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AI-Generated Graded Readers
Masaru Uchida, Gifu University

Publication webpage:
https://www1.gifu-u.ac.jp/~masaru/a1/ai-generated_graded_readers.html

Publication date: March 22, 2026

About This Edition

This book is a simplified English adaptation created for extensive reading practice.
The text was translated from Japanese into English and simplified using ChatGPT for intermediate English learners as part of an educational project.

Target reading level: CEFR A2-B1

The adaptation aims to improve readability while preserving the narrative content and spirit of the original work.

Source Text

Original work: Ningen Shikkaku (人間失格)
Author: Dazai Osamu (太宰治)

Source: Aozora Bunko (青空文庫)
https://www.aozora.gr.jp/

Original Japanese text available at:
https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000035/card301.html

The original work is in the public domain in Japan.

Copyright and Use

This simplified English edition is an educational adaptation intended for non-commercial use only.

The source text is provided by Aozora Bunko, a digital library that makes Japanese public domain literature freely available.

For information about Aozora Bunko and its usage policies, see:
https://www.aozora.gr.jp/guide/kijyunn.html

This edition is an AI-assisted translation and simplification prepared for educational purposes.

Disclaimer

This edition is an independent educational adaptation and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Aozora Bunko.

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Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human (Simplified Edition, Adapted and Simplified from Japanese by ChatGPT)

Part 1

Preface

  I have seen three pictures of that man. I still remember them clearly, and even now they give me an uneasy feeling. They did not seem like simple family pictures, and they did not leave an ordinary memory in my mind. Each one showed a different age of his life. Yet all three had something cold, empty, and hard to explain.
  The first picture showed him as a child, perhaps about ten years old. He was standing by a garden pond, and many women and girls were around him. I thought they must have been his sisters, his younger sisters, or his girl cousins. He wore striped hakama, and his head bent a little to the left. On his face there was something that looked like a smile, but I could not call it a true smile.
  A dull person might look at that picture and say, “What a sweet boy.” Such a person might smile politely and see nothing strange there. And yes, perhaps there was a small shadow of ordinary childish prettiness in the face. But anyone with even a little care for beauty would feel something different at once. That person might say quietly, “What an unpleasant child.”
  The more I looked at that face, the worse I felt. It was not warm, open, or innocent. It did not have the soft light that real laughter gives to a child’s face. Instead, it gave me a cold and weakly sick feeling, as if something false had been placed over the child like a thin mask. I felt that if someone looked at it long enough, he would want to turn the picture face down.
  The boy was not truly laughing. I knew that because both his hands were closed into hard fists. A human being does not laugh naturally with both fists tight like that. It was more like the face of a monkey, not the face of a boy who felt joy. The skin of the face was only pulled into ugly lines, and those lines pretended to be a smile. I had never seen such a strange and troubling child’s face before.
  The second picture was even more surprising. The boy had become a student, perhaps in high school, perhaps at the university. He was very handsome, so handsome that many people might stop and stare at him. He wore a student uniform, and a white handkerchief showed from his breast pocket. Sitting in a wicker chair with one leg crossed over the other, he was smiling again.
  This second smile was smoother than the first one. It was not the twisted monkey-like grin of the child in the garden. It looked practiced, almost elegant, as if he had studied how to smile in front of others. But still it was not the smile of a living person. It seemed light like paper, thin like air, and made from the outside rather than born from the inside.
  There was no weight in it. There was no deep feeling of blood, life, tiredness, or real youth. Everything in that face seemed made, arranged, and carefully put in place. No simple word was enough for it. To call it only proud, shallow, soft, or fashionable would not explain it. The longer I looked, the more I felt again that strange fear, as if behind the beauty there stood something dark and ghost-like.
  The third picture was the strangest of all. In it I could not even guess his age. His hair seemed to have some white in it, and he sat in a dirty room whose wall was broken in several places. He was in one corner of that room, holding both hands over a small charcoal brazier. This time he was not smiling. In fact, I could not find any expression on his face at all.
  He looked as if he were already dead and had simply remained sitting there. The room itself almost stayed in the memory more strongly than the man. The broken wall, the small fire, the dark corner—these remained clear to me. But the face of the man did not stay in my mind. It had no force, no mark, no shape that could hold the eye.
  When I closed my eyes after looking at that picture, I could remember the room but not the face. When I opened my eyes and looked again, I felt no relief of recognition. There was no moment of, “Ah, yes, now I remember him.” It was only dull, empty, and unpleasant. I felt almost angry at the face because it refused to remain in my memory as a human face should.
  Even the face of a dying person usually keeps some sign of feeling. Even a face near death often has pain, pride, fear, peace, or at least some shadow of a last thought. But this face had none of those things. It was as if someone had taken an ordinary human body and fixed onto it the head of some tired animal. It made the heart grow cold.
  I have seen many faces in my life. I have seen the cheerful faces of children, the proud faces of students, and the tired faces of old men. I have seen faces that were beautiful, foolish, cruel, honest, and sad. Yet I had never seen a face like that man’s face. In all three pictures, from first to last, there was something that made me feel that he had never fully stood inside the human world.
  The child’s false smile, the young man’s beautiful but empty smile, and the older man’s dead, blank face seemed joined together by one dark line. It was as if the same hidden trouble moved under all three pictures, growing quieter and deeper with time. In the first picture it twisted the mouth. In the second it made beauty feel false. In the third it erased even the last sign of life.
  That is why I could not forget those three pictures. They were not merely records of a life from childhood to youth and then to ruin. They were like three windows, and through each one I saw the same lonely shadow. I did not yet know the whole story of the man. But from those three faces alone, I felt that his life had moved under a heavy cloud from the beginning.

