by Osamu Dazai
My father had been giving me a fixed allowance for spending money each month. It would disappear in two or three days’ time, but there had always been cigarettes, liquor and fruit in the house, and other things—books, stationery, and anything in the way of clothing—could be charged at shops in the neighborhood. As long as it was one of the shops my father patronized it made no difference even if I left the place without offering so much as a word of explanation.
Then suddenly I was thrown on my own in lodgings, and had to make ends meet on the allowance doled out each month from home. I was quite at my wit’s end. The allowance disappeared in the customary two or three days, and I would be almost wild with fright and despair. I sent off barrages of telegrams begging for money of my father, my brothers and my sisters by turns. In the wake of the telegrams went letters giving details. (The facts as stated in the letters were absurd fabrications without exception. I thought it a good strategy to make people laugh when asking favors of them.) Under Horiki’s tutelage I also began to frequent the pawnshops. Despite everything I was chronically short of money.
And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn’t know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment. I would rush outside either to help in the activities of the movement or to make the round of the bars with Horiki, drinking cheap saké wherever we went. I almost completely neglected both my school work and my painting. Then in November of my second year in college I got involved in a love suicide with a married woman older than myself. This changed everything.
I had stopped attending classes and no longer devoted a minute of study to my courses; amazingly enough I seemed nevertheless to be able to give sensible answers in the examinations, and I managed somehow to keep my family under the delusion that all was well. But my poor attendance finally caused the school to send my father a confidential report. My elder brother, acting on behalf of my father, thereupon addressed me a long, sternly phrased letter, warning me to change my ways. More pressing causes of grief to me were my lack of money and the jobs required of me by the movement, which had become so frequent and frenetic that I could no longer perform them half in the spirit of fun. I had been chosen leader of all the Marxist student action groups in the schools of central Tokyo. I raced about here and there “maintaining liaison.” In my raincoat pocket I carried a little knife I had bought for use in the event of an armed uprising. (I remember now that it had a delicate blade hardly strong enough to sharpen a pencil.) My fondest wish was to drink myself into a sound stupor, but I hadn’t the money. Requests for my services came from the party so frequently that I scarcely had time to catch my breath. A sickly body like mine wasn’t up to such frantic activity. My only reason all along for helping the group had been my fascination with its irrationality, and to become so horribly involved was a quite unforeseen consequence of my joke. I felt secretly like telling the group, “This isn’t my business. Why don’t you get a regular party man to do it?” Unable to suppress such reactions of annoyance, I escaped. I escaped, but it gave me no pleasure: I decided to kill myself.
There were at that time three women who showed me special affection. One of them was the landlord’s daughter at my lodging house. When I would come back to my room so exhausted by my errands for the movement that I fell into bed without even bothering to eat, she invariably would visit my room, carrying in her hand a writing pad and a pen.
“Excuse me. It’s so noisy downstairs with my sister and my little brother that I can’t collect my thoughts enough to write a letter.” She would seat herself at my desk and write, sometimes for over an hour.
It would have been so much simpler if I just lay there and pretended not to be aware of her, but the girl’s looks betrayed only too plainly that she wanted me to talk, and though I had not the least desire to utter a word, I would display my usual spirit of passive service: I would turn over on my belly with a grunt and, puffing on a cigarette, begin, “I’m told that some men heat their bath water by burning the love letters they get from women.”
“How horrid! It must be you.”
“As a matter of fact, I have boiled milk that way—and drunk it too.”
“What an honor for the girl! Use mine next time!”
If only she would go, quickly. Letter, indeed! What a transparent pretext that was. I’m sure she was writing the alphabet or the days of the week and the months.
“Show me what you’ve written,” I said, although I wanted desperately to avoid looking at it.
“No, I won’t,” she protested. “Oh, you’re dreadful.” Her joy was indecent enough to chill all feeling for her.
