One of Takeichi’s predictions came true and the other did not. His shameful prediction that women would fall for me proved accurate,

but the pleasant one, his assurance that I would become a great painter, missed the mark.

I managed only to become a nameless hack who churned out manga for cheap magazines.

I was expelled from college because of the incident at Kamakura and went to live in a cubbyhole on the second floor of Flatfish’s house. Once a month, a bit of money would arrive from home, coming not directly to me but secretly, by way of Flatfish. (I gathered that my brothers sent it, without

our father’s knowledge.) Otherwise I was completely cut off from family. Flatfish was always in a bad humor, never returning my ingratiating smiles. The discovery that a human being could undergo a transformation with such apparent ease struck me as disgraceful––and, in equal or greater measure, comical.

“You mustn’t go out. Whatever you do, please don’t go out.” That was all he ever said to me.

Flatfish seemed to have the idea that I might do myself in, that I was in danger of leaping into the sea after the woman, and that was why he gave me strict orders never to leave the house. Unable to drink or smoke, I stayed in my second-floor cubbyhole of a room reading old magazines from morning till night, living like a moron, drained of even the energy to commit suicide.

Flatfish’s place was near the medical school in Okubo. The sign out front boasted “Garden of the Green Dragon: Fine Art and Antiques,” but on the inside, the shop was narrow and dusty, its shelves lined with random, useless junk. (Not that Flatfish relied on the sale of that junk to make his living; he seemed rather to profit from facilitating the transfer of ownership of treasures from one gentleman client to another.) Flatfish was almost never physically present in the shop. Most mornings he hurried off somewhere with a scowl on his face, leaving a boy of seventeen or so to keep an eye on me. Anytime he had a spare moment, that boy would be out playing catch with neighborhood children. He seemed to regard me, the second-floor sponger, as an idiot or madman and would sometimes lecture me as if I were a child. Because I never can quarrel with anyone, I would adopt an air of weary admiration and listen submissively. Rumor had it that he was Flatfish’s love child, whom for some complicated reason Flatfish could not openly acknowledge, and that this explained Flatfish’s bachelorhood. I had previously heard these things whispered by members of my own family, but as I’ve never been able to work up much interest in others’ life stories, I didn’t know the details for certain. Still, something in the boy’s eyes did suggest fish, so who knows, maybe he really was

Flatfish’s son. In any case, they made a dismal pair. Sometimes late at night I heard them send out for noodles without telling me and eat in silence when the order came.

The boy made most of the meals. Three times a day, he carried a tray- table of food upstairs to me, the second-floor sponger. Flatfish and he rushed through their meals in a small, dank room at the foot of the stairs, amid a clattering of dishes.

One evening at the end of March, whether Flatfish had unexpectedly made a pile of money or conceived some plan, I don’t know (even if both those suppositions were accurate, there could have been any number of other detailed reasons that I had no way of knowing), but he invited me downstairs to share a spread that for once included sake and, after he himself, the host, had expressed admiration and praise for the sashimi—not flatfish but tuna—he turned to me, the sponger sitting there in a daze, poured me a bit of sake and asked, “What do you intend to do after this, hmm?”

I didn’t answer but picked up a sheet of dried sardines, looked into the silver eyes of the little fish and felt a wave of drunken nostalgia for the days when I used to go out and about in the city. I even felt nostalgia for Horiki. Such longing for freedom overtook me that I nearly gave in to tears.

Since going to live in that house, I had not had the strength for my usual clowning and simply lay around, the object of scornful looks from Flatfish and the boy. Flatfish seemed eager to avoid intimate talks and I, having no desire to run after him and make some sort of plea, had turned into this foolish parasite.

“A suspended indictment suggests that the incident won’t remain on your record. So if you just set your mind to it, you can start a new life. If you are penitent and come to me with a serious proposal, I will give it my consideration.”

The way he talked—or rather the way everyone in society talked—was convoluted and murky, so subtly intricate that it sounded weak; the tone of strict precaution, pointless as far as I could see, and the endless, fussy

haggling always left me so bewildered that I lost interest and either started clowning and making fun of the whole business or else gave silent assent, leaving everything to others in defeat.