Part 2

First Notebook

  I have lived a life full of shame. Even now, I do not understand what people mean by a human life. I was born in the country in the north, and when I was small, many ordinary things seemed strange to me. When I first saw a train station bridge, I thought it was made only for fun. I climbed up and down it happily, as if it were part of a fine game from a foreign land. Much later, I learned that it was only a useful thing for people to cross the tracks, and my joy died at once.
  When I was a child, I saw pictures of an underground railway in books. I thought that, too, must be a kind of play. I believed people went under the ground because it was more amusing than riding on the road above. The same thing happened with other parts of life. Even the covers of bedding and pillows seemed to me like useless decoration, and only when I was almost twenty did I understand that such things had a plain use. Each time I learned such a fact, I felt dark and sad, as if the world had grown smaller.
  There was another thing I could never understand. I did not know what hunger was. This did not mean that I grew up in comfort and so never lacked food. The trouble was stranger than that. Even when my stomach was empty, I did not know it. When I came home from school, people around me would say, “You must be hungry. Here, have some sweet beans, or cake, or bread.” Then I would use my usual wish to please others and say softly, “Yes, I am hungry,” while putting a few sweet beans into my mouth, though I still did not know what that feeling was.
  Of course I ate. I ate rare food, fine food, and food that was put before me when I visited other houses. Yet I can hardly remember ever eating because hunger drove me to it. The most painful time of day in my childhood was the family meal in my own house. We were a large country family, and each person had a tray. Those trays were set in two lines in a dim room, and I, the youngest child, sat at the lowest place while everyone ate in silence.
  That room filled me with fear. At noon, when more than ten people bent over their food without speaking, I felt cold to the bone. The dishes were plain and almost always the same, for ours was an old-fashioned house. Nothing rare or bright appeared there. I sat in that dark room, lifting small amounts of rice to my mouth, and I wondered why human beings had to gather three times every day and do this solemn act. Sometimes I even thought that eating must be a sad ceremony, like a silent prayer to the hidden spirits moving through the house.
  When people said, “If you do not eat, you die,” the words sounded to me like a cruel threat. Even now that idea still feels half like a superstition to me. People said that because one must eat, one must work, and because one must work, one must live in a certain way. But such talk never became clear inside my mind. I only felt fear. It seemed that everyone else had received a rule book for human life, and I alone had been left without one.
  Because of this, I could never believe that my idea of happiness was the same as other people’s. Since I was very young, others often called me a lucky child. Yet I often felt that I was living in a kind of hell. I even thought that if the ten sorrows inside me were given one by one to my neighbors, any one of them might be enough to kill a person. But then I would wonder if their pain was greater than mine in some practical way that I could not see. I could not tell what others truly suffered from, or what made them rise each day and continue living.
  I thought about these things too much. Did people walk down the road thinking only about money, or food, or tomorrow’s work? Did they sleep deeply at night and wake fresh in the morning? Did they speak easily because words came to them in a natural way? I did not know. The more I tried to understand, the more alone I felt. In the end I could hardly speak to other people at all, because I never knew what should be said.
  So I thought of a way to live. That way was clowning. It was my last attempt to win some small place among human beings, though I was terribly afraid of them. I smiled all the time, but inside I was sweating with fear. With my family, too, I had already become skillful at this art. Without noticing when it began, I had become a child who never said one true thing.
  When I look at old family pictures now, I see it clearly. All the others sit or stand with serious faces, but I alone twist my face in a strange way and grin. Even that was part of my small and sad performance. I never answered back when anyone in the family scolded me. A few harsh words struck me like thunder, and I would think, “They are right. This must be the truth of the human world, and I am the one who cannot follow it.” So I accepted blame in silence and trembled inwardly like a person near madness.
  Angry faces were the worst of all. In them I saw something more frightening than a lion, a crocodile, or a dragon. An ordinary person might look calm and gentle, like a cow resting in a field, and then suddenly reveal a terrible nature in a burst of anger. When I saw that change, my whole body shook. I began to think that perhaps this hidden violence was one of the powers needed to live as a human being. If that was true, then I myself had no hope.
  Little by little I completed myself as a clown. I hid my sadness and my nerves in the deepest part of my chest and showed only easy laughter. “It is enough if they laugh,” I told myself. “Then perhaps they will forgive me for standing outside their lives.” I joked not only for my family but also for the servants, who seemed even harder for me to understand. One summer I walked through the hall in a light cotton robe with what looked like a red wool sweater under it, and the whole house laughed. In truth I had only tied my sister’s leggings around my arms and let them show at the sleeves, but even my elder brother, who rarely laughed, cried out warmly, “Leaf, that does not suit you at all.”
  My father often stayed in Tokyo and came back with many gifts. One evening before such a trip, he gathered all the children in the guest room and asked each of us what we wanted. He wrote every answer in a notebook. That alone was unusual, for he was not a man who often spoke closely with his children. Then he turned to me and said, “What about you, Yōzō?” and at once I could say nothing.
  When someone asked what I wanted, I suddenly wanted nothing. At the same time, I could never refuse what another person wanted to give me, even if I disliked it. That weakness later became one of the great causes of my shameful life. Seeing me stand there in silence, my father’s face darkened a little. Then he said, “Would a book do? Or in Asakusa I saw a lion-dance mask, just the right size for a child.” My elder brother answered for me and said, “A book is best,” and my father shut the notebook with a flat sound.
  I thought at once, “I have failed. I have made Father angry.” That night I lay awake in fear, then crept out from my bed and went to the guest room. I opened the drawer where he had put the notebook, found the page with the children’s requests, licked the pencil tip, and wrote, “Lion dance.” I did not want the mask at all. In truth I would rather have had the book. But I had felt that Father himself wished to buy me the mask, and I risked that midnight act only to follow his hidden wish and win back his good mood.
  The plan succeeded better than I had hoped. After returning from Tokyo, Father spoke loudly to my mother while I listened from the children’s room. “At the toy shop in Nakamise,” he said, “I opened my notebook and found ‘Lion dance’ written there. It was not my writing. Then I understood. It was Yōzō’s trick. He stood there smiling and said nothing, but later he wanted it so badly that he secretly wrote it down. What a strange boy he is. Why did he not say so at first? I laughed right there in front of the shop. Call him here at once.” By pleasing him in that crooked way, I had escaped danger again. That, too, was part of my clown’s training.
  I used the same methods elsewhere. I gathered the servants in a Western-style room, made one of them strike the piano keys wildly, and danced like an Indian to the noise until everyone burst into laughter. At school I was also careful never to be admired in a serious way. I could do the lessons well, but I drew funny pictures, wrote comic pieces, and made the boys laugh during breaks. I wanted them to think of me as a harmless little joker, not as a person to respect. And so, for a while, I succeeded in slipping away from their respect by making myself into a joke.