I thought up an errand for her to do. “Sorry to bother you, but would you mind going down to the drugstore and buying me some sleeping tablets? I’m over-exhausted. My face is burning so I can’t sleep. I’m sorry. And about the money . . .”
“That’s all right. Don’t worry about the money.”
She got up happily. I was well aware that it never offends a woman to be asked to do an errand; they are delighted if some man deigns to ask them a favor.
The second girl interested in me was a “comrade,” a student in a teacher’s training college. My activities in the movement obliged me, distasteful as it was, to see her every day. Even after the arrangements for the day’s job had been completed, she doggedly tagged along after me. She bought me presents, seemingly at random, and offered them with the words, “I wish you would think of me as your real sister.”
Wincing at the affectation I would answer, “I do,” and force a sad little smile. I was afraid of angering her, and my only thought was to temporize somehow and put her off. As a result, I spent more and more time dancing attendance on that ugly, disagreeable girl. I let her buy me presents (they were without exception in extraordinarily bad taste and I usually disposed of them immediately to the postman or the grocery boy). I tried to look happy when I was with her, and made her laugh with my jokes. One summer evening she simply wouldn’t leave me. In the hope of persuading her to go I kissed her when we came to a dark place along the street. She became uncontrollably, shamefully excited. She hailed a taxi and took me to the little room the movement secretly rented in an office building. There we spent the whole night in a wild tumult. “What an extraordinary sister I have,” I told myself with a wry smile.
The circumstances were such that I had no way of avoiding the landlord’s daughter or this “comrade.” Every day we bumped into one another; I could not dodge them as I had various other women in the past. Before I knew what was happening, my chronic lack of assurance had driven me willy-nilly into desperate attempts to ingratiate myself with both of them. It was just as if I were bound to them by some ancient debt.
It was at this same period that I became the unexpected beneficiary of the kindness of a waitress in one of those big cafés on the Ginza. After just one meeting I was so tied by gratitude to her that worry and empty fears paralyzed me. I had learned by this time to simulate sufficiently well the audacity required to board a streetcar by myself or to go to the Kabuki Theatre or even to a café without any guidance from Horiki. Inwardly I was no less suspicious than before of the assurance and the violence of human beings, but on the surface I had learned bit by bit the art of meeting people with a straight face—no, that’s not true: I have never been able to meet anyone without an accompaniment of painful smiles, the buffoonery of defeat. What I had acquired was the technique of stammering somehow, almost in a daze, the necessary small talk. Was this a product of my activities on behalf of the movement? Or of women? Or liquor? Perhaps it was chiefly being hard up for cash that perfected this skill.
I felt afraid no matter where I was. I wondered if the best way to obtain some surcease from this relentless feeling might not be to lose myself in the world of some big café where I would be rubbed against by crowds of drunken guests, waitresses and porters. With this thought in my mind, I wen
t one day alone to a café on the Ginza. I had only ten yen on me. I said with a smile to the hostess who sat beside me, “All I’ve got is ten yen. Consider yourself warned.”
“You needn’t worry.” She spoke with a trace of a Kansai accent. It was strange how she calmed my agitation with those few words. No, it was not simply because I was relieved of the necessity of worrying about money. I felt, rather, as if being next to her in itself made it unnecessary to worry.
I drank the liquor. She did not intimidate me, and I felt no obligation to perform my clownish antics for her. I drank in silence, not bothering to hide the taciturnity and gloominess which were my true nature.
She put various appetizers on the table in front of me. “Do you like them?” I shook my head. “Only liquor? I’ll have a drink too.”