If only Flatfish had spoken to me in the following simple way, that would have settled things, I later realized, feeling deep melancholy for his unwarranted cautiousness, or rather for society’s enigmatic pretension and concern for appearances. All he had to say was, “Starting in April, enroll in school somewhere, either a national university or a private one. Once you do that, your folks will increase your allowance to cover your living expenses.”

As I found out much later, this actual plan had been decided on. I would certainly have gone along with the idea. Flatfish’s roundabout, overly cautious way of speaking completely messed things up and forever changed the course of my life.

“If you aren’t willing to come to me with a serious proposal, then my hands are tied.”

“What kind of proposal?” I truly had no idea.

“That’s something you must ask yourself, don’t you think?” “Like what?”

“Like what do you intend to do with yourself from now on?” “Should I get a job?”

“The question is, how do you feel about it?” “Well, the trouble with going to school is…”

“It costs money. But money isn’t the real problem. The problem is knowing what you want.”

Why didn’t he just come out with it and say, “Your folks have agreed to pay for you to go back to school”? Knowing that would have settled my concerns. Instead, I was in a deep fog.

“How about it? Do you have some sort of hope for your future? I tell you, taking on responsibility for another person is harder than that person can possibly understand.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s a true source of worry. But I have taken on full responsibility for you, and I don’t want to see you avoid commitment. I want you to show me that you’re determined to make something of yourself. Come to me with a serious proposal, and I am prepared to respond. Of course, a poor man like me can only do so much. If you’re expecting to live in luxury the way you used to, you’ve got another think coming. But if you pull yourself together, work out a clear plan for your future and bring it to me, I am prepared to offer what little aid I can, bit by bit, for the sake of your new life. Now do you understand what I’m saying? So tell me: what exactly do you plan to do next?”

“If I can’t stay here, then I’ll get a job and––”

“Are you serious? Nowadays, not even graduates of Tokyo Imperial University—”

“I’m not saying I’d get an office job.” “What, then?”

“I’ll be a painter,” I said boldly. “Whaat?”

I will never forget the sly shadow that crossed Flatfish’s face as he ducked his head and laughed, a shadow suggestive of scorn, yet somehow different. To compare society to the ocean, it was the weird sort of shadow you would expect to find adrift in the ocean’s bottomless depths, a laugh that afforded a glimpse into the inmost recesses of adult life.

That’s out of the question, you haven’t pulled yourself together in the slightest, think it over, see that you give the matter some serious thought tonight: with these words at my back, I fled upstairs as if I were being chased, but even after I went to bed, nothing came to mind. Then dawn came, and I ran away from Flatfish’s house.

I’ll be back this evening for sure. I’m going to see the friend named below to talk over my future plans, so don’t worry. I mean it.

I wrote this on notepaper in pencil, jotted down Horiki’s name and

address—“Masao Horiki, Asakusa”—and sneaked out of the house.

I didn’t run away in a fit of pique at Flatfish’s lecture. He was absolutely right. I couldn’t pull myself together, I had no notion what I might do in the future, and I couldn’t just go on imposing on him. Even if I somehow managed to rouse myself to find a worthy goal, how could I possibly finance a new life with monthly assistance from someone as poor as him? I recoiled at the idea. I left because I couldn’t bear to stay a moment longer.

But I certainly had no serious intent to talk over my “future plans” with the likes of Horiki. I left the note because I wanted to set Flatfish’s mind at ease for a short time, even momentarily. (Rather than writing the note as a detective-story ploy to buy time for my getaway—though that thought was faintly in the back of my mind—it’s more accurate to say I wrote it out of fear that the shock of my disappearance would greatly upset Flatfish. Though the truth inevitably comes out, my fear of stating the plain facts gives me an unfortunate tendency to embellish. Many people would therefore scorn me as a liar, but my embellishments are almost never self- serving. It’s just that I have a suffocating dread of sudden changes, the sort that spoil the atmosphere. I am so desperate to please that more often than not I add a word of embellishment, however warped, feeble or stupid it may be, and even knowing that doing so will work against me in the long run. And this is a habit of mine that society’s “honest souls” have taken full advantage of.) And so on the spur of the moment I dredged up Horiki’s full name and address and scribbled them on the bottom of the page.

I left Flatfish’s house and walked to Shinjuku, where I sold some books I had brought along. After that I had no idea what to do.