Part 3

  But there was one place where my clowning brought a danger of its own. That place was school. There, people had begun to respect me. The idea of being respected frightened me almost more than being hated. To me, respect meant this: I had fooled everyone, but one person somewhere saw the truth, and one day that person would expose me and destroy me with a shame worse than death.
  I had not won this respect because my family was rich. I had won it because I was what people call a clever boy. I was often sick as a child and sometimes missed school for a month, or two months, or even nearly a whole year. Yet when I returned, rode to school in a rickshaw, and took the tests, I somehow did better than the other boys. Even when I was healthy, I hardly studied at all.
  During lessons I drew cartoons. During breaks I showed them to the other boys and explained them in funny ways until they laughed. In composition class I wrote nothing but comic stories, and even when teachers warned me, I did not stop. I already knew that some of them secretly enjoyed those pieces. Their warnings were only part of the game.
  One day I wrote about a foolish thing that had happened when I was traveling to Tokyo with my mother by train. I wrote it in a very sad style because I was sure the teacher would laugh more that way. After handing it in, I quietly followed him toward the teachers’ room. The moment he left the classroom, he picked out my paper, began to read, smiled to himself, and at last burst into loud laughter in front of the other teachers.
  I watched that scene with deep satisfaction. It meant I had succeeded. I had escaped from the danger of admiration and moved into the safer place of being only a funny little fellow. My report cards showed perfect marks in all my subjects, but my conduct mark was lower, sometimes only six or seven. That, too, made people laugh at home, and so it protected me.
  Yet my true nature was nothing like that cheerful image. During those years, I had already suffered ugly things at the hands of servants in the house. Now I think such acts against a child are among the lowest and cruelest of human crimes. But at the time I endured them in silence. I even thought, in a weak and tired way, that I had seen one more part of what human beings are.
  If I had been in the habit of telling the truth, I might have spoken to my father or mother without shame. But I could not fully understand even them, and so I could not trust them. To complain to people seemed useless to me. Whether I told my parents, a policeman, or even the government, I believed the same thing would happen in the end: the stronger person, the person who knew how to speak well in the world, would win.
  So I said nothing. I kept enduring, and I kept playing the clown. Some people may laugh at this and say that I am talking about a grand distrust of mankind. They may ask when I became a holy man or a Christian. But I do not think distrust of people leads straight to religion. Human beings live every day inside distrust, and still they go on smiling and doing their business.
  I remember one small example from those early years. A famous man from my father’s political party came to our town to give a speech, and I went with the servants to hear him. The hall was full, and I saw many faces of people who were friendly with my father. They clapped loudly and looked pleased. But when the meeting ended and everyone walked home through the snowy night, those same people spoke bitterly about the speech, saying it had been dull and foolish.
  Some of them then came straight to our house. They entered the guest room, sat before my father, and told him with shining faces that the meeting had been a great success. Even the servants, who had mocked it all the way home, told my mother that it had been very interesting. Such things happened everywhere. People deceived one another in bright, clean, cheerful ways, and often seemed not even to notice that they were doing it.
  It was not the deception itself that troubled me most. I, too, was deceiving people from morning to night with my clowning. I was not especially interested in moral lessons about honesty and virtue. What I could not understand was something else: how people could deceive and be deceived, and yet remain calm, clear, and full of confidence. If someone had explained that secret to me, I think I would not have feared people so much.
  I think now that this is why I told no one what had been done to me. It was not only distrust. It was also because I felt that people had already closed the shell of trust against me. Even my own father and mother sometimes showed me sides of themselves I could not read at all. I had no place where I could lay down the truth and believe it would be received simply as truth.
  And perhaps that silent loneliness gave off a smell of its own. Women, by instinct, seemed later to sense it. Looking back, I think that hidden loneliness became one of the reasons many women were drawn toward me or tried to use me. Put in the simplest way, I became a man who could keep a woman’s secret.

Part 4

Second Notebook

  My middle-school years began in a place very near the sea. On the shore stood more than twenty large mountain cherry trees with black trunks. When the new school year began, those trees opened their rich flowers against the blue sea, and their young leaves shone with a sticky brown color. When the wind grew strong, the petals flew out over the water, covered the waves, and then came back to the sand again. The schoolyard itself was almost part of that beach.
  I entered that school somehow, though I had hardly prepared for the examination. On the cap badge and on the buttons of the uniform there was also a cherry flower. Near the school lived a family who were distant relations of ours, and because of that my father chose the school for me. I stayed in their house and went to school from there. Since the school was very close, I sometimes waited until the morning bell rang and then ran there at the last minute.
  For the first time in my life, I was living away from my own home. Strangely, that new place felt easier than the town where I had been born. Perhaps that was because by then my clowning had become much more skillful, and I no longer needed to work so hard to deceive people. But I think there was another reason too. It is always harder to act before one’s own family than before strangers.
  Even a great actor, I think, would find it hardest to perform in his hometown while all his relatives sat close by and watched him. Yet I had performed before my family and had even done it with some success. Once I had learned that, it was not so hard to perform before other people. So at this new school I seemed lively and easy. In truth, the fear of human beings still moved inside me just as strongly as before.
  In the classroom I made the boys laugh every day. Even the teachers laughed, though they sometimes said, “This would be a very good class if only Ōba were not in it.” I could even make the military instructor smile, though he usually shouted like thunder. Little by little I began to feel some relief. I thought I had hidden my true self completely at last.
  Then, just when I had begun to feel safe, I was struck from behind. The one who struck me was the very last person I would have feared. He was a weak, thin boy with a dull face and pale skin. His jacket sleeves were too long for him, as if they had once belonged to his father. He was poor at lessons, poor at exercise, and almost always sat out during physical training.
  One day in gymnastics class we were practicing on the horizontal bar. As usual, I made a false performance. I put on a very serious face, jumped hard toward the bar, and then failed in a foolish way on purpose, falling forward into the sand so that everyone would laugh. The boys laughed exactly as I had hoped. I stood up smiling and brushed off the dust.
  Just then that boy came close behind me. His name, I think, was Takeichi. In a low voice he touched my back and said only two words. “On purpose. On purpose.” At that moment I felt the whole world burst into flames. I had never imagined that anyone, and especially Takeichi, would see through me so exactly.
  From that day on I lived in terror. Outwardly I went on making jokes and amusing the class, but inside I was full of dread. At any moment, I thought, Takeichi might tell the others that all my clowning was a trick. I wanted to stay beside him all day and all night so that he would not speak. If I could not make him my friend, I thought, then perhaps I could only pray for his death.
  Still, I did not want to kill him. I have often wished that someone would kill me, but I have never wished to kill another person. I believed that would only give happiness to the one I feared. So I tried a different way. I smiled at him gently, spoke sweetly, and often invited him to come to the house where I was staying.
  At first he only looked at me with empty eyes and said nothing. Then one afternoon, in early summer, a sudden white rain began to fall after school. The students did not know how to go home, but my lodgings were close. As I was about to run out, I saw Takeichi standing sadly by the shoe boxes. I took his hand and said, “Come with me. I will lend you an umbrella.” Then I pulled him through the rain and brought him to my house.
  In that house lived an aunt who was past fifty, an older daughter of about thirty with glasses and a weak body, and a younger daughter called Secchan, who had just finished girls’ school. The older one, whom I called Ane-sa like the others in the house, had once married and then returned home. Downstairs there was a small shop that sold paper and sports goods. The family also lived on rent from several row houses their dead father had left behind.
  As soon as we reached my room, Takeichi said, “My ears hurt.” When I looked, I saw that both ears were full of sickness, and the wet matter was almost flowing out. I cried out in an exaggerated way and said, “This is bad. I am sorry. I dragged you through the rain.” Then I went downstairs, brought back cotton and alcohol, laid his head on my lap, and cleaned his ears as carefully as I could.
  That kindness was not pure. I was trying to tie him to me and keep my secret safe. But Takeichi did not seem to notice. While lying there with his head on my knees, he said, “You will be loved by women.” I smiled and said nothing. Yet his foolish little compliment remained in my heart, and later I learned that it was less foolish than it sounded.
  Women were even harder for me to understand than men. Since childhood I had been surrounded by sisters, girl cousins, maids, and other women, and so I had grown up among them. Yet I had never once felt easy with them. To deal with women was like walking on very thin ice. One wrong step could wound me in a way that did not show on the outside but hurt badly within.
  I had already noticed many strange things about them. A woman could pull a person close and then push him away. She could treat him coldly before others and then hold him tightly when no one was watching. She could sleep like a dead person. She could laugh without end. Women, it seemed to me, rested more deeply than men inside clowning, and they wanted more of it, as if they could never get enough.
  The older daughter and Secchan soon began to come up to my room whenever they had free time. Each time they appeared at the door, I jumped inside with alarm. They would ask, “Are you studying?” and I would answer, “No,” trying to sound calm. Then they would come in anyway, and I would prepare myself once more to perform.

