I have lived a life of much shame.

I have no idea what it must be like to live as a human being. Born in the Tohoku countryside, I never saw a train until I was fairly big. I scampered up and down the station overpass without realizing it was there to let people cross over the train tracks. All I could think was that the station was designed like a foreign playground, complicated in a fun way, modern and stylish. I went on thinking that for quite some time. Going up and down the overpass seemed to me a refined sort of game, the niftiest of all the services the railway provided, and later on when I found it was actually a practical set of stairways to enable passengers to cross over the tracks, all my pleasure evaporated.

As a child, I first saw a subway train in a picture book, and again I was

convinced that such a thing had been devised not out of practical necessity but because compared to riding aboveground, riding underground would be so much more unusual and entertaining.

I was sickly as a child and often took to my bed, where I thought the sheets, pillowcases and quilt covers were all unnecessary decorations. When in my late teens I realized their utilitarian value, human thriftiness left me feeling depressed and sad.

I never knew what hunger was, either. By this I obviously don’t mean simply that I grew up in a home with ample provision for the necessities of life. I mean that I had no notion of the sensation of hunger. Strange as this may sound, even if I was hungry, I was never actually aware of it. When I came home from school, people would fuss over me: “You must be starving. I remember how that feels! The hunger pains you suffer when you come home from school are the worst. How about some candied beans? There’s pound cake and buns, too.” Always accommodating, I would mutter, “Yeah, I’m starving,” and throw a handful of candied beans in my mouth. But what it felt like to be hungry, I had no idea.

I’m a hearty eater, all right, but I have no recollection of ever eating out of hunger. I am drawn to foods that are fancy or out of the ordinary. When I’m a guest somewhere, generally I eat what I’m offered, even if it takes an effort to get it down. The most difficult ordeal for me in childhood was definitely mealtime at home.

I grew up in a big country family—there were a good ten of us—and at meals we would all sit on the tatami in two facing rows, each with our own tray-table. As the youngest, I of course occupied the very last place. The room where we ate was dimly lit, and the sight of ten or more people sitting and eating in gloomy silence was chilling. Also, because ours was an old- fashioned country household, the foods on the menu were set, with no possibility of anything the least fancy or out of the ordinary. Mealtime came to hold terrors for me. Sitting in the last seat in that shadowy room, shivering from the cold as bit by bit I lifted morsels of food to my mouth and swallowed them, I wondered why people ate three times a day, anyway.

Everyone looked so solemn, it occurred to me that meals might be a kind of ritual carried out three times daily at specified times, a ritual requiring everyone to gather in a dimly lit room, take their places in neat rows, and, whether they felt like it or not, sit with faces downturned and chew in silence as they prayed to the household gods.

Eat or die: this expression sounded to my ears like an unpleasant bit of intimidation, no more. But that superstition (even now, I can’t help thinking of it as such) brought me constant anxiety and fear. People work for a living because they have to feed themselves, or else they’ll die: nothing was so impenetrable and obscure to me, so starkly threatening, as those words.

To this day I have no idea why humans do the things they do. As a child, I had an uneasy sense that my concept of happiness was utterly different from the one everyone else shared, an uneasiness that made me toss on my futon night after night and moan, nearly out of my mind. Have I ever known happiness? All my life people have been telling me how fortunate I am, but I have always, always felt that I was going through the torments of hell and that those who called me fortunate were infinitely better off.

Sometimes I feel as if I were burdened with ten woes so heavy that if my neighbor had to bear even one, it would be enough to do him in.

