Horiki and me.

Despite our mutual contempt, we kept on seeing each other. If what the world calls friendship consists in dragging each other down, then Horiki and I were definitely friends.

Through the chivalry of the madam of the Kyobashi bar (using the word “chivalry” in reference to a woman is unconventional, but in my experience, city women are far more chivalrous than city men, who are generally timid, obsessed with appearances and stingy besides), I was able to marry Yoshiko. We set up housekeeping in a rented room on the ground

floor of a wooden apartment building in Tsukiji, near the Sumida River. I quit drinking and devoted myself to drawing the manga that were becoming my steady profession. After dinner, we would go see a movie and stop in a coffee shop on the way home or buy a potted flower. More than anything, I loved listening to my little bride, who trusted me with all her heart, and watching her movements. My heart begin to warm with the faint hope that I might in time become somewhat human and avoid having to die a tragic death. And then along came Horiki.

“Hey there, lover boy! Wait, what’s this? I’ll be damned. You look like a solid citizen for once. The lady in Koenji sent me.” He lowered his voice and jerked his chin toward Yoshiko, who was in the kitchen making tea. “Okay if I go on?”

“Absolutely. You can say anything in front of her.” I was calm.

Yoshiko had a genius for trusting me, and not just about my relations with the madam of the Kyobashi bar; even when I told her what had happened in Kamakura, she never suspected me of having loved Tsuneko, and not because I was a skillful liar. Sometimes I described the incident in plain terms, but to Yoshiko it all sounded like a joke.

“Cocky as ever, aren’t we!” Horiki said. “Well, it’s nothing big. She wants you to drop by and say hello now and then.”

Just when you begin to forget, an ominous bird comes flying up and pecks at the wounds of memory. Instantly, past scenes of shame and guilt unfolded before me with such vividness that I wanted to scream in terror. I couldn’t sit still.

Me: “Want to go drinking?” Horiki: “Sure.”

Horiki and me. We resembled each other. Sometimes I even thought we were identical, but that of course was only when we were making the rounds of bars, drinking cheap liquor. In any case, when the two of us got together, we changed into a pair of dogs of the same shape and coat, roaming the snowy streets of Tokyo.

From that day on, we renewed our old friendship and went back together

to the little bar in Kyobashi, among other places. Eventually we even showed up at Shizuko’s apartment in Koenji, a pair of drunken dogs, and spent the night.

I will never forget: one sultry summer evening, just as the sun was setting, Horiki came to my place in Tsukiji wearing a worn-out cotton kimono. He’d pawned his summer clothes that day because he needed cash, but if his aged mother found out it would be awkward; he wanted to redeem the pawned items right away, so would I lend him some money? Unfortunately I, too, was broke. As usual, I instructed Yoshiko to take some of her clothes to a pawnshop and convert them to cash. After Horiki got his loan, there was a bit left over, so I had her go out and spend the remainder on distilled spirits. We went up on the rooftop to drink as we took in the occasional breeze off the Sumida River, redolent of drainage ditches: a truly grubby version of the elegant summer pastime.

We started a guessing game involving comic nouns and tragic nouns. It was a game I invented. Nouns come in categories of masculine, feminine and neuter, but there ought to be a distinction between comic and tragic nouns. “Steamboat” and “train,” for example, are tragic, while “streetcar” and “bus” are comic. Anyone who doesn’t understand why is unqualified to speak of art. A playwright who inserts even one tragic noun into a comedy is a failure, and the same goes for inserting comic nouns into a tragedy.

“Ready? How about ‘cigarette’?” “Tragic,” Horiki said promptly. “And ‘medicine’?”

“Powder or pills?” “Injection.” “Tragic.”

“You think so? There are hormone injections, too, you know.”

“Definitely tragic. Needles are involved, and there’s nothing more tragic than a needle.”

“Okay, I’ll let you have that one. But medicine and doctors are surprisingly comic. How about death?”