Though I am always sociable, I have never once known true friendship. Apart from Horiki, who kept me company in my wanderings about town, all my associations have only caused me distress. To relieve that distress, I would throw my energies into clowning and become so exhausted that merely catching sight of a distant acquaintance on the street or someone who looked like someone I knew was a nasty surprise that made me momentarily dizzy and gave me chills. I knew what it was to be liked, but I

seemed to be deficient in the ability to love. (Then again, I have grave doubts about the ability of any human being to love.) As a result, I could never have anything remotely like a buddy. I even lacked the ability to call on anyone. The gate to any house was more daunting to me than the Divine Comedy’s Gate of Hell. I had the actual, vivid sensation that behind the gate lurked a horrible monster like a dragon, writhing and emitting a foul odor.

I had no friends. Nowhere to go. Horiki.

This was one of those times when a word spoken in jest turns out to be true. I’d scribbled his name at random on the note I left behind, but now I decided I would, in fact, go call on him in Asakusa. Never before had I taken it upon myself to visit Horiki at home; mostly I summoned him to my place by telegram. Now even the cost of a telegram was problematic, and anyway, disgrace had so damaged my ego that I feared if I were to send him a telegram, he might not come. I made up my mind to go see him, even though paying calls was the hardest thing in the world for me. I boarded the streetcar with a sigh. The realization that my sole lifeline was of all people Horiki overwhelmed me and sent a chill down my spine.

Horiki was home. He lived in a two-story house down a squalid alley. He occupied the lone, medium-sized room on the second floor, while downstairs, his elderly parents and a young workman stitched cloth strips and pounded them to make thongs for geta clogs.

That day, Horiki showed me a new aspect of himself as a city dweller, by which I mean utter nerve, an egoism so cold and calculating that a country boy like me could only stare in wide-eyed amazement. He wasn’t perpetually passive and compliant, like me.

“I can’t believe what you pulled off. Has your old man forgiven you yet?

No?”

I couldn’t tell him I’d run away. As usual, I was evasive, even though he was bound to hit on the truth before long. “Things’ll work out in the end.”

“Come on, this is no laughing matter. Take my advice and quit acting like an idiot, will you? I’ve got business to take care of today. I’ve got a lot

going on.”

“Business? What business?”

“Hey! Don’t pull the thread off the cushion!”

While we talked, without realizing it I’d been toying with a tassel thread on a corner of the cushion I was sitting on—binding thread, I think it’s called. Horiki evidently felt so proudly possessive of everything in his house, down to a strand of thread on a cushion, that he scolded me angrily without the slightest sign of embarrassment. I realized that his association with me had never cost him anything.

His mother brought up a tray with two bowls of shiruko, sweet bean soup over sticky mochi.

“Well, isn’t this nice!” Horiki expressed profound, apparently sincere appreciation, the very model of a grateful son. With what struck me as unnatural politeness, he went on, “Thank you so much, Mother. You made shiruko? That’s really great. You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble. I’m just about to leave, but I can’t go off without some of your wonderful shiruko! I’ll dig in.” He turned to me. “Have some. She went to all the trouble of making it for us. Oh, man, this is good. Really great.”

He ate with a joy and gusto that didn’t seem put on for show. I sipped my shiruko, but it was watery, and the mochi tasted like something else, a substance impossible to identify. I did not despise their poverty. (At the time, I didn’t think the shiruko tasted bad, and the old woman’s thoughtfulness was genuinely touching. Poverty inspires fear in me but not contempt.) The shiruko, and Horiki’s joy in it, were an object lesson in city- dwellers’ true frugality and the careful distinction that Tokyoites maintain between their lives at home and away. I had the dismaying feeling that I alone was a dimwit whose private and public lives were undifferentiated, someone forever fleeing the society of human beings, abandoned even by Horiki. I sat plying worn lacquer chopsticks as I ate the shiruko and felt, I will note here, exceedingly forlorn.

“Sorry, but I have to go.” Horiki stood up and put on his jacket. “I’m off.

Sorry.”

Then a woman caller appeared, and my life changed.

Horiki was suddenly energized. “Oh, hey. I was just about to head off to see you when this fellow showed up. No, it’s fine. Come on in.”