Part 5

  The moment those two women came into my room, I had to begin my work again. “Are you studying?” they would ask, and I would smile, close my book, and answer, “No, not at all.” Then, before I had even thought, funny stories would begin to come out of my mouth. I spoke about the teachers, about some foolish thing at school, about boys who had fallen down or spoken in a strange way. None of it came from my heart. It was only my clowning, smooth and ready, moving ahead of me.
  Women, I felt, rested in clowning even more than men did. Men laughed, but after a while they stopped, and I also knew that if I joked too long with men, I would fail. So with them I tried to stop at the right time. Women were different. They wanted more and more. They did not seem to know when enough was enough. They laughed with real pleasure, and when they laughed they demanded another joke, and then another, until I felt completely tired.
  One evening Secchan came to my room with Ane-sa, and after making me perform for some time, she suddenly said, “Put on some glasses.” She always spoke in a rough, commanding way, as if I were her servant. I asked, “Why?” and she answered only, “Never mind. Put them on. Borrow Ane-sa’s glasses.” So I obeyed at once, as a clown must.
  The moment I put on the glasses, both sisters fell over with laughter. “You look exactly the same,” they cried. “Exactly like Lloyd!” At that time a foreign comic actor named Harold Lloyd was very popular in Japan. I stood up, raised one hand, and began a foolish speech as if I were greeting my Japanese fans. That made them laugh even more, and I felt my strange little place in that house grow firmer.
  After that, whenever a Harold Lloyd film came to the town theater, I went to see it. I watched his face carefully. I studied the way he moved, the way he opened his eyes, the way he stood, the small timing of his expressions. I was not studying art. I was studying safety. Anything that could make people laugh, anything that could keep them from looking straight into me, had value for me.
  One autumn night I was lying down, reading a book, when Ane-sa flew into the room like a bird. She threw herself suddenly on top of my quilt and began to cry. “You will help me, won’t you?” she said. “That is it, isn’t it? We should leave this house together. Help me. Please help me.” She kept saying such things and weeping in a violent way that might have shocked another boy.
  But to me, strangely, it did not feel new. Women had shown me such sudden changes before. So I was not deeply surprised, and in fact I felt a little bored by the common and empty nature of her words. I quietly slipped out from under the quilt, took a persimmon from the desk, peeled it, and handed her a piece. She ate it while still crying. Then, after a few moments, she asked in a calmer voice, “Do you have any interesting book? Lend me one.”
  I went to my shelf and gave her Sōseki’s I Am a Cat. “Thank you for the food,” she said with a shy smile, and then she left the room. It was not only Ane-sa. Again and again I felt that women were impossible to understand. To think about what they wanted, what they feared, what kind of feeling they truly lived by, seemed to me more difficult and more unpleasant than trying to understand the thoughts of a worm under the earth.
  There was only one small rule I had learned from experience. When a woman suddenly began to cry, if you gave her something sweet, she often became calm again. That was not wisdom. It was only one more tired little fact I had gathered in my fearful life among people. Secchan, too, gave me many such facts. She even brought her school friends to my room, and I had to make all of them laugh in the same fair and foolish way.
  Yet when those friends had gone home, Secchan would always speak badly of them. “That girl is bad,” she would say. “You must be careful of her.” I used to think that if she disliked them so much, she should not bring them at all. But she kept bringing them, and because of her, almost all the visitors to my room became girls and women. Still, this was not yet the meaning of Takeichi’s foolish prophecy that I would be loved by women. At that time I was nothing more than the Harold Lloyd of northern Japan.
  The ugly truth in Takeichi’s words had not yet shown itself. It would rise years later in a much darker shape. But Takeichi gave me another gift, one even more important. One day he came to my room carrying a color picture and showed it to me with great pride. “This is a ghost picture,” he said. I looked at it and felt a shock run through me.
  I knew at once that it was only a self-portrait by Van Gogh. In those days even boys in the country had seen printed pictures of Western painters such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Renoir. I had seen many of them myself and had liked the strong colors and the strange brushwork. But I had never thought of such a picture as a ghost. That word, coming from Takeichi, opened a new door in me.
  To test him, I took out a book of Modigliani and showed him a picture of a naked woman with skin like burned copper. “What about this?” I asked. “Is this a ghost too?” Takeichi opened his eyes wide and cried, “Amazing. It looks like a horse from hell.” “So this too is a ghost?” I asked. “I want to draw ghost pictures like this,” he said. And at that moment I felt as if my future road had been decided.
  I thought then of the painters who had been wounded by human beings, frightened by them, pushed to the edge by them, until at last they began to see monsters even in bright daytime. Perhaps they had not hidden that fear by clowning, as I did. Perhaps they had painted exactly what they saw, without shame, without trying to please anyone. “I will draw them too,” I said in a low voice. “I will draw ghost pictures. I will draw horses from hell.” I was trembling with excitement.
  Since primary school I had loved pictures, both looking at them and drawing them. But the pictures I drew were not praised as highly as my funny compositions. My school essays were only clowning to me, and teachers laughed at them. My drawings were different. Even in my childish way I tried harder with them. Yet when I followed the pretty style of the school examples or the fashionable painters, what I made looked flat and useless, like colored paper.
  Takeichi’s foolish but powerful words made me see my mistake. To try only to paint beautiful things beautifully—that was too soft, too simple, too weak. Real painters, I thought, could take even ugly things and still feel the joy of expression. They did not depend on what others expected. Keeping this new secret hidden from the women who came to my room, I began little by little to work on self-portraits.
  The picture that came out shocked even me. It was dark, miserable, and terrible. Yet I secretly told myself that this must be the true face hidden under all my laughter and jokes. Outwardly I smiled and made others laugh, but inwardly I was carrying a heart like that picture. Even so, I could not show it to anyone except Takeichi. If others saw it, they might suddenly become careful around me, or worse, they might think it was only another new trick and laugh at it. That would have hurt more than anything.
  So I hid the picture deep in the closet. In school drawing class I continued to make ordinary pretty pictures in the old safe way. But for Takeichi alone I showed my secret paintings, and he praised them warmly. I made another, then another. Then he gave me his second prophecy. “You will become a great painter,” he said. With those two prophecies cut into me by that foolish boy—one that women would gather around me, and one that I would become a great artist—I went on at last toward Tokyo.

