Japanese Literature

I don’t directly know the madman who wrote this memoir. However, I do know the person who appears in the journal, who may be the madam of the kyobashi stand-bar. She was small, pale, with narrow, upturned eyes and a high nose, and looked more like a beautiful young man than a beautiful woman. It seems that this memoir mainly describes the scenery of Tokyo in those days of 1930s, 1960s and 1970s, but it was around the 10th year of the Showa era, when the “military” of Japan was beginning to be exposed explicitly, that my friend took me to the stand bar of kyobashi a couple of times to drink highballs. It was around the 10th year of the Showa era, when the Japanese “military” was beginning to be exposed, so I was unable to meet the man who wrote this memoir.
　However, in February of this year, I visited a friend who had evacuated to Funabashi City in Chiba Prefecture. In fact, I had asked my friend to arrange a marriage for one of my relatives, so I thought I would buy some fresh seafood for my family to eat. I went to Funabashi City with a backpack on my back.
　Funabashi City was a rather large city facing the muddy sea. It was not easy to find the house of my friend, a new resident, even if I asked the locals for the address. It was cold and my shoulders ached from carrying my backpack, so I pushed open the door of a coffee shop, attracted by the sound of a record on a harp.
　I felt familiar with the madam there, and when I asked her, I found out that she was the little old lady from kyobashi ten years ago. She seemed to remember me right away, and we both exaggeratedly surprised and laughed. Then, as usual in such situations, we talked about our experiences of being burned out in air raids, as if we were proud of each other, even though we were not asked.
“You, however, have not changed.
“No, I’m an old woman. No, I’m an old woman now, my body is in shape. No, I’m an old woman.
“No, I have three more children. I’m going shopping for them today.
　We exchanged the usual greetings of people who have not seen each other for a long time, and then we asked each other what had happened to our mutual acquaintances. Then, suddenly, Madame changed her tone and asked me if I knew Ip-chan. When I replied that I didn’t know her, she went to the back of the room, brought me three notebooks and a picture of Mitsuba, and handed them to me.
“She handed me three notebooks and a photo of Miho.
　He said.
　I’m not one to write with material forced upon me by others, so I was about to give them back immediately, but I was so fascinated by the photo (I’ve already written about the strangeness of the photo of the three leaves on the postcard) that I decided to leave the notebooks with him anyway. I asked her if she knew where the professor of the women’s college lived, and she said she did. She said she sometimes came to this coffee shop. It was just around the corner.
　That night, after sharing a few drinks with my friend, we decided to have him stay with us, and I stayed up all night reading Rei’s notebook.
　I stayed up all night and read through Rei’s notebooks. The stories in the journal were from the past, but I’m sure they would be of great interest to people today. It seemed to me that it would be more meaningful to ask some magazine to publish the story rather than adding my own handwriting to it.
　The only marine products I brought back for the children were dried fish. I left my friend’s place with my backpack on my back, stopped by a coffee shop and said
I stopped by Rei’s coffee shop and said, “Thanks for your help last night. By the way, ……”.
　I immediately started with
“I was wondering if I could borrow this notebook for a while.
“Yes, please.
“Is this man still alive?
“Well, that’s the thing, I have no idea. About ten years ago, a parcel containing the notebook and photos was sent to the kyobashi store, and the sender was supposed to be Ip-chan, but there was no address or even name on the parcel. During the air raid, it was lost among other things, and I was strangely saved by it.
“Did you cry?
“No, not crying. …… No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
“It’s been ten years since then, so he’s probably dead by now. I’m sure he sent this to you as a thank you. It may have been an exaggeration, but it seems that you have suffered a great deal of damage. If all of this were true, and if I were his friend, I would have wanted to take him to a brain hospital.
“It’s her father’s fault, you know.
　He said casually.
“The Ip-chan we knew was a very honest, good-natured girl, who, if she hadn’t been drinking, would have been a …… god-like good girl.

“One.”

　One of Takeichi’s predictions came true and one did not. One of Takeichi’s prophecies came true, and one did not. The unhonorable prophecy that he would be loved came true, but the blessed prophecy that he would become a great painter did not.
　I was only able to become an obscure and inferior cartoonist for an inferior magazine.
　Because of the incident in Kamakura, I was expelled from high school, and I slept and slept in a three-mat room on the second floor of Hirame’s house. Hirame was always in a foul mood and never laughed when she smiled at him. The change was so terrible that it was almost ridiculous.
You can’t leave,” he said. Anyway, please don’t go out.
　That’s all she said to herself.
　Hirame seemed to think that he was in danger of committing suicide, that is, that he was in danger of jumping back into the sea after the woman, so he strictly forbade himself to go out. But I couldn’t drink or smoke, and I was living like an idiot from morning to night, huddled under a three-tatami kotatsu on the second floor, reading old magazines.
　Hirame’s house was located near the medical school in Okubo, and although the signboard read “Seiryuen,” a calligraphic and antique dealer, it was one of two houses in one building, with a narrow frontage, a dusty interior, and a lot of inappropriate junk (although Hirame did not rely on the junk in the store to do business). The store was full of dust, and it was full of junk. (However, Hirame does not rely on the junk in the shop for her business, but she makes money by taking an active part in cases where she has to hand over the ownership of the so-called husband’s treasured items to the so-called husband over there. Whenever he had a spare moment, he would play catch with the neighborhood kids outside, but he seemed to think that the upstairs tenant was either a fool or a lunatic. He listened and obeyed with a tired and impressed look on his face. The boy was Shibuta’s illegitimate son, and yet for some strange reason, Shibuta had never claimed to be his son or daughter, and there seemed to be a reason why Shibuta had always been single. I had heard some rumors about it from my own family, but I don’t know anything about it because I’m not really interested in other people’s affairs. I don’t know anything about it because I’m not really interested in what happens to other people. However, there was something about the boy’s eyes that reminded me of the eyes of a fish, or maybe he really was Hirame’s illegitimate son. Sometimes, late at night, the two of them would order soba noodles and eat them together in silence, without telling the person upstairs.
　At Hirame’s house, the little boy always prepared the meals, and only the meals for the troublesome people upstairs were put on separate plates and brought upstairs by the little boy three times a day.
　One evening at the end of March, Hirame had either found an unexpected windfall or had some other trick up her sleeve (even if both of these two guesses were correct, there were probably several more reasons that I could not have guessed). He invited himself downstairs to the dining table, which was unusually furnished with a choshi (sake bottle), admired and praised the tuna sashimi, not Hirame, and offered a little sake to the absent-minded housemate.
“What are you going to do now, exactly?
　Instead of answering, I picked up a tatami sardine from a plate on the table and looked at the silvery eyes of the little fish.
　Since I had come to this house, I had not had the heart to play the role of a clown, and I had just laid myself down in the scorn of Hirame and the boy, and Hirame seemed to be avoiding talking to me at length, and I had no desire to go after Hirame to complain about anything.
I was almost like a dunce in the house. “Deferred prosecution doesn’t mean a criminal record or anything like that. So, well, you can be rehabilitated by your mind. If you change your mind and seriously ask me for advice, I’ll think about it.
　Hirame’s way of speaking, and indeed, the way all people in the world speak, has this complicated, somewhat dazed, fugitive, subtle complexity to it. I was always bewildered and felt like I didn’t care, so I would make fun of them with clownishness or leave them to their own devices with a silent nod.
　In later years, I learned that all Hirame had to do was simply report to me as follows, and I felt depressed at her unnecessary caution, and at the incomprehensible vanity of the people of the world.
　All Hirame had to do at that moment was to say, “I don’t care if it’s government or private.
All Hirame had to say at that time was, “Go to any school, government or private, from April. Your living expenses are supposed to be more than enough to pay for your schooling.
　I found out much later that that was the way it was supposed to be. And I would have followed the instructions. But because of Hirame’s cautious and roundabout way of saying things, things got strangely complicated and my direction in life changed.
“I can’t help it if you don’t feel like coming to me for advice.
“What kind of advice?”
　I really had no idea what I was talking about.
“That’s what’s on your mind, isn’t it?
“Like what?
“Like, what are you going to do with yourself?
“Do you want me to work?
“No, I mean, what are you thinking about?
“I mean, I’m going to school. ……
“Yes, I need money. But the problem is not money. It’s your feelings.
　Why didn’t he just say, “The money is supposed to come from your country. That one word should have set my mind, but I was in a fog.
“What do you think?　Do you have any kind of hope for the future?　Thank you very much, you have no idea how difficult it is to take care of one person.
“I’m sorry.
“I’m really worried about you. Now that I’ve taken care of you, I don’t want you to be half-hearted either. I want you to show me how determined you are to follow the path of rehabilitation. For example, if you were to ask me for serious advice about your future plans, I would be willing to give you that advice. Since this is the assistance of poor Hirame, it would be a mistake to expect the same luxury as before. However, if you are firm in your mind and have a clear plan for the future, and if you come to me for advice, I am willing to help you with your rehabilitation, even if it is only a small amount. Do you understand?　Do you understand how I feel? What are you going to do now?
“If they don’t put me upstairs here, I’m going to work at …….
“Are you really saying that?　In today’s world, even if you graduate from the Imperial College, you’ll still have to work at …….
“No, I’m not going to be a salaryman.
“What are you then?
“I’m a painter.
　I said it boldly.
“Huh?”
　I couldn’t forget the sly look on Hirame’s face as she laughed with her neck wrinkled. It was like a shadow of disdain, but differently, if the world were an ocean, there would be a strange shadow hovering in the depths of the ocean, like a glimpse into the depths of an adult’s life.
　I went upstairs as if I were being chased and went to bed, but no thought came to me. I went upstairs as if I were being chased.
　I am sure I will return in the evening. I will go to the friend on the left to consult with him about my future plans, so don’t worry. Don’t worry.
　I then wrote down Masao Horiki’s name and address in Asakusa and secretly left Hirame’s house.
　I didn’t run away from Hirame because I was annoyed that she lectured me. As Hirame had said, I was a man without a strong will, and I had no idea what I would do in the future, and it would be a pity for Hirame to have me in trouble with her. And if I should ever get the urge to get inspired and make up my mind, it would be a painful and uncomfortable feeling to think that I would have to get monthly support from that poor Hirame.
　However, I had not left Hirame’s house with the intention of going to Horiki for advice on my so-called “future plans”. Rather, I wrote the letter to reassure Hirame, even if it was only for a short while (I wrote the letter out of a detective story-like ploy to get as far away from Hirame as possible in the meantime. It would be more accurate to say that I was afraid of shocking Hirame and confusing him. It was one of my sad habits to always put on some kind of decoration, because I was afraid of telling the truth, even though it was bound to be found out anyway. Even though I knew that the change in the atmosphere was chokingly horrible and would be detrimental to me later, my “desperate service” was distorted, weak, and ridiculous. At that time, I just wrote Horiki’s name and address on a piece of paper as it came to me from the bottom of my memory.
　I left Hirame’s house, walked to Shinjuku, sold the books in my pocket, and was still at a loss. Aside from playmates like Horiki, all my social contacts had been painful, and I had tried my best to act like a fool to relieve the pain. He was so exhausted that when he saw the face of someone he knew slightly, or even a face that looked like him, he would be startled, and for a moment, he would get a dizzying shiver of discomfort. I knew that people liked me, but it seemed that I lacked the ability to love others. (I doubt very much that people in the world have the ability to love.) As such, there was no way I could have a so-called “best friend,” and I didn’t even have the ability to “visit. The gates of other people’s houses were even more creepy to me than the gates of Hell in the Divine Comedy, and I could feel, without exaggeration, the presence of fishy, foul-smelling beasts like horrible dragons crawling behind the gates.
　I don’t have any relations with anyone. I can’t go anywhere to visit.
　Horiki.
　It was a joke that turned out to be a pawn. As I had written in the letter, I decided to visit Horiki in Asakusa. In the past, I had never visited Horiki’s house on my own, and I had usually sent him a telegram to invite him to my place. With a sigh, I got on the streetcar and realized that Horiki was my only hope in this world, and I felt a terrible chill run down my spine.
　Horiki was at home. In a two-story house at the end of a dirty alley, Horiki occupied the only room on the second floor, a six-tatami mat, while downstairs, Horiki’s elderly parents and a young craftsman were sewing and beating geta cords.
　That day, Horiki showed me a new side of him as an urbanite. He was, as they say, a shrewd man. It was a cold and sly egoism that made me, a country bumpkin, look at him with astonishment. He was not a man who just flowed incessantly as I did.
I’m so tired of you,” he said. Has your grandfather given you his permission yet? Have you?
　I couldn’t say that I had escaped.
　I could not say that I had escaped, so I had to use the word “rei” to cover it up. I was sure that Horiki would find out soon enough, but I faked it.
“I’ll figure it out.
“Come on, it’s not funny. I’d advise you to stop being so stupid. I’ve got some business to attend to today. I’ve been ridiculously busy lately.
“What kind of business?
“Hey, hey, hey, don’t cut the threads of the zabuton.
　As I was talking, I was unconsciously fidgeting with one of the four corner threads of my zabuton, the binding thread or cord, and pulling it with my fingertips. Horiki was not ashamed to admit that even a single thread of a zabuton could be spared if it came from Horiki’s house. When I thought about it, Horiki had not lost anything in her relationship with herself so far.
　Horiki’s old mother brought her two trays of oshiruko.
“What’s this?
　Horiki, like the filial son he had always been, turned to his mother and said, “I’m sorry.
“I’m sorry, is it oshiruko? You’re so bold. I didn’t need to worry about this. I didn’t need to worry about it, because I had to go out right away on an errand. No, but it’s a waste of your prized oshiruko. I’ll have one. Why don’t you have one too? My mother took the trouble to make it for me. Oh, it’s so good. He’s so bold.
　As if it were not an act, he was overjoyed and ate it with relish. I sipped it myself, but I could smell the hot water, and when I ate the rice cake, it was not rice cake, but something I did not understand. It was not that I despised the poverty. I didn’t think it tasted bad at that time, and I was deeply touched by the thoughtfulness of my old mother. (I didn’t think it tasted bad at the time, and I was deeply touched by my old mother’s thoughtfulness. I have a fear of poverty, but I don’t think I despise it. I just want to write that I was so dismayed to feel as if even Horiki had abandoned me. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to say anything.
“I’m sorry, but I have some business to attend to today.
　I’m sorry, but I have some business to attend to today,” Horiki said as he stood up and put on his jacket.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go.
　At that moment, Horiki had a female visitor, and his own life took a sudden turn.
　Horiki became suddenly animated.
“I’m sorry, sir. I was just about to come to you, but this person came unexpectedly, and I don’t mind. Come on in.
　Seemingly in a panic, he took off his own zabuton, turned it inside out and offered it to the woman, who snatched it back, turned it inside out again and offered it to him. There was only one other guest futon in the room besides Horiki’s.
　The woman was thin and had a high back. She sat in a corner near the entrance, leaving the mattress by her side.
　I listened to their conversation in a daze. The woman seemed to be from a magazine company, and she had asked Horiki to do some cutting or something, and she seemed to have come to pick it up.
“I’m in a hurry.
“It’s ready. It’s already done. Here you go.”
　A telegram came.
　Horiki read it, and his good mood quickly turned sour.
“Shit!　What’s wrong with you?
　It was a telegram from Hirame.
“Anyway, go home at once. It would be nice if I could take you home, but I don’t have time for that right now. I don’t have time for that now. You look so carefree, even though you’re a runaway.
“Where do you live?
“Okubo.
　I answered abruptly.
“I suddenly answered, “Well, it’s near the office.
　The woman was born in Koshu and was twenty-eight years old. She was twenty-eight years old and lived in an apartment in Koenji with her five-year-old daughter. She told me that it had been three years since she had lost her husband.
“You seem to have had a hard life growing up. You seem to have had a very difficult upbringing. I feel sorry for you.
　After Shizuko (that was the name of the reporter) left for a job at a magazine in Shinjuku, I was left to stay at home quietly with myself and a five-year-old girl named Shigeko. Up until then, Shigeko had been playing in the apartment manager’s room when her mother was away, but now she was in a much better mood with her “thoughtful” uncle as her playmate.
　I stayed there for about a week in a daze. One of the kites was stuck to the power lines near the window of my apartment, blown by the dusty spring breeze and torn down, but it was still stuck to the power lines, nodding its head and all. I had nightmares.
“I need money.
“…… How much?”
“A lot. …… It’s true what they say, when you’re out of money, you’re out of luck.
“That’s ridiculous. That’s so old-fashioned, …….
“Really?　But you don’t get it, do you? If I don’t do something, I might have to run.
“Which one of us is poorer? Which one of us is poor, and which one of us is going to run away? That’s weird.
“I want to earn my own money and use it to buy alcohol, or cigarettes. I think I’m a much better painter than Horiki.
　At this time, what naturally came to my mind were the self-portraits of Takeichi’s so-called “ghosts” that he had drawn in junior high school. A lost masterpiece. They were lost during my frequent moves, but I have a feeling that they were excellent paintings. After that, even though I tried to paint various pictures, they were far from the gems of my memories, and I was always plagued by a languid sense of loss that left me feeling empty inside.
　A glass of absinthe left undrunk.
　That’s how I secretly described my eternal and uncompensable sense of loss. Whenever the subject of painting came up, that leftover glass of absinthe would flicker before my eyes, and I would feel a pang of impatience, wanting to show that painting to this person and make him believe in my artistic talent.
“I wanted to show him that painting and make him believe in my talent. I don’t know about you, but you’re so cute when you make jokes with a serious face.
　I’m not joking, I’m telling the truth, I want to show you that picture.
Then he suddenly changed his mind, gave up, and said, “A cartoon. At least, I think I’m better than Horiki at cartoons.
　The clown’s deceitful words were taken more seriously.
“That’s right. I’ve always admired the cartoons you draw for Shigeko, and I can’t help but gush over them. Why don’t you give it a try?　I can ask the editor-in-chief of my company to give it a try.
　The company was publishing a little-known monthly magazine for children.
　The company published a little-known monthly magazine for children. …… When most women see you, they can’t wait to do something for you. …… You’re always so frightening, and yet so funny. …… Sometimes he’s very sad and alone, and that makes a woman’s heart itch even more.
　I’m not sure if it’s because I’m not a woman or because I’m a man. In spite of her efforts, she ended up having to rely on Shizuko more and more, and she had to take care of almost everything, including the cleaning up of her runaway from home, by this Koshu woman who was much more of a man than a woman, and she had to be even more “frightened” of Shizuko.
　Thanks to Shizuko’s arrangement, Hirame, Horiki, and Shizuko had a meeting, and I was completely cut off from my hometown, and I ended up living with Shizuko “under the sun. Thanks to Shizuko’s hard work, I was able to make some money, and I used the money to buy alcohol and cigarettes, but my anxiety and annoyance only grew. When I was drawing the monthly comic strip “The Adventures of Kinta and Ota” for Shizuko’s magazine, I was suddenly reminded of my hometown house, and I felt so shabby that I couldn’t move my pen anymore.
　Shigeko called me “Dad” without any hesitation at that time.
“When I prayed, I felt God’s presence. Is it true that if you pray, God will give you everything?
　I wanted to say that prayer myself.
　I wanted to say that prayer myself, “Oh, give me a cold will. Let me know the nature of man. Let it be no sin for a man to push another away. Give me the mask of wrath.
“Yes, yes. I’m sure He’ll give you everything you need, but maybe not for your father.
　I was frightened, even of God. I couldn’t believe in God’s love, but only in God’s punishment. Faith. He felt as if he was going to the judgment seat with a nod of his head to receive God’s lash. He could believe in hell, but he could not believe in heaven.
“Why can’t I?”
“Because I disobeyed my parents.”
“Really?　Everyone says your father is a very good man.
　I know I’m being deceptive, I know that everyone in this apartment likes me, but it’s hard to explain to Shigeko how afraid I am of everyone, how the more I fear them, the more they like me, and the more they like me, the more I fear them, and the more I have to stay away from them.
“What on earth do you want to ask God for, Shigeru-chan?
　I casually turned the conversation around.
“Shigeko wants a real father for her.
　I was startled and dizzy. An enemy. I wondered if I was Shigeko’s enemy, or if Shigeko was my enemy, but anyway, here was another horrible adult threatening me, a stranger, an inexplicable stranger, a stranger full of secrets, Shigeko’s face suddenly looked like that.
　I had hoped that Shigeko was the only one, but it turned out that he, too, had the tail of a cow that unexpectedly swatted away flies. From then on, I had to be frightened even of Shigeko.
“Shiki-ma!　Are you there?”
　Horiki had started to come to her again. The man who had made me feel so lonely on the day I ran away from home, I couldn’t refuse him and greeted him with a faint smile.
“I heard that your manga is becoming quite popular. Amateurs are no match for you because they have the courage to be scary and shit. But don’t let your guard down. But don’t let your guard down, because your sketching isn’t even close to being up to par.
　He even showed the attitude of a master. I wondered what his face would be like if I showed him my “ghost” drawing.
“Don’t say that to me. Don’t tell me that. I’ll scream in pain.
　Horiki finally said with a smile on his face.
“If you only have the talent to walk the world, you’ll get ripped apart someday.
　A talent for worldly affairs. I really couldn’t help but laugh at …… myself. I have a talent for worldly affairs!　But to be afraid of, avoid, and cheat people as I do is the same as adhering to the common proverb, “There is no luck in a god who does not touch you. Oh, I think that people do not understand each other, they see each other completely wrongly, but they think that they are the best of friends, and they do not realize it all their lives, and when the other person dies, they cry and read condolences.
　Horiki, after all, was the one who had been there for me when I ran away from home (though I must have accepted reluctantly at Shizuko’s urging), so she acted as if she were a great benefactor of my rehabilitation or an iceman under the moon, giving me lectures with a plausible face, visiting me drunkenly late at night to stay overnight, and borrowing five yen (it was always five yen).
“He would also visit her drunkenly late at night and borrow five yen. The world will not allow you to go any further.
　What in the world is “the world”? Is it the plural of human beings? Where is the reality of the world? I had always thought of it as something strong, harsh, and scary, but when Horiki said that, I suddenly realized that it was not.
“But when Horiki told me that, I suddenly thought, “The world is you, isn’t it?
　However, when Horiki said that to me, the words, “The world is you, isn’t it?
I didn’t want to offend Horiki.
(It’s not the world. It’s not the world, it’s you, isn’t it?
If you do that, the world will give you a hard time.
(It’s not the world. It’s you, isn’t it?
The world will bury you now.
It’s not the world. It’s you who will be buried, isn’t it?
　　But I just wiped the sweat from my face with a handkerchief and said
“I just wiped the sweat from my face with a handkerchief and said, “Cold sweat, cold sweat.
　I just wiped the sweat from my face with a handkerchief and smiled.
　Since then, however, I have had a kind of thought that the world is an individual.
　To borrow a phrase from Shizuko, I became a little more selfish and less frightened. To borrow a phrase from Shizuko, I have become a little more selfish and less frightened, and to borrow a phrase from Horiki, I have become a little more stingy. To borrow a phrase from Shigeko, I have become less attached to Shigeko.
　I don’t talk much, I don’t laugh, and every day, while I’m doing Shigeko’s bidding, I’ve been working on “The Adventures of Mr. Kinta and Mr. Ota,” “Nonki Osho,” which is a clear subgenre of “Nonki Toussaint,” and “Sekkachi Pinchan,” a series of manga with a title that I don’t understand and that I’m desperate for. In response to orders from various publishers (some of which came from Shizuko’s company, but all of which were from so-called third-rate publishers who were even more vulgar than Shizuko’s company), I drew slowly, with a very gloomy mood (my drawing was very slow). Then, when Shizuko came home from the office, I would take turns going outside to drink cheap, strong sake at a food stall or bar near the Koenji station, and then return to my apartment in a slightly cheerful mood.
“The more I looked at you, the stranger you looked, and I actually got the idea for Nonki Osho’s face from your sleeping face.
“Even your face is getting old,” he said. You look like a forty-year-old man.
“It’s your fault. You’ve sucked me dry. The flow of water and human flesh are the same thing. What are you moping about at the riverside?
“Don’t make a fuss, go to sleep. Don’t make a fuss.
　He was calm and unconcerned.
“I’ll have a drink. The flow of water and a man’s body are the same thing. The flow of water and the body of water are the same.
　While singing, Shizuko would make me strip off my clothes, and I would fall asleep with my forehead pressed against Shizuko’s chest, and that was my daily life.

