by Osamu Dazai
Towards the end of that year I came home late one night blind drunk. I felt like having a glass of sugar-water. Yoshiko seemed to be asleep, so I went myself to the kitchen to look for the sugar bowl. I took off the lid and peered inside. There was no sugar, only a thin black cardboard box. I took it absent-mindedly in my hand and read the label. I was startled: somebody had scratched off most of the writing, but the part in Western letters remained intact. The word DIAL was legible.
DIAL. At the time I relied entirely on gin and never took sleeping pills. Insomnia, however, was a chronic complaint with me, and I was familiar with most sleeping pills. The contents of this one box of Dial was unquestionably more than sufficient to cause death. The seal of the box was unbroken. I must have hidden it here at some time or other in the past when I felt I might need it, after first scratching off the label. The poor child could not read Western letters, and I must have thought it was enough if I just scratched off with my nails the part of the label in Japanese. (You have committed no sin.)
I very quietly filled a glass with water, careful not to make the least noise, and deliberately broke the seal of the box. I poured the whole contents into my mouth. I calmly drained the glass of water in one gulp. I switched off the light and went to bed at once.
For three days and nights I lay as one dead. The doctor considered it an accident, and was kind enough to postpone reporting to the police. I am told that the first words I murmured as I began to recover consciousness were, “I’m going home.” It’s not clear even to myself what place I meant by “home,” but in any case these were the words I said, accompanied, I was told, by profuse weeping.
Gradually the fog cleared, and when I regained consciousness there was Flatfish sitting at my pillow, a most unpleasant expression on his face.
“The last time was also at the end of the year, wasn’t it? He always chooses the end of the year, just when everybody is frantically busy. He’ll prove the death of me if he keeps on doing such things.”
The madam of the bar in Kyobashi was the recipient of Flatfish’s discourse.
I called, “Madam.”
“What? Have you come to?” She held her smiling face directly over mine as she spoke.
I burst into tears. “Take me away from Yoshiko.” The words came as a surprise even to myself.
The madam rose to her feet and breathed a barely audible sigh.
Then I made an utterly unpremeditated slip of the tongue, one so comic, so idiotic that it all but defies description. I said, “I’m going somewhere where there aren’t any women.”
Flatfish was the first to respond, with loud guffaws; the madam tittered; and in the midst of my tears I turned red and smiled despite myself.
“An excellent idea,” said Flatfish still continuing his inane laughter. “You really ought to go to a place with no women. Everything goes wrong as soon as women are around you. Yes, a place without women is a fine suggestion.”
A place without women. And the worst of it was that my delirious ravings were later to be realized in a most ghastly way.
Yoshiko seemed to have got the idea that I had swallowed the overdose of sleeping pills by way of atonement for her sin, and this made her all the more uncertain before me. She never smiled, and she looked as if she could hardly be persuaded to open her mouth. I found the apartment so oppressive that I would end by going out as usual to swill cheap liquor. After the Dial incident, however, I lost weight noticeably. My arms and legs felt heavy, and I often was too lazy to draw cartoons. Flatfish had left some money when he came to visit me. (He said, “It’s a little gift from me,” and offered it exactly as if it were his own money, though I gathered that it actually came from my brothers as usual. This time, unlike when I ran away from Flatfish’s house, I was able to get a vague glimpse through his theatrical airs of importance; I too was clever and, pretending to be completely unaware of what was going on, humbly offered Flatfish my thanks for the money. It nevertheless gave me a strange feeling, as if at the same time I could and could not understand why people like Flatfish resorted to such complicated tricks.) I did not hesitate to use the money to go by myself to the hot springs of southern Izu. However, I am not the kind to make a leisurely tour of hot springs, and at the thought of Yoshiko I became so infinitely forlorn as to destroy completely the peaceful frame of mind which would have permitted me to gaze from my hotel window at the mountains. I did not change into sports clothes. I didn’t even take the waters. Instead I would rush out into the filthy little bars that looked like souvenir stands, and drink gin until I fairly swam in it. I returned to Tokyo only sicklier for the trip.
The night I returned to Tokyo the snow was falling heavily. I drunkenly wandered along the rows of saloons behind the Ginza, singing to myself over and over again, so softly it was only a whisper, “From here it’s hundreds of miles to home . . . From here it’s hundreds of miles to home.” I walked along kicking with the point of my shoes the snow which was accumulating. Suddenly I vomited. This was the first time I had brought up blood. It formed a big rising-sun flag in the snow. I squatted there for a while. Then with both hands I scooped up snow from places which were still clean, and washed my face. I wept.
“Where does this little path go?
Where does this little path go?”