“Comic. Also Christian pastors and Buddhist priests.” “Very good! And life is tragic.”

“Nope. That’s comic, too.”

“Then everything is! Here’s one more for you. What about manga artist?

Surely that’s not a comic noun?” “Tragic. An enormously tragic noun.”

“What do you mean? An enormous tragedy would be you, not me.”

Any game that sinks to the level of such stupid jokes is dopey, but we took great pride in these exchanges, convinced we were displaying a degree of wit unknown in the world’s salons.

I also invented another, similar game, a guessing game of antonyms. The antonym of black is white. The antonym of white, however, is red, and that of red is black.

“What’s the opposite of flower?” I asked.

Horiki twisted his mouth, considering. “Well, there used to be a restaurant called ‘Flower Moon,’ so, moon.”

“That’s not an antonym. It’s more of a synonym, the way stars are synonymous with violets. An antonym it’s not.”

“I’ve got it. Bee.” “Bee?”

“Peonies are crawling with . . . oh wait, it’s ants.” “Yikes, that’s no antonym, it’s a motif. You’re slipping.” “I’ve got it! Clouds.”

“Clouds hide the moon, though.”

“Right, right. Wind scatters blossoms. The antonym of flower is wind.” “Not great. Sounds like a line from a popular ditty. You’re betraying your

roots.”

“All right then, how about the lute?”

“Worse and worse. The antonym of flower has to be . . . you have to name the least flowerlike thing in the world.”

“Okay, so it’s . . . wait a minute. Oh, I know. Woman.”

“While you’re at it, why don’t you give me a synonym for woman.”

“Entrails.”

“You, sir, lack the heart of a poet. What’s the antonym of entrails?” “Milk.”

“Not bad. Keep it up. Shame. What’s the antonym of shame?” “Shameless. Like that hot manga artist, Sir Faifa Drowning,” he said. “What about Masao Horiki?”

At this point neither of us was capable of laughing. We had succumbed to the gloom, the sensation that one’s head is full of broken glass, that comes from getting drunk on cheap spirits.

“Don’t get smart. At least I’ve never been tied up like a common criminal, unlike present company.”

I was shocked. So deep down, Horiki had never considered me reformed or respectable, had seen me only as a failed suicide without shame, a stupid ghost, a walking corpse. I was someone he could use as needed to supply his own amusement: that’s as far as his “friendship” went. This realization was of course unpleasant, but I soon backtracked. For him to take that view struck me as reasonable. From childhood, I’d never felt I deserved to be called human, after all. Maybe it was only right that even Horiki should hold me in contempt.

“Crime,” I said, affecting nonchalance. “What would the antonym of crime be? There’s a toughie.”

“Law,” Horiki replied with smooth equanimity.

I looked at his face. Red neon light from a sign on a nearby building flashing across his features gave him the stern authority of a relentless cop. Dumbfounded, I blurted, “Come on! That’s not even close.”

Imagine thinking the antonym of crime is law! But maybe that’s how most people in society get by, putting things in neat little categories, figuring that any place without cops is a hotbed of crime.

“What then—God? You have an annoying way of sounding like a damned preacher, you know that?”

“Hang on a minute. Let’s give it some more thought. Interesting topic, isn’t it? The way someone answered this question would tell you all you

needed to know about them, I bet.”

“Nah. Look, the opposite of crime is virtue. Being a virtuous citizen.

Someone like me, in other words.”

“Ha. Joking aside, virtue’s the opposite of vice, not of crime.” “Are vice and crime different?”

“I’d say so. Virtue and vice are man-made concepts, words applied to morality that people arbitrarily made up.”

“Dammit. Now we’re back at God. God, God. Leave it at God and be done with it. I’m hungry.”

“Yoshiko’s boiling beans downstairs.”

“Good. I like beans.” He plopped down flat on his back, hands behind his head.

“You don’t seem interested in crime anyway.”

“I’m not. I’m not a criminal like you. I may play around, but I don’t make women die, and I don’t wangle money from them.”