In short, I don’t get it. I lack the ability to grasp the nature or degree of my neighbor’s suffering. For all I know, “practical” suffering—the sort that can be ended by putting food in one’s stomach—might be the most hellish of all, ghastly enough to blow my ten woes right out of the water. I really can’t say. But then how do sufferers manage to carry on without killing themselves or going mad, stay interested in politics, resolutely continue the struggle to live and never give into despair? Can their suffering be genuine? They are complete egotists and see nothing wrong with that, never doubt themselves in the least—is that it? That would make life easy. Maybe all humans are like that, maybe that’s how they’re supposed to be, I don’t know . . . maybe they sleep soundly at night and wake up in the morning refreshed. What dreams do they dream? What do they think about as they walk down the street? Money? Surely not only that. We live to eat, I think I

have heard it said, but never have I heard it said that we live for money. And yet, maybe . . . no, I don’t know. The more I think about things, the less I understand and the more I’m overwhelmed by the anxiety and fear that I alone am different from everybody else. I can hardly have a conversation with my neighbor. What should I say, how should I say it? I have no idea.

That’s how I came up with the idea of acting the clown.

This was my final way of asking humans for love. Humans terrified me in the extreme, but I couldn’t separate myself from them without regret. Acting the clown allowed me to feel a tenuous connection with humanity. On the outside I was always wearing a smile, but inside I was desperate, feeling I was skating on the edge of disaster, working up a nervous sweat as I offered entertainment. From childhood on, I could never imagine how anyone––even members of my own family––might be suffering or what thoughts went through their heads as they lived their lives. People simply scared me silly, and clowning around was my way of dealing with awkwardness and fear. I soon became quite good at it. In short, I turned into a child who never spoke a word of truth. In family photos from around that time, everyone else looks sober and only I am grinning, my face always twisted in some peculiar way. That was another form of the sad, childish clown acts I used to perform.

I never talked back to my family. The slightest scolding hit me like a clap of thunder, drove me nearly out of my mind; far from talking back, I would feel as if the scolding expressed a timeless truth handed down through generations, one I was so incapable of acting on that I suspected myself unfit for human society. Arguing back or defending myself was impossible. When someone rebuked me, I would think Yes, it’s true, and feel that I had made a grave mistake; I always bore the attack in silence, gripped by a terror great enough to unhinge me.

Probably no one enjoys getting criticized or yelled at, but when I looked into the face of an angry person, I saw a wild beast in its true colors, a beast more terrifying than a lion, alligator or dragon. Normally people hide their true nature, but at unexpected moments—as when a cow lying peacefully in

a pasture suddenly lashes out with its tail to kill a fly on its flank—a sudden burst of anger can expose it, causing me to shudder with fright and my hair to stand on end. I nearly lost all hope for my own existence when I thought that such brutishness might be something else that humans need to survive.

Other people made me shake with fear, and my own words and actions failed to bolster my confidence. I shut away my private anguish in a tiny mental compartment, keeping my gloom and nervousness secret and putting on a determined show of innocent cheer until, little by little, my transformation into a droll eccentric was complete.

All I have to do is make people laugh, any old way; then even if I stay outside of their lives they might not mind; the thing is not to be an eyesore, to be nothing, the wind, the sky: as these thoughts mounted, I acted as a jester around my family in frantic desperation and also around the servants, male and female, who were even more incomprehensible and terrifying to me than my family.

In the summertime I made them all laugh by walking around the house with a red wool sweater on underneath my cotton kimono. Even my eldest brother, who seldom cracks a smile, burst out laughing. “Yo-chan, that’s, uh, not the best look for you.” His tone indicated he thought me adorable. Well, I wasn’t so far gone that I’d actually wear a wool sweater in the middle of summer like some moron who doesn’t know hot from cold, thank you. I had merely slipped a pair of my sister’s leggings on my arms so they showed at the wrist under my kimono sleeves, making it look as if I were wearing a sweater.

My father frequently had business in Tokyo, so he had a second home in the city’s Ueno district, where he spent the better part of each month. When he came back, he always brought a ton of presents for everyone in the family, including more distant relatives. It was kind of a hobby of his.

One time, the night before he was leaving for Tokyo, he gathered us children in the living room and asked each one with a big smile, “What do you want me to bring you back next time?” then carefully wrote down the answer in a notebook. It was unusual for him to shower us with so much

attention. When my turn came, I froze.

