Japanese Literature

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.