This was my daily life.
The next day, she did the same thing again.
The next day, he did the same thing, following the same conventions as yesterday.
In other words, as long as you avoid the wild and great joys
In other words, as long as you avoid the wild and loud joys, you will naturally avoid the sadness.
As long as you avoid the stones that block your way
The toad circles around and past.
End of indentation here.

　When I came across this poem by Guy-Charles Croix, translated by Toshi Ueda, I felt my face redden to the point of burning.
　Toad.
(That’s me. There is nothing that the world will or will not forgive. There is no way to bury or not to bury. I am an inferior animal, no better than a dog or a cat. Toad. (It’s just moving slowly.)
　My drinking has gradually increased, not only in the vicinity of Koenji Station, but also in Shinjuku and Ginza, where I go out to drink and even stay out overnight. In other words, he had become even rougher and meaner than he had been before his passionate death, and he was so desperate for money that he took Shizuko’s clothes.
　It had been more than a year since I came here and laughed at that torn kite, and around the time of the cherry blossoms, I took Shizuko’s sash and undershirt to the pawn shop again, made some money, drank at Ginza, and stayed out two nights in a row.
“Why do you drink alcohol?
“My father doesn’t drink because he likes it. My father doesn’t drink because he likes it, but because he’s such a nice guy. ……
“Do nice people drink?
“Not really. ……
“Your father will be very surprised.
“He might not like it. Look, look, he’s jumping out of the box.
“It’s like Sekkachi Pinchan.
“Yeah.
　I could hear Shizuko’s low, happy laughter from inside.
　I opened the door narrowly and peeked inside to see that it was a white rabbit. It was a white rabbit, scampering around the room, and the mother and child were chasing it.
(How happy are these people? (They are so happy, these people.) I, a fool, got into the middle of them, and now I’m going to ruin them. They are happy. A good father and son. Happiness, oh, if only God would hear the prayers of someone like me, just once, just once in my lifetime, I would pray.
　I felt like I wanted to huddle there and join my hands. I closed the door softly and went back to Ginza, never to return to the apartment again.
　So, I ended up lying on the second floor of a stand-bar near kyobashi, again in the shape of a man.
　The world. I felt that I was beginning to understand it. It’s a battle between individuals, and it’s a battle on the spot, and all you have to do is win on the spot. The difficulties of the world are the difficulties of the individual, and the ocean is not the world but the individual. I have learned to behave a little more brazenly, as it were, according to my immediate needs, without being so limitlessly careless.
　I left my apartment in Koenji and went to the madam of a stand-by in kyobashi.
“I’m leaving.”
　That was all I needed to say to the madam of the kyobashi stand-by, and that night I was forced to stay upstairs in the kyobashi. As long as the madam was willing, everything was fine.
　I was like a customer, a husband, an errand boy, a relative, and a very unknown person to the world, but “the world” did not blame me in the slightest.
　I became less and less cautious about the world. I began to think that the world was not such a horrible place. In other words, my previous fears had been that the spring breeze would be filled with hundreds of thousands of whooping cough mold, the public baths would be filled with hundreds of thousands of blinding mold, the barber shops would be filled with hundreds of thousands of bald head mold, the hanging skins of the railway lines would be filled with scabies worms, or the sashimi and pork would be filled with scabies worms. The larvae of the chrysomelid worm and the eggs of the dystoma and other worms were always hidden in the raw meat, and if you walked barefoot, small fragments of glass would enter through the soles of your feet and run around inside your body, poking your eyeballs and causing blindness. It was as if we were being terrorized by so-called “scientific superstition. It is true that hundreds of thousands of fungi floating and swimming in the air are “scientifically” accurate. At the same time, I have come to realize that if you completely silence their existence, they are just “ghosts of science” that will disappear as soon as they have no connection to you. How frightened I am by such “scientific statistics” as how many bales of rice are already thrown away if ten million people eat three grains of leftover rice in their lunch boxes in a day, or how much pulp will be saved if ten million people save one sheet of nosepaper a day. Every time I left even one grain of rice uneaten, every time I sniffed, I was troubled by the illusion that I was wasting a mountain of rice and a mountain of pulp, and I felt gloomy, as if I was committing a grave sin. However, that was the “lie of science,” the “lie of statistics,” and the “lie of mathematics. Even as an applied problem of multiplication and division, it is a very primitive and incompetent subject, just like calculating the probability of how many times a person will step off one leg and fall into that hole in a dark, unlit toilet, or how many passengers will drop their feet into that gap between the entrance and exit of a train and the edge of the platform. It is as ridiculous as calculating probability, and it seems to be possible, but I have never heard of a single case where a person was injured by failing to step over a latrine hole, and I was taught such a hypothesis as “scientific fact,” and I accepted it as reality and was afraid of it. I was taught such a hypothesis as a “scientific fact” and accepted it as a reality.
　Even so, human beings were still frightening to me, and I had to drink a glass of alcohol before I could meet with customers at the store. I wanted to see something scary. Every night, I would still go out to the store and drunkenly spout off some lame artistic theory to the customers, like a child squeezing a small animal that is actually a little scared.
　Cartoonist. Ah, but I’m just an unknown cartoonist with no great joy and no great sorrow. No matter how much I rushed inwardly to have a big, wild joy, no matter how big a sorrow would come later, the only joy I had at the moment was arguing with my customers and drinking their drinks.
　After arriving at kyobashi, I had been living this kind of trivial life for about a year, and my cartoons began to appear not only in magazines for children but also in crude and obscene magazines sold at train stations.

This is the first time I’ve done this.
If you stop praying in vain
I’ll be back in a few days.
Let’s just have a drink and remember all the good things.
Let’s forget about all the unnecessary thoughtfulness.

They’re the ones who scare people with their fears and anxieties
Frightened of the great sins they’ve created
Preparing for the vengeance of the dead.
And to prepare for the vengeance of the dead, they make plans in their own heads.

In the evening, when the wine is flowing, my heart is full of joy
This morning, it’s cool, it’s just desolate
In the midst of a night of wonder
I’m in a different mood

Please stop thinking that I’m cursed.
Like a drum echoing from afar
What’s wrong with him?
I can’t help it if I’m accused of every little thing, even farting.

Isn’t justice the guiding principle of life?
Farewell to the bloody battlefield.
What kind of justice dwells in the tip of an assassin’s tongue?
What kind of justice dwells within?

Where is the guiding principle?
What light of wisdom is there?
Beautiful but fearful is this world.
For the weak child of man is burdened with a burden he cannot bear

And the seeds of uncontrollable lust are planted in him
Cursed with good, evil, sin, punishment, and so on
I can’t do anything about it, I’m just confused
Without the strength or will to break it down

Where have you been wandering around?
What are you criticizing, examining, reaffirming?
Empty dreams, illusions that don’t exist.
I’ve forgotten to drink, so I’m just mulling things over.