He acted awfully flustered. I took the cushion from under me, flipped it over and held it out, and he snatched it out of my hand and flipped it over again before offering it to her. In the whole room, besides the one Horiki was sitting on, there was only one extra cushion for company.

The woman was tall and thin. She sat down in a corner near the door, giving the cushion a pass.

I listened idly to their conversation. I gathered that she worked for a magazine and had come to collect an illustration that she had previously asked Horiki to do.

“We need it quickly.”

“It’s ready. I finished it quite some time ago. Here, take a look.” A telegram arrived.

As Horiki read it, his sunny expression turned to a look of disgust. “Dammit! What have you done?”

The telegram was from Flatfish.

“Go back there right now. I should take you myself, but I just don’t have the time. You look awfully carefree for someone who just ran away from home.”

“Where do you live?” the woman asked.

“In Okubo,” I said automatically, before I had time to think. “That’s near my company.”

She had moved to Tokyo from the city of Koshu and was twenty-eight years old. She lived in Koenji with her five-year-old daughter. She had been a widow for three years.

“You seem like someone who had a hard time growing up. You’re sweet.

Poor dear.”

For the first time in my life, I lived as a kept man. After Shizuko (that was the magazine reporter’s name) left in the morning to work at the publishing house in nearby Shinjuku, I stayed home with her daughter, Shigeko. Until I

moved in, while her mother was out Shigeko would go to the apartment manager’s room to play, but she seemed delighted to have acquired a “sweet” man for a playmate.

I stayed there aimlessly for a week or so. Caught in electric wires just outside the window was a kite shaped like a man in kimono with arms spread wide. Buffeted and torn by the dusty winds of spring, the man-kite hung on grimly, twisting in the wires, seeming at times to nod. Every time I saw the thing, I smiled sheepishly and blushed. It haunted my dreams.

“I wish I had some money,” I said. A pause. “How much?”

“A lot. It’s true what they say, you know: when poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window.”

“Don’t be silly. That’s so trite.”

“Is it? But you never know. If things go on this way, I might run away.” “Which one of us is poor? And which one is going to run away? Talk

sense.”

“I want to buy alcohol, no, cigarettes, with money I earn. I’m a better artist than Horiki any day.”

I had in mind the self-portraits I’d drawn back in middle school, the ones Takeichi had called “monsters.” My lost masterpieces. In the course of many moves, they had disappeared. I felt they had truly been fine works of art. Since then I had tried many times to paint but never produced anything the least bit close to those memorable gems. I suffered from a listless sense of loss, as if my heart were hollow.

An unfinished glass of absinthe.

In my mind, that was how I described that sense of irreparable loss. When the topic of painting came up, that unfinished glass of absinthe would flicker before me, tormenting me with the impatient longing to show her those paintings and convince her of my artistic ability.

She was amused. “Are you? It’s adorable, the way you joke with a straight face.”

It’s not a joke, it’s true. If I could only show her those paintings . . . This

anguished thought would go around and around in my head until, changing my mind, I gave up. “Better at manga, I mean. When it comes to manga, I’ve got Horiki beat.”

More than desperate appeals, she took seriously such clownish dissembling.

“You know, actually, I’ve been admiring your manga. The ones you draw for Shigeko make me laugh out loud. Why not go ahead and give it a try? I can put in a word with the chief editor at our company if you like.”

Her company published a monthly magazine for children, one that had yet to make much of a name for itself.

“Women just take one look at you and immediately they are beside themselves, wanting to do something for you.” “You’re timid, and yet you’re funny.” “Sometimes you sit alone, brooding, but that only makes a woman’s heart yearn to help you all the more.”

Shizuko said many such things, meaning to flatter me, but I knew that these were the disgusting attributes of a kept man and so I continued to brood. Unable to cheer up, wanting money more than a woman, I secretly longed to get away and earn my own living. My schemes backfired, however, making me increasingly dependent on her. In her strong-minded way, she dealt with the messy aftermath of my running away from Flatfish’s place, as well as other things, and as a result I became even more timid around her.

