by Osamu Dazai
“Is the lady-killer at home?”
Horiki had taken to visiting me again at my place. I could not refuse him, even though this was the man who had made me so miserable the day I ran away. I welcomed him with a feeble smile.
“Your comic strips are getting quite a reputation, aren’t they? There’s no competing with amateurs—they’re so foolhardy they don’t know when to be afraid. But don’t get overconfident. Your composition is still not worth a damn.”
He dared to act the part of the master to me! I felt my usual empty tremor of anguish at the thought, “I can imagine the expression on his face if I showed him my ‘ghost pictures’.” But I protested instead, “Don’t say such things. You’ll make me cry.”
Horiki looked all the more elated with himself. “If all you’ve got is just enough talent to get along, sooner or later you’ll betray yourself.”
Just enough talent to get along—I really had to smile at that. Imagine saying that I had enough talent to get along! It occurred to me that a man like myself who dreads human beings, shuns and deceives them, might on the surface seem strikingly like another man who reveres the clever, wordly-wise rules for success embodied in the proverb “Let sleeping dogs lie.” Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death?
Horiki, I had to admit, participated in the settlement after my running away, though reluctantly, under pressure from Shizuko, and he was now behaving exactly like the great benefactor to whom I owed my rehabilitation or like the go-between of a romance. The look on his face as he lectured me was grave. Sometimes he would barge in late at night, dead-drunk, to sleep at my place, or stop by to borrow five yen (invariably five yen).
“You must stop your fooling around with women. You’ve gone far enough. Society won’t stand for more.”
What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called “society”? I had spent my whole life thinking that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words “Don’t you mean yourself?” come to the tip of my tongue. But I held the words back, reluctant to anger him.
Society won’t stand for it.
It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it—right?
If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it.
It’s not society. It’s you, isn’t it?
Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society.
It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?
Words, words of every kind went flitting through my head. “Know thy particular fearsomeness, thy knavery, cunning and witchcraft!” What I said, however, as I wiped the perspiration from my face with a handkerchief was merely, “You’ve put me in a cold sweat!” I smiled.
From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?
From the moment I suspected that society might be an individual I was able to act more in accordance with my own inclinations. Shizuko found that I had become rather self-willed and not so timid as before. Horiki remarked that it was funny how stingy I had become. Or, as Shigeko had it, I had stopped being so nice to Shigeko.
Without a word, without a trace of a smile, I spent one day after the next looking after Shigeko and drawing comic strips, some of them so idiotic I couldn’t understand them myself, for the various firms which commissioned them. (Orders had gradually started coming in from other publishers, all of an even lower class than Shizuko’s company—third-rate publishers, I suppose they’d be called.) I drew with extremely, excessively depressed emotions, deliberately penning each line, only to earn money for drink. When Shizuko came home from work I would dash out as if in relay with her, and head for the outdoor booths near the station to drink cheap, strong liquor.
Somewhat buoyed after a bout, I would return to the apartment. I would say, “The more I look at you the funnier your face seems. Do you know I get inspiration for my cartoons from looking at your face when you’re asleep?”
“What about your face when you sleep? You look like an old man, a man of forty.”
“It’s all your fault. You’ve drained me dry. ‘Man’s life is like a flowing river. What is there to fret over? On the river bank a willow tree . . .’”
“Hurry to bed and stop making such a racket. Would you like something to eat?” She was quite calm. She did not take me seriously.
“If there’s any liquor left, I’ll drink it. ‘Man’s life is like a flowing river. Man’s river . . .’ no, I mean ‘the river flows, the flowing life’.”
I would go on singing as Shizuko took off my clothes. I fell asleep with my forehead pressed against her breast. This was my daily routine.
. . . et puis on recommence encore le lendemain
avec seulement la même règle que la veille
et qui est d’éviter les grandes joies barbares
de même que les grandes douleurs
comme un crapaud contorne une pierre sur son chemin. . . .
When I first read in translation these verses by Guy-Charles Cros, I blushed until my face burned.
The toad.
(That is what I was—a toad. It was not a question of whether or not society tolerated me, whether or not it ostracized me. I was an animal lower than a dog, lower than a cat. A toad. I sluggishly moved—that’s all.)
The quantities of liquor I consumed had gradually increased. I went drinking not only in the neighborhood of the Koenji station but as far as the Ginza. Sometimes I spent the night out. At bars I acted the part of a ruffian, kissed women indiscriminately, did anything as long as it was not in accord with “accepted usage,” drank as wildly—no more so—as before my attempted suicide, was so hard pressed for money that I used to pawn Shizuko’s clothes.