I could hear indistinctly from the distance, like an auditory hallucination, the voice of a little girl singing. Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in this world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarely, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles. My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody. If I had ever attempted to voice anything in the nature of a protest, even a single mumbled word, the whole of society—and not only Flatfish—would undoubtedly have cried out flabbergasted, “Imagine the audacity of him talking like that!” Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit? I really don’t know myself, but since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent.
I got up from the snowbank with the thought: I ought to get the proper kind of medicine without delay. I went into a pharmacy nearby. The proprietress and I exchanged looks as I entered; for that instant her eyes popped and she held her head lifted, as if caught in the light of a flash bulb. She stood ramrod stiff. But in her wide-open eyes there was no trace of alarm or dislike; her look spoke of longing, almost of the seeking for salvation. I thought, “She must be unhappy too. Unhappy people are sensitive to the unhappiness of others.” Not until then did I happen to notice that she stood with difficulty, supporting herself on crutches. I suppressed a desire to run up beside her, but I could not take my eyes from her face. I felt tears starting, and saw then the tears brimming from her big eyes.
That was all. Without saying a word I went out of the pharmacy and staggered back to my apartment. I asked Yoshiko to prepare a salt solution. I drank it. I went to sleep without telling her anything. The whole of the following day I spent in bed, giving as excuse a lie to the effect that I felt a cold coming on. At night my agitation over the blood I had secretly coughed became too much for me, and I got out of bed. I went to the pharmacy again. This time I confessed with a smile to the woman what my physical condition was. In humble tones I asked her advice.
“You’ll have to give up drinking.”
We were like blood relatives.
“I may have alcoholic poisoning. I still want to drink.”
“You musn’t. My husband used to soak himself in liquor in spite of his T.B. He claimed that he killed the germs with liquor. That’s how he shortened his life.”
“I feel so on edge I can’t stand it. I’m afraid. I’m no good for anything.”
“I’ll give you some medicine. But please cut out the drinking a
t least.”
She was a widow with an only son. The boy had been attending a medical school somewhere in the provinces, but was now on leave of absence from school with the same illness that killed his father. Her father-in-law lay abed in the house with palsy. She herself had been unable to move one side of her body since she was five, when she had infantile paralysis. Hobbling here and there in the shop on her crutches she selected various medicines from the different shelves, and explained what they were.
This is a medicine to build your blood.
This is a serum for vitamin injections. Here is the hypodermic needle.
These are calcium pills. This is diastase to keep you from getting an upset stomach.
Her voice was full of tenderness as she explained each of the half-dozen medicines. The affection of this unhappy woman was however to prove too intense. At the last she said, “This is a medicine to be used when you need a drink so badly you can’t stand it.” She quickly wrapped the little box.
It was morphine.
She said that it was no more harmful than liquor, and I believed her. For one thing, I was just at the stage where I had come to feel the squalor of drunkenness, and I was overjoyed to be able to escape after such long bondage to the devil called alcohol. Without a flicker of hesitation I injected the morphine into my arm. My insecurity, fretfulness and timidity were swept away completely; I turned into an expansively optimistic and fluent talker. The injections made me forget how weak my body was, and I applied myself energetically to my cartoons. Sometimes I would burst out laughing even while I was drawing.
I had intended to take one shot a day, but it became two, then three; when it reached four I could no longer work unless I had my shots.
All I needed was the woman at the pharmacy to admonish me, saying how dreadful it would be if I became an addict, for me to feel that I had already become a fairly confirmed addict. (I am very susceptible to other people’s suggestions. When people say to me, “You really shouldn’t spend this money, but I suppose you will anyway ...” I have the strange illusion that I would be going against expectations and somehow doing wrong unless I spent it. I invariably spend all the money immediately.) My uneasiness over having become an addict actually made me seek more of the drug.
“I beg you! One more box. I promise I’ll pay you at the end of the month.”
“You can pay the bill any old time as far as I’m concerned, but the police are very troublesome, you know.”
Something impure, dark, reeking of the shady character always hovers about me.
“I beg you! Tell them something or other, put them off the track. I’ll give you a kiss.”
She blushed.
I pursued the theme. “I can’t do any work unless I have the medicine. It’s a kind of energy-builder for me.”
“How about hormone injections?”
“Don’t be silly. It’s liquor or that medicine, one or the other. If I haven’t got it I can’t work.”
“You mustn’t drink.”
“That’s right. I haven’t touched a drop of liquor since I began with that medicine. I’m in fine physical shape, thanks to you. I don’t intend to go on drawing stupid cartoons forever, you know. Now that I’ve stopped drinking and have straightened myself out, I’m going to study. I’m sure I can become a great painter. I’ll show you. If only I can get over this critical period. So, please. How about a kiss?”