I didn’t make her die and I didn’t wangle money from anyone, said a faint yet desperate voice inside me, but by force of habit I quickly reversed course and decided it was all my fault.

I lack the ability to argue with someone straight on. Thanks to the drunken gloom enveloping me, I was growing more irritated by the second, but I suppressed my anger and muttered half to myself:

“Crimes you go to jail for aren’t the whole story. Maybe finding the antonym of crime would shed light on the true nature of crime. God . . . salvation . . . love . . . light . . . God has his opposite in Satan, and the opposite of salvation has to be suffering. The counterpart of love is hate, of light, darkness. Right and wrong, crime and prayer, crime and repentance, crime and confession, crime and . . . aagh, they’re all synonymous! What’s the antonym of crime?”

“Try sounding it out backwards, just the consonants. M-R-C . . . murk?

Pork’d be better. I’m so hungry. Bring me something to eat.”

“Go get it yourself, why don’t you!” My voice trembled with a rage I had seldom known.

“All right then, I’ll pop on downstairs, and Yoshi-chan and I’ll commit a crime together. A direct investigation’s better than all this debating. The antonym of crime is pork and beans––no, fava beans!” His speech was badly slurred.

“Suit yourself. Just go away.”

“Crime and hunger, hunger and fava beans. Bah, they’re all synonyms.” He got up, mumbling random nonsense.

Crime and punishment. Dostoevsky. A thought grazed a corner of my mind, startling me: what if Dostoevsky had paired those two words not as synonyms, but as antonyms? Crime and punishment, two utterly irreconcilable things, fire and water. I felt I could almost see into the depths of the scummy, rancid pond, the chaos that was Dostoevsky’s antonym- pairing mind, but no, I couldn’t quite make it out . . . My head spun with thoughts that flickered like a revolving lantern until I heard a shout:

“Hey! You never saw fava beans like these. C’mere!”

Horiki’s voice and expression had changed. Moments ago he had staggered downstairs, and now here he was back again already.

“What is it?” A peculiar excitement filled me.

The two of us descended from the roof to the second floor, and midway to my apartment on the ground floor, Horiki stopped still and whispered “Look!” He pointed.

The small window above my place was open, so I could see inside. The lights were on, illuminating a pair of animals.

My head swam. It’s all part of being human. All part of being human. Nothing to be surprised about. Breathing hard, forgetting even to rescue Yoshiko, I stood frozen on the stairs.

Horiki coughed loudly. I tore back upstairs to get away, collapsed on the roof and looked up at the dark summer sky swollen with rain. The emotion that engulfed me then was not anger or disgust or even sorrow, but massive terror. Not the terror of encountering a graveyard ghost, but a wild and overpowering dread with ancient roots, the sort of terror that might arise on glimpsing, among the giant cedars of a Shinto shrine, the figure of a deity

all in white. Beginning that night, my hair turned prematurely gray. I lost all confidence and every vestige of faith in others; I was permanently estranged from all expectation, all joy, all sympathy with the world’s affairs. The impact of that night was truly life-shattering. I suffered a frontal blow that cracked my skull between the eyebrows, leaving a wound that still throbs painfully whenever I come near any human being.

“I feel for you, but I hope you learned your lesson. I’m never coming back. This place is a hell on earth.” Horiki paused. “Still, you need to forgive Yoshiko. You’re no prize yourself. I’m off.”

Horiki wasn’t stupid enough to hang around in a situation so awkward.

I got up and drank alone, then wept bitter tears, sobbing unrestrainedly. I could have gone on weeping forever.

Before I knew it, Yoshiko was standing behind me with a vacant expression on her face, holding a dish piled high with fava beans. “He said he wouldn’t do anything to me but . . .”

“Never mind. Don’t say anything. You never knew enough to distrust anybody. Sit down. Let’s eat the beans.”