Look at this empty sky.
It’s just a dot floating in the middle of the sky.
You don’t know why the earth rotates on its axis
It rotates, it revolves, it reverses itself.

Everywhere I feel the supreme power
In every nation, in every race
I find the same humanity in every nation, in every race.
I’m a heretic.

You’ve all misunderstood the scripture.
Otherwise, they wouldn’t have common sense or wisdom.
They forbid the pleasures of the living, they stop drinking.
Okay, Mustafa, I hate that kind of thing.
I hate it.

　But at that time, there was a virgin who advised her to stop drinking.
“Oh, no, you’re drunk every day at noon.”
　She was the seventeen or eighteen-year-old daughter of a small tobacconist across the street from the bar, a white girl with double teeth. Whenever I went to buy cigarettes, she would laugh and warn me.
“Why not? Why is it wrong? Drink as much as you can, my child, and let the hatred go away, go away, go away. Do you understand?
“I don’t understand.
“Son of a bitch. I’m gonna kiss you.
“Come on.
　He sticks out his bottom lip, not a little offended.
“Asshole. Chastity, …….”
　But the look on Yoshi’s face clearly showed that she smelled like an untainted virgin.
　On a cold night after the New Year’s Eve, I was drunk, went out to buy cigarettes, fell into a manhole in front of a tobacco shop, yelled, “Yoshi-chan, save me!
“You’re drinking too much.
　She said without laughing.
　I don’t mind dying, but I don’t want to get injured, bleed out, and become a cripple, etc. So, as Yoshi-chan tended to the wound on my arm, I thought I should stop drinking.
“I’ll stop. I won’t drink a drop from tomorrow.
“Are you sure?
“I’m sure I will. If I stop, Yoshi, will you be my wife?
　But the wife thing was a joke.
“Mochi.”
　Mochi was an abbreviation for “of course. Mochi was an abbreviation for “of course.
“All right. Let’s do genman. I’m sure I’ll stop.
　So, the next day, I drank from noon.
　In the evening, I wandered out and stood in front of Yoshi-chan’s store.
“I’m sorry, Yoshi-chan. I drank too much.
“Oh, no. “Oh, no, I didn’t mean to act drunk.
　I was surprised. I felt like I was sober.
“No, it’s true. I really drank. I’m not pretending to be drunk.
“Don’t make fun of me. Don’t make fun of me, I’m a bad person.
　They don’t want to suspect anything.
“I’m sure you can tell by looking at me. I’ve been drinking since noon today. You’ll have to forgive me.
“You’re a good actor, aren’t you?
“I’m not acting, you idiot. I’m gonna kiss you.
“Come on.
“No, I’m not qualified. No, I’m not qualified. I’ll have to give up being your wife. Look at your face. Isn’t it red?　I’ve been drinking.
“That’s because the sun is shining on you. Look at your face. I promised you yesterday. You couldn’t have drunk it. I’ve been drinking. It’s a lie, a lie, a lie that I drank.
　I had never slept with a virgin younger than me before, I would marry her, no matter what great sorrows came afterwards for that, I would have a lifetime of wild and great joy. I had thought that the beauty of virginity was just a sweet sentimental illusion of a foolish poet, but now I knew that it existed in this world. They did not hesitate to steal the flowers.
　We eventually got married, and the joy that came with it was not necessarily great, but the sorrow that followed was so unimaginably great that it would not be enough to call it horrible. For me, “the world” was still an unfathomable and frightening place. It was not an easy place where everything could be decided in a single game.

(#5 indented) 2.