Part 6

  Marked by Takeichi’s two prophecies, I at last came to Tokyo. I wanted to enter an art school, but my father had long ago decided on another road for me. He meant to send me to higher school and then make me a government official. Since I had no power to answer back, I obeyed him vaguely, as I obeyed everything. I left the middle school by the sea before the final year, took the examination for a higher school in Tokyo, and passed.
  I entered the dormitory at once, but I could not bear it there. The dirt, the roughness, and the heavy air of group life exhausted me almost at once. To hear words such as youth, pride, and school spirit gave me a chill, and I felt that the classroom and the dormitory were both full of twisted desire and noisy false health. My clowning, which had served me so well before, was useless there. So I obtained a doctor’s paper saying that I had a lung illness, left the dormitory, and moved into my father’s house in Sakuragichō, Ueno.
  My father himself stayed there only one or two weeks a month when there was no session of the assembly, so most of the time the large house held only an old caretaker couple and me. I often skipped school, yet I had no wish to go sightseeing in Tokyo. I did not visit the famous shrines, statues, or graves that people speak of. I stayed in the house, read books, and drew pictures. When my father was in town, I hurried out each morning as if going to school, but sometimes I went instead to a painter’s studio in Sendagi and practiced drawing for three or four hours.
  Even after I left the dormitory, the school itself never became easier. When I sat in class, I felt like a stranger, almost like an auditor who did not belong there. Perhaps that feeling was only my own wounded pride, but it made me more and more unwilling to attend. Through primary school, middle school, and higher school, I never once understood what people meant by love of one’s school. I never even tried to learn a school song.
  At the drawing studio I met a man who taught me many things at once: alcohol, cigarettes, prostitutes, pawnshops, and left-wing politics. It was a strange set of lessons, but that is exactly how it happened. His name was Horiki Masao. He was six years older than I was, born in the lower part of Tokyo, and already out of a private art school. We had never spoken before when he came to me one day and said, “Can you lend me five yen?”
  I was so surprised that I handed it to him at once. “Good,” he said. “Let us drink. I will treat you with your own money.” Then he pulled me into a café near the studio. He had a dark, handsome face, wore a proper jacket and tie, and kept his hair smooth with pomade, parted exactly in the middle. I sat there frightened, smiling that same embarrassed smile of mine, but after two or three glasses of beer I felt a strange lightness, as if some iron band around my chest had loosened.
  Horiki said art schools were useless and shouted about nature and feeling with a seriousness that seemed silly to me. I did not respect him. I thought he was probably a bad painter and a foolish man. Still, I also thought he might be useful as a companion in play, and on that point I was right. He was the first real city loafer I had ever known, and though his form was different from mine, he too seemed cut off from ordinary human life.
  As I went about with him, I discovered how helpless I had been in Tokyo by myself. I was afraid of tram conductors, afraid of the women standing on the red-carpeted stairs at the theater entrance, afraid of waiters standing quietly behind me, waiting for my plate to empty, and above all afraid of paying money. At the moment of handing over coins, I would become dizzy with shame and tension, and sometimes I forgot even to take my change or the thing I had bought. Alone, I could hardly walk the city at all. That was one reason I had stayed shut inside the house like a useless invalid.
  But when I handed my purse to Horiki and walked beside him, all that fear grew much smaller. He knew how to bargain, how to choose the cheapest way to travel, and how to spend very little while still making an evening seem full. He avoided expensive taxis, used trams and buses cleverly, and even taught me where one could drink cheaply after dawn or eat nourishing food from a street stall. He knew the cheapest liquor that would make one drunk quickly. Most important of all, he never once let the business of paying become frightening for me.
  Another comfort was that Horiki talked without end. He ignored the thoughts of the listener and poured out his own words like a river. Because of that, I was saved from the silence I had always feared between two people. In the past I had used clowning to fill such silence, speaking desperately because I could not bear the pause. Now Horiki did that work for me without knowing it, and all I had to do was smile now and then and say, “Surely not,” or something like that.
  Before long I understood that drink, tobacco, and prostitutes were all very useful weapons against human fear. Even if the peace they gave lasted only a little while, it was real enough to make me hungry for more. I began to think I would not regret selling everything I owned if only I could keep those comforts near me. Prostitutes did not look human to me in the ordinary sense. They did not look like women from whom I had to hide, but rather like idiots or mad people, and in their arms I could sleep deeply and without fear.
  They showed me a kind of natural kindness that had no plan behind it. It was not the sharp, watching kindness of ordinary society. It was the kindness of people who might never see me again and did not care to trap me in any future. Sometimes, in those nights, I thought I saw a saintly light around them, like the soft halo in old Christian pictures. Yet while I went to them only to escape fear and rest for a few hours, some vulgar extra thing began to cling to me.
  Horiki was the first to point it out. He said that I had become skillful with women, and though he spoke half in jest, his words struck me like a dirty stain suddenly shown in a mirror. I remembered awkward letters from girls, small signs from women in shops and cafés, and the strange way some women seemed to move toward me even when I had done nothing. Because I was so passive, nothing serious had happened from any of these signs. Still, I could not deny that some shameful smell, some false dream-making atmosphere, had begun to hang about me. After Horiki spoke of it, even my visits to prostitutes lost some of their old comfort.
  Then Horiki, out of fashion rather than conviction, took me one day to a secret left-wing study group. There I was introduced to comrades, forced to buy a pamphlet, and made to listen to a lecture on Marxist economics from an ugly young man sitting in the best seat. Everything he said seemed reasonable enough, but it did not touch the deeper fear I carried. Human beings, I felt, were ruled not only by money but by something darker, more foolish, more like a ghost story. Even so, I went to every meeting. I liked the people there, though not for the reasons they imagined.
  The hidden, illegal side of their world gave me a strange comfort. The lawful world seemed colder and more frightening, as if it were built from rules I could never understand. To sit among these secret people, even if they were serious over simple matters, felt easier than sitting among proper men in the open light. I joked, relaxed the room, ran their little errands, and became rather popular among them. Around the same time, my father decided to sell the house in Sakuragichō, and I moved to a dark old boarding house in Morikawa-chō. There, for the first time, I had to live on a fixed monthly sum, and I failed at once.
  The money vanished in two or three days. Following Horiki’s lessons, I began to visit pawnshops, and still I was always short of cash. I could not endure being alone in that boarding-house room. I was sure that someone would attack me if I stayed there quietly too long, so I ran out into the streets, helped the underground group, wandered with Horiki, drank cheap liquor, and little by little abandoned both my studies and my painting. By November of my second year, the errands from the movement had grown too heavy, my body could no longer keep up, and I began to think only of escape. At last I ran from all of it, and decided to die.