We sat side by side and ate the beans. Is trusting people a sin? I wondered. The guy was an illiterate shopkeeper, a pipsqueak around thirty. He used to ask me to draw him manga and paid a piddling amount of money for them with great fanfare.

Not surprisingly, he never showed his face again. Somehow my loathing of that shopkeeper paled next to the disgust and rage I felt toward Horiki, who on first stumbling on the scene had done nothing, not so much as coughing loudly before turning back upstairs to tell me. At night, unable to sleep, I groaned in torment.

Forgiving or not forgiving my wife was not an issue. Yoshiko had a genius for trusting people, had never suspected the worst of anyone. And yet, the result was this misery!

God, I ask you: is trusting people a sin?

Rather than Yoshiko’s physical defilement, the defilement of her trusting nature was for me a source of such unrelenting suffering that life became

unbearable. To a wretched wimp like me, always trying to gauge people’s moods by their expressions, my ability to trust cracked beyond repair, Yoshiko’s innocent faith in others had been as refreshing as a leafy waterfall. Overnight, the pure water of that cascade had changed to yellow sludge. From that time on, she trembled at my every smile and frown.

She would start when I called her and look anywhere but at me. No matter how I joked around, trying to make her laugh, she was nervous and tense, and she took to addressing me with honorifics all the time.

Could an innocent, trusting heart be the wellspring of all crime, all sin?

I sought out and read books involving the rape of a wife. None of the women in the books had been violated in as wretched a way as Yoshiko, it seemed to me. What happened to her wasn’t suited for a novel anyway. If there’d been a smidgeon of romance between her and the pipsqueak shopkeeper, I might even have found it easier to bear; all that happened was that one summer night she trusted him, and just like that, precisely because she’d been trustful, a frontal blow split my head open between the eyes, my voice turned hoarse, my hair went prematurely gray, and Yoshiko was doomed to be a bundle of nerves for the rest of her life.

Most of the novels I read attached great weight to whether or not the husband forgave his wife’s “act,” but that didn’t strike me as a very big or pressing issue. Happy is the husband who retains the right to forgive or not to forgive. A man unable to bring himself to forgive his wife ought to swiftly divorce her and take a new wife; if he can’t do that, he should forgive her and display tolerance. In either case the situation is resolved, whichever way the husband’s feelings incline. To summarize, while an incident of that nature surely comes as a great shock to the husband, it is just that, a shock, and not an endless series of lashing waves. This was the sort of trouble that the anger of an authoritative husband could cure. But in our case, the husband, me, was totally lacking in authority.

Upon reflection, I came to feel that everything was completely my fault, so that far from getting angry, I was unable to utter a word of reproach. The wife, moreover, had been violated because of the rare virtue she possessed,

one that the husband had long admired: the unbearably sweet virtue of an innocent, trusting soul.

Is innocent trust a sin?

Having called into question the one virtue I had relied on, I lost my moorings and turned to drink. My expression became extremely mean, I drank cheap spirits all day, my teeth fell out, and the manga I drew were all but pornographic. Let me be perfectly clear: around then I began making copies of erotic prints to sell illegally. I wanted money to buy alcohol. I would look at Yoshiko, who always nervously looked away, and I’d reason that since she didn’t know enough to be on her guard, maybe she’d been with the shopkeeper more than once. What about Horiki? Had she been with him, too? And with other men I didn’t know? My doubts multiplied, but I lacked the courage to ask her outright and get a straight answer. Writhing in my usual anxiety and fear, I drank. When I was drunk, I would ask her a leading question or two, my heart oscillating foolishly between joy and sorrow, while on the surface I continued to play the clown. Then, after inflicting loathsome, hellish caresses on her, I would fall fast asleep.

Late one December night, I came home in a drunken stupor and felt like drinking sugar water. Yoshiko was sleeping, so I went into the kitchen and looked around for the sugar bowl. When I lifted the lid, instead of sugar I found a small, narrow black box. I picked it up casually and was aghast at the writing on the label. Half of it had been scratched off, but the name in Western lettering was clearly legible: DIAL.

