by Osamu Dazai
A distant relative of mine had a house nearby, which was one reason why my father had especially selected for me this school of cherry blossoms by the sea. I was left in the care of the family, whose house was so close to the school that even after the morning bell had rung I could still make it to my class in time if I ran. That was the kind of lazy student I was, but I nevertheless managed, thanks to my accustomed antics, to win popularity with my schoolmates.
This was my first experience living in a strange town. I found it far more agreeable than my native place. One might attribute this, perhaps, to the fact that my clowning had by this time become so much a part of me that it was no longer such a strain to trick others. I wonder, though, if it was not due instead to the incontestable difference in the problem involved in performing before one’s own family and strangers, or in one’s own town and elsewhere. This problem exists no matter how great a genius one may be. An actor dreads most the audience in his home town; I imagine the greatest actor in the world would be quite paralyzed in a room where all his family and relatives were gathered to watch him. But I had learned to play my part. I had moreover been quite a success. It was inconceivable that so talented an actor would fail away from home.
The fear of human beings continued to writhe in my breast—I am not sure whether more or less intensely than before—but my acting talents had unquestionably matured. I could always convulse the classroom with laughter, and even as the teacher protested what a good class it would be if only I were not in it, he would be laughing behind his hand. At a word from me even the military drill instructor, whose more usual idiom was a barbarous, thunderous roar, would burst into helpless laughter.
Just when I had begun to relax my guard a bit, fairly confident that I had succeeded by now in concealing completely my true identity, I was stabbed in the back, quite unexpectedly. The assailant, like most people who stab in the back, bordered on being a simpleton—the puniest boy in the class, whose scrofulous face and floppy jacket with sleeves too long for him was complemented by a total lack of proficiency in his studies and by such clumsiness in military drill and physical training that he was perpetually designated as an “onlooker.” Not surprisingly, I failed to recognize the need to be on my guard against him.
That day Takeichi (that was the boy’s name, as I recall) was as usual “onlooking” during the physical training period while the rest of us drilled on the horizontal bar. Deliberately assuming as solemn a face as I could muster, I lunged overhead at the bar, shouting with the effort. I missed the bar and sailed on as if I were making a broad jump, landing with a thud in the sand on the seat of my pants. This failure was entirely premeditated, but everybody burst out laughing, exactly as I had planned. I got to my feet with a rueful smile and was brushing the sand from my pants when Takeichi, who had crept up from somewhere behind, poked me in the back. He murmured, “You did it on purpose.”
I trembled all over. I might have guessed that someone would detect that I had deliberately missed the bar, but that Takeichi should have been the one came as a bolt from the blue. I felt as if I had seen the world before me burst in an instant into the raging flames of hell. It was all I could do to suppress a wild shriek of terror.
The ensuing days were imprinted with my anxiety and dread. I continued on the surface making everybody laugh with my miserable clowning, but now and then painful sighs escaped my lips. Whatever I did Takeichi would see through it, and I was sure he would soon start spreading the word to everyone he saw. At this thought my forehead broke out in a sweat; I stared around me vacantly with the wild eyes of a madman. If it were possible, I felt, I would like to keep a twenty-four hours a day surveillance over Takeichi, never stirring from him, morning, noon or night, to make sure that he did not divulge the secret. I brooded over what I should do: I would devote the hours spent with him to persuading him that my antics were not “on purpose” but the genuine article; if things went well I would like to become his inseparable friend; but if this proved utterly impossible, I had no choice but to pray for his death. Typically enough, the one thing that never occurred to me was to kill him. During the course of my life I have wished innumerable times that I might meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody. I thought that in killing a dreaded adversary I might actually be bringing him happiness.
In order to win over Takeichi I clothed my face in the gentle beguiling smile of the false Christian. I strolled everywhere with him, my arm lightly around his scrawny shoulders, my head tilted affectionately towards him. I frequently would invite him in honeyed, cajoling tones to come and play in the house where I was lodging. But instead of an answer he always gave me only blank stares in return.
One day after school was let out—it must have been in the early summer—there was a sudden downpour. The other students were making a great fuss about getting back to their lodgings, but since I lived just around the corner, I decided to make a dash for it. Just as I was about to rush outside, I noticed Takeichi hovering dejectedly in the entrance way. I said, “Let’s go. I’ll lend you my umbrella.” I grabbed Takeichi’s hand as he hesitated, and ran out with him into the rain. When we arrived home I asked my aunt to dry our jackets. I had succeeded in luring Takeichi to my room.
The household consisted of my aunt, a woman in her fifties, and my two cousins, the older of whom was a tall, frail, bespectacled girl of about thirty (she had been married at one time but was later separated), and the younger a short, round-faced girl who looked fresh out of high school. The ground floor of the house was given over to a shop where small quantities of stationery supplies and sporting goods were offered for sale, but the principal source of income was the rent from the five or six tenements built by my late uncle.