Part 7

  At that time, three women were especially close to me. One was the daughter of the boarding house where I lived. After I came back from those secret errands, tired enough to fall on the bed without supper, she would come quietly into my room with writing paper and a fountain pen. “I am sorry,” she would say. “Downstairs the little ones are noisy, and I cannot write there.” Then she would sit at my desk for more than an hour, pretending to write some long letter.
  I should have kept silent and let her do as she pleased. But she always looked as if she wanted me to say something, and I was a man trained from childhood to serve others through clowning. So I forced my tired body upright, lit a cigarette, and said foolish things. “There was once a man who got a love letter from a woman and became so happy that he heated the bath at once,” I said. “That was you, surely,” she answered. “No,” I said. “At most I once heated milk and drank it.” She laughed and asked to see the letter she believed I had received, and I played along though I wished only for sleep.
  Then, because I wanted her gone, I would give her an errand. “Could you go to the pharmacy on the tram street and buy me some sleeping medicine?” I would say. “I am too tired, and my face burns, but I cannot sleep.” She would rise gladly at once and say, “That is all right. You need not give me money.” I already knew one fact about women: being asked to do something for a man often pleased them more than flattery.
  The second woman was a student from the women’s higher school, one of the so-called comrades from the movement. I had to see her almost every day because of party work. Even after our business was over, she stayed beside me and bought me things for no reason. “Think of me as your real older sister,” she would say in a tone that made me shiver inwardly. I answered with a sad little smile, “I do,” only because I feared anger and wanted to keep the situation calm.
  She was not beautiful, and the things she bought me were always tasteless. I often gave them away at once. Yet I served her, joked for her, smiled for her, and tried by every weak method to keep her in a good mood. One summer night she would not leave me, so in a dark street I kissed her only to make her go home. Instead, she went half mad with excitement, called a car, and took me to a secret office room used by their group, where there was noisy trouble until morning. “A fine sort of sister,” I thought bitterly.
  The third woman was different. She was a café girl in Ginza, and I had met her only once. Even so, I felt tied to her by a kind of debt, and the feeling frightened me. By then I could ride the tram alone and even enter cafés by myself, though always with the same nervous smile. One cold autumn night I went into a large café in Ginza with only ten yen in my pocket and said to the woman who came to my table, “I have only ten yen, so keep that in mind.” She answered in a western accent, “Do not worry,” and for some reason those words calmed me at once.
  Her name, I think, was Tsuneko, though even now I am not fully sure. With her I did not feel the need to clown so much. I drank quietly and showed her my dark, silent self. Later, in the small room she rented over a carpenter’s place in Honjo, she told me in a flat way about her life: her husband was in prison for fraud, she was from Hiroshima, and she had been carrying things to the prison every day but would stop. Usually women’s life stories meant nothing to me, but with her I felt something different. Around her body there seemed to move a cold lonely air that matched my own.
  That night was, for me, a happy night. I use that large word only this once. But in the morning I became frightened by happiness itself. Before it could wound me, I wanted to run away. So I joked in the old foolish way. “People misunderstand the saying that when money ends, love ends,” I told her. “It does not mean the woman leaves because the money is gone. It means the man grows weak, loses heart, becomes half mad, and throws the woman away first.” She laughed, and I fled before the warmth between us could grow.
  A month passed. Then, late in November, I was drinking cheap liquor with Horiki at a stall in Kanda. He wanted to keep drinking though we had no money at all. Drunk and reckless, I said, “All right, I will take you to a land of dreams, a place of wine and women.” “A café?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “Then let us go,” he cried. So we rode to Ginza and entered that great café almost penniless, trusting only in Tsuneko.
  The moment we sat down, Tsuneko and another girl came running to us. The other girl sat by me, and Tsuneko dropped beside Horiki. He had already said many times on the tram, “I am starving for women tonight. I will kiss the girl who sits by me.” I had answered weakly that I did not care, because I hated conflict. Yet when I saw Tsuneko beside him, I was startled. It was not jealousy. It was pity. I thought, “If Horiki dirties her, then this is the end.”
  Horiki looked Tsuneko up and down, twisted his mouth, and then said with disgust, “Even I cannot kiss such a poor-looking woman.” He folded his arms and laughed at her. I leaned close and said to Tsuneko, “Bring us more drink. We have no money.” Then I drank and drank until I lost myself completely. Horiki’s cruel words struck me like lightning, because from the eyes of ordinary people Tsuneko truly was only a shabby, tired, poor woman. Yet at that very moment, seeing her so insulted, I felt for the first time in my life the weak beginning of real love.
  When I woke, Tsuneko was sitting by my pillow in her room. “You joked that when money ends, love ends,” she said. “I thought it was a joke, but perhaps you meant it. Would it still be no good if I earned money for us?” “No,” I answered. We lay down again, and near dawn she first spoke the word “death.” She too seemed tired of life, and I myself was worn out by fear of the world, lack of money, the movement, women, school, everything. So I agreed lightly. Even then, however, there was still some element of play in my heart. I had not yet truly decided to die.
  The next morning we wandered through the Asakusa entertainment quarter and went into a café for milk. “You pay,” she said. I stood up, took out my purse, opened it, and found only three copper coins. In that instant I saw clearly my room at the boarding house, empty now except for my student uniform and bedding, every other thing already pawned. I saw that I had nothing left in the world except the clothes I wore. Tsuneko looked into my purse and said innocently, “Only that much?” Those words cut me to the bone. Because I loved her, her voice hurt me more than anything. At that moment I truly decided to die.
  That night we went to Kamakura. Before entering the sea, Tsuneko untied her sash and folded it carefully on a rock. “I borrowed this from a friend at the café,” she said. I took off my coat and placed it there too. Then we went into the water together. Tsuneko died. I alone was saved.
  Because I was a student and my father’s name still meant something, the case became a large story in the newspapers. I was taken to a hospital by the shore, and a relative came from home to manage things. He told me that my whole family was in a rage and that from now on I might as well think of myself as cut off from them forever. But I hardly cared. I only cried for Tsuneko. Of all the women I had known, that poor, shabby Tsuneko was the only one I had loved.
  At the hospital they found a weakness in my left lung, and this helped me in an unexpected way. Later I was taken from the hospital to the police on the charge of helping in a suicide, but there they treated me as a sick man and put me in a protected room. In the night an old policeman opened the door softly and said, “Cold, are you? Come warm yourself here.” I went into his room and sat by the brazier. He asked, “You still miss the woman who died, do you not?” I answered in a thin voice, “Yes.” Then, growing grand, he began to ask indecent questions as if he were the true investigator.
  I understood his game at once. I could have refused to answer, but instead I performed for him perfectly, as though my whole fate lay in his hands. The next morning I was taken before the chief, a younger man with a darker face. The moment I entered he said, “What a handsome fellow. You are not to blame. Your mother is to blame for giving birth to such a handsome boy.” Those words did not flatter me. They made me feel like some ugly creature marked by shame.
  He noticed blood on my handkerchief and said I must make my body stronger. In truth the blood had come not from my lungs but from a small sore below my ear that I had touched too much. Still, I thought it might be useful to let them believe I was coughing blood, so I bowed and said nothing. Later, before the prosecutor, I tried the same trick once more and added two false coughs for effect. He looked at me with a quiet smile and said only, “Is that true?” I cannot describe the shame of that moment. Only once before in my life had I felt such total failure in my acting.
  In the end I was not prosecuted. Yet I felt no joy. I sat on a bench in the waiting room of the prosecutor’s office and waited for my guarantor, a dealer in old things whom my family called Flatfish, to come and take charge of me. Through the high window behind me I could see the evening sky, red with sunset. Seagulls were flying there in shapes like the written character for woman.