　Horiki and myself.
　If this is what is called a “friendship” in this world, then the relationship between myself and Horiki must be a “friendship” as well.
　If I were to rely on the chivalrous spirit of the madam of the kyobashi stand-bar (chivalrous spirit of a woman is a strange word to use, but in my experience, at least in the case of men and women in the city, women have more chivalrous spirit than men. In the case of urban men and women, women have more chivalry than men. I was able to get Yoshiko, the tobacconist, to become my common-law wife, and we rented a room downstairs in a small, two-story wooden apartment in Tsukiji, near the Sumida River. After dinner, we went out to see a movie together, and on the way back, we went to a coffee shop and bought some flower pots. Just as I was beginning to have a faintly sweet thought that maybe I would be able to become more and more like a human being and not have to die a miserable death, Horiki appeared in front of me again.
“Hey!　Hey, color demon. Hmm?　Even so, you’ve become somewhat sensible looking. I’m here today on a mission from Lady Koenji.
　I was about to say this when he suddenly lowered his voice, looked at Yoshiko who was preparing tea in the kitchen with his chin, and asked her if she was all right.　I don’t care.
“I don’t care. I don’t care what you have to say.
　I said calmly.
　In fact, Yoshiko was such a genius at trust that she never doubted her relationship with the old lady of kyobashi, or even with Tsuneko when she informed her of the incident in Kamakura.
“You’re still so cocky. It’s nothing serious, just a message that you should come and visit us at Koenji once in a while.
　Just as I was about to forget, a mysterious bird came flapping its wings and pierced the wounds of my memory with its beak. Immediately, the memories of past shame and guilt unfold before your eyes, and you can’t sit still for fear of screaming.
“Shall I drink?
　I said to myself.
“Okay.”
　And Horiki.
　Myself and Horiki. We both looked alike in shape. There were times when I felt like we looked exactly alike. Of course, this only happened when we were drinking cheap sake here and there, but anyway, when we saw each other, we instantly turned into dogs of the same shape and coat, running around in the snowfall.
　After that day, we rekindled our old friendship, and I went with them to that little old lady in kyobashi, and finally, the two drunken dogs even visited Shizuko’s apartment in Koenji, and stayed there for the night.
　I’ll never forget it. It was a very hot summer night, and Horiki came to her apartment in Tsukiji at nightfall wearing a worn-out yukata, saying that she had pawned some summer clothes for a certain need and that it would be very bad if her old mother found out about the pawn. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any money of my own, so as usual, I told Yoshiko to take her clothes to the pawn shop and make some money. We then went to the roof of the apartment building and had a very dirty summer party with the stale wind that sometimes blew faintly from the Sumida River.
　At that time, we began to play the game of guessing comedic and tragic nouns. For example, a steamer and a train are both tragic nouns, while a streetcar and a bus are both comedic nouns. For example, steamship and train are both tragic nouns, while tram and bus are both comedic nouns. Any playwright who does not know why this is so is not worthy of discussing art.
“Are you ready?　Do you want a cigarette?
　I ask myself.
“Tiger. “Tra.
　Horiki replies subliminally.
“And the pills?
“Powder?　Pills?
“Injections.
“Tiger.
“You think so?　There’s also hormone injections.
“No, definitely tigers. Needles first. You’re a great tiger.
“Okay, I’ll give you that. But, you know, medicine and doctors, they’re more comedy than you think. What about death?
“Comedy. So are priests and monks.
“Very good. And life is a tiger.
“No. Rice.
“No, that would mean everything would be rice. Now, let me ask you something else. What about cartoonists?　You can’t call them comics, can you?
“Tiger, tiger. Big tragic noun!
“What? You’re the big tiger.
　It would have been boring if it had turned out to be a bad pun, but we were very proud of this game, which we thought was extremely clever and had never been seen before in any salon in the world.
　At that time, I had also invented another game similar to this one. It was a game of guessing antonyms. A black ant (short for “antonym”) is white. But a white ant is red. Red ants are black.
“What about flower ants?”
　Horiki’s mouth curved up in thought.
“Well, there was a restaurant called Hanazuki, so that’s the moon.
“No, that’s not an anto. No, that’s not an ant, it’s more of a synonym. Even stars and violets are synonyms, aren’t they? It’s not an ant.
“All right, it’s a bee.
“Bee?
“Peonies and …… ants?
“No, it’s a motif. Don’t cheat.
“All right!　Flowers and clouds. ……
“Clouds on the moon, right?
“Yes, yes. Flowers and wind. Wind. Flower and wind. Flower and wind.
“That’s not good. That’s a Naniwa-bushi phrase. That’s a Naniwa-bushi phrase. It shows your true character.
“No, it’s biwa.
“It’s Biwa. The anto of a flower should be …… the thing that looks the least like a flower in the world.
“So, uh, …… wait, what, a woman?
“What’s the synonym for woman, by the way?
“Offal.”
“You don’t know poetry, do you? So, what’s the ant of offal?
“Milk.
“That’s a little better. Keep it up. One more thing. Shame. Ant of guts.
“Shamelessness. Ikita Joshi, the cartoonist of the moment.
“What about Masao Horiki?”
　At this point, both of us started to feel like we couldn’t laugh anymore, and we started to feel gloomy, as if our heads were filled with shards of glass, which is typical of shochu drunkenness.
“Don’t get cocky. I’ve never been humiliated by a rope like you.
　Inwardly, Horiki didn’t think of himself as a real human being, only as a mortal, shameless, stupid fool, a so-called “living corpse,” who would use him wherever he could for his own pleasure. But then again, it was quite understandable that Horiki saw me that way. I had always been a child who didn’t deserve to be a human being, and perhaps even Horiki deserved to despise me. Maybe even Horiki deserved to be scorned.
“I’m not sure. What is the antonym for sin? This is a tough one.
　I don’t know,” he said, trying to look casual.
“The law.”
　Horiki replied matter-of-factly, and I looked at his face. In the red light of the flickering neon sign of a nearby building, Horiki’s face looked as dignified as a demon detective. Horiki’s face looked as dignified as that of an evil detective.
“That’s not what a crime is, is it?
　The synonym for sin is law!　But maybe that’s how easily people in the world think and live their lives. It is only where there are no criminals that sin thrives.
“What is it then, God?　There’s something about you that’s a little bit like a fucking monk. It’s a taste.
“Don’t take it so lightly. Let’s see what we can come up with. This is an interesting topic, though, isn’t it? It seems to me that one answer to this theme can tell you everything about a person.
“No way. …… Ant of sin is goodness. A good citizen. He’s like me.
“Don’t joke about it. But good is the Ant of evil, not the Ant of sin. But good is the Ant of evil, not the Ant of sin.
“Is there a difference between evil and sin?
“No, I don’t think so. The concept of good and evil is man-made. It’s a man-made moral language.
“Shut up. Then it must be God. God, God. God, God, God. I’m starving.
“Yoshi is boiling fava beans right now.
“Thank you. It’s my favorite food.
　I lay down on my back with my hands folded behind my head.
“You don’t seem to have the slightest interest in sin, do you?
“I’m not a sinner like you, you know. Of course, I’m not a sinner like you. I may take pleasure in it, but I don’t let women die and I don’t take money from them.
　Somewhere in the back of my mind, a faint but desperate protest arises, “I didn’t make her die, I didn’t take her money,” but then I immediately think back to the fact that it was my fault.
　I just can’t bring myself to have a straightforward discussion. I tried my best to suppress the gloomy drunkenness of the soju, which was making me feel worse by the minute, and said to myself, almost as if I were talking to myself.
“But being thrown in jail is not the only crime. I think that if we can understand the ant of sin, we can understand the substance of sin. …… God, …… salvation, …… love, … …light, …… but God has an anto called Satan, salvation anto would be suffering, love has an anto called hate, light has anto called darkness, good has anto called evil, sin and prayer, sin and repentance, sin and confession, sin and …… Aha, they’re all synonyms, what’s the opposite of sin?
“What is the opposite of sin? The counterpart of “tsumi” is “mitsu,” which is as sweet as honey. I’m starving. Bring me something to eat.
“Why don’t you bring me something to eat?
　For almost the first time in his life, he shouted in anger.
“All right, then, let’s go there and commit the crime together. Let’s go to Shita and commit the crime together. The guilty party is the honey bean, or is it the spider bean?
　I was so drunk that I could barely speak.
“Suit yourself. Go away!
“Sin and hunger, hunger and peas, or is that a synonym?
　”Sin and hunger, hunger and peas.
　Sin and punishment. Dostoyevsky. It flashed through the corner of my mind, and I thought, “What if that Dostoevsky is the one? What if Mr. Dost hadn’t thought of Crime and Punishment as a synonym, but had placed it as an antonym?　Crime and punishment, absolutely incompatible, incompatible with glacial coal. When I was thinking of sin and punishment as antonyms in the depths of Dost’s blue, rotten pond, the depths of turbulence, …… ah, I almost understood, no, not yet, …… and so on, when a running lantern was spinning in my brain, I thought
“Hey!　”Hey, it’s a pea. Come on!”
　Horiki’s voice and complexion had changed; he had just gotten up and wandered off, only to come back again.
“What?”
　The two of them went downstairs from the rooftop, and halfway down the stairs to their room further downstairs, Horiki stopped and said, “Look!
“Look!”
　Horiki stops in the middle of the stairs going down from the second floor to her room downstairs.
　Horiki stops in the middle of the stairs leading downstairs to her room, and points to a small window above her room. The lights are still on and there are two animals.
　I stood there on the stairs, dizzy, muttering in my chest with rapid breathing, “This is a human being, this is a human being, there is nothing to be afraid of,” forgetting to help Yoshi.
　Horiki let out a loud cough. The emotion that struck me was not anger, disgust, or sadness, but sheer terror. It was not the fear of a ghost in a cemetery, but an ancient and violent fear, the kind you might feel when you meet a white-robed deity in a cedar grove at a shrine. My youthful gray hair began that night, and I began to lose confidence in everything, to doubt people to the depths of my being, and to withdraw forever from all expectations, joy, and resonance with the workings of this world. In fact, it was a decisive event in my life. I had been split right between the eyes, and ever since then, the wound hurt every time I approached any human being.
“I sympathize with you, but I think you’ve learned your lesson. I’ll never come back here again. It’s like hell. You can go to …… and forgive Yoshi-chan. You’re not a good guy, either. Excuse me.
　Horiki was not stupid enough to stay in an awkward place for long.
　I got up, drank some shochu by myself, and then cried out loud. I could cry as much or as little as I wanted.
　Before I knew it, Yoshiko was standing in the background, holding a plate piled high with fava beans.
“Tell me you’re not going to do anything, …….”
“Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything. You never knew how to doubt anyone. Sit down. Let’s eat some beans.
　We sat side by side and ate the beans. Oh, trust is a sin, isn’t it?　The other man was a small, uneducated merchant of about thirty years of age who made me draw cartoons for him and then left me a small amount of money.
　The merchant never came back, but for some reason I felt more hatred and anger toward Horiki, who had come back to the rooftop to tell me the news without even coughing loudly when I first found him, than hatred toward him.
　There is nothing to forgive or not to forgive, Yoshiko is a genius of trust. He never knew how to doubt anyone. But that is why he is so miserable.
　Ask God. Is trust a sin?
　The fact that Yoshi’s trust was tainted, rather than the fact that Yoshi’s trust was tainted, caused me so much anguish that I could not live for a long time afterwards. For someone like me, who was so frightened, who was always looking at other people’s faces, and whose ability to trust others was cracked, the innocence of Yoshi’s trust was as refreshing as a waterfall of green leaves. Overnight, it had turned into yellow sewage. Behold, from that night onwards, Yoshi started to care even about his every smile.
“Hey!
　He twitched when I called him “Hey,” and seemed to be at a loss for where to put his eyes. No matter how much I tried to make him laugh, no matter how much I tried to clown him, he would become frightened and fearful.
　I wondered if an innocent trusting heart is the original spring of sin.
　I tried to find and read various books about married women who had been raped. But I could not find a single woman who had been raped in such a tragic way as Yoshiko. It’s not a story at all. If there had been even a hint of love between the little merchant and Yoshi, my feelings might have been saved, but there was only one night in the summer when Yoshi trusted her, and that was it. And for that reason, his own eyebrows were split open, his voice became hoarse, his hair began to turn gray, and he had to live in fear for the rest of his life. Most of the stories seemed to focus on whether or not the husband would forgive the wife’s “act,” but that didn’t seem to be such a big problem for me. If he felt that he could not forgive her, he should not make such a big deal about it, but should just leave her and get a new wife. In any case, I even felt that all sides of the story would be settled by the husband’s feelings. In other words, even though such an incident was a great shock to my husband, it seemed to me that it was just a “shock,” and unlike the endlessly lapping waves, it was a problem that could be handled by the anger of my husband who had the right to do so. However, in their case, the husband had no rights, and when she thought about it, she felt as if everything was her fault, so she couldn’t even say a single thing to him, let alone get angry. The wife was raped because of a rare quality that she possessed, and that quality was her husband’s longed-for trust in her innocence, which was so lovely.
　The trust of innocence is a sin.
　Even the beauty that was her only hope was now in doubt, and she no longer understood what was going on, and the only thing she could think of was alcohol. The expression on my face became extremely disgusting, I drank soju from morning, my teeth chipped to pieces, and I began to draw almost obscene cartoons. No, let me be clear. From that time on, I began to copy and sell shunga. I wanted to have money to buy shochu. When I looked at Yoshiko, who was always looking away from me, I wondered if she had been with that merchant more than once, because she was a completely unguarded woman, and if Horiki was?　No, or even with someone I didn’t know?　So I just drank shochu and got drunk, and tried to ask a few sneaky questions, and felt silly inside. And then, after that, I would give her the hellish caresses she desperately needed, and sleep like a muddle.
　At the end of the year, I came home drunk and wanted to drink some sugar water, and since Yoshi seemed to be asleep, I went to my room and found a sugar jar. When I opened the lid, I found that there was no sugar in the jar, but a small black paper box. I casually picked it up and was astonished to see the label on the box. More than half of the label had been scratched off with my fingernails, but the Western letters were still there, and they were clearly written on it: DIAL.
　DIAL. At that time, I was using soju exclusively and not hypnotics, but I was familiar with most hypnotics because insomnia was like a chronic disease for me. This one box of Ziar was definitely more than a lethal dose. He hadn’t sealed the box yet, but he must have hidden it in here at some point with the intention of scratching off the label and all. The poor kid couldn’t read the Western characters on the label, so he must have scratched off half of it with his fingernails and thought it was okay. (You are not to blame.)
　I gently filled a glass of water, trying not to make a sound, then slowly broke the seal of the box and dropped the whole thing into my mouth at once, drank the water from the glass calmly, turned off the light and went to bed.
　For three days and nights, he felt as if he were dead. The doctor considered it to be negligence and gave him some time to report it to the police. When he was about to wake up, the first thing he muttered to himself was that he was going home. I don’t know where he meant by “home”, but anyway, he said that and cried terribly.
　The fog gradually lifted, and I found Hirame sitting by my bedside with a very unhappy expression on her face.
“The other day, at the end of the year, we were both so busy that we were dizzy.
　The person who listened to Hirame’s story was the old madam of kyobashi.
“Madam,” he called.
　I called her.
“Yes, what?　Did you notice?”
　Madame said as she put a smile on her face.
　I let the tears roll down my face.
“Yoshi, let me leave her.”
　The words came out unexpectedly.
　Madame sat up and let out a deep sigh.
　Then I made another gaffe that I had trouble describing as either funny or stupid.
“I’m going to a place where there are no women.
　First, Hirame laughed out loud, then Madame started to giggle, and then she herself burst into tears, blushed, and laughed.
“Yes, that’s better.
　”Yes, that’s better,” said Hirame, laughing lazily.
Yes, it’s better,” said Hirame, laughing lazily, “to go where there are no women. I don’t like it when women are around. Where there are no women is a good idea.
　Where there are no women. But this stupid idea of his was later realized in a very gruesome way.
　Yoshi seemed to think that he had taken her place and poisoned her, and she was even more shy with him than before, refusing to laugh at anything he said, and unable to speak at all. I was annoyed to be in my apartment, so I went out and drank cheap alcohol as usual. However, since the incident with Giard, my body had become much thinner, my limbs were sluggish, and I tended to neglect my manga work. This money also seemed to have come from my brothers back home. By that time, I had become able to see through Hirame’s wasteful theatrics, albeit dimly, unlike when I had run away from Hirame’s house, so I cunningly pretended not to notice and thanked her for the money in a sincere manner. (But I couldn’t help but feel strange, as if I could understand why Hirame and her friends would pull off such a complicated trick, but I didn’t.) With the money, I took the plunge and went to a hot spring in Minami-Izu by myself. I didn’t change my clothes, I didn’t bathe in the hot water, I just ran outside and jumped into a dirty teahouse and drank so much shochu that I felt sick. I drank so much shochu that it made my body feel even worse.
　It was a night of heavy snowfall in Tokyo. I was drunkenly walking along the back streets of Ginza, whispering over and over again, “Here I am, hundreds of miles away from home, here I am, hundreds of miles away from home,” and kicking off the falling snow with my toes, when I suddenly threw up. It was my first hemoptysis. A large flag of the Japanese flag was formed on the snow. I squatted for a while, then scooped up the snow that was not soiled with my hands, washed my face, and cried.
　He washed his face and cried, “Kouko, how is this narrow path?
　How is this narrow path?
　The voice of the poor child sang faintly from a distance, as if it were a hallucination. Misfortune. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there are many unhappy people in this world, or even all unhappy people, but their unhappiness can be protested openly to the world, and “the world” easily understands and sympathizes with their protests. However, since my own misfortune is caused entirely by my own guilt, I have no way to protest to anyone, and if I were to say even a single word of protest while stammering, Hirame and everyone else in the world would be astonished at how I could talk like that. I don’t know if I’m being selfish, or if I’m just too weak-minded, but it seems that I’m full of guilt, and I’m just going to get unhappier and unhappier, and there’s no concrete way to stop it.
　I stood up and went into a nearby drug store to get some kind of medicine, and when I saw the wife of the drug store, she instantly raised her head and looked at me as if she had been hit by a flash. However, there was neither astonishment nor disgust in her eyes, but almost a look of longing, as if she was seeking help. I thought to myself, “She must be an unhappy person, because unhappy people are sensitive to the unhappiness of others,” when I suddenly noticed the wife standing dangerously with her crutches. I suppressed the urge to run over to her, but as I looked at her, I began to cry. As I looked at her, I began to cry, and then tears began to flow from her large eyes as well.
　After that, without speaking a word, I left the pharmacy, staggered back to my apartment, had Yoshiko make me a salt water solution, drank it, and went to bed in silence.
“He said, “You have to stop drinking.
　We were like flesh and blood.
“I think I might be an alcoholic. I still want to drink.
“No, you must not. My husband, who is a Theban, said that alcohol kills fungus, so he got drunk and shortened his life.
“I can’t do it because I’m worried. I can’t do it. I’m scared. I can’t do it.
“I’ll give you some medicine. Don’t drink.
　His wife (a widow with a baby boy, who had entered a medical school in Chiba or somewhere else, but soon contracted the same disease as my father, and was on leave of absence from the hospital.
　This is a hematopoietic agent.
　Here’s a hematopoietic agent, here’s a solution of vitamine. This is the syringe.
　This is a calcium tablet. This is diastase to prevent gastrointestinal distress.
　What is this? She lovingly explained to me about five or six different medicines, but this unhappy wife’s love was also too deep for me. At the end, she quickly wrapped a small box in paper, saying that this was a medicine for when I really, really wanted to drink alcohol.
　It was an injection of morphine.
　His wife said it was less harmful than alcohol, and I believed her. Without hesitation, he injected the morphine into his arm. Without hesitation, I injected the morphine into my arm. My anxiety, frustration, and embarrassment were completely removed, and I became a very cheerful orator. After the injection, I forgot about the weakness in my body and devoted myself to my comic work, creating such a strange taste that I would burst into laughter while drawing.
　I would draw one comic a day, then two, then four, until I couldn’t work without them.
“Don’t do that, you’ll get addicted, you’ll be in trouble.
　When the wife of the apothecary told me this, I felt as if I had become quite an addict (I am very susceptible to suggestion). (I am very susceptible to people’s suggestion. Even if they tell me not to spend this money, when they say, “It’s you, isn’t it? The fear of addiction led him to seek out more and more medicines.
“Please!　One more box. I’m sure I’ll pay the bill at the end of the month.
“I don’t mind paying the bill at any time, but the police are always so annoying.
　Oh, there is always a hint of a murky, dark, shady person around me.
“You’ll have to fake it somehow, ma’am. I’ll give you a kiss.”
　The wife blushed.
　She blushed, and I began to take advantage.
“I can’t get any work done without my pills, you know. It’s like a stimulant for me.
“Then why don’t you get a hormone shot?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t do my job without alcohol, or else I’d have to take those pills.
“You can’t drink.
“Isn’t that right?　I haven’t had a drop of alcohol since I started using the drug. I haven’t had a drop of alcohol since I started using that medicine, and my body is in very good shape because of it. I’m not going to be drawing bad comics forever, I’m going to quit drinking, fix my body, study hard, and become a great artist. Now is the important part. So, please, please, please. I’ll give you a kiss.
　His wife started laughing.
“You’re in trouble. I don’t care if you get addicted.
　”I don’t want you to get addicted,” she said, making a clacking sound with her crutches.
I can’t give you a whole box,” he said. You can’t give him a whole box, he’ll use it up. Half.”
“I can’t give you a whole box.
　I’m going to give you a shot as soon as I get home.
“Doesn’t it hurt?
　Yoshi asked himself with some trepidation.
“It hurts, yes. It hurts, but I have to do it to improve my work efficiency. I’m feeling pretty good these days, aren’t I?　Come on, let’s get to work. Work, work.”
　I was so excited.
　I once knocked on the door of an apothecary in the middle of the night. I suddenly hugged her, kissed her, and mimicked crying as she came out in her nightgown with crutches.
　She silently handed me a box.
　I had already become a complete addict when I realized that chemicals were just as, if not more, filthy than shochu. It was truly the height of shamelessness. I was so desperate to get my hands on the drug that I started copying spring paintings again, and even had a literally ugly relationship with the crippled wife of the drug store.
　I want to die, I want to die, I can’t take it back, no matter what I do, no matter what I do, I’ll only be ruined, I’ll only be adding to my shame, I can’t even hope to ride a bicycle to a waterfall with green leaves, I’ll only be adding to my miserable sins, my suffering will only increase and become more intense. I want to die, I have to die, living is the seed of sin,” he thought to himself, but all he could do was go back and forth between his apartment and the pharmacy in a half-crazed state.
　No matter how much work he did, the amount of medicine he used increased, and the amount he owed for the medicine reached a frightening amount. When his wife saw his face, tears came to her eyes, and she herself shed tears.
　Hell.
　With such determination that he was willing to bet on the existence of God, he decided to write a long letter to his father back home, confessing all of his true situation (although he could not write about the woman).
　However, the results were not good, and I waited and waited for no reply, and in my frustration and anxiety I increased the dosage of medicine.
　That afternoon, Hirame came to me with Horiki, as if she had a devilish intuition.
“I heard you had hemoptysis.
　I heard you had hemoptysis,” Horiki said, sitting on his haunches in front of him and smiling more gently than I had ever seen him smile before. I was so grateful and happy to see that kind smile that I turned my face away and shed a tear. With that one gentle smile, I was completely overwhelmed and buried.
　I was put in a car. Hirame, in a somber tone of voice (a tone so quiet that I wanted to describe it as compassionate), told me that I had to go to the hospital anyway and that they would take care of the rest. We arrived at the entrance of a large hospital in the middle of the forest after a long ride in a car, including my son Yoshi.
　I was expecting a sanatorium.
　I was examined by a young doctor who was very soft and polite, and then he said
“Well, you’re going to rest here for a while, aren’t you?
　Hirame, Horiki and Yoshiko were left alone to go home, but Yoshiko handed her a furoshiki (wrapping cloth) with some clothes to change into and then silently pulled out a syringe and some leftover medicine from between her sashes. I wondered if she had thought it was a stimulant.
“No, I don’t need it anymore.
　It was a rare thing, really. It was the only time in my entire life that I had refused to take a drug when it was offered to me. My misfortune was the misfortune of a person without the ability to refuse. I was terrified that if I were to refuse, the other person’s heart and my own would be forever cracked white and unrepairable. But at that moment, I rejected morphine quite naturally, even though I had been half-crazed in my search for it, and I wondered if I had been hit by what Yoshiko called “godlike ignorance. Wasn’t I already a non-addict at that moment?
　However, I was soon escorted by a young doctor with a sly smile to a certain ward, where I was locked up with a bang. It was a brain hospital.
　It was a brain asylum, and my silly idea of going to a place where there were no women, which I had made when I had taken the diarrhea, had been realized in a very strange way. The ward was full of male lunatics, the nurse was also a man, and there were no women.
　Now I was no longer a sinner, but a madman. No, I was not crazy at all. I had never been crazy, not even for a moment. But then again, that’s what most lunatics say about themselves. So it seems that those who are put in this hospital are crazy and those who are not are normal.
　I ask God. Is non-resistance a sin?
　I cried at the sight of Horiki’s mysterious and beautiful smile, forgot about judgment and resistance, got into a car, and was brought here to be a madman. Even if I were to leave this place now, I would still be a madman, or rather, a cripple, stamped on my forehead.
　Disqualified as a human being.
　I was no longer a human being.
　It was early summer when I came here, and I could see the red water lilies blooming in the small pond in the hospital garden through the iron lattice window. Three years later, when the cosmos began to bloom in the garden, my eldest brother from my hometown unexpectedly came to pick me up with Hirame, and told me that my father had died of a stomach ulcer at the end of last month. He told me that my father had died of a gastric ulcer at the end of last month, and that he and his family had no intention of worrying about your past or your life, and that there was nothing for them to do. Don’t worry about it.
　I felt as if I could see the mountains and rivers of my hometown in front of me, and I nodded vaguely.
　A cripple.
　After I learned that my father had died, I felt as if I had lost my mind. I felt as if the pot of my anguish had been emptied. I felt as if the pot of my anguish had been emptied. I even felt as if the reason why the pot of my anguish was so heavy was because of my father. It was as if I had lost my spirit. I even lost the ability to suffer.
　My eldest brother had done exactly what he had promised to do. He bought a house on the outskirts of the village, which had five rooms, but was so old that the walls were peeling off, the pillars had been eaten by insects, and there was almost no way to repair it. He bought a very old house with peeling walls, pillars eaten away by insects, and almost beyond repair, and gave it to him, along with an ugly, red-haired maid, who was nearly sixty years old.
　A little over three years had passed since then, and during that time I had been raped in a strange way several times by the old maid named Tetsu, and we had occasional quarrels. I didn’t pay any attention to it, and even though I took ten pills before going to bed, I didn’t feel sleepy at all, so I thought it was strange, but then I felt sick to my stomach and rushed to the lavatory. In addition, I went to the toilet three more times. When I looked at the box of medicine, I saw that it was a laxative called Henomotin.
　As I lay on my back with a hot water bottle on my stomach, I thought I would say something to Tetsu.
“This isn’t Calmotin, you know. It’s called henomotin.
　I was about to say, “This is not calmotin, it’s called henomotin. Apparently, “cripple” is a comedic noun. I took a laxative to try to sleep, and the name of the laxative was Henomotin.
　There is no happiness or unhappiness in me now.
　Just a day goes by.
　That was the only thing that seemed to be the truth in the world of so-called “human beings” that I had been living in a screaming, screaming world.
　But a day goes by.
　I will be twenty-seven years old this year. My gray hair has grown so much that most people think I am over forty.

