up in a few days, but cigarettes, alcohol, cheese and fruit were always available at home, and books, writing materials and clothing I could purchase from local stores on credit. In the neighborhood restaurant where Father was a regular, I could treat Horiki to a bowl of noodles, or rice topped with deep- fried prawns and vegetables, and never pay a penny.

Now all of a sudden I was out on my own, forced to meet all my expenses

out of my monthly allowance. As before, the money evaporated in two or three days, leaving me horrified, helpless and panicky. I would fire off telegrams and follow-up letters to my father, brothers and sisters in turn, begging for assistance (the circumstances I described in the letters were invariably fictionalized, presented in a tone of frivolity; I figured that when asking someone for something, it was best to begin by getting a laugh). Under Horiki’s guidance I took to frequenting pawnshops, but even so, I was always hard up for cash.

In short, I lacked the ability to live on my own without connections.

Sitting huddled alone in my room felt terrifying, as if at any moment I might be attacked, perhaps hit on the head, so I would rush out to help with the movement or go drinking cheap liquor with Horiki, abandoning my schoolwork and my painting, both. Then in the November of my second year in college, I formed a double suicide pact with a married woman, and my life turned upside down.

Although I didn’t ever go to class or study, somehow I seemed able to come up with passable answers to exam questions, and so far I had been able to fool my family back home. Now, however, the school sent my father a confidential report of my failure to meet attendance requirements, among other things, and I began receiving a stream of long, sternly worded letters from my eldest brother, written in Father’s stead. There were also more direct sources of pain: my lack of money and the fact that my service to the movement had become so intense and all-absorbing that I could no longer do it half in fun. I was in charge of Marxist student action groups in schools throughout central Tokyo, in the districts of Hongo, Koishikawa, Shitaya and Kanda. In case of an armed uprising, I bought a small knife (I later realized its delicate blade was barely strong enough to sharpen pencils) that I carried around in my raincoat pocket while I busied myself doing “liaison” work.

I wanted to have a drink and fall sound asleep, but I had no money. Moreover, orders from P (our code name for the Party, as I recall, though again I could be wrong) came in such a cascade that I scarcely had time to breathe. My sickly body couldn’t keep up. All along I had only been helping out because the group’s illegal status appealed to me, but what had started as a joke was now all too real. Unbearably busy, I felt like telling the P leadership, You’ve got the wrong guy. Why not have an actual member do your dirty work? Unable to suppress my hateful thoughts, I fled. When fleeing didn’t make me feel any better, I decided to end it all.

At the time, there were three women who had feelings for me. One was my landlord’s daughter. Every time I came back exhausted after helping with the movement and collapsed on my futon without supper, she would

show up in my room, pen and writing paper in hand: “May I come in? My sister and brother make so much noise downstairs, I can’t focus on this letter I’m writing.” Then she would sit at my desk and write for an hour or more.

All I had to do was ignore her and go back to sleep, but she so clearly wanted me to talk to her that my passive urge to please kicked in. Even though I didn’t want to utter a word, I rolled over onto my stomach with great effort and took a drag on a cigarette.

“I heard there’s a guy who heats his bathwater by burning love letters from women.”

“No! I bet it’s you.”

“I once heated a cup of milk that way and drank it down.” “I would consider it an honor. Use mine next, won’t you?”

If only she’d go away and leave me alone! Writing a letter? A likely story.

Scribbling random nonsense, I’d have bet.

“Let me see it,” I said, though seeing what she had written was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. She lit up with pleasure and protested in a coy manner so disgraceful I lost all interest in her. Then I came up with an idea: I would send her on an errand.

“I hate to ask you this, but would you mind going out to the pharmacy and picking me up some Calmotine? I’m worn out, my face is hot and I can’t sleep. I’d really appreciate it. The money is—”

“Oh, don’t you worry about the money.” She gladly got up.

I knew very well that women aren’t put off when asked to run an errand, that they quite like having a man ask them to do some little thing for him.

Another woman attracted to me was a student in a teacher-training college, a “comrade” whom I had no choice but to see daily, like it or not. After a meeting to plan the day’s activities, she would tag along and buy me this and that.

“Just think of me as your real sister,” she would say, and I’d force a sad smile, inwardly shuddering at her affected ways.

“I do, I do.”