Whenever someone asked me what I wanted, my mind went blank. I would have the distinct thought that it didn’t matter, that nothing would make me happy anyway. But when I received something not to my liking, I was incapable of rejecting it. I couldn’t come out and say I didn’t like it. Things I liked, I tasted with bitter fear, as if I were a thief, and then endured nameless dread. I lacked the strength to choose between two alternatives. This trait contributed greatly to what I refer to as my “life of much shame.”

As I stood there fidgeting in silence, Father grew impatient. “What then, another book? You know, in a store in Asakusa I saw a lion mask, the kind they use in the New Year’s lion dance, just the right size for a little boy. Wouldn’t you like that?”

The words “Wouldn’t you like that?” paralyzed me. I couldn’t come up with any response, humorous or otherwise. I failed utterly in my role as jester.

“He’d probably like a book,” said my oldest brother with a serious expression.

“A book, is it?” Father’s smile faded in disappointment, and he slapped the notebook shut without writing anything down.

What a disaster! I had made Father angry, and he was sure to exact a terrible revenge. How could I set this right before it was too late? I lay quaking in my futon and racked my brains, then quietly got up, went into the living room and opened the desk drawer where I had seen Father put away the notebook. I took it out, flipped through the pages and, after finding the list of requests, licked the pencil attached to the notebook and wrote in big letters: LION MASK. Then I went back to bed. I didn’t want a lion mask one bit. Even a book would have been better. But I realized that Father wanted to buy me the lion mask, and my desire to cater to his wish and restore his good humor led me to sneak into the living room in the dead of night.

That extreme gambit was rewarded with exactly the success I had hoped for. Before long Father came back from Tokyo, and from the children’s

room I heard him say to Mother in a booming voice: “I opened up this notebook by the toy stand on Nakamise Street and look here, see, it says ‘LION MASK.’ That’s not my writing. I puzzled over it till the answer came to me: it’s Yozo, up to his tricks. When I asked him what he wanted, he just stood there grinning and didn’t say a word, but afterward he must have decided he had to have a lion mask. He’s a hard one to figure, the little rascal. Playing dumb, then writing it out like this. If he wanted a lion mask so much, all he had to do was say so! I laughed out loud in front of the toy stand. Send him in here right now.”

Then there was the time I gathered the servants in the Western-style room and had one of them bang on the keys of the piano (though we lived in the country, the house was furnished with pretty much all the amenities) while I danced like a wild Indian to that random melody and made everyone howl with laughter. My second-oldest brother took pictures with a flash attachment, and when they were developed, there between the folds of my loincloth (a calico wrapping cloth) was my weenie, which made everyone laugh all over again. I have to say this caper was another grand success.

I subscribed to a dozen or more monthly magazines for boys, and besides that I ordered all sorts of books from Tokyo and read them on my own, so I was well acquainted with Prof. Blumptyblump, Dr. Whosis and so on, and in addition I was well versed in ghost stories, tales of derring-do, funny stories and jokes. I had no shortage of material to draw from in order to amuse the family with deadpan recitals of funny stuff.

But oh, at school!

There, I was beginning to command respect. Being respected also scared me no end. To me it meant pulling the wool over the eyes of everyone around me only to be seen through by someone all-knowing and all- powerful who would blast me to smithereens, subject me to humiliation worse than death: that was how I defined the state of being respected. Even if I fooled everyone else into respecting me, one person would know the truth and sooner or later tell the others, who would then realize they had been fooled and in a rage inflict who knew what revenge. The very thought

was hair-raising.

The respect that came my way at school was owing not to the wealthy family I was born into but rather to my reputation as a whiz kid. Always a delicate child, I was often laid up with illness and would miss a month or two of classes or even the better part of an entire school year, yet when I recovered and rode back to school in a rickshaw to take the final exams, I would outperform everyone in my class. Even when my health was good, I did no studying whatever but spent my time drawing manga that I would explain to my classmates during recess to make them laugh. The compositions I wrote for the teacher consisted of comical anecdotes, and despite the teacher’s cautions, I wouldn’t stop writing them––I knew he secretly looked forward to reading them.