At Shizuko’s instigation, Flatfish, Horiki and she got together and settled on a plan: I would end relations with my family, and she and I would live together as man and wife. Thanks to her efforts on my behalf, my manga sold surprisingly well. I used the income to buy alcohol and cigarettes, but my loneliness and gloom only deepened. I did nothing but brood, so homesick and despondent that often as I was drawing “The Adventures of Kinta and Ota,” the monthly manga series for Shizuko’s magazine, my pen would stop moving and I would bend my head in tears.

At such times I felt a slight salvation in little Shigeko, who by then was freely calling me “Daddy.”

“Daddy, is it true that God will give you anything you pray for?”

I more than anyone wanted to pray in supplication: Grant me an icy will. Grant me understanding of what it is to be human. Is it not a sin to push others aside? Grant me a mask of anger.

“That’s right, Shige-chan. I’m sure He’ll give you anything, but maybe not me.”

I was afraid even of God, unable to believe in divine love, able only to believe in divine punishment. Faith. To me, that meant simply facing God’s judgment seat with head bowed, prepared to accept his chastisement. I could believe in hell, but not in the existence of heaven.

“Why not you, Daddy?” “Because I disobeyed my father.”

“You did? But everybody says you’re nice.”

That’s because I had them all fooled. Everyone in the building felt friendly toward me, I knew that, but how could I possibly convey to Shigeko how afraid of them all I was, and how the more afraid I was, the more they liked me, and the more they liked me the more I feared them and had to distance myself from them? This unhappy sickness of mine was beyond explanation. Casually, I changed the subject.

“Shige-chan, what do you want to ask God for?”

“I want my real Daddy back.”

Shock made me dizzy. Enemies. Whether I was her enemy or she was mine, now somewhere there was another grown-up who posed a threat to me. The face of a stranger, an inscrutable stranger, a stranger full of secrets: all at once that’s how Shigeko’s face looked to me.

Shigeko alone was different, I had thought, but all along she, too, had possessed a cow’s tail, capable of lashing out and killing a fly. After that, I was timid even around her.

“Lover boy! You home?”

Horiki began coming to see me again. Even after the loneliness he’d inflicted on me the day I ran away, I still couldn’t refuse to see him and greeted him with a dim smile.

“Your manga are pretty popular, I hear. Well, an amateur knows no fear— foolhardy courage is hard to beat. Watch yourself, though. Your drawings aren’t quite up to snuff.”

He had the nerve to talk down to me, as if he were the master. If only I could show him my “monster” paintings, I thought, still suffering from that endlessly recurring fantasy. I’d like to see the look on his face then.

“Don’t say that! Makes me want to scream.”

Horiki looked more pleased with himself than ever. “Just remember, a knack for getting on in the world will only take you so far. Eventually you’ll betray yourself.”

A knack for getting on in the world? Me? I rolled my eyes. Then again, perhaps in fearing, avoiding, and deceiving others, I was actually in line with the sort of shrewd, world-weary approach to life that is embodied in the proverb “Let sleeping dogs lie.” People don’t know each other at all, really. It’s possible to have a completely mistaken view of someone, consider him your best friend, and even, when he dies, deliver a tearful eulogy, all without ever having known who he truly was.

Having participated (no doubt reluctantly, at Shizuko’s urging) in discussions to settle the aftermath of my running away, Horiki began acting as if he were a great benefactor of mine, responsible for my rehabilitation, or else my go-between. He would lecture me with a straight face. He often dropped by late, drunk, and stayed the night or borrowed five yen (it was always five yen) before going on his way.

“But seriously, no more fooling around with women. Society is unforgiving.”

What does “society” mean, anyhow? The collective plural of “human being”? What is the substance of society? All my life, I had thought of society as something strong, harsh and intimidating, but when Horiki said that, the words “Society is you, isn’t it?” were on the tip of my tongue, although, not wanting to anger him, I bit them back.

Society is unforgiving.

—It’s not society that’s unforgiving, it’s you, isn’t it?

Do that, and society will give you a hard time.

—Not society. You will. Society will ostracize you.

—No, not society. You will do the ostracizing, won’t you?

Know thyself—thy horror, grotesquerie, villainy, cunning, sorcery! Many more such words flashed through my mind, but all I did was wipe my face with a handkerchief and laugh. “You’ve got me in a cold sweat!”

From that time on, I have operated under the guiding principle that society is the individual.