　At the beginning of the new school year, the mountain cherry blossoms, along with their sticky brown new leaves, open their gorgeous blossoms against the blue sea. I didn’t study very hard for the entrance exam, but I was able to enter a junior high school in the Northeast where the sandy beach of cherry blossoms is used as a schoolyard. The logo on the school cap and the buttons on the uniforms both had cherry blossoms on them.
　My father had chosen the school with the sea and cherry blossoms for me, partly because there was a distant relative’s house near the school. I was left in the care of the family, and since the school was very close by, I was quite a lazy junior high school student, running to school after hearing the bell ringing for the morning assembly.
　For the first time in my life, I went to another region, but it seemed to me that this other region was a much more comfortable place than my birthplace. It may be explained that this was because I had finally mastered my clowning and no longer needed as much trouble as before to mock people. But more importantly, there is a difference in the difficulty of acting between family and strangers, between home and abroad, which cannot be overlooked by any genius, even by Jesus, the Son of God. The most difficult place for an actor to perform is the theater in his hometown, and in a room where all his family members are sitting together, any great actor would not be able to perform. But I did act. And it was quite a success. There was no way that such a great actor could go to another country and fail to perform.
　My own fear of humanity was as fierce and strong as it had ever been, but my acting was very spontaneous, and I was always making the class laugh. The teacher would cover her mouth with her hand and laugh. It was so easy for me to make even that thunderous officer of mine laugh.
　Just as I was about to be relieved that I had completely concealed my true identity, I was unexpectedly stabbed from behind. The man who stabbed me in the back was, of course, the poorest student in the class, with a pale face and an overly long upper garment with sleeves like those of a Prince Shotoku that had been handed down to him by his parents. It was a student who looked like a moron. As I expected, I didn’t even recognize the need to be wary of this student.
　That day, during gymnastics time, the student (I don’t remember his last name, but I think his first name was Takeichi) was observing as usual, while we were being made to practice the bars. I deliberately put on my most solemn face, yelled at the bars, jumped, and then flew forward like a broad jump, landing on the sand with a thud. It was all a premeditated failure. As I was getting up and dusting the sand off my pants, I heard Takeichi poke me on the back and whisper in a low voice, “That was intentional.
“It was intentional.
　I was shaken. It had never occurred to me that Takeichi would be able to see through my intentional mistake. I felt as if I were watching the world burn up in hell in an instant.　I felt as if I was about to scream and go crazy.
　I struggled to suppress the feeling that I was going to go crazy.
　On the surface, I was still acting like a sad clown and making everyone laugh, but suddenly I let out a heavy sigh and thought that no matter what I did, Takeichi would see through me like a leaf, and that he would surely go around telling everyone about it sooner or later. When I thought about it, my forehead began to sweat and I looked around in vain with a strange look in my eyes like a madman. If I could, I would have stayed by Takeichi’s side at all hours of the day, morning, noon and night, watching him to make sure he didn’t reveal any secrets. I wanted to make every effort to make him believe that my clowning was not intentional, but real, while I was still attached to him, and if possible, become his best friend. If this was impossible for all of us, we could do nothing but pray for his death. However, I could not bring myself to kill him. In all my life, I had many times wished to be killed by others, but I had never wanted to kill anyone. I never wanted to kill anyone, because I thought it would only bring happiness to the person I feared.
　In order to win him over, I would first put a fake Christian “gentle” smile on my face, bend my head to the left about 30 degrees, lightly hold his small shoulders, and in a sweet voice that sounded like a cat’s paw, I would often invite him to come visit me at my boarding house. But he always looked blankly at me and kept quiet. One day after school, in early summer, it was raining white in the evening and the students were having trouble getting home. When we arrived at the house, I asked my mother to dry their coats, and succeeded in luring him upstairs to my room.
　In the house, there was an over fifty year old woman, and a thirty year old, tall, bespectacled, sickly looking older sister and daughter (she had been married off and then returned home again). The family consisted of only three members: a tall, sickly woman with glasses (I called her Anesa, after the locals), and a short, round-faced younger sister, Setchan, who seemed to have recently graduated from a girls’ school. The main source of income seemed to be the rent for the fifty-six row houses that her late husband had built and left behind.
“My ears hurt.”
　Takeichi said as he stood up.
“They hurt when they get wet in the rain.
　When I looked at him, I saw that both his ears were badly sore. When I looked at them, I saw that both ears were badly stained, and pus was about to flow out of the ear shells.
I thought, “This can’t be good. It’s going to hurt.
　I said, exaggerating my horror.
“I’m sorry for dragging you out in the rain.
　He then went downstairs to get some cotton and alcohol, put Takeichi on his knees as a pillow, and carefully cleaned his ears. Takeichi did not seem to notice that this was a hypocritical scheme. He said
“You’ll make a woman fall in love with you,” he said, flattering himself with his ignorance while sleeping on his lap.
　However, in later years, I realized that this was like a horrible prophecy of the devil that even Takeichi was unaware of. The words “to fall in love” and “to be fallen in love with” are so vulgar, joking, and disrespectful that no matter how “solemn” the occasion, if even a single word of these words were to appear, the whole complex of melancholy would immediately collapse, and you would feel as if you were just a flatulence. However, if you use a literary term like “anxiety of being loved” instead of a slang term like “pain of being loved,” it does not seem to destroy the complex of melancholy, which I find strange.
　At that time, I just blushed and laughed and didn’t answer anything, but actually, I had a faint idea. But to write that I had a faint idea about the shy atmosphere created by such a vulgar word as “fallen in love,” would be like expressing such a silly sentiment that it would hardly be a line from a young master of rakugo. I am not saying that I “had some ideas” with such a joking and reluctant feeling.
　To me, the human female was several times more difficult to understand than the male. In my family, there were more women than men, and my relatives also had many girls, as well as maids of honor for “crimes. But I was also treading on thin ice when I met these women. I had almost no idea what to expect. She was in a fog, and sometimes she made the mistake of stepping on the tail of a tiger, and suffered a terrible wound, which, unlike the whip she had received from the men, was extremely uncomfortable, like internal bleeding, and was difficult to heal.
　I had already made various observations about women since I was a child, such as: women draw you in and then let you go; women belittle you when you are in the presence of others, and hold you tightly when no one is around; women sleep deeply as if they were dead; women live to sleep, don’t they? I had already made various observations about women since I was a child, and although they were like human beings, they seemed to be completely different from men. The words “to be loved” and “to be liked” were not at all appropriate in my case, and “to be bothered” might have been a better description of my situation.
　Women seemed to be even more at home with clowns than men. I knew that if I acted as a clown and the man laughed too much, I would fail, so I always made sure to end the clowning at an appropriate point. But women don’t know moderation, and they demand that I clown them forever and ever, and I am exhausted from the endless encores. In fact, she laughed a lot. In fact, women seem to be able to take more pleasure than men.
　Whenever I had a spare moment, my sister and her daughters would come upstairs to my room, and I would jump up and down in fright every time.
“Studying?
“No.”
　”No,” she smiles, closes her book, and says
No,” he smiled, closed the book, and said, “Today, at school, there’s a geography teacher named Combo.
　”Today, at school, there was a geography teacher named Kongbo.
“Try on your glasses, leaf.
　One night, my sister Setchan came to my room with Anesa, and after making her play the clown, she said something like that.
“Why?”
“Just put them on, and borrow Anesa’s glasses.
　The clown was always in such a violent and commanding tone. The clown obediently put on Anesa’s glasses. Immediately, the two girls burst into laughter.
“You look just like him. You look just like Lloyd.
　At that time, a foreign movie comedian named Harold Lloyd was very popular in Japan.
　I stood and raised one hand.
“Gentlemen.”
　and said.
I stood up, raised one hand, said, “Gentlemen,” and tried to say, “I’d like to introduce myself to my Japanese fans at…”
　After that, I went to see Lloyd’s movies every time they came to the theaters in my town, and secretly studied his facial expressions.
　One autumn night, while I was reading a book in my sleep, Anesa came into my room as quickly as a bird, suddenly collapsed on my comforter, and cried.
She suddenly collapsed on her comforter and cried, “You’re going to help me, aren’t you? You’re right. It would be better for us to leave this house together. Please help me. Help me.”
　She cried again, saying such exasperated words. However, this was not the first time I had seen such an attitude from a woman, so I was not surprised by Anesa’s radical words, and instead, I felt awakened by her banality and insignificance. I handed it to Anesa. Then Anesa ate the persimmon with a squirm, and said, “Do you have any interesting books?
“Do you have any interesting books?　Give it to me.
　I’ll give it to you.
　I picked out a book called “I am a Cat” by Soseki from my bookshelf.
“Thanks for the food.
　Anesa smiled shyly and walked out of the room. Not only Anesa, but wondering what kind of feelings women had in their lives was more complicated, annoying, and creepy to me than trying to figure out the thoughts of a worm. However, I knew from my own experience from an early age that when a woman cried out so suddenly, if I handed her something sweet, she would eat it and be in a better mood.
　My younger sister, Setchan, would even bring her friends to her room and make them laugh fairly because of her example, and when her friends left, Setchan would always say bad things about them. Setchan would always tell them to watch out for her because she was a delinquent. If that’s the case, why didn’t he just bring her all the way here? Thanks to this, almost all the guests in my room were women.
　However, this was still not the realization of Takeichi’s flattering “being loved”. It was not until several years later that Takeichi’s ignorant flattery began to take on an ominous shape, living on in the form of a vague prophecy.
　Takeichi had also given himself another important gift.
“It was a picture of a ghost.
　One day, when Takeichi came to visit me upstairs, he proudly showed me one of his original color illustrations and explained it to me.
　Oh?　I thought. At that moment, I felt as if my path to fall was decided, and in later years, I could not help but feel that way. I knew what I was doing. I knew it was just a self-portrait, like Van Gogh’s example. When I was a boy, French Impressionist paintings were all the rage in Japan, and this was usually the first step in appreciating Western art, and even junior high school students in the countryside were familiar with the paintings of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Lunar. I had also seen many of Van Gogh’s original color prints and was fascinated by their interesting touch and vivid colors, but I had never thought of them as paintings of ghosts.
But I had never thought of it as a painting of a ghost. “Well, how about this one? Maybe it’s a ghost.
　I pulled out a book of Modigliani’s paintings from the bookshelf and showed Takeichi a portrait of a beautiful nude woman with burnt red copper skin.
“It’s amazing.
　Takeichi rolled his eyes and marveled.
“It looks like a horse from hell.
“Is it a ghost?
“I wish I could draw a picture of a ghost like that.
　I wish I could paint such a ghost. These painters, after being hurt and frightened by the monster that is man, finally believed in visions and saw monsters in nature in broad daylight, and instead of clowning around, they made an effort to express what they saw. I was so excited that I started to cry.
I was so excited that I cried and said, “I’ll draw one too. I’m going to draw a picture of a ghost. I’m going to draw a picture of a ghost, and I’m going to draw a horse in hell.
　I’ll draw a picture of a ghost, a horse in hell,” I said to Takeichi in a very quiet voice.
　Ever since I was in elementary school, I have loved to draw and to look at pictures. However, the pictures I drew were not as well received by the people around me as the way I spelled them. I never really trusted human words, so my spelling was just a kind of clownish greeting to me, which delighted my teachers in elementary school and junior high school. However, I was not amused at all, and the only thing I could draw (apart from cartoons, etc.) was the subject matter, which I took some pains to express in my own young way. The models in the school’s art classes were boring, the teachers’ drawings were poor, and I had to devise my own various ways of expressing myself in a completely haphazard manner. When I entered junior high school, I had all the tools for oil painting, but even if I had looked to the impressionist style as a model for my touch, my paintings would have been as flat as a piece of washi paper. However, through Takeichi’s words, I realized that my previous attitude toward painting had been wrong. I had been naive and foolish to try to express beautifully what I felt was beautiful. I was given a primitivist’s guide to the art of painting by Takeichi, who told me that the Meisters create beauty out of nothing, or vomit out of ugliness, but do not hide their interest in it, and bask in the joy of expression. Takeichi gave me a primitivist’s tome on how to paint, which he says is full of joy of expression, and in other words, is not influenced by human thoughts in the slightest.
　I was surprised at how gruesome the picture turned out to be. However, I secretly affirmed that this was my true self that I had been hiding deep inside, that although I was smiling cheerfully on the outside and making people laugh, I actually had such a gloomy heart, and that there was nothing I could do about it. However, I did not show the picture to anyone except Takeichi. I didn’t want anyone to discover the depths of my clownishness and be suddenly alarmed by my petty ways, and I also feared that they might not even know who I was and think of me as a new-fangled clown and make fun of me. So I immediately put it away deep in the closet.
　Also, during art class at school, I kept the “haunted method” to myself and continued to draw with the same ordinary touch that I had always used to draw beautiful things beautifully.
　I had been showing my fragile nerves to Takeichi without hesitation, and I felt comfortable showing him my latest self-portrait, and he praised me greatly.
“He continued to draw two, three more ghosts, and received another prediction from Takeichi: “You will become a great painter.
　I got another prediction from Takeichi that I would become a great painter.
　After receiving these two prophecies, one that I would be loved and the other that I would become a great painter, from the idiot Takeichi, I came to Tokyo.
　I wanted to enter an art school, but my father had already told me that he intended to send me to a high school and make me a government official. I had had enough of the cherry blossoms and the sea, so instead of moving on to the fifth grade, I took the entrance exam to a high school in Tokyo and was accepted. I asked the doctor to write a certificate for pulmonary infiltration and moved out of the dormitory to my father’s villa in Uenosakuragi-cho. I couldn’t live in a group, for the life of me. In addition, words like “the thrill of youth” and “the pride of youth” gave me chills, and I couldn’t really follow the high school spirit. The classrooms and the dormitory seemed to be a dumping ground for distorted sexual desires, and my near-perfect clowning was of no use to me there.
　My father only stayed at the house for a week or two a month when he was not in session, so when he was away, it was just the three of us in the large house, the elderly couple who kept the villa and myself. When my father came to Tokyo, I stayed at home reading and drawing all day long. When my father came to Tokyo, I would rush to school every morning, but there were times when I would go to the art school of Shintaro Yasuda, a Western-style painter in Sendagi-cho, Hongo, and practice drawing for three or four hours. Once I escaped from the dormitory of the high school, I felt as if I was in a special position, like an auditing student, even though I attended classes at school. Throughout elementary school, junior high school, and high school, I was unable to understand what school spirit was. I never even tried to learn the school song.
　Eventually, at art school, one of my art students introduced me to alcohol, cigarettes, prostitutes, pawnshops, and leftist ideology. It was a strange combination, but it was true.
　He had graduated from a private art school, and since he didn’t have a studio at home, he went to this art school to study Western-style painting.
“Can you lend me five yen?
　We only knew each other’s faces, but we had never spoken to each other before. I stammered and offered him five yen.
I stammered and offered him five yen, “All right, let’s drink. I’ll buy you a drink. It’s a good chigoe.
　Unable to refuse, I was dragged to a kafue in Horai, near the art school, and that was the beginning of my friendship with him.
I’ve had my eye on you for a while,” he said. I’ve had my eye on you for a while,” he said, “and that sly smile, that’s the look of a promising artist. Here’s to getting to know you!　Kinu, isn’t this guy a beauty?　Don’t fall in love with him. Now that he’s here, I’m afraid I’m the second most beautiful man in the school.
　Horiki was a dark-skinned, neat-faced man who wore a proper sebiro, a rarity for an art student, with a modest taste in neckties, and a head of hair that he wore in a pomade.
　The place was unfamiliar to me, and I was already frightened. I crossed and uncrossed my arms and smiled slyly, but as I drank a couple of beers, I began to feel a strange sense of freedom and lightness.
“I was thinking of joining an art school, …….”
“No, it’s boring. No, that place is boring. School is boring. Our teacher is in nature!　Paathos to nature!”
　However, I did not feel any respect for what he said. I thought he was an idiot and must be a bad painter, but he might be a good person to play with. In other words, for the first time in my life, I saw a real urban yokozuna. He may have been different from me in form, but we were certainly the same in the sense that he was completely detached from the activities of human beings in this world and was lost. He did this without consciously thinking about it, and he was completely unaware of the misery of this clowning, which was essentially what made him different from myself.
　I always despised him, thinking that he was only playing with me, and that I was only seeing him for fun, and sometimes I even felt ashamed of my friendship with him.
　At first, however, I thought he was a good guy, a rare good guy, and my fear of human beings caught me completely off guard, and I thought I had found a good guide in Tokyo. In fact, I was afraid of the conductors when I took the train alone, afraid of the ushers standing on both sides of the scarlet carpeted staircase at the main entrance to the Kabuki-za Theater, and afraid of the waiters standing quietly behind me waiting for me to finish my plate when I entered the restaurant. When I went into a restaurant, I was horrified by the waiters who stood quietly behind me, waiting for me to finish my plate, and I was especially horrified when I paid the bill. I couldn’t walk around Tokyo alone, so I spent most of the day lounging around the house.
　When he handed his wallet to Horiki and walked with him, Horiki bargained a lot, and was very good at playing around, making the most out of the little money he had. He also avoided the expensive yen taxis and used the train, bus, and pompon steam to get to his destination in the shortest time possible. On the way back from the whore’s place in the morning, he would stop by a restaurant to take a morning bath and have a light drink with hot tofu, which was inexpensive but made him feel luxurious. He also assured me that there was nothing better than electric blanc for getting drunk quickly.
　Moreover, what saved me from having to deal with Horiki was the fact that he would ignore the thoughts of his listeners and just let his so-called “passion” (or maybe passion means ignoring the other person’s position) erupt in idle chatter all the time, until we got tired of walking together and fell into an awkward silence. I had no fear of falling into awkward silence. I had always been wary of the horrible silence that would appear when I came into contact with other people, so I had always been a heavy talker and had always tried my best to clown around. I didn’t even bother to reply, just listened and laughed occasionally, saying, “No way.
　I soon realized that alcohol, cigarettes, and whores were all very good ways to take my mind off my fear of humanity, even if only for a moment. I even began to feel that I would be willing to sell all of my possessions to find such a means.
　The whore seemed to me to be neither a human being nor a woman, but a moron or a madman, and in her bosom I felt completely at ease and was able to sleep well. They were all so pathetically devoid of any real desire. Perhaps it was because they felt a sense of kinship with me, but I was always shown a natural, uncomfortable degree of fondness by the whores. There were nights when I actually saw the light of Mary in those moronic or crazy whores.
　However, as I went there to get away from my fear of human beings and to seek a quiet night’s rest, and as I played with whores of my own kind, I somehow began to feel an unconscious and unpleasant atmosphere all around me. This was a so-called “extra appendix” that I hadn’t even thought of, but gradually the “appendix” came to the surface, and when Horiki pointed it out, I was astonished and had a bad feeling about it. In a vulgar way, I had been training myself as a woman with a prostitute, and recently I had become very good at it, and I heard that training with a prostitute was the hardest and most effective way to train a woman. He was already surrounded by the scent of “womanizer,” and women (not just whores) instinctively sniffed it out and came close to him.
　For example, I remember receiving a poorly written letter from a woman at a coffee shop. Whenever I went out to eat beef, even if I didn’t say anything, the maids at the restaurant would look at …… the box of cigarettes handed to me by the girl at the tobacconist who always bought them. Also, when I went to see a Kabuki play and the person seated next to me said, …… Also, when I was drunk and asleep on the streetcar late at night, …… Also, when I unexpectedly received a thoughtful letter from a relative’s daughter in my hometown, …… I was drunk asleep on the tram late at night, and I received an unexpected letter from a relative’s daughter in my hometown. …… Also, an unknown girl gave me a doll that seemed to have been made by her while I was away. …… I was extremely reluctant to talk about it, so it was all a one-time story. However, I couldn’t deny that there was something about me that made women dream, and it wasn’t just a joke. The fact that someone like Horiki had pointed this out to me made me feel a bitterness akin to humiliation, and it also suddenly awakened my interest in playing with prostitutes.
　One day, because of his vainglorious modernity, Horiki took me to a secret study group called the Communist Reading Group (I don’t remember if it was called R.S. or something else). For someone like Horiki, a secret communist meeting may have been just another one of Rei’s “tours of Tokyo”. I was introduced to the so-called “comrades,” was forced to buy some pamphlets, and received a lecture on Marxian economics from a young man with an ugly face sitting above me. However, it seemed obvious to me. That must be true, but there is something even more incomprehensible and frightening in the human mind. I don’t know what it is, but I have a feeling that there is something more than just economics at the bottom of the human world, something like a ghost story. I was so frightened by the ghost stories that I naturally affirmed the so-called materialism as if it were water flowing downhill, but I could not use it to free myself from the fear of human beings, open my eyes to the green leaves, and feel the joy of hope. However, I attended the R.S. (I think it was called R.S., but I may be wrong) without missing a single meeting, and I couldn’t help but find it amusing that my “comrades” were all stiff-faced, as if it was a big deal, and were indulging in almost elementary arithmetic theories, such as “one plus one is two. I couldn’t help but think it was hilarious that they were all so stiff-faced and indulging in the study of almost elementary arithmetic theories such as “one plus one is two,” so I tried to make the meeting more relaxed with my own clowning. These simple-minded people may have thought of me as a “comrade” who was as simple and optimistic as they were, but if that had been the case, I would have mocked them from beginning to end. I was not a comrade. I was not a comrade, but I always attended the meetings without fail, and served as a clown to everyone.
　It was because I liked them. Because I liked them, because I liked them. But it wasn’t necessarily an affinity that was based on Marx.
　Illegal. For me, it was a ghostly pleasure. In fact, I was comfortable with it. I couldn’t sit in that windowless, chilly room, and even though it was an ocean of illegality outside, it seemed easier to jump in, swim, and eventually die. It seemed more comfortable for me to jump in, swim, and eventually die.
　There is a word, “shady person. I feel that I have been a shade from the time I was born. When I meet someone who has been pointed out by the world as being a shade, I always feel a kind heart. Then, my “kind heart” was so kind that I was enchanted by it.