At the time I drank cheap spirits exclusively and wasn’t using sleeping pills. But as a chronic insomniac, I was familiar with most brands and knew that this boxful constituted more than a lethal dose. The seal was unbroken. She must have hidden the pills here with the intent to do herself in sometime, even going so far as to scratch off the brand name. Yoshiko, poor kid, was unable to read Western letters, so she must have thought it was enough if she scratched off only the name in Japanese. (You did nothing wrong, my dear.)

Quietly, taking care not to make a sound, I filled a cup with water, then

slowly and deliberately broke the seal, poured the entire contents into my mouth, and calmly drained the cup. Then I turned off the light and went to bed.

For three whole days, I slept the sleep of the dead. The doctor judged that it was an accidental overdose and kindly refrained from notifying the police. When I began to come out of it, the first words out of my mouth were reportedly “I’m going home.” What I may have meant by “home,” I have no idea, but at any rate I apparently said those words and cried bitterly.

Gradually the mist cleared, and there by my pillow sat Flatfish, looking extremely grim.

“The last time, too, it was late December, the time of year when we’re all crazily busy. By always picking the end of the year for his shenanigans, he makes my life unbearable.”

He was addressing this complaint to the madam of the bar in Kyobashi. I called out to her:

“Madam.”

“Yes, what is it? Have you woken up?” She smiled, bringing her face close to mine.

Tears poured down my cheeks. “Help me leave Yoshiko.” The words surprised even me.

She sat up and breathed a sigh.

Then I made a slip of the tongue so comical, so absurd, I hardly know how to describe it: “I’m going where there are no women.”

Flatfish guffawed, Madam giggled, and I, still shedding tears, turned red and gave a nervous laugh.

“Yep,” said Flatfish, laughing foolishly on and on, “that’s what you should do all right. Go someplace with no women. With women around, you’re finished. A place with no women: now there’s a good idea!”

A place with no women. Right. Yet my absurd, incoherent ravings were to be fulfilled later on in the direst way.

Yoshiko seemed to have the idea that I had taken the overdose in atonement for her sin. Now she was even more timid around me than

before. She never smiled, no matter what I said, and hardly spoke a word. I found being in the apartment with her so oppressive that I took to going out like the old days and drinking cheap liquor. But ever since swallowing the pills, I had grown thin and gaunt. My arms and legs felt heavy, and I’d begun to neglect my work. Flatfish had left me some money. (“A little something from Shibuta,” he wrote on the envelope, making it seem as if the money came from him, but I sensed that once again it was from my brothers back home. Unlike the time I ran away from Flatfish’s house, now I was able to see dimly through his self-important posturing. With equal guile, I pretended to be unaware of what was going on and thanked him meekly, not at all sure why he and they played that convoluted game. The situation made me extremely uncomfortable.)

I used the money to take a solo trip to the hot springs in southern Izu peninsula. A leisurely tour of hot springs was not my style, however. At the thought of Yoshiko, I was utterly forlorn, in no mood to sit and gaze tranquilly from my hotel room at the mountain scenery. Without bothering to change into the dressing gown the inn provided, let alone soak in the hot waters, I would rush out and take refuge in dingy bars where I drowned myself in liquor. I returned to Tokyo in worse shape than ever.

On my first night back in Tokyo, there was a heavy snowfall. I wandered drunkenly through the Ginza backstreets, singing a line from a war song under my breath over and over again: Here am I, hundreds of leagues from home. I walked along kicking the snow piling up on the ground, and then suddenly I vomited. For the first time I brought up blood, forming a big Rising Sun flag on the snow. I crouched down for a while and then with both hands scooped up clean snow and used it to wash my face, weeping.