Ever since I began to suspect that society is the individual, I had become slightly more able to act of my own volition. In Shizuko’s words, I’d gotten “a bit willful and not so timid.” To Horiki, I’d become “weirdly stingy.” And as Shigeko put it, I’d “stopped being nice to Shigeko.”

Taciturn and unsmiling, day after day, while babysitting I would work on “The Adventures of Kinta and Ota,” “The Easygoing Priest”—a clear rip- off of “Easygoing Daddy”—or “Harum-Scarum Pin-chan,” a manga serial whose title made no sense even to me, something I came up with in desperation. I worked sluggishly in a truly dismal state of mind, filling orders from various publishing companies (little by little, orders had started trickling in from other companies besides Shizuko’s, but always from vulgar, third-rate publishers), wanting only to earn enough to buy alcohol. When Shizuko came home from work, I would switch places with her, popping off to a street stall or bar near Koenji Station to down cheap, strong drinks, and then return to the apartment feeling slightly cheered.

“The more I look at you, the funnier your face looks to me,” I’d say to Shigeko. “You know, the idea for the Easygoing Priest’s face came to me from looking at you when you’re asleep.”

“When you’re sleeping, you look like an old man, a man in his forties.” “That’s your fault. You’ve sucked me dry. The flow of the water and hu-u-

man life. Why so mournful, riverside wi-i-llow?”

“Don’t make so much noise. Hurry and get ready for bed. Or would you like something to eat?” She said this with utter calm, not rising to my bait.

“I’ll have a nightcap.” I burst into drunken song again. “The flow of the water and hu-u-man life. The flow of human . . . no, I mean the flow of the water and wa-a-ter life.”

While I sang, Shizuko would undress me, and I would fall asleep with my forehead pressed against her breast. This was our nightly routine.

The next day you do the same things over again, Following the same rule as the day before:

That is, by avoiding great, savage joy You avoid great sorrow as well,

The way a toad goes around a stone in its path.

When I came across this verse by Guy-Charles Cros, translated into Japanese by Bin Ueda, my face turned a fiery red.

A toad.

(That was me. It wasn’t a question of society being forgiving or unforgiving, ostracizing me or not. I was an animal lower than a dog, lower than a cat. A toad. All I did was shamble along.)

Gradually, I was drinking more. I went out to drink not just by Koenji Station, but also in Shinjuku and even on the Ginza strip. Sometimes I stayed out all night and, to avoid following any “rule,” acted like a hooligan in bars, kissing all the girls and in general reverting to the wild, dissipated life I had led before the suicide pact—or worse. When I ran short of money I even resorted to pawning Shizuko’s clothes.

One day—this was more than a year after the time in late spring when I’d moved in with Shizuko and smiled wryly at the torn man-kite––I again took one of her obi sashes, an under-kimono and a few other things, pawned the lot, and went on a drinking spree on the Ginza. I stayed away two nights in succession. On the third evening, I went home feeling guilty and sneaked up to the door of the apartment. From inside I could hear mother and daughter talking.

“Why does he drink?”

“Daddy doesn’t drink because he likes it. He drinks because he’s such a good person, that’s why.”

“Do good people drink a lot?” “No, not really.”

“Daddy will be surprised, won’t he?”

“He might not like it. See there, it’s jumped out of its box!” “Just like Harum-Scarum Pin-chan!”

“That’s right!” Shizuko said with a low laugh, sounding heartily amused.

I opened the door a crack and peered inside. Hopping around the room was a white baby rabbit, with the two of them in pursuit.

(They’re happy, these two. If a jerk like me joins them, I’ll only mess things up. Modest happiness. A nice mother and daughter. Let them be happy. Dear God, if you hear the prayers of someone like me, just this once, hear my prayer.)

I felt like kneeling and folding my hands. Softly I closed the door, went back to the Ginza, and never lived in that apartment again.

After that I crashed on the second floor of a bar near Kyobashi and became a kept man once more.

Society. I felt I was beginning to get a handle on the concept. It meant conflict between individuals, extemporaneous conflict, conflict demanding on-the-spot victory. Human beings never submit to other human beings. Even slaves engage in mean, servile retaliation. Survival depends on extemporaneous matches of the winner-takes-all variety. Though people mouth allegiance to higher principles, the focus of their efforts is always an individual. Behind the individual is another individual. The abstruseness of society is the abstruseness of the individual. Society is not an ocean, but the individual: this discovery freed me somewhat from the terrifying specter of society as an ocean and, no longer engaging in endless, random acts of consideration, I became able to display a certain gall as the moment required.