A year had passed since I first came to her apartment and smiled bitterly at the torn kite. One day, along when the cherry trees were going to leaf, I stole some of Shizuko’s underrobes and sashes, and took them to a pawnshop. I used the money they gave me to go drinking on the Ginza. I spent two nights in a row away from home. By the evening of the third day I began to feel some compunctions about my behavior, and I returned to Shizuko’s apartment. I unconsciously hushed my footsteps as I approached the door, and I could hear Shizuko talking with Shigeko.
“Why does he drink?”
“It’s not because he likes liquor. It’s because he’s too good, because . . .”
“Do all good people drink?”
“Not necessarily, but . . .”
“I’m sure Daddy’ll be surprised.”
“Maybe he won’t like it. Look! It’s jumped out of the box.”
“Like the funny man in the comics he draws.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” Shizuko’s low laugh sounded genuinely happy.
I opened the door a crack and looked in. I saw a small white rabbit bounding around the room. The two of them were chasing it.
(They were happy, the two of them. I’d been a fool to come between them. I might destroy them both if I were not careful. A humble happiness. A good mother and child. God, I thought, if you listen to the prayers of people like myself, grant me happiness once, only once in my whole lifetime will be enough! Hear my prayer!)
I felt like getting down on my knees to pray then and there. I shut the door softly, went to the Ginza, and did not return to the apartment.
My next spell as a kept man was in an apartment over a bar close by the Kyobashi Station.
Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is the struggle between one individual and another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything. Human beings never
submit to human beings. Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except in terms of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one’s country and suchlike things, but the object of their efforts is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual’s needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment.
When I left the apartment in Koenji I told the madam of the bar in Kyobashi, “I’ve left her and come to you.” That was all I said, and it was enough. In other words, my single then-and-there contest had been decided, and from that night I lodged myself without ceremony on the second floor of her place. “Society” which by all rights should have been implacable, inflicted not a particle of harm on me, and I offered no explanations. As long as the madam was so inclined, everything was all right.
At the bar I was treated like a customer, like the owner, like an errand boy, like a relative of the management; one might have expected that I would be considered a very dubious character, but “society” was not in the least suspicious of me, and the regular customers of the bar treated me with almost painful kindness. They called me by my first name and bought me drinks.
I gradually came to relax my vigilance towards the world. I came to think that it was not such a dreadful place. My feelings of panic had been molded by the unholy fear aroused in me by such superstitions of science as the hundreds of thousands of whooping-cough germs borne by the spring breezes, the hundreds of thousands of eye-destroying bacteria which infest the public baths, the hundreds of thousands of microbes in a barber shop which will cause baldness, the swarms of scabious parasites infecting the leather straps in the subway cars; or the tapeworm, fluke and heaven knows what eggs that undoubtedly lurk in raw fish and in undercooked beef and pork; or the fact that if you walk barefoot a tiny sliver of glass may penetrate the sole of your foot and after circulating through your body reach the eye and cause blindness. There is no disputing the accurate, scientific fact that millions of germs are floating, swimming, wriggling everywhere. At the same time, however, if you ignore them completely they lose all possible connection with yourself, and at once become nothing more than vanishing “ghosts of science.” This too I came to understand. I had been so terrorized by scientific statistics (if ten million people each leave over three grains of rice from their lunch, how many sacks of rice are wasted in one day; if ten million people each economize one paper handkerchief a day, how much pulp will be saved?) that whenever I left over a single grain of rice, whenever I blew my nose, I imagined that I was wasting mountains of rice, tons of paper, and I fell prey to a mood dark as if I had committed some terrible crime. But these were the lies of science, the lies of statistics and mathematics: you can’t collect three grains of rice from everybody. Even as an exercise in multiplication or division, it ranks as one of the most elementary and feeble-minded problems, about on a par with the computation of the percentage of times that people slip in dark, unlighted bathrooms and fall into the toilet, or the percentage of passengers who get their feet caught in the space between the door of a subway train and the edge of the platform, or other such footling exercises in probability. These events seem entirely within the bounds of possibility, but I have never heard a single instance of anyone hurting himself by falling into the toilet. I felt pity and contempt for the self which until yesterday had accepted such hypothetical situations as eminently factual scientific truths and was terrified by them. This shows the degree to which I had bit by bit arrived at a knowledge of the real nature of what is called the world.
Having said that, I must now admit that I was still afraid of human beings, and before I could meet even the customers in the bar I had to fortify myself by gulping down a glass of liquor. The desire to see frightening things—that was what drew me every night to the bar where, like the child who squeezes his pet all the harder when he actually fears it a little, I proclaimed to the customers standing at the bar my drunken, bungling theories of art.