Where does this path lead? In the distance a little girl was singing a nursery song, her voice so faint that I wondered if I was imagining it. Misery. In this world there were so many unhappy people—perhaps it was fair to say there were only unhappy people. But other unhappy people can boldly protest their lot, and society can easily understand and offer sympathy. My unhappiness, however, was entirely the result of my own

errors, leaving me no way to protest my lot to anyone. If I did stammer out a single word, not only Flatfish but everybody was sure to react with horror and retort, “How dare you talk that way!” Whether I was selfish or simply faint-hearted I had no idea, but either way, I was sinful to the core and naturally plunged deeper and deeper into the abyss of sorrow. I had no concrete measure to halt my descent.

I got up and, having decided to seek some kind of medicine or other for the moment, went into a nearby pharmacy. The woman behind the counter looked at me and froze, with her eyes opened wide and her head lifted, as if caught in the flash of a camera. There was neither surprise nor aversion in her eyes; the look she gave me was pleading, almost yearning. Ah, she is unhappy, too, I thought. Unhappy people are sensitive to the unhappiness of others. Then I realized she was standing with difficulty, on crutches. I suppressed the impulse to rush to her side. We went on looking at each other until I felt the sting of tears, and then I saw tears stream from her big eyes.

Without a word, I turned and left the pharmacy, staggered home, and drank a salt solution that Yoshiko prepared for me. Silently I went to bed and stayed there all the next day on the pretext that I felt a cold coming on. At night, bothered by the secret knowledge that I had vomited blood, I got up and went back to the pharmacy. This time, forcing a smile, I confessed the state I was in and asked the woman’s advice.

“You have to quit drinking.”

We were like blood relatives.

“I may be an alcoholic. I’d like a drink right now.”

“No, you mustn’t. My husband had TB. He used to say he’d kill the germs with liquor, and drank himself silly. Shortened his life.”

“I’m so restless, I can’t do anything. I’m terrified, a total mess.” “I’ll give you some medicine. But you’ve got to quit drinking.”

She was a widow with an only son. The boy had entered medical school in Chiba Prefecture or somewhere only to come down with the same illness as his father and land in the hospital. She lived with her father-in-law, a

bedridden paralytic. The woman herself had been stricken with polio at the age of five and had a bad leg. She bustled around the shop on her crutches, selecting a variety of medicines from a drawer here and a shelf there and laying them out for me.

This is to build your blood.

This is a vitamin solution and syringe.

These are calcium pills. This is diastase to prevent an upset stomach or diarrhea.

Tenderly, she explained each of the half-dozen medicines, but the tenderness of that unhappy woman was too much for me. Finally she said, “This is for when you want a drink so much you can’t stand it,” and swiftly handed me a small box wrapped in paper.

It was morphine.

She told me it was less harmful than alcohol, and since I was starting to see the sordid side of a drunkard’s life, the prospect of escaping the bottle’s satanic clutches filled me with elation. Without a bit of hesitation, I gave myself an injection in the arm. Just like that, my anxiety, fretfulness and discomfort vanished, and I became inordinately cheerful and voluble. After an injection, my debilities forgotten, I would devote myself to my manga drawing with renewed vigor. I developed the peculiar habit of bursting into laughter while drawing.

One vial per day soon turned into two; around the time I hit four, I could no longer work without the drug.

“You can’t go on like this. Once you’re addicted, you’re really in for it.”

At this warning from the woman at the pharmacy, I felt as if I were already a serious addict. (I am highly susceptible to suggestion. Told “Don’t spend this money––though if I know you, you won’t listen,” I have the strange illusion that not to spend it would be wrong, going against expectations. Inevitably, I spend the money immediately.) Nervousness over becoming an addict only led me to use the drug more and more.

“Please! I’m asking you. One more box. I promise I’ll settle my bill at the end of the month.”

“You can settle up anytime you want as far as I’m concerned. But watch out for the police, they like to crack down.”

A dark and murky aura always surrounded me, giving me the shady air of an outcast.

“Can’t you say something to put them off? Please! I’ll give you a kiss.” She turned red.

I pressed harder. “Without the drug, my work goes nowhere. For me, it works like a tonic.”