When I left the Koenji apartment, “I just broke up with her” was all I said to the madam of the bar in Kyobashi, and that was enough. Victory in the

winner-takes-all match was mine. That very night, I moved rashly into that living area over the bar, but society, for all its supposed terrors, did me no harm. Nor did I justify myself to society in any way. If it was okay with the madam, that was all I needed to know.

I was like a client, but I was like a husband, too, or an errand boy or some kind of relative. Despite my assuredly enigmatic status, “society” never lifted an eyebrow but treated me with the utmost cordiality, calling me familiarly by name and even pouring me drinks.

Gradually I stopped being wary. I began to think that society was not so scary after all. In my fear, I had resembled those who tremble at “scientific superstitions” warning that spring breezes are full of whooping cough germs; that germs in the public bath cause blindness, germs at the barbershop cause baldness, and train straps are crawling with mites; that sashimi and rare or undercooked meat inevitably contain tapeworm larvae, flukes and all manner of parasite eggs; and that if you walk barefoot, a tiny glass shard will enter through the sole of your foot, circulate through your body to your eye and make you go blind. Certainly, the existence of swarms of wriggling germs is scientifically accurate. But at the same time, I began to understand that if I ignored them, they would become mere “scientific ghosts” and disappear in a flash, having nothing to do with me.

“Scientific statistics” had terrorized me. Ten million people all leaving three rice grains uneaten in their lunchboxes every day would mean the waste of dozens of bales of rice. If ten million people all cut down their daily use of tissue paper by a single sheet, vast amounts of wood pulp could be saved. Every time I left a single grain of rice uneaten, every time I blew my nose, I suffered from the illusion that I was wasting a mountain of rice or wood pulp and felt as glum as if I had committed a grave offense.

But those were in fact scientific, statistical, mathematical lies. The leftover grains of rice could never be collected. Even as math word problems, the topics were primitive and moronic, as absurd as calculating the probability of someone losing their balance in a dark toilet and falling in, or getting a foot caught between the train car and the platform. Such

mishaps sound plausible, but you never actually hear of anyone getting injured by failing to straddle the toilet properly. Gradually I’d come to understand the substance of society to the extent that I could look back with affection and laughter on myself, Yozo Oba, who, having had that hypothetical situation drummed into him as “scientific fact,” had until the day before accepted the danger as real and lived in terror of it.

Despite this progress, I still had a dread of human beings. Before meeting customers in the bar, I had to down a big swig of sake. Curiosity often got the better of my fears, drawing me into the bar every night. Like a child who clutches all the tighter a small animal he is rather afraid of, I would harangue customers with drunken rants on the theory of art.

I was a manga artist, a nameless cartoonist who knew neither great joy nor great sorrow. However much later great sorrow might come to me, however much I secretly longed for great, savage joy, my only pleasures of the moment were trading useless comments with customers and drinking their sake.

Soon it was nearly a year since I had taken up this wasteful life in Kyobashi. My manga were running not only in children’s magazines but in tawdry, obscene magazines sold in stations. Under the crazy pen name Sir Faifa Drowning (survived a drowning) I penned dirty nude drawings accompanied by verses from “The Rubaiyat.”

Quit praying useless prayers, will you? Be done with everything sentimental—

Come, have a drink! Remember only the good times. Who needs solicitude? Let it go.

Those who threaten others with terror and unease Cower at their own egregious sins

Concocting scheme after scheme To fend off the revenge of the dead.

Last night, full of wine, my heart rejoiced; This morning, sober, all is bleak.

I can only marvel at how my mood Changes so completely overnight.

Don’t fret about divine retribution, A prospect as disturbing as

The echo of a distant drum.

If we must pay for every fart, there is no hope.

Is justice the guiding principle in life? What justice lies, pray tell,

On a bloody battlefield

Or at the tip of the assassin’s sword?

Wherein lies life’s guiding principle? What light of wisdom may there be?

This fleeting life is at once beautiful and terrifying: Frail, we are saddled with burdens too heavy to bear.