It was a cold autumn night. I was waiting at a sushi stall back of the Ginza for Tsuneko (that, as I recall, was her name, but the memory is too blurred for me to be sure: I am the sort of person who can forget even the name of the woman with whom he attempted suicide) to get off from work. The sushi I was eating had nothing to recommend it. Why, when I have forgotten her name, should I be able to remember so clearly how bad the sushi tasted? And I can recall with absolute clarity the close-cropped head of the old man—his face was like a snake’s—wagging from side to side as he made the sushi, trying to create the illusion that he was a real expert. It has happened to me two or three times since that I have seen on the streetcar what seemed to be a familiar face and wondered who it was, only to realize with a start that the person opposite me looked like the old man from the sushi stall. Now, when her name and even her face are fading from my memory, for me to be able to remember that old man’s face so accurately I could draw it, is surely a proof of how bad the sushi was and how it chilled and distressed me. I should add that even when I have been taken to restaurants famous for sushi I have never enjoyed it much.
Tsuneko was living in a room she rented on the second floor of a carpenter’s house. I lay on the floor sipping tea, propping my cheek with one hand as if I had a horrible toothache. I took no pains to hide my habitual gloom. Oddly enough, she seemed to like seeing me lie there that way. She gave me the impression of standing completely isolated; an icy storm whipped around her, leaving only dead leaves careening wildly down.
As we lay there together, she told me that she was two years older than I, and that she came from Hiroshima. “I’ve got a husband, you know. He used to be a barber in Hiroshima, but we ran away to Tokyo together at the end of last year. My husband couldn’t find a decent job in Tokyo. The next thing I knew he was picked up for swindling someone, and now he’s in jail. I’ve been going to the prison every day, but beginning tomorrow I’m not going any more.” She rambled on, but I have never been able to get interested when women talk about themselves. It may be because women are so inept at telling a story (that is, because they place the emphasis in the wrong places), or for some other reason. In any case, I have always turned them a deaf ear.
“I feel so unhappy.”
I am sure that this one phrase whispered to me would arouse my sympathy more than the longest, most painstaking account of a woman’s life. It amazes and astonishes me that I have never once heard a woman make this simple statement. This woman did not say, “I feel so unhappy” in so many words, but something like a silent current of misery an inch wide flowed over the surface of her body. When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom like a “withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool.” I had freed myself from fear and uneasiness.
It was entirely different from the feeling of being able to sleep soundly which I had experienced in the arms of those idiot-prostitutes (for one thing, the prostitutes were cheerful); the night I spent with that criminal’s wife was for me a night of liberation and happiness. (The use of so bold a word, affirmatively, without hesitation, will not, I imagine, recur in these notebooks.)
But it lasted only one night. In the morning, when I woke and got out of bed, I was again the shallow poseur of a clown. The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness. I was impatient to leave her while things still stood the same, before I got wounded, and I spread my usual smokescreen of farce.
“They say that love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, but people generally get the sense backwards. It doesn’t mean that when a man’s money runs out he’s shaken off by women. When he runs out of money, he naturally is in the dumps. He’s no good for anything. The strength goes out of his laugh, he becomes strangely soured. Finally, in desperation, he shakes off the woman. The proverb means that when a man becomes half-mad, he will shake and shake and shake until he’s free of a woman. You’ll find that explanation given in the Kanazawa Dictionary, more’s the pity. It isn’t too hard for me to understand that feeling myself!”
I remember making Tsuneko laugh with just such stupid remarks. I was trying to get away quickly that morning, without so much as washing my face, for I was sure that to stay any longer would be useless and dangerous. Then I came out with that crazy pronouncement on “love flying out the window,” which was later to produce unexpected complications.
I didn’t meet my benefactor of that night again for a whole month. After leaving her my happiness grew fainter every day that went by. It frightened me even that I had accepted a moment’s kindness: I felt I had imposed horrible bonds on myself. Gradually even the mundane fact that Tsuneko had paid the bill at the café began to weigh on me, and I felt as though she was just another threatening woman, like the girl at my lodging house, or the girl from the teacher’s training college. Even at the distance which separated us, Tsuneko intimidated me constantly. Besides, I was intolerably afraid that if I met again a woman I had once slept with, I might suddenly burst into a flaming rage. It was my nature to be very timid about meeting people anyway, and so I finally chose the expedient of keeping a safe distance from the Ginza. This timidity of nature was no trickery on my part. Women do not bring to bear so much as a particle of connection between what they do after going to bed and what they do on rising in the morning; they go on living with their world successfully divided in two, as if total oblivion had intervened. My trouble was that I could not yet successfully cope with this extraordinary phenomenon.