She burst out laughing. “What a nuisance you are. You may already have become an addict, for all I know.” Her crutches clacked as she hobbled over to the shelf to take down some medicine. “I can’t give you a whole box. You’d use it all up. Here’s half.”
“How stingy you’ve become! Well, if that’s the best you can do.”
I gave myself a shot as soon as I got back home.
Yoshiko timidly asked, “Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Of course it hurts. But I’ve got to do it, no matter how painful it is. That’s the only way to increase the efficiency of my work. You’ve noticed how healthy I’ve been of late.” Then, playfully, “Well, to work. To work, to work.”
Once, late at night, I knocked on the door of the pharmacy. As soon as I caught sight of the woman in her nightgown hobbling forward on her crutches, I threw my arms around her and kissed her. I pretended to weep.
She handed me a box without a word.
By the time I had come to realize acutely that drugs were as abominable, as foul—no, fouler—than gin, I had already become an out-and-out addict. I had truly reached the extreme of shamelessness. Out of the desire to obtain the drug I began again to make copies of pornographic pictures. I also had what might literally be called a very ugly affair with the crippled woman from the pharmacy.
I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.” I paced back and forth, half in a frenzy, between my apartment and the pharmacy.
The more I worked the more morphine I consumed, and my debt at the pharmacy reached a frightening figure. Whenever the woman caught sight of my face, the tears came to her eyes. I also wept.
Inferno.
I decided as a last resort, my last hope of escaping the inferno, to write a long letter to my father in which I confessed my circumstances fully and accurately (with the exception, of course, of my relations with women). If it failed I had no choice but to hang myself, a resolve which was tantamount to a bet on the existence of God.
The result was to make everything only the worse: the answer, for which I waited day and night, never came, and my anxiety and dread caused me to increase still further the dosage of the drug.
I made up my mind one day to give myself ten shots that night and throw myself into the river. But on the afternoon of the very day I chose for the event, Flatfish appeared with Horiki in tow, seemingly having managed with his diabolical intuition to sniff out my plan.
Horiki sat in front of me and said, with a gentle smile, the like of which I had never before seen on his face, “I hear you’ve coughed blood.” I felt so grateful, so happy for that gentle smile that I averted my face and wept. I was completely shattered and smothered by that one gentle smile.
I was bundled into an automobile. Flatfish informed me in a quiet tone (so calm indeed that it might almost have been characterized as compassionate) that I should have to go for the time being to a hospital, and that I should leave everything to them. Weeping helplessly, I obeyed whatever the two of them decreed, like a man bereft of all will, decision and everything else. The four of us (Yoshiko came along) were tossed in the car for quite a long time. About dusk we pulled up at the entrance to a large hospital in the woods.
My only thought was, “This must be a sanatorium.”
I was given a careful, almost unpleasantly considerate examination by a young doctor. “You’ll need to rest and recuperate here for a while,” he said, pronouncing the words with a smile I could only describe as bashful. When Flatfish, Horiki and Yoshiko were about to go, leaving me there alone, Yoshiko handed me a bundle containing a change of clothes, then silently offered from her handbag the hypodermic needle and the remaining medicine. Is it possible she actually believed after all that it was just an energy-building medicine?
“No,” I said, “I won’t need it any more.”
This was a really rare event. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that it was the one and only time in my life that I refused something offered to me. My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no. I had been intimidated by the fear that if I declined something offered me, a yawning crevice would open between the other per
son’s heart and myself which could never be mended through all eternity. Yet I now refused in a perfectly natural manner the morphine which I had so desperately craved. Was it because I was struck by Yoshiko’s divine ignorance? I wonder if I had not already ceased at that instant to be an addict.
The young doctor with the bashful smile immediately ushered me to a ward. The key grated in the lock behind me. I was in a mental hospital.
My delirious cry after I swallowed the sleeping pills—that I would go where there were no women—had now materialized in a truly uncanny way: my ward held only male lunatics, and the nurses also were men. There was not a single woman.
I was no longer a criminal—I was a lunatic. But no, I was definitely not mad. I have never been mad for even an instant. They say, I know, that most lunatics claim the same thing. What it amounts to is that people who get put into this asylum are crazy, and those who don’t are normal.
God, I ask you, is non-resistance a sin?
I had wept at that incredibly beautiful smile Horiki showed me, and forgetting both prudence and resistance, I had got into the car that took me here. And now I had become a madman. Even if released, I would be forever branded on the forehead with the word “madman,” or perhaps, “reject.”