Afraid of making the ugly, unlikable woman angry, I avoided leveling with her and ended up yielding to her whims. When she bought me something (invariably in atrocious taste; I usually handed off whatever it was to a street vendor or the like), I would look pleased and offer a quip to make her laugh. One summer night on a dark street corner, she was being especially clingy, and, desperate to be rid of her, I kissed her. She became shamefully, wildly impassioned, hailed a cab and took me to a little office that the movement secretly rented, where we whooped it up till morning.

That’s one hell of a sister, I told myself with a wry smile.

With both the landlord’s daughter and this “comrade,” our forced close contact left me no way to escape, as I had done with so many women in the past, and so things dragged on, my old insecurity compelling me to cozy up to them both. I felt paralyzed, unable to extricate myself.

Around that same time, a woman working in a big hostess bar on the Ginza strip did me an unexpected favor, and even though we had met only once, my awareness of what I owed her filled me with concern and terror. By then, I had equipped myself with sufficient brazenness to ride the streetcar, see kabuki or stroll into a hostess bar alone, even without Horiki to shepherd me.

In my heart, I still distrusted and feared the confidence and the violence

of human beings, but little by little I had grown able, on the surface, to meet people and talk to them properly with a straight face—or no, I take it back, it wasn’t in me to meet people without affecting the defeated, strained smile of a buffoon. Yet somehow I had learned to engage in small talk, even if I did sound overwrought and flustered. Did I owe this change to the work I’d done on behalf of the movement? To women? To drinking? More than anything, I owed it to being perennially broke. I lived in a state of constant fear, and one day it occurred to me that if I could go to a big hostess bar and lose myself amid the jostle of drunken patrons, hostesses and busboys, I might relax and find relief from the sense of being pursued.

With that hope in mind, I went into the aforementioned establishment with just ten yen and told the hostess with a laugh,

“I’ve only got ten yen on me. Thought you ought to know.” “No need to worry.”

I detected a bit of western Japan in her speech. Her comment had a peculiarly calming effect on my shakiness and agitation—and no, it wasn’t that I no longer feared coming up short on the bill. I actually felt that as long as I was with her, there was no need to worry.

I ordered a drink. The hostess had earned my trust and I felt no need to clown around, so I let my true character, gloomy and taciturn, show as I drank in silence.

“Want any of these?” She spread out an assortment of appetizers. I shook my head.

“Just a drink? I’ll have one, too.”

It was a cold autumn night. I went to the back-alley sushi stall where Tsuneko (I think she was called Tsuneko, but my recollection has faded and I can’t be certain; I am the sort of man who forgets the name of the woman he agreed to commit double suicide with) had said she would meet me after work. While I was waiting for her, I ate some sushi that tasted bad. (I may have forgotten her name, but for some reason I can clearly recall the bad taste of that sushi. I also have a vivid mental picture of the old bald guy with a face like a rat snake, swinging his head from side to side while he hand-rolled sushi with flair, making himself look as if he knew what he was doing. In later years, more than once I would be riding the streetcar, catch sight of a familiar-looking face and, after racking my brain, realize Oh yeah, he looks like the sushi guy that time and smile wryly to myself. When her name and even her face are vanishing from my memory, why do I still remember the sushi guy’s face so precisely that I could draw it? I believe it’s because of his bad-tasting sushi, which chilled and disturbed me. Then again, even when taken to a famous sushi restaurant, I was never impressed. The pieces of sushi were always too big. I would think, Why can’t they make them the size of a thumb, the way they’re supposed to be? )

She was living in a rented room on the second floor of a carpenter’s house in Honjo. I lay on the tatami and sipped a cup of tea, one hand propping up

my cheek as if I were suffering from a toothache, making no attempt to hide my disconsolation. This posture seemed to meet with her approval. She struck me as totally isolated, a woman standing amid a swirl of dead leaves, whipped by a cold wind.

As we lay there side by side, she told me her story. She was two years older than me, married, from Hiroshima. “I’ve got a husband. He used to be a barber in Hiroshima, and last spring we ran away together to Tokyo. He never found a real job, and after a while he was charged with fraud and sent to prison. I’ve been going to see him every day, taking him whatever he needs, but from tomorrow I’ll stop.”

Unfortunately, somehow women’s life stories never interest me, perhaps because women aren’t very good at telling them; they emphasize the wrong points. At any rate, I always turn a deaf ear.

I feel so sad and alone.

Those few words murmured in my ear would arouse my sympathies more than any rambling sob story. I find it bizarre and astonishing that no woman has ever spoken them to me. Neither did she, but her body was wrapped in a thin current of sadness and loneliness that wrapped around me, too, when I nestled against her, merging with my own current of prickly gloom and enabling me, like a withered leaf settling on a rock at the river bottom, to let go of my fear and anxiety.