At the end of November I went drinking with Horiki at a cheap bar in Kanda. We had no sooner staggered out of that bar than my evil companion began to insist that we continue our drinking somewhere else. We had already run out of money, but he kept badgering me.
Finally—and this was because I was drunker and bolder than usual—I said, “All right. I’ll take you to the land of dreams. Don’t be surprised at what you see. Wine, women and song . . .”
“You mean a café?”
“I do.”
“Let’s go!” It happened just as simply as that. The two of us got on a streetcar. Horiki said in high spirits, “I’m starved for a woman tonight. Is it all right to kiss the hostess?”
I was not particularly fond of Horiki when he played the drunk that way. Horiki knew it, and he deliberately labored the point. “All right? I’m going to kiss her. I’m going to kiss whichever hostess sits next to me. All right?”
“It won’t make any difference, I suppose.”
“Thanks! I’m starved for a woman.”
We got off at the Ginza and walked into the café of “wine, women and song.” I was virtually without a penny, and my only hope was Tsuneko. Horiki and I sat down at a vacant booth facing each other. Tsuneko and another hostess immediately hurried over. The other girl sat next to me, and Tsuneko plopped herself down beside Horiki. I was taken aback: Tsuneko was going to be kissed in another few minutes.
It wasn’t that I regretted losing her. I have never had the faintest craving for possessions. Once in a while, it is true, I have experienced a vague sense of regret at losing something, but
never strongly enough to affirm positively or to contest with others my rights of possession. This was so true of me that some years later I even watched in silence when my own wife was violated.
I have tried insofar as possible to avoid getting involved in the sordid complications of human beings. I have been afraid of being sucked down into their bottomless whirlpool. Tsuneko and I were lovers of just one night. She did not belong to me. It was unlikely that I would pretend to so imperious an emotion as “regret.” And yet I was shocked.
It was because I felt sorry for Tsuneko, sorry that she should be obliged to accept Horiki’s savage kisses while I watched. Once she had been defiled by Horiki she would no doubt have to leave me. But my ardor was not positive enough for me to stop Tsuneko. I experienced an instant of shock at her unhappiness; I thought, “It’s all over now.” Then, the next moment, I meekly, helplessly resigned myself. I looked from Horiki to Tsuneko. I grinned.
But the situation took an unexpected turn, one very much for the worse.
“I’ve had enough,” Horiki said with a scowl. “Not even a lecher like myself can kiss a woman who looks so poverty-stricken.”
He folded his arms and stared, seemingly in utter disgust, at Tsuneko. He forced a smile.
“Some liquor. I haven’t got any money.” I spoke under my breath to Tsuneko. I felt I wanted to drink till I drowned in it. Tsuneko was in the eyes of the world unworthy even of a drunkard’s kiss, a wretched woman who smelled of poverty. Astonishingly, incredibly enough, this realization struck me with the force of a thunderbolt. I drank more that night than ever before in my life, more . . . more, my eyes swam with drink, and every time Tsuneko and I looked in each other’s face, we gave a pathetic little smile. Yes, just as Horiki had said, she really was a tired, poverty-stricken woman and nothing more. But this thought itself was accompanied by a welling-up of a feeling of comradeship for this fellow-sufferer from poverty. (The clash between rich and poor is a hackneyed enough subject, but I am now convinced that it really is one of the eternal themes of drama.) I felt pity for Tsuneko; for the first time in my life I was conscious of a positive (if feeble) movement of love in my heart. I vomited. I passed out. This was also the first time I had ever drunk so much as to lose consciousness.