　There is also the word “culprit consciousness. In this world of human beings, I was tormented by this consciousness all my life, but it was a good companion like my wife Kasu-Nuka, and playing with her alone in a shabby way may have been one of my attitudes toward life. The wound naturally appeared on one of my shins from the time I was a baby, and instead of healing over time, it only grew deeper and deeper until it reached my bones. For such a man, the atmosphere of the group of the underground movement was very safe and comfortable, and he felt that the pain of the wound was like a whisper of the wound’s living feelings or even love. In other words, he felt that the skin of the movement suited him better than its original purpose. In Horiki’s case, he was just a foolish hanger-on who went to the meeting once to introduce himself, but he never came back to the meeting, saying that Marxists needed to study the production side as well as the consumption side. When I think about it, at that time, there were many things that I wanted to do. When I think about it, there were many different types of Marxists in those days. Some, like Horiki, called themselves Marxists out of vanity and modernity, while others, like myself, just sat there because they liked the smell of illegality. If the true believers of Marxism were to find out, both Horiki and myself would have been angrily attacked and driven away as traitors. However, neither myself nor Horiki were expelled, and I was able to behave more freely and in better health in the illegal world than in the legal world of gentlemen. As a result, I was able to behave in a so-called “healthy” manner, and I was asked to do various things as a prospective “comrade” that were so overly secretive that I wanted to burst out. In fact, I never turned down such an errand, I accepted anything without hesitation, and I never got into any trouble because of the suspicious questioning by the dogs (as the comrades called the police), laughing and making people laugh. They were nervous as if it was a big deal, and even did a poor imitation of a detective novel, using extreme caution, and the work they asked me to do was so trivial that it made me feel dumb. But they were doing what they called their job, and they were doing it correctly. At that time, I was fine with being a member of the Party, even if it meant being arrested and living in prison for the rest of my life. I even thought it might be easier to stay in jail than to groan in the hell of sleeplessness every night, terrified of the “real life” of people in the world.
　However, my father was so vexing and frightening that I was thinking of leaving the house and taking up lodgings somewhere, but I could not bring myself to say anything about it.
　My father’s term of office as a member of the Diet was about to expire, and he must have had a number of reasons for doing so, but it seemed that he had no intention of running for office any longer. Moreover, he had built a retreat house in his hometown and had no desire to stay in Tokyo. Anyway, the house was soon sold to someone else, and I moved into a dimly lit room in an old boarding house called Senyukan in Hongo Morikawa-cho.
　Until then, my father had handed me a fixed amount of pocket money every month, which would disappear in a few days, but I always had cigarettes, sake, cheese, and fruit in the house.
　Suddenly, I was living alone in a boarding house, and had to make do with a fixed monthly remittance, which threw me for a loop. The money disappeared within a couple of days, and I began to shudder and go crazy with anxiety. I sent telegrams to my father, brother and sister asking for money alternately, and letters to Isaihumi (the circumstances complained of in the letters were all clownish fictions). He thought that the best way to ask someone for money was to make that person laugh first), while Horiki taught him how to run a pawn shop.
　After all, I was not capable of making a living by myself in a boarding house that I had nothing to do with. I felt horrible sitting alone in my room at the boarding house and felt as if I would be attacked and shot at any moment. In November of my second year at high school, I was involved in an amorous death with a woman who was older than me, and my situation changed drastically.
　Although I had been absent from school and had not studied even a little, I still had a strange tendency to write well on exams, and it seemed that I had been mocking my relatives back home. So my eldest brother began to send me long, sarcastic letters on behalf of my father. But more than that, my direct pain was the lack of money and the fact that my work for the Rei Movement had become too strenuous to be done in a playful manner. I had become the head of the Marxist student action team for all the schools in Hongo, Koishikawa, Shimotani, Kanda, and the central district, or whatever district it was called. When I heard about the “armed uprising,” I bought a small knife (now that I think about it, it was a small knife, not even big enough to sharpen a pencil), put it in my pocket, and flew around from place to place to make so-called “contacts. I want to drink alcohol and sleep well, but I don’t have any money. In addition, P (I think that’s what they used to call the Party, but I may be wrong) sent me so many requests for help that I didn’t have time to breathe. My sickly body could no longer handle it. In the beginning, I had only been helping the group out of an illegitimate interest, and when the work became so hectic, as if it were a joke, I secretly felt a sense of annoyance, as if to say, “That’s not the right thing to do, why don’t you let your direct descendants do it? I couldn’t stop myself from feeling a sense of annoyance, so I ran away. I ran away, and as I expected, I didn’t feel good, so I decided to die.
　At that time, there were three women who had a special fondness for him. One of them was the daughter of Senyukan, where he was staying. After she had gone to bed without eating, she would always come to my room with an envelope and a fountain pen.
“I’m sorry. She would always come to her room with her stationery and fountain pen and say, “I’m sorry, but my sister and brother are making so much noise downstairs that I can’t even write to them.
　I’m sorry, but my sister and brother are so noisy downstairs that I can’t even write a letter.
　I should have just pretended to be ignorant and gone back to sleep, but the girl seemed to want to say something to me, so I showed my spirit of passive service, and although I really didn’t want to say a word, I put a lot of energy into my exhausted body, crawled on my stomach, smoked a cigarette, and said, “I love you from a woman.
“He crawled on his stomach, smoked a cigarette, and said, “I heard that a man took a bath because of a love letter from a woman.
“Oh, no. “Oh, no, it’s you, isn’t it?
“I’ve boiled milk and drunk it.
“I’m flattered. Have a drink.
　I can’t wait for him to leave. I can’t even see the letter. I wonder if he’ll leave soon.
“Let me see it.
　He was so happy that it was almost embarrassing, and it only woke me up. Then I thought to myself, “Why don’t I just tell him I have to run an errand for him?
I thought to myself, “I’m sorry, but could you please go to the drugstore on Train Street and get me some Calmotin?　I’m too tired, my face is all hot, and I can’t sleep. I’m sorry. The money is at …….
“No, I don’t need money.
　I’m happy to stand. I knew that asking a woman to do an errand was not a way to discourage her, and in fact, women were always happy when a man asked them to do an errand.
　The other was a so-called “comrade” who was a literature student at the Women’s Higher Normal School. I had to meet this person every day, even if I didn’t want to, because I had to do something for the Rei Movement. Even after the meeting was over, the woman kept walking with me and kept buying things for me.
“You can think of me as your real sister.
　I shuddered at her insolence.
“That’s what I intend to do.
　I’m going to do that,” she replied with a melancholy smile on her face. Anyway, I’m afraid of upsetting her, so I have to do something to cover it up. One summer night, I couldn’t get him to leave me, so I kissed him in the dark of the city, just to get him to go home. I was so excited that I called a car and took her to a small western-style room that looked like an office in a building that was secretly rented for their campaign, and we had a big party until morning.
　I couldn’t avoid her as I had done with many other women in the past, and my anxiousness led me to do my best to keep them in a good mood, until I felt as if I were tied up in a knot.
　At the same time, I had also received an unexpected favor from a lady who worked at a large café in Ginza, and even though I had only met her once, I was still obsessed with that favor and felt so worried and scared that I could not move. By that time, I was able to get on the train by myself, go to the Kabuki-za theater, or even wear a kasuri kimono and enter the Kafue without having to rely on Horiki’s guidance. In my heart, I was still suspicious, afraid, and troubled about human self-confidence and violence, but on the surface, little by little, I was able to greet others with a straight face, no, no, I could not greet others without the bitter smile of a defeated clown. “I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been running around exercising or because I’m a woman.　Or of women?　Or alcohol?　But it was mainly because of the lack of money that I had almost mastered it. I was frightened wherever I was, and I thought that if I could blend in with the many drunken customers, wives, and boys at the big kafue, it would calm my ever-chasing mind.
“He walked into a large cuff shop in Ginza by himself with ten yen, and said to the waiter, laughing, “I only have ten yen, so be careful.
　”Don’t worry.
“Don’t worry.
　There was a hint of a Kansai accent in her voice. I could hear the Kansai accent in his voice, and it strangely calmed my trembling heart. No, it wasn’t because I didn’t have to worry about money anymore, but because I felt like I didn’t have to worry about being around that person anymore.
　I drank myself to sleep. I drank my drink in silence, hiding the fact that I was so comfortable with the person that I didn’t feel like clowning around.
“Do you like this?”
　The woman placed a variety of dishes in front of him. I shook my head.
“Do you only drink?　I’ll have a drink with you.
　It was a cold autumn night. It was a cold autumn night, and I remembered that Tsuneko (I think she was called that, but my memory is fading and I’m not sure. (I don’t remember the person’s name, but I clearly remember how bad the sushi was…) I did what Tsuneko told me to do, and went to a sushi stall behind Ginza, and ate some not-so-tasty sushi. Later, when I was on the train, I thought about how I had seen him before, and realized that he looked like the old man of the sushi shop. There were many times when I laughed when I realized that I looked like the old man from the sushi shop. The fact that I could remember his name and even his face so accurately that I could draw a picture of his face, even now that his name and even his face have faded from my memory, suggests that the sushi was so bad that it must have given me a cold and painful feeling. Originally, when I was taken to a place that served good sushi, I never thought it was good. It was too big. (I always wondered if it was possible to make it as big as my thumb.
　He rented the second floor of a carpenter’s shop in Honjo. On the second floor, I drank tea, holding my cheek with one hand, as if I were suffering from a severe toothache, without hiding my gloomy mind. The person seemed to like my appearance. She, too, was a woman who seemed to be completely isolated, with only the falling leaves dancing around her in the cold withering wind.
　While we were having a good night together, she told me that she was two years older than me, that her hometown was Hiroshima, that she had a husband who was a barber in Hiroshima, that they had run away together to Tokyo last spring, but that he hadn’t been able to do any real work in Tokyo and was in jail for fraud. I used to go to the prison every day to bring him something or other, but I’ll stop doing that from tomorrow,” she said. I don’t know if it was because the woman was a bad storyteller, or if it was because the story was told in the wrong way, but in any case, it was always a complete bore to me.
　It was shabby.
　I expected to feel more sympathy for a single word than for the ten million words of a woman’s personal story, but I found it both strange and strange that I had never heard a single word from any woman in this world. However, she did not say “wretched” in words, but she had a silent and terrible wretchedness in the outline of her body, like an air current about an inch wide. “Like a dead leaf falling on a rock at the bottom of the water, I was able to get away from fear and anxiety.
　The night I spent with the wife of the fraudster was a night of happiness (I will not use such an exaggerated word without hesitation in my memoirs) and liberation, quite different from the feeling of sleeping peacefully in the shelter of the whores (the prostitutes were cheerful, after all).
　But it was only one night. In the morning, I woke up, sprang up, and found myself as the frivolous clown I used to be. A weakling fears even happiness. They get hurt by cotton. Happiness can hurt you. He was so anxious to get away from it all before it hurt him that he put up a smokescreen of clownishness.
“When money runs out, it’s the end of a relationship, but that’s the other way around. When a man runs out of money, he gets dumped by a woman. When a man runs out of money, he will naturally become dejected and useless, and even his laughter will lose its power. I know how you feel. I know the feeling, too.
　I seem to remember saying something stupid like that and making Tsuneko spout off. I quickly left without washing my face, thinking that there was no need to stay long and that I should not be afraid. At that time, I said that the end of the money was the end of the relationship, which was a bullshit remark that later became an unexpected sticking point.
　After that, I did not see my benefactor that night for a while. As the days passed, my joy waned, and I began to feel horrible for having received such a trifling favor. I began to feel that Tsuneko, like the girl in the boarding house and the female high school teacher, was only trying to intimidate me, and even though we were far apart, I was constantly frightened of Tsuneko. I was extremely reluctant to meet him, but this reluctance was not due to any cunning on my part, but rather to the fact that women do not make even the slightest connection, not even a speck of dust, between what happens after they rest and what happens after they wake up in the morning. This was because I had not yet fully comprehended the strange phenomenon of living with the two worlds completely disconnected.
　At the end of November, I drank cheap sake with Horiki at a food stall in Kanda, and even after we left the stall, my bad friend insisted that we drink somewhere else, even though we had no more money. Even though we had no more money, we insisted on having a drink.
“Okay, then, I’ll take you to dreamland. I’ll take you to a dreamland.
“Kafue?
“Yes.
“Let’s go!”
　So they got on the streetcar, and Horiki was so excited.
“I’m thirsty for a woman tonight. I’m thirsty for a woman tonight. Can I kiss the wench?
　I didn’t like the idea of Horiki acting so drunk. Horiki knew this, so he made sure he did.
“Okay. I’m going to kiss you. I’m going to kiss you, and I’m going to show you how to kiss the lady who sits beside me. Do you mind?
“I don’t mind.
“Thank you!　I’m thirsty for a woman.
　I got off at Ginza 4-chome and walked into the so-called drunk and thirsty kafue, almost penniless, with Tsuneko as my trusty rope, and sat down on a vacant box facing Horiki. Then Tsuneko sat down beside Horiki, which made me jump. Tsuneko was about to be kissed.
　I didn’t feel like I was missing out. I didn’t have much desire for possession, and even though I occasionally felt a faint sense of regret, I didn’t have the energy to boldly assert my ownership and fight with others. Later, I even watched in silence as my common-law wife was raped.
　I didn’t want to get involved in human conflicts as much as possible. It was frightening to be caught in the vortex. Tsuneko and I were only together for one night. Tsuneko is not mine. There was no way she could have such greedy desires. But then, I realized something.
　I was struck by the thought of Tsuneko being kissed fiercely by Horiki right in front of my eyes. For a moment, I was flabbergasted at Tsuneko’s misfortune, thinking that she would have to leave me after Horiki had soiled her, and that I didn’t have enough positive heat to keep her there. He looked at Horiki and Tsuneko and smiled.
　But then, unexpectedly, things took a turn for the worse.
“I quit!
　Horiki said, his mouth twisted.
“Even I can’t stand this poor woman. ……”
　He folded his arms and stared at Tsuneko with a wry smile on his face.
“I’ll have a drink. I don’t have any money.”
　I whispered to Tsuneko. I wanted to drink as much as I could. To the eyes of a philistine, Tsuneko was not even worthy of a drunkard’s kiss, she was just a shabby, poor woman. Surprisingly, unexpectedly, I was struck down by a bolt from the blue. I drank as much and as often as I could, getting drunker and drunker than I had ever done before, and I looked at Tsuneko and smiled at each other sadly, thinking that she was just a very tired and poor woman. At the same time, the affinity between people without money (I now believe that the discord between rich and poor is one of the eternal themes of dramas, even though it may seem trite) filled my heart with such a sense of affinity, and I longed for Tsuneko. I threw up. I threw up. That was the first time I had ever been so drunk that I lost my mind.
　When I woke up, Tsuneko was sitting by my bedside. I woke up to find Tsuneko sitting by my bedside in the upstairs room of a carpenter in the main building.
“I thought she was joking when she said that the end of a relationship is the end of money, but she was serious. I thought you were joking, but you were serious. What a complicated situation. Can’t I help you?
“No.”
　The woman rested, and at dawn, the word “death” came out of her mouth for the first time. The woman seemed to be exhausted by her life as a human being, and she, too, was afraid of the world, the hassle, the money, the exercise, the women, the schoolwork.
　However, at that time, I was not yet ready for a real “death”. Somewhere, there was a playfulness lurking in me.
　That morning, the two of us were wandering around the six wards of Asakusa. They went to a coffee shop and drank some milk.
“You can leave it.
　I stood up, pulled a coin purse out of my pocket, and opened it to reveal three copper coins. I was struck by a feeling of horror rather than shame, and what immediately came to my mind was my room at Senyukan, with only my uniform and futon left, a desolate room with nothing left to pawn.
　Because I was so confused, the woman also stood up, looked into her purse, and said, “Oh, is that all?
“Oh, that’s it?”
　It was an absent-minded voice, but it was also painful to the bone. It was the first time I had ever heard the voice of someone I was in love with, and it hurt. Not only that, but three copper coins were not money at all. It was a strange humiliation that I had never experienced before. It was a humiliation that I could not live with. At that time, I had not yet broken free from the mold of being a rich boy. At that time, I made up my mind in my heart that I was willing to die.
　That night, we jumped into the sea in Kamakura. The woman told us that she had borrowed this sash from her friend at the store, so she untied it, folded it, and placed it on a rock, while I took off my cloak, placed it on the same spot, and entered the water with her.
　The woman died. I was the only one who survived.
　Since I was a student at a high school, and my father’s name had some so-called nuance, it seemed to be a big issue in the newspapers.
　I was admitted to a seaside hospital, and a relative from my hometown rushed to my house to take care of everything, and told me that my father and the rest of the family were furious, and that I might have to leave my family for good. He told her that Kuni’s father and the rest of the family were furious and that she might have to leave her birthplace. She was the only person I had ever really liked, that poor Tsuneko.
　I received a long letter from my lodger, in which she had written fifty tanka poems. “It was a long letter from my lodger, containing fifty tanka poems, all beginning with the strange words, “Please live. There was also a nurse who came to my hospital room to play with the nurses, laughing merrily, and squeezed my hand before leaving.
　At the hospital, I was found to have a problem with my left lung, which turned out to be very convenient for me, and I was taken from the hospital to the police on a charge of “assisting suicide.
　In the middle of the night, an elderly patrolman who was on duty in the room next to the protection room gently opened the door between us and said, “Hey!
“Hey!”
　He called out to himself, “Hey!
“Hey!” he said to himself, “You must be cold. Come here and get warm.
　He said, “It must be cold.
　I purposely and reluctantly walked into the lodging room, sat down on a chair and sat on the brazier.
“You must still miss the dead woman.
“Yes.”
　Yes,” he replied in an especially thin, muffled voice.
Yes,” he replied in an especially faint voice, “that’s what humanity is all about.
　He became more and more serious.
“Where did you first have relations with the woman?
　Where did you first have relations with a woman? He seemed to think that I was a child, and that he wanted to pretend as if he were the chief interrogator on a wandering autumn night, in order to get some obscene statement out of me. I quickly sensed this and struggled to resist the urge to erupt. I knew that I could refuse to answer any of the officer’s “unofficial questions,” but in order to add interest to the autumn night, I tried to keep my mind focused on the fact that the officer was the chief interrogator, and that the decision on the severity of the punishment was based solely on his wishes. He gave a lax statement that only slightly satisfied his curiosity.
“Well, that’s pretty much it. If you answer anything honestly, we’ll have to make some adjustments.
“Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I look forward to working with you.
　It was almost an act of divine intervention. It was a powerful performance that did nothing, not even one thing, special for me.
　At dawn, I was summoned by the chief. This time, it was a formal interrogation.
　As soon as I opened the door and walked into the chief’s office.
“Oh, you’re a good man. It’s not your fault. It’s your mother’s fault for giving birth to such a good man.
　It was a young, dark-skinned, college-educated chief. When he suddenly said that, I felt miserable, like a cripple with a red bruise all over my face.
　The interrogation by the chief, who looked like a judo or kendo player, was very simple, a far cry from the secretive and obsessive “interrogation” of the old officer late at night. After the interrogation, the chief prepared the documents to be sent to the prosecutor’s office.
You have to be strong,” he said. You seem to be producing blood sputum.
　He said.
　That morning, I had been coughing a lot and every time I coughed, I would cover my mouth with a handkerchief, but there was blood on the handkerchief, as if red hail had fallen on it. But it was not blood from my throat, it was blood from a small boil I had picked up under my ear last night. However, I suddenly felt that it would be more convenient if I didn’t say anything about it, so I just said
“Yes?”
　So I just said, “Yes,” with downcast eyes and an auspicious look in my eyes.
　The chief finished filling out the paperwork.
The chief finished the paperwork and said, “The prosecutor will decide whether you will be prosecuted or not, but I suggest you send a telegram or call to your personal representative and ask him to come to the prosecutor’s office in Yokohama today. I’m sure you have someone, a guardian or a guarantor.
　I remembered that my father’s guarantor for my school was a stocky, single man of forty named Shibuta, a calligrapher and antique dealer from our hometown who had been a frequent guest at my father’s villa in Tokyo. My father always called him “flounder” because his face, especially his eyes, resembled a flounder, and I had gotten used to calling him that.
　I borrowed the police phone book and searched for the phone number of Hirame’s house, and when I found it, I called Hirame and asked him to come to the Prosecutor’s Office in Yokohama.
He said, “Hey, you’d better disinfect that phone right away. You’d better disinfect that phone right away, because it’s spitting out blood.
　After I was taken back to the protection room, the loud voice of the police chief telling the officers to disinfect the phone reached my ears as I sat in the protection room.
　A little after noon, I was tied up with a thin rope, which I was allowed to cover with my cape, but the young officer was holding the end of the rope tightly, and together we took the train to Yokohama.
　But I felt no anxiety at all, and I remembered the police protection room and the old officer.
　However, even in the midst of my nostalgic memories of that period, there was one tragic mistake that I will never forget: I broke out in a cold sweat. In a dimly lit room of the prosecutor’s office, I was briefly interrogated by the prosecutor. The prosecutor was a quiet man of about 40 years of age (even if I had good looks, they must have been so-called “evil good looks,” but the prosecutor’s face had an air of intelligent tranquility, as if I wanted to call it “correct good looks”), so I was not alarmed at all. He seemed to be a man of unconcerned character, so I was not alarmed at all, and was making a vague statement, when all of a sudden, Rei’s cough came out, and I pulled out a handkerchief from my embankment, looked at the blood, and thought that this cough might also be useful for something. He covered his mouth with a handkerchief and glanced at the prosecutor’s face, just in time.
“Are you sure?”
　He smiled quietly. I broke out in a cold sweat, and even now, I want to do a full-on dance. It’s no exaggeration to say that this feeling is more than what I felt when that idiot, Takeichi, poked me in the spine and kicked me down to hell when I was in junior high school. This, that, and the other two are the records of my biggest acting failures in my life. Sometimes I even wish I had been sentenced to ten years in prison rather than face such quiet contempt from the prosecutor.
　I was given a reprieve from prosecution. I sat on a bench in the anteroom of the prosecutor’s office, waiting for the arrival of my caretaker, Hirame, but I was not happy at all.
　From the high window behind me, I could see the sunset sky, and a seagull was flying in the shape of the character for “woman.