This was completely different from the feeling of ease that enabled me to sleep soundly in the arms of idiot prostitutes. (For one thing, the prostitutes were cheerful.) That night with the wife of a convicted criminal was, for me, a night of liberation and happiness (an outlandish word that I do not expect to use again in this notebook in such an assured and affirmative way).

But those feelings were to last for only one night. The next morning I awoke, jumped up and reverted to the same flippant clown act as always. To the weak, even feeling happy can be frightening. We can injure ourselves with cotton balls, get hurt by happiness. Anxious to end things before disaster struck, I put up the usual smoke screen of buffoonery.

“When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window, they say, but the popular interpretation is all wrong. The proverb doesn’t mean that when your money’s gone, your woman will walk out. When a man runs out of money, you see, naturally he loses heart, goes into a deep funk. His laugh is hollow and he becomes strangely paranoid, until finally, in desperation, he walks out and keeps right on going, never looks back. That’s what it says in the Kanazawa Dictionary. It’s a damn shame, though I can imagine the feeling.”

I remember spouting some such nonsense and making Tsuneko burst out laughing. Nothing good could come of my hanging around, so I made tracks, not even staying long enough to splash water on my face. My irresponsible remarks would later give rise to an unexpected complication.

I didn’t see my benefactor of that night for another month. After I left her, my happiness waned day by day, and the slight kindness she had done me began to fill me with alarm. For no reason, I began to feel the shackles of obligation, and the simple fact that I had made Tsuneko pay my entire bill that night weighed on me until in my mind she was no different from the landlord’s daughter or the girl at the teacher-training college, just another threatening female, and despite the distance between us, I lived in constant fear. Moreover, I had the overpowering conviction that any woman I had once slept with would turn on me in a fury if we met again, so that in my reluctance to see her, I gave the Ginza a wide berth. My reluctance wasn’t a result of craftiness on my part but rather rose out of my failure to fully grasp a curious phenomenon: women maintain not a speck of connection between what happens after they go to bed and what happens after they get up in the morning but live in two worlds as cleanly cut off from one another as if by the river of oblivion.

Late in November, I was drinking cheap liquor with Horiki at a bar in Kanda, and when we left, that evil friend of mine insisted we continue drinking. Neither of us had any money, but that didn’t stop him.

“Come on, let’s go somewhere else and drink some more!”

Drunk, feeling reckless, I gave in. “All right then, follow me to the land

of dreams. Hold on to your hat. Get ready for a night of revelry and feasting like you’ve never—”

“You mean a hostess bar?” “I do.”

“Let’s go!”

We boarded a streetcar.

Horiki was in high spirits. “I’m hungry for a woman tonight. Okay if I kiss a hostess?” I didn’t much like it when he put on that sort of drunken act, and he knew it, so he pressed the point. “All right? I’m kissing a hostess, I tell you. Wait and see. Whoever comes and sits beside me is getting herself kissed but good.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Thanks! I’m starved for a woman.”

We got off the streetcar at Ginza Yonchome and entered that same hostess bar, the palace of revelry and feasting. I had barely a penny on me; Tsuneko was my only hope. Horiki and I found a vacant booth and sat across from each other, and she and another hostess came scurrying over. The other one sat next to me, and Tsuneko plopped down beside Horiki. Then it hit me: she was moments away from being kissed.

I didn’t feel resentful. I’m not possessive by nature. On occasion, I might

feel a faint pang when someone takes something that belongs to me, but I lack the energy to assert my rights by starting a fight. Later in my life, I would even look on in silence as my wife was sexually assaulted.

As far as possible, I strove to steer clear of human complications. The mere thought of getting sucked into that whirlpool terrified me. Tsuneko and I had shared a single night. She did not belong to me. I had no right to feel anything as arrogant as resentment. And yet I was shocked.

This was because I felt sorry for Tsuneko, about to receive a ferocious kiss from Horiki right in front of me. Once tarnished in that way, she would no doubt have to leave me. I lacked the fierce passion to make her stay. It’s all over now, I thought, and although her misfortune gave me a momentary shock, I soon accepted the inevitable, accommodating myself to the

situation with the ease of water flowing around something in its way. I looked from Horiki to Tsuneko and grinned.

But all at once the situation took a wholly unexpected turn—a turn for the worse.