Part 8

Third Notebook

  Because of the Kamakura incident, I was driven out of the higher school. After that I lived in a tiny upstairs room in Flatfish’s house. It was only three mats wide, and the life there felt smaller still. Money came from home in very small amounts, but never to me directly. It seemed that my brothers sent it in secret, hiding the matter even from my father.
  My connection with home was almost completely cut. Flatfish was always in a bad mood, and no matter how politely I smiled, he did not smile back. The change in him shocked me. I had not known that a person could turn so quickly, almost as if he had turned over his hand. Again and again he told me only one thing: I must not go out.
  He seemed to believe that I might kill myself if I were left alone outside. Perhaps he imagined that I would follow Tsuneko into the sea. But in that house even the wish to die had grown weak. I could not drink, I could not smoke, and from morning until night I sat under the kotatsu reading old magazines and doing nothing at all. A man living in that dull way does not have much strength even for death.
  Flatfish’s shop stood near the medical school in Ōkubo. A large sign gave it a grand name, but inside there were only dust and broken objects. Still, he did not truly live by those old things. He seemed to earn money by moving valuable objects from one rich man to another. He was rarely at home, and when he went out, a boy of seventeen or eighteen remained behind as if to watch me.
  That boy treated me like a fool or a half-mad man. He gave me advice in a serious tone, and because I could never argue, I listened with a tired smile and obeyed him. I learned that he was said to be Flatfish’s hidden son, though the two never openly spoke as father and son. At night they sometimes ate noodles together in silence downstairs, while I lay above them and listened. They sounded like a lonely pair, though I felt no closeness to them.
  One evening near the end of March, Flatfish called me down to a meal. There was even a bottle of sake and slices of tuna, and I wondered whether he had made some profit that day or had some other plan. He asked me in a careful voice what I meant to do with my life. I did not answer. I only picked up a small dried fish from the table and looked at its silver eye.
  A little wine had made me soft, and suddenly I missed my old wandering life. I missed even Horiki. More than anything, I wanted freedom again, and I felt close to tears. Since coming to that house, I had no energy even for clowning. I had become only a useless lodger lying under the contempt of Flatfish and the boy.
  Then Flatfish began one of those long, cloudy talks that people call practical. He told me that because I had not been prosecuted, I could still begin again if only I truly wished to reform. If I came to him seriously and spoke of my future, he said, he might consider helping me little by little. But he never clearly said what he meant. Later I understood that he wanted me to enter some school again and that money from home would have been arranged if I had done so.
  At that time, however, he spoke in such a twisted and careful way that I understood nothing. When I asked what sort of plan he meant, he only answered, “That is in your own heart.” When I asked for an example, he asked again what I wished to do. At last I said, “Perhaps I should work.” He pressed me further, and in confusion I said the first bold thing that came to me: “I want to be a painter.”
  I shall never forget the look on his face. He bent his neck, gave a sly little laugh, and stared at me as if he had seen some foolish fish rise from the bottom of the sea. He told me to think seriously through the night and not speak such nonsense again. But I could think of nothing. Before dawn I wrote him a note saying that I was going to consult a friend about my future and that I would surely come back that evening. Then I slipped out of the house and fled.
  I had no real plan. I walked as far as Shinjuku, sold the books I had on me, and then stood there with nowhere to go. I had never truly felt friendship with anyone. I knew how to make people like me, but not how to love them. Even visiting someone’s house filled me with terror, as if a beast were waiting behind the gate. Yet because I had written Horiki’s name and address in the note to Flatfish, I ended by going exactly where I had pretended I would go.
  Horiki was at home. His room stood above the workshop where his old parents and a young worker made sandal straps. That day he showed me a side of himself I had not fully seen before. He was careful, hard, and cold in a way that belonged to the city. He asked whether my father had forgiven me, and because I could not say, “No, I have run away,” I answered vaguely as usual.
  He soon made it clear that he had no time for me. Even the thread on a cushion seemed precious to him, and when I pulled at one by mistake while talking, he sharply told me not to ruin it. His mother brought up sweet bean soup, and Horiki thanked her with perfect politeness and ate it with real pleasure. Watching him, I felt more strongly than ever that he belonged to a solid world of household life from which I was forever shut out.
  Then, while I was still there, a woman came to visit him. She was thin and tall and worked for a magazine office. She had come to collect some drawings from him, and I sat in silence while they talked. Just then a telegram arrived from Flatfish, and Horiki read it with annoyance. He turned on me at once and said that I must go back immediately. The woman asked where I lived, and without thinking I answered, “Ōkubo.”
  “That is near my office,” she said. She was from Kōshū, twenty-eight years old, and had a little daughter of five. Her husband had died three years earlier, and she lived in an apartment in Kōenji. She looked at me closely and said, “You seem like a man who has suffered much. You notice everything. Poor thing.” Before I knew it, I had gone with her.