“In that case, you’d be better off with hormone injections.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I need alcohol, or that drug. Unless I have one or the other, I can’t get any work done.”

“Alcohol is no good.”

“Right? Ever since I started using that drug, I haven’t had a drop. I feel like a new man. I don’t intend to go on being a lousy manga artist forever, you know. I’m quitting the bottle. I’ll recover my health, study and become a great painter. Just wait and see. This is a crucial turning point for me. So please, please do me this favor. Shall I give you a kiss?”

She started to laugh. “What am I going to do with you! Don’t blame me if you wind up addicted.” Her crutches clicked on the floor as she fetched the drug from a shelf. “I can’t give you the whole box. I know you’d use it up right away. Here’s half.”

“Stingy, aren’t we? Oh well, I suppose I’ll just have to get by.” I went home and immediately gave myself an injection. “Doesn’t it hurt?” Yoshiko asked timidly.

“Sure it does. But I have to do it whether I want to or not, in order to work more efficiently. I’m on top of things these days, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, right? Now, it’s back to work! Time to buckle down!” I burbled frenetically.

Once I even pounded on the pharmacy door late in the evening. When the widow hobbled to the door in her nightgown, her crutches clicking, I threw my arms around her and kissed her, pretending to weep.

Silently she handed me an entire box.

By the time I realized beyond all doubt that the drug was as sordid and disgusting as cheap liquor––no, more so––I was a complete addict. I knew no shame whatsoever. To afford the drug, I again started churning out copies of erotic woodblock prints and even entered into an illicit affair with the crippled widow.

I want to die. I’d be better off dead. There’s no way out now. No matter what I do, I fall apart every single time and pile shame on shame. Who am I to dream of a leafy waterfall? I’ll just go on committing one sickening, despicable sin after another. My suffering will only expand and intensify. I want to die. I have to die. Living is the source of sin.

Even as I brooded on these things, I raced back and forth between the apartment and the pharmacy in a frenzy.

However much more work I did, as my use of the drug increased at the same rate, I soon owed a horrific amount of money. The sight of me brought tears to the widow’s eyes. I wept, too.

It was a living hell.

To escape this living hell, as a last resort—knowing that failure would leave me with no option but to hang myself—I decided on a step tantamount to betting on the existence of God: I wrote a long letter to my father back home and told him all about my predicament (though I couldn’t bring myself to write about the widow).

The result was only to make a bad situation worse. I waited on tenterhooks but no answer came, and frustration and anxiety drove me to increase still more the amount of the injections.

One day, I quietly made up my mind that I would give myself ten doses that night and jump into the river. That very afternoon, Flatfish showed up with Horiki in tow, as if he’d seen through my plan with diabolical clairvoyance.

“I hear you coughed blood.”

Horiki sat cross-legged in front of me and said this with the gentlest smile I had ever seen. Overcome with gratitude and joy, I bent my head and wept. That one gentle smile of his was all it took to completely destroy and

annihilate me.

They bundled me into a car. “For starters, you need to be in the hospital. Leave the rest to us.” Flatfish urged this in a soft, heartfelt tone—a tone of such utter tranquility that I am tempted to call it “merciful”—and, like someone utterly lacking in will or judgment, able only to sob, I quietly did as he and Horiki said. We three and Yoshiko rode in the car for quite some time, jostling and swaying. Just as it was growing dark, the car pulled up in front of a big hospital in the middle of a forest.

A sanatorium, I had no doubt.

A young, suspiciously mild-mannered doctor examined me carefully and then said with what I can only call a shy smile, “Well, you’ll need to stay here a while and rest.”

Flatfish, Horiki and Yoshiko were all to go home and leave me there on my own. Yoshiko handed me a cloth bundle containing a change of clothes, then silently drew from her obi sash the hypodermic needle and what remained of the drug. After all this time, she still thought it was a tonic.

“No, I don’t need it anymore.”