One time I wrote as usual about an epic failure, describing in tragic terms the time when, on the train to Tokyo with Mother, I mistakenly peed in an aisle spittoon. (I hadn’t, however, been under any misapprehension about the nature of the spittoon; I’d acted knowingly, feigning childish innocence.) I turned in the paper, so certain it would make the teacher laugh that when he set off for the faculty room I followed along surreptitiously. As soon as he left the classroom, I saw him pull my composition out of the pile and begin to read it while walking, chuckling to himself. He must have come to the end before he entered the faculty room, for by then he was laughing hard, red in the face, and immediately began showing it to the other teachers. I was deeply satisfied.

A lovable scamp.

I succeeded in getting people to view me as a scamp. I succeeded in avoiding being an object of respect. On my report card, I received top grades in all subjects, but in deportment I would get only average or below, and this was another source of hilarity at home.

In truth, however, deep down I was not a scamp, but the polar opposite. Already by that time maids and menservants had taught me unspeakable things, done unspeakable things to me. I still believe that molesting a child is, of all the crimes humans can commit, the ugliest, vilest, cruelest crime

imaginable. But I endured it. I even felt as if I had come upon another human characteristic and weakly laughed it off. Had I been used to telling the truth, I might have been able to report those crimes to Father or Mother without flinching, but not even my parents made complete sense to me. I had no hope that anything would come of an appeal for help, whether to my father, my mother, a policeman or the government: in the end, I feared I would only be taken in by the slick excuses of people more skilled than I was at getting on in the world. The outcome would be unfair, that was a foregone conclusion. Since it was no use turning to others for help, all I could do was keep my mouth shut and endure, go on playing the clown. I felt I had no choice.

What’s this, some may sneer, lack of faith in human beings? Since when did you become a Christian? But lack of faith in human beings does not necessarily lead directly to religion, or so it seems to me. It’s clear that everyone, sneerers included, gets along just fine amid their mutual distrust without paying any heed to Jehovah or whoever.

One night when I was small, a famous man from my father’s political party came to town to deliver a speech, and the servants took me to the theater to hear it. Every seat was filled, and everyone especially close to my father was there, clapping enthusiastically. When the speech ended, the crowd set off for home on the snowy road in clusters of three and five, ripping into the meeting as they walked. Some of the voices raised in criticism belonged to my father’s special friends. Father’s opening remarks were clumsy, the great man’s speech was a pile of gibberish—Father’s friends and associates said these things in angry, accusatory tones. Those same people then stopped by our house, went inside, and with expressions of apparent delight assured Father that the event had been a grand success. When Mother asked the servants their opinion, they said it was interesting without batting an eye. This from fellows who had complained to each other all the way home that lectures were the most boring thing in the world.

But that’s only one example of human insincerity. Human life is, it seems to me, rife with vivid examples of an insincerity that is pure, happy and

serene––people deceiving one another without, amazingly, inflicting pain, without even realizing their mutual deception. But the deceptions themselves don’t especially interest me. I myself deceive people from morning till night with my clowning. I can’t get excited about textbook morality, the notion of doing what’s “right.” What confounds me is the spectacle of human beings who exude purity, happiness and serenity while engaged in deception, or who are confident in their ability to do so. I was never taught this deep secret. If I had only known that one thing, I would never have experienced such dread of human beings or felt such an urgent need to get on their good side. I wouldn’t have been in such conflict with human life, wouldn’t have gone through the torments of hell night after night. In short, the reason I never reported those foul crimes the servants committed against me had nothing to do with my distrust of human beings nor of course with Christian ethics; it was rather because people around me shut down my ability to trust anyone. Even my parents sometimes acted in ways I found hard to understand.

And I think the loneliness I embraced, unable to confide in anyone, gave off a scent that women picked up instinctively, and this was one reason why in later years I was taken advantage of in so many ways.

Women saw in me a man who could keep the secrets of love.