Takeichi, standing haplessly in my room, said, “My ears hurt.”
“They must’ve got wet in the rain.” I examined his ears and discovered they were both running horribly. The lobes seemed filled to the bursting with pus. I simulated an exaggerated concern. “This looks terrible. It must hurt.” Then, in the gentle tones a woman might use, I apologized, “I’m so sorry I dragged you out in all this rain.”
I went downstairs to fetch some cotton wool and alcohol. Takeichi lay on the floor with his head on my lap, and I painstakingly swabbed his ears. Even Takeichi seemed not to be aware of the hypocrisy, the scheming, behind my actions. Far from it—his comment as he lay there with his head pillowed in my lap was, “I’ll bet lots of women will fall for you!”—It was his illiterate approximation of a compliment.
This, I was to learn in later years, was a kind of demoniacal prophecy, more horrible than Takeichi could have realized. “To fall for,” “to be fallen for”—I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar “What a messy business it is to be fallen for” by the more literary “What uneasiness lies in being loved.”
Takeichi uttered that idiotic compliment, that women would fall for me, because I had been kind enough to clean the discharge from his ears. My reaction at the time was merely to blush and smile, without saying a word in return but, to tell the truth, I already had a faint inkling of what his prophecy implied. No, to speak in those terms of the atmosphere engendered by so vulgar an expression as “to fall for” is to betray a precocity of sentiment not even worthy of the dialogue of the romantic lead in a musical comedy; I certainly was not moved by the farcical, self-satisfied emotions suggested by the phrase “to have a faint inkling.”
I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male. In my immediate family women outnumbered the men, and many of my cousins were girls. There was also the maidservant of the “crime.” I think it would b
e no exaggeration to say that my only playmates while I was growing up were girls. Nevertheless, it was with very much the sensation of treading on thin ice that I associated with these girls. I could almost never guess their motives. I was in the dark; at times I made indiscreet mistakes which brought me painful wounds. These wounds, unlike the scars from the lashing a man might give, cut inwards very deep, like an internal hemorrhage, bringing intense discomfort. Once inflicted it was extremely hard to recover from such wounds.
Women led me on only to throw me aside; they mocked and tortured me when others were around, only to embrace me with passion as soon as everyone had left. Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. Who knows? Women may live in order to sleep. These and various other generalizations were products of an observation of women since boyhood days, but my conclusion was that though women appear to belong to the same species as man, they are actually quite different creatures, and these incomprehensible, insidious beings have, fantastic as it seems, always looked after me. In my case such an expression as “to be fallen for” or even “to be loved” is not in the least appropriate; perhaps it describes the situation more accurately to say that I was “looked after.”
Women were also less demanding than men when it came to my clowning. When I played the jester men did not go on laughing indefinitely. I knew that if I got carried away by my success in entertaining a man and overdid the role, my comedy would fall flat, and I was always careful to quit at a suitable place. Women, on the other hand, have no sense of moderation. No matter how long I went on with my antics they would ask for more, and I would become exhausted responding to their insatiable demands for encores. They really laugh an amazing amount of the time. I suppose one can say that women stuff themselves with far more pleasures than men.
The two cousins in whose house I was living while attending school used to visit my room whenever they had the time. Their knock on my door, no matter how often it came, never failed to startle me so that I almost jumped in fright.
“Are you studying?”
“No,” I would say with a smile, shutting my book. I would launch into some silly story, miles removed from what I was thinking. “Today at school the geography teacher, the one we call the Walrus . . .”
One evening my cousins came to my room and after they had compelled me to clown at unmerciful lengths, one of them proposed, “Yozo, let’s see how you look with glasses on.”
“Why?”
“Don’t make such a fuss. Put them on. Here, take these glasses.”
They invariably spoke in the same harsh, peremptory tones. The clown meekly put on the older girl’s glasses. My cousins were convulsed with laughter.
“You look exactly like him. Exactly like Harold Lloyd.”
The American movie comedian was very popular at the time in Japan.
I stood up. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, raising one arm in greeting, “I should like on this occasion to thank all my Japanese fans—”
I went through the motions of making a speech. They laughed all the harder. From then on whenever a Harold Lloyd movie came to town I went to see it and secretly studied his expressions.
One autumn evening as I was lying in bed reading a book, the older of my cousins—I always called her Sister—suddenly darted into my room quick as a bird, and collapsed over my bed. She whispered through her tears, “Yozo, you’ll help me, I know. I know you will. Let’s run away from this terrible house together. Oh, help me, please.”