All because we are implanted with seeds of uncontrollable desire, We are plagued with talk of right and wrong, crime and punishment. Helpless, we are in a constant muddle,

Granted neither the power nor the will to overcome.

Where have I been wandering, lost? Criticizing, examining, reconsidering what?

Ah—chasing empty dreams, unreal phantasmagoria.

Aha! Forgot my wine. All this is but the musings of a fool.

Listen to me. Look up at the vastness of the sky. We are tiny specks in the universe, no more.

Who can say what keeps this planet spinning?

Earth does as it pleases—rotate, revolve, turn upside down.

Sensing supreme Power everywhere, Discovering in all peoples of every land A common humanity,

I am called a heretic.

Everyone reads scripture wrong.

Or else there is no common sense, no wisdom. Forbidding the pleasures of the flesh, giving up wine . . . Sheesh. Mustafa, I despise such things!

But around that time, a certain young miss was urging me to give up drinking. She was a girl of seventeen or eighteen named Yoshi who worked in the little cigarette stand across the street from the bar. She had fair skin and a charming double tooth. Every time I stopped by to purchase cigarettes, she would smile and chide me:

“You’re terrible, always drunk in the middle of the day.”

“What’s so terrible about it? Why not be drunk? ‘Quaff wine to the very last drop, my child; away with enmity, away!’ said an ancient Persian. ‘Let us leave off. Hope for the grief-weary heart lies only in the intoxicating cup.’ Get it?”

“No.”

“You little dickens. I’m going to kiss you.”

“Go right ahead.” Unfazed, she pursed her lips. “Don’t be silly. Have you no shame?”

But the look on Yoshi’s face clearly marked her as an untouched virgin. One bitterly cold January night, I set out to buy cigarettes, drunk as usual,

and fell in the manhole in front of the cigarette stand. When I called out to Yoshi for help she pulled me out, tended to the injury on my right arm, and

said quietly and soberly, “You drink too much.”

I’m the sort of person who’s unafraid of dying but can’t bear the thought of hurting myself, bleeding, and becoming disabled, so while she tended to my arm I decided to give up drinking.

“I’ll quit. From tomorrow, I won’t drink a drop.” “Really?”

“I mean it. I’ll quit. Then will you marry me?” The bit about marrying me was a joke.

“Natch.”

“Natch” was short for “naturally.” All sorts of abbreviated words were trending then, including mobo for “modern boy” and moga for “modern girl.”

“All right, let’s make a pinky promise. I’ll quit for sure.”

The next day, I started drinking in the daytime again. In the evening, I staggered over to Yoshi’s stand and stood swaying in front of it

“Sorry, Yoshi. I’m drunk again.”

“You’re mean, pretending to be drunk like that.”

Startled, I began to sober up. “No, it’s true. I really am drunk. I’m not pretending.”

“Don’t tease me. Be nice.” She never doubted me for a minute.

“Surely you can tell by looking. I’ve been drinking since noon. Forgive me.”

“You certainly put on a good act.”

“It’s not an act, you idiot. I’m going to kiss you.” “Go ahead.”

“No, I don’t deserve to. Can’t marry you, either. Look at my face. See how red it is? I’m sloshed.”

“It’s red from the rays of the setting sun. I’m not falling for your little joke. Yesterday you promised to quit. There’s no way you’d be drunk today. You made a pinky promise. How can you say you’ve been drinking? It’s a lie, a whopping lie!”

I looked at Yoshi seated inside the cigarette stand, at her smiling, cream-

colored face amid the shadows. Ah, how precious is such unsullied virginity. I’ve never slept with a virgin younger than me. I’ll marry her. However great a sorrow lies in store for us, I don’t care. For once in my life, I want to experience great, savage joy. I always thought virginal beauty was the indulgent, sentimental fantasy of silly poets, but it’s real, it exists. I’ll marry her, and in the spring when the new leaves come out we’ll bike over to see a waterfall. I made up my mind on the spot; seizing that once-in-a-lifetime chance, I did not hesitate to steal her flower.

In time we married, and while the joy we obtained was not so very great, the subsequent sorrow was beyond horrifying, unimaginably huge. Society was after all deeply terrifying to me. Seizing this opportunity wasn’t enough to settle my life. Society was far harsher than that.