I have lived a life of shame.
I have no idea what human life is like. I was born in a rural area in the northeast of Japan, so I didn’t see a train until I was very old. I didn’t realize that they were built to go up and down the bridge of the depot and then over the tracks, and I just thought that they were designed to make the depot complex and fun, like a foreign playground. And for quite a long time, I thought so. Going up and down the bridge was rather a sophisticated game to me, and I thought it was one of the most thoughtful services on the railroad, but I was suddenly awakened to discover that it was merely a very practical staircase for passengers to cross over the tracks. Later, I discovered that it was just a very practical staircase for passengers to cross over the tracks.
I also saw a subway railroad in a picture book when I was a child, and I thought it was not a pragmatic idea but just a fun game to ride in an underground car instead of riding in an above-ground car.
I had been sickly since childhood and often fell asleep. As I slept, I thought that the coverings on my mattress, pillow, and quilt were boring decorations, but when I was about 20 years old, I realized that they were actually practical items.
I also didn’t know that I was hungry. No, I don’t mean that I grew up in a house where I didn’t have to worry about food, clothing, or shelter, but I had no idea what hunger felt like. In a weird way, I was hungry, but I didn’t know it. In elementary school and junior high school, when I came home from school, people around me would say, “You must be hungry, I remember that too. How about some sweet beans? We have sponge cake and bread…” I put on my sycophantic spirit and muttered, “I’m hungry,” and popped a dozen sweet beans into my mouth, but I had no idea what hunger felt like.
Of course, I eat a lot, but I don’t remember eating anything out of hunger. I eat what I think is unusual. I eat what I think is unusual, what I think is luxurious. I would also eat things that were served to me when I went out, even if I had to force myself to eat them. And so, the most painful time for me as a child was, indeed, mealtime in my own home.
The dining room was dimly lit, and at lunchtime, I always felt chilly as I watched the dozens of people in my family quietly eating their meals. And since it was an old-fashioned house in the countryside, most of the dishes were set in stone, so there was no need for anything unusual or extravagant. I sat at the end of the dimly lit room, shivering from the cold, and pushed a small amount of rice into my mouth. The family would gather three times a day in a dimly lit room, arrange the dishes in order, and chew the rice in silence, even if they didn’t want to eat it, and then turn their heads and pray to the spirits that were crawling around the house.
The words “Eat rice or die” sounded like a nasty scare to my ears. The superstition (which still seems like a superstition to me), however, always gave me anxiety and fear. There was nothing that sounded more difficult, more austere, and more threatening to me than the words, “Man must work for his food and eat his food, or he will die.
In other words, it seems that I still don’t understand anything about human life. I have been tossing and turning at night, moaning and groaning, and even going insane because of my anxiety that my idea of happiness is at odds with the idea of happiness of everyone else in the world. I wondered if I was happy at all. Ever since I was a little girl, people have often told me that I am a fortunate person, but I have always felt like hell, and in fact, those who have told me that I am a fortunate person seem to me to be much, much happier than I am.
I even thought that if I had ten lumps of misfortune and my neighbor had to bear even one of them, that one lump would be enough to kill my neighbor.
In other words, I don’t know. I have no idea what the nature and extent of my neighbor’s suffering are. It may be a practical suffering, a suffering that can be solved by simply eating a meal, but it may be the most intense suffering, a horrible abyss that blows away the ten misfortunes of my own example. I don’t know, but for that, how can you not commit suicide, not go crazy, discuss political parties, not despair, not give in, and continue to fight for your life without suffering? You can be an egoist and be convinced that it’s natural, and never doubt yourself? I don’t know. I wonder if they sleep well at night and feel refreshed in the morning. I wonder what they dream about. I wonder what they think about as they walk down the street. Money? I think I’ve heard that people live for food, but I’ve never heard of living for money. The more I think about it, the more I don’t know, and the more anxious and afraid I am that I am completely different. I can barely communicate with my neighbors. I don’t know what to say or how to say it.
So I came up with the idea of clowning.
It was my last attempt at courtship. It seems that I was terrified of humans, and yet, I couldn’t get over them. So, I was able to make a small connection with humans through this line of clowning. On the outside, I was constantly smiling, but on the inside, I was desperately serving people, sweating like a fish in a barrel.
Ever since I was a child, I had no idea what my family members were going through, and I had already become a good clown because I couldn’t stand the awkwardness. In other words, I had somehow become a child who never said a word of truth.
When I look at pictures of myself with my family, I always find myself smiling with a strange contortion on my face, while everyone else has a serious face. This was also a kind of clowning that made me sad and young.
Also, I had never responded to anything my relatives had said to me. These little incidents came to me like a bolt out of the blue, and I felt as if I were going crazy, thinking that these incidents must be the so-called “truth” of the universal human race and that I could no longer live with humans because I did not have the power to do so. I thought that I could no longer live with humans. Therefore, I could not argue or excuse myself. Whenever I heard someone say something wrong about me, I would feel as if I had made a terrible mistake, and I would always silently accept the attack and inwardly feel crazy fear.
It may not be a good feeling for anyone to be accused or angered by others, but in the face of an angry person, I see the true nature of an animal that is more horrible than a lion, a crocodile, or a dragon. They usually seem to hide their true nature, but when I see them suddenly revealing their horrible nature in anger, like a cow lying calmly in the grass and then suddenly killing a fly with its tail, I always get a shiver that makes my hair stand on end. When I thought that this nature might be one of the qualifications for human life, I almost felt despair for myself.
I was always trembling with fear of human beings. I never had the slightest confidence in my own words or actions as a human being, so I kept my anguish to myself in a small box in my chest, hiding my melancholy, my Naivasness, and pretending to be innocent and optimistic, and I gradually perfected myself as a clownish freak.
As long as I could make them laugh at anything, they wouldn’t mind that I was outside of their so-called “life,” and anyway, I mustn’t be an eyesore to them, I must be nothing, the wind, the sky.
In the summer, I would walk down the hall wearing a red woolen sweater under my yukata and make everyone in the house laugh. Even my eldest brother, who rarely laughed, burst into laughter when he saw it.
“It doesn’t look good on you, Ip-chan.
He said in a tone of voice that sounded like he was trying to be cute. I’m not that kind of a weirdo who doesn’t know heat and cold well enough to wear a woolen sweater in the middle of summer. I wore my sister’s leggings around my arms and peeked out from the cuffs of my yukata to make it look like I was wearing a sweater.
My father had a villa in Sakuragi-Cho, Ueno, where he lived most of the month, as he was often in Tokyo. He had a villa in Sakuragi-Cho, Ueno, where he lived most of the month. When he returned home, he would buy a lot of souvenirs for his family and relatives, which was something of a hobby of his.
One night before my father’s trip to Tokyo, he gathered the children in the guest room and asked each one of them, laughing, what kind of souvenirs they would like to bring back home, and wrote down their answers in a notebook. It was rare for my father to be this close to his children.
“When he was asked, “Where’s Yozo?
I was stumped.
Whenever I was asked what I wanted, I suddenly wanted nothing. The thought that I don’t care, that there is nothing that can make me happy, moves in and out of my mind. At the same time, I couldn’t refuse what people gave me, no matter how much it didn’t suit my taste. I couldn’t say “no” to things I didn’t like, and I couldn’t say “yes” to things I did like without hesitation, as if I were stealing them. In other words, I didn’t even have the power to choose between the two. This seems to have been one of the major causes of my so-called “shameful life” in later years.
My father became a little grumpy because I was squirming in silence.
“Books, after all. At a Nakamise in Asakusa, there was a lion for the New Year’s lion dance, a reasonable size for a child to wear and play with, don’t you want it?
Don’t you want it?” I was at a loss for words. The clown can’t answer or do anything. The clown actors were completely flunked.
“The book is good, isn’t it?”
My eldest brother said with a serious face.
“I see.”
My father closed his notebook without writing anything down.
That night, shivering in my bed, I thought that I had made a mistake, that I had angered my father, that his revenge must be terrible, and that I should do something to get it back while I could. I opened the drawer of the desk where my father had put his pocketbook, opened it, flipped through it, found the place where he had filled in order for the souvenir, licked the pencil on the pocketbook, wrote, “Shishimai,” and went to bed. I didn’t want the lion of the lion to dance at all. In fact, I would have preferred a book. However, I realized that my father wanted to buy the lion for me, so I complied with his wishes and dared to sneak into the guest room late at night just to make him happy.
This extreme measure was rewarded with the success I had hoped for. Eventually, my father came back from Tokyo, and I was sitting in my room listening to him talking loudly to my mother.
My father came back from Tokyo, and I was listening in my room when he said to my mother in a loud voice, “I opened this pocketbook at the toy store, and here, here, it says Shishimai. It’s not my handwriting. What do you mean? I craned my neck and came up with an idea. It’s Yozo’s prank. When I asked him about it, he just smiled and kept quiet, but later on, he couldn’t resist the lion. But later, you couldn’t resist the lion. He pretends not to know and writes properly. If you wanted it so badly, why didn’t you just say so? I laughed in front of the toy store. Hurry up and get Yozo in here.
On the other hand, I gathered all the servants and servant girls in a Western-style room and had one of them play the piano keys in a messy way (the house was equipped with most things, even though it was in the country). My second brother took a picture of his Indeyan dance with a flash, and when the picture was taken, his small penis was visible through the seam of his loincloth (it was a chintz furoshiki), which made the whole house laugh. This may have been another unexpected success for me.
I was very familiar with Dr. Mecharakuchara and Dr. Nanjamonja, and I was also quite familiar with ghost stories, storytelling, Rakugo, and Edo-Kobanashi, so there was no shortage of funny things I could say with a serious face to make the people in my house laugh.
But, oh, school!
I was about to be respected there. The idea of being respected also scared the hell out of me. Almost completely deceiving people, and then being discovered by some omniscient and omnipotent person, and then beaten to a pulp and humiliated beyond death, was my definition of being “respected.” Even if you are “respected” for deceiving people, one person knows about it, and when the people eventually realize that they have been deceived and taught by that one person, what kind of anger and revenge will they have at that time? Even the thought of it makes me shudder.
I almost gained the respect of the whole school by being able to do things rather than by being born into a rich family. I had been sickly since I was a child and had often missed a month or two or even a whole school year because I had fallen asleep. However, when I rode to school in a rickshaw with my sick body and took the final exam, I seemed to do better than anyone else in my class. Even when I was in good physical condition, I did not study at all, and even when I went to school, I drew cartoons during class time and explained them to my classmates during breaks, making them laugh. I also wrote a lot of comical stories on my spelling pages, and even though my teacher warned me about it, I didn’t stop. But I didn’t stop because I knew that my teacher was secretly looking forward to my funny stories. One day, Rei told me a story about how she had peed into a phlegm jar in the passage of a train carriage on her way to Tokyo with her mother (although she had not known it was a phlegm jar when she went to Tokyo). I was confident that the teacher would laugh, so I quietly followed her as she retired to the staff room. As soon as she left the classroom, she picked out her own spelling from those of the rest of the class and began to read it as she walked down the corridor, giggling, and eventually finished reading it when she entered the staff room.
Mischievous.
I succeeded in being seen as a so-called mischievous person. I succeeded in avoiding being respected. I got ten points in all my classes, but I got seven or six points in manipulative behavior, which was also the cause of much laughter in the house.
However, my true nature was quite antithetical to such mischievousness. At that time, I had already been taught and raped by maids and servants. I now believe that doing such things to a young child is the ugliest, lowliest, and cruelest crime a human being can commit. But I persevered. I even felt as if I had witnessed one more human trait, and I smiled helplessly. If I had been in the habit of telling the truth, I might have been able to complain to my father and mother about their crimes without feeling bad, but I couldn’t understand them either. Appealing to human beings, I couldn’t expect the least bit of help from them. No matter whether I appealed to my father, mother, policemen, or the government, in the end, I would just be subjected to the arguments of the world’s most powerful people.
I knew that there would always be one hand to fall, and it would be useless to appeal to people.
What, are you talking about your distrust of humans? Huh? Some people may scoff at me and ask, “When did you become a Christian?” However, it seems to me that distrust of human beings does not necessarily lead immediately to the path of religion. But it seems to me that distrust of human beings does not necessarily lead immediately to the path of religion. In fact, human beings, including those who ridicule them, live in distrust of each other, without regard for Jehovah or anything else. As I recall, when I was a child, a famous person from a political party to which my father belonged came to this town to give a speech, and my servants took me to the theater to listen to him. The place was packed, and I could see the faces of everyone in the town, especially those who were close to my father, applauding loudly. After the speech was over, the audience went home in groups through the snowy night streets, talking shit about the speech. Some of the voices were those of people who were particularly close to my father. The so-called “comrades” of my father were saying in a tone of voice similar to anger that my father’s opening speech was not good enough and that the speech of the celebrity of the day was incomprehensible. Then they stopped by my house, went into the guest room, and told my father that tonight’s speech was a great success, with happy faces. Even the servants, when asked by my mother how tonight’s speech had been, were quite happy to say that it had been very interesting. On the way home, the servants lamented to each other that there was nothing more uninteresting than a speech.
But this is just one small example. It seems to me that human life is filled with examples of pure, cheerful, and cheerful distrust, where people mock each other, and yet, strangely enough, none of them are hurt or even aware that they are mocking each other. However, I don’t have any special interest in mocking each other. But I do mock people from morning to night with the help of clowning. I don’t have much interest in the discipline textbook justice or whatever. I find it difficult to understand people who, while mocking each other, live in a pure, cheerful, and cheerful manner or have the confidence to live in a pure, cheerful, and cheerful manner. Human beings have never taught me the truth. If I had known that, I would not have been so afraid of human beings, nor would I have been so desperate to serve them. I wouldn’t have had to suffer so much in the nightly hell of being at odds with human life. In other words, the reason why I didn’t complain to anyone, even about the hateful crimes of the servants, was not because I distrusted human beings, and of course not because of Christian, but because human beings had tightly closed their shell of trust to me, Yozo. Even my parents sometimes showed me things that were difficult for me to understand.
The smell of my loneliness, which appealed to no one, was instinctively picked up by many women, and I feel that it became one of the reasons why I was taken advantage of in later years.
In other words, I was a man who could protect the secrets of love for women.