This was truly remarkable: for the first time in my life, I had turned down something I’d been offered. My unhappiness was the unhappiness of someone who lacked the power to say no. I had long been cowed by the fear that rejecting an offer would cause both my heart and that of the other person to crack beyond repair. But now, offered the morphine I’d been seeking in such a frenzy, I had declined it in a perfectly natural way. Perhaps Yoshiko’s angelic innocence had moved me. Perhaps in that moment I had already ceased to be an addict.

However, the young doctor with the shy smile immediately led me off to a ward and locked the door with a clang. It was a psychiatric ward.

I’m going where there are no women: that foolish cry, uttered in delirium after I took the sleeping pills, had come true in an uncanny way. The ward held only male lunatics, and the nurses, too, were all men. There wasn’t a single woman.

I was no longer a criminal but a lunatic. No, I definitely wasn’t insane.

Not for one moment had I lost my mind. But then that’s what madmen generally say. So apparently, anyone committed to this ward was out of his mind, and anyone not committed here was normal.

God, I ask you: is non-resistance a sin?

Rendered tearful by Horiki’s strangely beatific smile, powerless to exercise judgment or make any protest, I had gotten into the car and been taken here, and so I had become a lunatic. Now even if I got out of this place, the label would be branded on my forehead: lunatic. Or perhaps total wreck.

No longer human.

I had totally ceased to be a human being.

I arrived in early summer, when from my iron-barred window I could see red water lilies in the hospital’s little pond. Three months passed, and as cosmos flowers began to bloom in the garden, unexpectedly my brother came to get me, accompanied by Flatfish. He told me that Father had died the previous month of a stomach ulcer.

“The family is prepared to say no more about your past or cause you any more worry about how you are to live. You won’t have to do anything. In return, we ask only this: although you’re no doubt attached to Tokyo in many ways, we want you to leave the city and go recuperate in the country.” Flatfish had gone around making amends for all I’d done in Tokyo, so I could rest easy on that score, my brother concluded in his usual sober, tense

manner of speaking.

The mountains and rivers of home seemed to rise before my eyes, and I nodded faintly.

A total wreck, that’s what I was.

Learning that my father was dead left me stunned. He was gone. That familiar, terrifying presence that had never left my heart for a moment was no more. I felt as if the vessel of my suffering were now empty. More than likely, it was because of my father that the vessel had become so heavy. I lost all motivation. I lost even the capacity to suffer.

My brother did exactly as promised. He bought me a small thatch-roof house on the edge of a hot spring resort on the coast, four or five hours south by train from the town where I was born and raised. The climate here is unusually warm for the Tohoku region. Though the house has five rooms, it’s quite old, with peeling walls and worm-eaten pillars, seemingly beyond repair. My brother also hired a woman to look after me, an ugly crone twice my age with dreadful faded hair.

A little more than three years has gone by. In that time, Tetsu, the old woman, has violated me several times in a bizarre way. Now and then we quarrel like a married couple. My chest ailment is sometimes better and sometimes worse, and my weight fluctuates up and down. Sometimes I cough blood. Yesterday I sent Tetsu to the pharmacy to buy the sedative Calmotine. She came back with a box of a different shape from the usual one, but I didn’t think anything of it. I took ten pills before bed but never got the least bit sleepy, which seemed odd. Then my stomach cramped and I went to the toilet, where I had an explosive bout of diarrhea. I went three more times after that. Suspicious, I checked the box and found I’d taken Henomotine, a laxative.

I lay face up on my futon with a hot-water bottle on my stomach and started to scold Tetsu—“Hey, these aren’t sleeping pills, they’re laxatives!”—but got the giggles and couldn’t finish. “Total wreck” must be a comic noun. I took laxatives to go to sleep.

Now I am neither happy nor unhappy. Everything passes.

This is the one truth I have gleaned from human society, where I have lived as in a hell of screaming agony.

Everything passes.

This year I’ll be twenty-seven. My hair has turned so gray that people generally think I’m over forty.