by Osamu Dazai
Disqualified as a human being.
I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.
I came at the beginning of summer. Through the iron bars over the windows I could see water-lilies blossoming in the little pond of the hospital. Three months later, when the cosmos were beginning to bloom in the garden, my eldest brother and Flatfish came, to my great surprise, to take me out. My brother informed me in his habitually serious, strained voice that my father had died of gastric ulcers at the end of the previous month. “We won’t ask any questions about your past and we’ll see to it that you have no worries as far as your living expenses are concerned. You won’t have to do anything. The only thing we ask is that you leave Tokyo immediately. I know you undoubtedly have all kinds of attachments here, but we want you to begin your convalescence afresh in the country.” He added that I need not worry about my various commitments in Tokyo. Flatfish would take care of them.
I felt as though I could see before my eyes the mountains and rivers back home. I nodded faintly.
A reject, exactly.
The news of my father’s death eviscerated me. He was dead, that familiar, frightening presence who had never left my heart for a split second. I felt as though the vessel of my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.
My brother scrupulously carried out his promise. He bought a house for me at a hot spring on the coast, about four or five hours journey by rail south of the town where I grew up, an unusually warm spot for that part of Japan. The house, a thatch-covered rather ancient-looking structure, stood on the outskirts of the village. It had five rooms. The walls were peeled and the woodwork was so worm-eaten as to seem almost beyond all possibility of repair. My brother also sent to look after me an ugly woman close to sixty with horrible rusty hair.
Some three years have gone by since then. During this interval I have several times been violated in a curious manner by the old servant. Once in a while we quarrel like husband and wife. My chest ailment is sometimes better, sometimes worse; my weight fluctuates accordingly. Occasionally I cough blood. Yesterday I sent Tetsu (the old servant) off to the village drugstore to buy some sleeping pills. She came back with a box rather different in shape from the one I’m accustomed to, but I paid it no particular attention. I took ten pills before I went to bed but was surprised not to be able to sleep at all. Presently I was seized with a cramp in my stomach. I rushed to the toilet three times in succession with terrible diarrhoea. My suspicions were aroused. I examined the box of medicine carefully—it was a laxative.
As I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, a hot water bottle on my stomach, I wondered whether I ought to complain to Tetsu.
I thought of saying, “These aren’t sleeping pills. They’re a laxative!” but I burst out laughing. I think “reject” must be a comic noun. I had taken a laxative in order to go to sleep.
Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.
Everything passes.
That is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.
Everything passes.
This year I am twenty-seven. My hair has become much greyer. Most people would take me for over forty.
EPILOGUE
I never personally met the madman who wrote these notebooks. However, I have a bare acquaintance with the woman who, as far as I can judge, figures in these notebooks as the madam of a bar in Kyobashi. She is a slightly-built, rather sickly-looking woman, with narrow, tilted eyes and a prominent nose. Something hard about her gives you the impression less of a beautiful woman than of a handsome young man. The events described in the notebooks seem to relate mainly to the Tokyo of 1930 or so, but it was not until about 1935, when the Japanese military clique was first beginning to rampage in the open, that friends took me to the bar. I drank highballs there two or three times. I was never able therefore to have the pleasure of meeting the man who wrote the notebooks.
However, this February I visited a friend who was evacuated during the war to Funahashi in Chiba Prefecture. He is an acquaintance from university days, and now teaches at a woman’s college. My purpose in visiting him was to ask his help in arranging the marriage of one of my relatives, but I thought while I was at it, I might buy some fresh sea food to take home to the family. I set off for Funahashi with a rucksack on my back.
Funahashi is a fairly large town facing a muddy bay. My friend had not lived there long, and even though I asked for his house by the street and number, nobody seemed able to tell me the way. It was cold, and the rucksack hurt my shoulders. Attracted by the sound of a record of violin music being played inside a coffee shop, I pushed open the door.
I vaguely remembered having seen the madam. I asked her about herself, and discovered she was in fact the madam of the bar in Kyobashi I had visited ten years before. When this was established, she professed to remember me also. We expressed exaggerated surprise and laughed a great deal. There were many things to discuss even without resorting, as people always did in those days, to questions about each other’s experiences during the air raids.
I said, “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“No, I’m an old woman already. I creak at the joints. You’re the one who really looks young.”
“Don’t be silly. I’ve got three children now. I’ve come today to buy them some sea food.”
We exchanged these and other greetings appropriate to long-separated friends and asked for news of mutual acquaintances. The madam suddenly broke off to ask, in a rather different tone, if by chance I had ever known Yozo. I answered that I never had, whereupon she went inside and brought out three notebooks and three photographs which she handed to me. She said, “Maybe they’ll make good material for a novel.”
I can never write anything when people force material on me, and I was about to return the lot to her without even examining it. The photographs, however, fascinated me, and I decided after all to accept the notebooks. I promised to stop by again on the way back, and asked her if she happened to know where my friend lived. As a fellow newcomer, she knew him. Sometimes, in fact, he even patronized her shop. His house was just a few steps away.
That night after drinking for a while with my friend I decided to spend the night. I became so immersed in reading the notebooks that I didn’t sleep a wink till morning.
The events described took place years ago, but I felt sure that people today would still be quite interested in them. I thought that it would make more sense if I asked some magazine to publish the whole thing as it was, rather than attempt any clumsy improvements.
The only souvenirs of the town I could get for my children were some dried fish. I left my friend’s house with my rucksack still half-empty, and stopped by the coffee shop.
I came to the point at once. “I wonder if I could borrow these notebooks for a while.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Is the man who wrote them still alive?”
“I haven’t any idea. About ten years ago somebody sent me a parcel containing the notebooks and the photographs to my place in Kyobashi. I’m sure it was Yozo who sent it, but he didn’t write his address or even his name on the parcel. It got mixed up with other things during the air raids, but miraculously enough the notebooks were saved. Just the other day I read through them for the first time.”
“Did you cry?”
“No. I didn’t cry ... I just kept thinking that when human beings get that way, they’re no good for anything.”
“It’s been ten years. I suppose he may be dead already. He must have sent the notebooks to you by way of thanks. Some parts are rather exaggerated I can tell, but you obviously suffered a hell of a lot at his hands. If everything written in these notebooks is true, I probably would have wanted to put him in an insane asylum myself if I were his friend.”
“It’s his father’s fault,” she said unemotionally. “The Yozo we knew was
so easy-going and amusing, and if only he hadn’t drunk—no, even though he did drink—he was a good boy, an angel.”
1 The literal translation of the original title Ningen Shikkaku is “Disqualified as a Human Being.” I have elsewhere referred to this same novel as “The Disqualified.”
Copyright © 1958 by New Directions Publishing Corporation
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-9509
(eISBN: 978-0-8112-2007-1)
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published clothbound by New Directions in 1958
First published as New Directions Paperbook 357 in 1973
Published simultaneously in Canada by
Penguin Books Canada Limited
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue. New York 10011
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ALSO BY OSAMU DAZAI
THE SETTING SUN