I have seen three photographs of the man.
One is a photo of the man as a child, perhaps around the age of ten, standing by a pond in a garden, wearing a rough striped hakama, with his head tilted to the left about 30 degrees and smiling ugly, surrounded by many women (I imagine they were his sisters, younger sisters, and cousins). Ugly? But the dull people (i.e., those who don’t care about beauty and ugliness) look at him as neither funny nor ugly.
“But the dull ones (i.e., those who don’t care about beauty and ugliness) look unamused and say, “What a cute little boy.”
However, those who have had some training in beauty and ugliness will immediately think.
“What a disgusting child!”
The child’s smile was not at all what I expected.
The more I looked at the child’s smile, the more I felt that there was something indescribably creepy about it. It’s not a smile at all. This child is not smiling at all. The proof of this is that the child is standing with both fists clenched tightly. Humans are not capable of smiling while clenching their fists tightly. It’s a monkey. It’s a monkey smile. It’s just an ugly wrinkle on his face. I wanted to call him a “wrinkled little boy,” but the expression on his face was bizarre, and it made me feel somewhat awkward and annoyed. I had never seen a child with such a strange expression in my life.
The face in the second photo was also surprisingly different. It was a student’s face. I’m not sure if it’s a high school photo or a college photo, but anyway, it’s a handsome student. However, strangely enough, it did not look like a living person. She was wearing a school uniform, a white handkerchief peeking out of her breast pocket, sitting on a wicker chair with her legs crossed, and she was still smiling. This time, the smile was not that of a wrinkled monkey but a very brilliant smile, somehow different from a human smile. It is not like a bird’s, but as light as a feather, just a blank sheet of paper, so it is smiling. In other words, it’s like he’s made up from scratch. It’s not enough to say he’s racy. It’s not enough to say that he’s frivolous. It’s not enough to say he’s grinning. Of course, the word “fashionable” is not enough. Moreover, if you look closely, you can sense that even this beautiful student has something weird and mysterious about her. I had never seen a young man with such a mysterious appearance before.
The other photo is the strangest of all. It’s as if he doesn’t know when he was old anymore. His head seems to be somewhat gray. In the corner of a filthy room (three walls are clearly visible in the photo), he is holding his hands over a small brazier, and this time he is not smiling. This time he was not smiling. There was no expression on his face. In other words, he was sitting and holding his hands over the brazier as if he was dying naturally. That was not the only strange thing about the photo. The forehead was ordinary, the wrinkles on the forehead were ordinary, the eyebrows were ordinary, the eyes were ordinary, the nose, the mouth, the chin. Oh, this face not only had no expression, but it also had no impression. It has no features. For example, when I look at this picture, I close my eyes. I have already forgotten this face. I can remember the walls of the room and the small brazier, but the impression of the face of the main character in the room has faded away, and I just can’t remember it at all. It is a face that cannot be depicted. It’s a face that doesn’t belong in a cartoon or anything. I opened my eyes. There was no joy in my heart as I remembered that this was the face I had seen. To put it another way, even if I open my eyes and look at the photo again, I can’t remember. So, I feel uncomfortable and annoyed and want to turn away.
Even the so-called “face of death” should have some expression or impression, but if you put a horse’s head on a human body, it would look like this. I had never seen such a strange man’s face before in my life.