“I’m done!” Horiki frowned. “This one looks too pathetic, reeks too much of poverty, even for me.” He crossed his arms and stared at Tsuneko in apparent disgust, his mouth twisted in a crooked smile.

“Get us some drinks,” I told Tsuneko in a low voice. “We have no money.” I wanted to drown myself in alcohol. In the eyes of a man of the world, Tsuneko wasn’t even worthy of drunken kisses, she was only a pathetic woman who reeked of poverty. This discovery caught me completely off guard, left me thunderstruck.

I kept on drinking, more and more as never before, getting smashed. Tsuneko and I traded sad smiles. Yeah, I see it now, that’s all she is, a weird, worn-out woman who stinks of poverty. At the same time, as a fellow pauper I felt drawn to her (the discord between rich and poor may seem hackneyed, but I now believe it to be one of the eternal dramatic themes), and that attraction, that sense of closeness, came welling up, endearing her to me and making me sense for the first time in my life the positive, if faint, stirrings of love. I threw up. Lost consciousness. That was the first time in my life I ever drank so much that I passed out.

When I woke up, Tsuneko was sitting by my pillow. I had been asleep in her room in the carpenter’s house in Honjo.

“When you said poverty at the door makes love fly out at the window, I thought you were joking, but I guess you meant it. You never came back. It’s a messy business, the end of love. Would it make any difference if I earned money for the both of us?”

“No.”

Then she lay down, too, and toward dawn the word “death” passed her lips for the first time. She seemed exhausted by human affairs, and I was frazzled by fear of society, hassles, money, the movement, women, my studies . . . the more I thought about it, the less I felt I could bear to on

living, and when she suggested that we commit suicide together, I readily agreed.

But at that time I hadn’t really made up my mind to die. There was still an element of pretend in it all.

That morning, we walked around Asakusa together. We went into a coffee shop and had hot milk.

“You pay, will you?” she said.

I stood up, took out my wallet and opened it. Three copper coins. It was not shame that flowed through me but horror. I pictured my room at the lodging-house, now containing only my school uniform and futon, a barren room devoid of anything worth pawning. My only other possessions were the kimono and cloak I had on. This was the bitter truth. Obviously, I could not go on living.

As I stood there flustered, she got up and peered inside my wallet. “Is that all you’ve got?”

Her voice was innocent, but her words cut to my heart. My pain was all the greater because this was the voice of the first woman I had ever loved. Yes, it was all I had, and it was nothing; three copper coins hardly counted as money. I felt a peculiar humiliation beyond any I had ever known, a humiliation I could not live with. I suppose I had yet to shed my sense of myself as the pampered scion of a rich family. At this, I made the conscious decision, on my own, to die.

That night, we jumped into the sea at Kamakura. She first took off her obi sash, which she said she had borrowed from a friend, folded it and laid it on a rock. I took off my cloak and laid it in the same place, and we went into the water together.

She died. I alone was saved.

The newspapers made much of the incident, probably because I was a college student and my father’s name still retained some news value.

I was admitted to a hospital on the coast. A family member rushed to my side, saw to a great many details and returned home after informing me that the entire family from Father on down was furious with me and I might well

end up being disowned. I didn’t care. I longed for the dead Tsuneko and couldn’t stop weeping. Of all my relationships, the only person I had truly loved was Tsuneko, a woman who reeked of poverty.

The landlord’s daughter sent me a long letter containing fifty tanka poems, all starting with the odd first line, “Live for me, do.” Nurses took to popping into my sickroom to say a cheerful hello, and some would squeeze my hand before leaving.

They discovered at the hospital that my left lung had been damaged, which worked greatly to my advantage when the police came. I was charged with assisting a suicide and escorted from the hospital, but at the station they treated me as an invalid and put me in an isolation room, away from the other prisoners.

Late at night, the old policeman on night duty in the adjoining room quietly opened the door. “Hey!” he called to me. “You must be cold. Come in here and get warm.”

Deliberately acting downcast, I shuffled into his room, sat in a chair and held out my hands to the charcoal brazier.

“You miss the dead girl, don’t you?” “Yes.” I made my voice weak and faint.

“Of course you do. That’s human nature.” Gradually his tone became more assertive. “Where did you first have relations with her?” He made this inquiry with an air of authority that was worthy of a judge. He looked down on me as a child and seemed prepared to while away the long autumn night by acting as if he himself were in charge of the investigation, thereby getting me to confess to salacious details.