A comic strip artist, and at that an unknown one, knowing no great joys nor, for that matter, any great sorrows. I craved desperately some great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue, but my only actual pleasure was to engage in meaningless chatter with the customers and to drink their liquor.
Close to a year had gone by since I took up this debased life in the bar in Kyobashi. My cartoons were no longer confined to the children’s magazines, but now appeared also in the cheap, pornographic magazines that are sold in railway stations. Under a silly pseudonym I drew dirty pictures of naked women to which I usually appended appropriate verses from the Rubaiyat.
Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit
Of This and That endeavour and dispute;
Better be merry with the fruitful Grape
Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.
Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Promise go,
Nor heed the music of a distant Drum!
And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky
Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die
Lift not your hands to It for help—for It
As impotently rolls as you or I.
There was at this period in my life a maiden who pleaded with me to give up drink. “You can’t go on, drinking every day from morning to night that way.”
She was a girl of seventeen or so who worked in a little tobacco shop across the way from the bar. Yoshiko—that was her name—was a pale girl with crooked teeth. Whenever I went to buy cigarettes she would smile and repeat her advice.
“What’s wrong with drinking? Why is it bad? ‘Better be merry with the fruitful Grape than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.’ Many years ago there was a Persian . . . no, let’s skip it. ‘Oh, plagued no more with Human or Divine, To-morrow’s tangle to itself resign: And lose your fingers in the tresses of The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.’ Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t.”
“What a stupid little girl you are. I’m going to kiss you.”
“Go ahead.” She pouted out her lower lip, not in the least abashed.
“You silly fool. You and your ideas of chastity . . .”
There was something unmistakable in Yoshiko’s expression which marked her as a virgin who had never been defiled.
Soon after New Year, one night in the dead of winter, I drunkenly staggered out in the cold to buy some cigarettes and fell into a manhole in front of her shop. I shouted for Yoshiko to come save me. She hauled me out and bandaged my bruised right arm. Yoshiko, earnest and unsmiling, said, “You drink too much.”
The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks. I thought as I watched Yoshiko bandage my hand that I might cut down on my drinking.
“I’m giving it up. From tomorrow on I won’t touch a drop.”
“Do you mean it?”
“There’s no doubt about it. I’ll give it up. If I give it up, will you marry me, Yoshiko?”
Asking her to marry me was, however, intended only as a joke.
“Natch.”
(“Natch” for “naturally” was popular at the time.)
“Right. Let’s hook fingers on that. I promise I’ll give it up.”
The next day, as might have been expected, I spent drinking.
Towards evening I made my way to Yoshiko’s shop on shaking legs and called to her. “Yoshiko, I’m sorry. I got drunk.”
“Oh, you’re awful. Trying to fool me by pretending to be drunk.”
I w
as startled. I felt suddenly quite sober.
“No, it’s the truth. I really have been drinking. I’m not pretending.”
“Don’t tease me. You’re mean.” She suspected nothing.
“I should think you could tell by just looking at me. I’ve been drinking today since noon. Forgive me.”
“You’re a good actor.”
“I’m not acting, you little idiot. I’m going to kiss you.”
“Go ahead.”
“No, I’m not qualified. I’m afraid I’ll have to give up the idea of marrying you. Look at my face. Red, isn’t it? I’ve been drinking.”
“It’s just the sunset shining on it. Don’t try to fool me. You promised yesterday you wouldn’t drink. You wouldn’t break a promise, would you? We hooked fingers. Don’t tell me you’ve been drinking. It’s a lie—I know it is.”
Yoshiko’s pale face was smiling as she sat there inside the dimly lit shop. What a holy thing uncorrupted virginity is, I thought. I had never slept with a virgin, a girl younger than myself. I’d marry her. I wanted once in my lifetime to know that great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue. I had always imagined that the beauty of virginity was nothing more than the sweet, sentimental illusion of stupid poets, but it really is alive and present in this world. We would get married. In the spring we’d go together on bicycles to see waterfalls framed in green leaves.
I made up my mind on the spot: it was a then-and-there decision, and I did not hesitate to steal the flower.
Not long afterwards we were married. The joy I obtained as a result of this action was not necessarily great or savage, but the suffering which ensued was staggering—so far surpassing what I had imagined that even describing it as “horrendous” would not quite cover it. The “world,” after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a single then-and-there decision.
THE THIRD NOTEBOOK: PART TWO
Horiki and myself.