She continued in this hysterical vein for a while only to burst into tears again. This was not the first time that a woman had put on such a scene before me, and Sister’s excessively emotional words did not surprise me much. I felt instead a certain boredom at their banality and emptiness. I slipped out of bed, went to my desk and picked up a persimmon. I peeled it and offered Sister a section. She ate it, still sobbing, and said, “Have you any interesting books? Lend me something.”
I chose Sôseki’s I am a Cat from my bookshelf and handed it to her.
“Thanks for the persimmon,” Sister said as she left the room, an embarrassed smile on her face. Sister was not the only one—I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm. Long personal experience had taught me that when a woman suddenly bursts into hysterics, the way to restore her spirits is to give her something sweet.
Her younger sister, Setchan, would even bring friends to my room, and in my usual fashion I amused them all with perfect impartiality. As soon as a friend had left Setchan would tell me disagreeable things about her, inevitably concluding, “She’s a bad girl. You must be careful of her.” “If that’s the case,” I wanted to say, “you needn’t have gone to the trouble of bringing her here.” Thanks to Setchan almost all the visitors to my room were girls.
This, however, by no means implies that Takeichi’s compliment, “Women’ll fall for you” had as yet been realized. I was merely the Harold Lloyd of Northeast Japan. Not for some years would Takeichi’s silly statement come palpitatingly alive, metamorphosed into a sinister prophecy.
Takeichi made one other important gift to me.
One day he came to my room to play. He was waving a brightly colored picture which he proudly displayed. “It’s a picture of a ghost,” he explained.
I was startled. That instant, as I could not help feeling in later years, determined my path of escape. I knew what Takeichi was showing me. I knew that it was only the familiar self-portrait of van Gogh. When we were children the French Impressionist School was very popular in Japan, and our first introduction to an appreciation of Western painting most often began with such works. The paintings of van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Renoir were familiar even to students at country schools, mainly through photographic reproductions. I myself had seen quite a few colored photographs of van Gogh’s paintings. His brushwork and the vividness of his colors had intrigued me, but I had never imagined his pictures to be of ghosts.
I took from my bookshelf a volume of Modigliani reproductions, and showed Takeichi the familiar nudes with skin the color of burnished copper. “How about these? Do you suppose they’re ghosts too?”
“They’re terrific.” Takeichi widened his eyes in admiration. “This one looks like a horse out of hell.”
“They really are ghosts then, aren’t they?”
“I wish I could paint pictures of ghosts like that,” said Takeichi.
There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes. And the more nervous they are—the quicker to take fright—the more violent they pray that every storm will be . . . Painters who have had this mentality, after repeated wounds and intimidations at the hands of the apparitions called human beings, have often come to believe in phantasms—they plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature. And they did not fob people off with clowning; they did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared. Takeichi was right: they had dared to paint pictures of devils. These, I thought, would be my friends in the future. I was so excited I could have wept.
“I’m going to paint too. I’m going to paint pictures of ghosts and devils and horses out of hell.” My voice as I spoke these words to Takeichi was lowered to a barely audible whisper, why I don’t know.
Ever since elementary school days I enjoyed drawing and looking at pictures. But my pictures failed to win the reputation among my fellow students that my comic stories did. I have never had the least trust in the opinions of human beings, and my stories represented to me nothing more than the clown’s gesture of greeting to his audience; they enraptured all of my teachers but for me they were devoid of the slightest interest. Only to my paintings, to the depiction of the object (my cartoons were something else again) did I devote any real efforts of my original though childish style. The copybooks for drawing we
used at school were dreary; the teacher’s pictures were incredibly inept; and I was obliged to experiment for myself entirely without direction, using every method of expression which came to me. I owned a set of oil paints and brushes from the time I entered high school. I sought to model my techniques on those of the Impressionist School, but my pictures remained flat as paper cutouts, and seemed to offer no promise of ever developing into anything. But Takeichi’s words made me aware that my mental attitude towards painting had been completely mistaken. What superficiality—and what stupidity—there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty. The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. In other words, they seemed not to rely in the least on the misconceptions of others. Now that I had been initiated by Takeichi into these root secrets of the art of painting, I began to do a few self-portraits, taking care that they not be seen by my female visitors.
The pictures I drew were so heart-rending as to stupefy even myself. Here was the true self I had so desperately hidden. I had smiled cheerfully; I had made others laugh; but this was the harrowing reality. I secretly affirmed this self, was sure that there was no escape from it, but naturally I did not show my pictures to anyone except Takeichi. I disliked the thought that I might suddenly be subjected to their suspicious vigilance, when once the nightmarish reality under the clowning was detected. On the other hand, I was equally afraid that they might not recognize my true self when they saw it, but imagine that it was just some new twist to my clowning—occasion for additional snickers. This would have been most painful of all. I therefore hid the pictures in the back of my cupboard.