Quickly grasping his intent, it was all I could do to keep from laughing in

his face. I knew I would be within my rights to refuse to cooperate with such an “off-book interrogation,” but the night ahead was long, and to liven it I assumed an outward air of utmost sincerity, as if I firmly believed that he was in charge of the investigation and could singlehandedly decide the severity of my penalty. I fabricated a statement to at least take the edge off his licentious curiosity.

“All right, that gives me a pretty good idea of how it went. When a prisoner answers questions honestly, we take that into consideration.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that very much.”

My performance was inspired, divine. A performance from which I derived no benefit whatsoever.

Sometime after dawn, the police chief sent for me; now the official interrogation would begin. When I opened the door and went into his office, he took one look at me and said, “Well, a handsome fellow! None of this is your fault. It’s your mother’s fault for giving birth to someone so devilishly handsome.”

The chief was still young, with a swarthy complexion and the air of a college educated man. Taken by surprise, I felt wretched and hideously disfigured, as though I had a red birthmark covering half my face.

The interrogation by this police chief, who had the build of a martial arts master, was cut and dried, a world away from the sly, thoroughly obscene midnight questioning of the old policeman. Afterward, as he filled out a form to send to the district attorney’s office, the chief remarked, “You’ve got to take better care of yourself. You’ve been coughing blood, haven’t you?”

That morning I had an oddly persistent cough, and every time I coughed I

covered my mouth with a handkerchief that was spattered with blood. The spots were not from my throat, however. The night before, I had fiddled with a small pimple under my ear, and that was the source of the bleeding. It crossed my mind that I was better off not revealing this, so I merely looked down and said solemnly, “Yes, sir.”

The police chief finished writing. “Whether you’ll be indicted is for the prosecutor to decide, but you should go ahead and arrange by telegram or telephone to have someone come pick you up today at the public prosecutor’s office in Yokohama. There must be somebody you can ask, a guardian or a guarantor.”

I remembered that an antique dealer named Shibuta from my hometown, a frequent visitor at my father’s house in Tokyo, was my guarantor at

college. A bachelor in his forties, short and heavyset, he was always playing up to my father. His face, particularly the eyes, looked so much like a flatfish that Father always called him that, and I was used to calling him by his nickname, too.

I borrowed a telephone book, found Flatfish’s home phone number, and gave him a call. When I asked him to come pick me up at the public prosecutor’s office in Yokohama, he responded in a haughty tone completely unlike his usual ingratiating manner, but even so, he agreed to do it.

After I returned to the isolation room, the police chief barked out an order, his voice so loud that even I could hear: “Hey, hurry up and disinfect the phone, will you? The guy’s coughing blood!”

That afternoon, my arms were bound to my torso with narrow hemp rope, and while I was permitted to conceal my bondage under a cloak, a young policeman kept a firm grip on the end of the rope as the two of us headed off to Yokohama by streetcar.

I felt not the least bit anxious. I looked back fondly on the isolation room and the old policeman. Why am I like this? Though I was tied up like a criminal, I felt relieved, and even now, as I set down my recollections of that day in a calm, reflective state of mind, I am enjoying myself, perfectly at ease.

But mixed in with my fond memories of that time is the haunting memory of a colossal failure. I underwent a simple interrogation in a dimly lit room in the public prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor was a quiet man of around forty (whereas my good looks, if any, were undoubtedly tainted with sensuality, his were what I would call proper good looks, exuding an air of intelligent serenity), and his personality seemed so easygoing that I was making my statement absentmindedly, guard down. Then all at once that cough of mine came back, and I brought out my handkerchief. Seeing the bloodstains on it, the shameful thought struck me that perhaps my cough might again be of some use. I added a couple of fake coughs for good measure, exaggerating them for effect, and then, still holding the

handkerchief over my mouth, I glanced at the prosecutor’s face. “Was that real?” he asked with a quiet smile.

I broke into a cold sweat. Even now, looking back, I go into a dizzy panic. It was far worse than the time in middle school when that dummy Takeichi jabbed me in the back and said the words “on purpose,” plunging me into hell. This notebook contains the record of the two times in my life when my act flopped. I think sometimes I’d rather have been handed a ten-year sentence than face the prosecutor’s quiet contempt.

The indictment was suspended. I wasn’t at all glad, but sat in utter

wretchedness on a bench outside the prosecutor’s office, waiting for Flatfish to come pick me up.

Through a high window I could see the sky at sunset, where a seagull was flying in the shape of the kanji character for “woman.”