  So I entered, for the first time, a life like that of a kept man. When Shizuko went out to work at the magazine office in Shinjuku, I stayed quietly in the apartment with her daughter Shigeko. Until then, the child had played in the manager’s room when her mother was out, but now a “clever uncle” had appeared to amuse her, and she seemed pleased. I remained there for about a week in a dull daze, watching a torn kite caught in the wire outside the window. Even in the spring wind it would not come free, and each time I saw it nod and shake there, I smiled bitterly and felt ashamed.
  One day I said that I wanted money. Shizuko asked how much, and I answered, “A great deal.” I told her that when money ends, ties also end, and she laughed at the old saying. I said that without money I might run away, that I wanted to earn some with my own hands, and that at least in drawing I was better than Horiki. The old self-portraits from my middle-school years came back to me then, those lost “ghost pictures” that I had once believed in.
  I told myself that if I could at least draw cartoons, I might prove something. Shizuko had already noticed the small comic drawings I made for Shigeko and said they were good. She offered to speak to the editor at her company about giving me work for a children’s magazine. She also told me, with a kind of blunt tenderness, that women always wanted to do something for me because I looked so anxious, so helpless, and yet so absurdly comic. Her words only sank me deeper, but they were useful words all the same.
  Through Shizuko’s efforts, a meeting was arranged among Flatfish, Horiki, and Shizuko. After that my break with home became complete, and I came to live openly with her. Thanks again to her, my cartoons began to bring in a little money. I used it for drink and cigarettes, yet my heart grew no lighter. Still, there was one small comfort in that apartment. By then little Shigeko had begun to call me, without any doubt at all, “Daddy.”
  One day she asked me, “Daddy, if we pray, will God give us anything?” I felt then that I myself was the one who wanted to pray. Give me a cold and steady will, I wished to say. Teach me what a human being truly is. Tell me whether pushing others aside is a sin. Give me, if nothing else, the mask of anger. But to Shigeko I only answered softly, “Yes, perhaps. God may give anything to Shigeko. But He may not give things to Daddy.”

Part 9

  “Why not?” Shigeko asked. I answered, “Because I did not obey my parents.” She looked at me with wide and honest eyes and said, “But everyone says you are a very good person, Daddy.” I could not explain the truth to her. I could not explain that the more people liked me, the more afraid I became, and the more I wanted to run away from them.
  I changed the subject quickly and asked, “Then what do you want to ask God for?” I tried to sound calm, but I felt uneasy. Shigeko answered at once, “I want my real daddy.” The words struck me so hard that I almost lost my breath. In that moment even she, the child I had trusted most, seemed to become one more strange human being with a secret heart.
  From then on, I became nervous even with Shigeko. I had thought that only adults had hidden tails like cows that suddenly strike and kill the flies on their own skin. But now I felt that children also carried sharp and dangerous truths. I began to keep myself back from her. My one small place of comfort in that apartment became weak and uncertain.
  Around that time Horiki began visiting me again. When he came, he called out in his old way, teasing and noisy, as if he still knew me better than anyone. He spoke proudly about my comics and laughed at my poor drawing, acting like a master giving advice to his foolish pupil. I smiled and answered him, but inside I felt only tiredness and shame.
  He borrowed money again and again, gave me warnings I had not asked for, and stayed late into the night. Once he told me, “You should stop your trouble with women at this point. Society will not forgive any more.” I almost answered, “It is not society. It is you.” But I swallowed the words. I was still too afraid of anger to say them aloud.
  Yet his remark stayed in my mind. Little by little I began to think that what people called society was not some giant dark thing hanging over the world. It was only one person facing another person. When someone said, “Society will not allow it,” perhaps what he really meant was, “I do not allow it.” That idea did not free me completely, but it loosened one chain inside me.
  Because of that thought, I changed a little. Shizuko said I had become more selfish. Horiki would have said I had become mean. Shigeko might have said only that I did not love her as warmly as before. In truth I had simply grown quieter, colder, and more direct in small matters. I was less eager to please every person in the room.
  I spent my days slowly drawing comic series for poor children’s magazines and cheap publishers. I drew because I needed money for drink and cigarettes, not because I believed in the work. My pen moved painfully slowly, and my heart was always dark. When Shizuko came back from the office, I often went straight out to drink alone at cheap stalls near Kōenji Station.
  Then I would return a little drunk, sing foolish songs, joke in a tired voice, and let Shizuko take off my clothes like a nurse caring for a sick man. After that I pressed my forehead against her breast and fell asleep. The same thing happened the next day, and then the next. I began to think that if I avoided great joy, perhaps I might also avoid great sorrow. I felt like a heavy toad going slowly around a stone in the road because it was too weak to climb over it.
  My drinking grew worse. I went out farther, not only around Kōenji but also to Shinjuku and Ginza, and sometimes did not come home at night. I even stole Shizuko’s clothes and took them to the pawnshop. More than a year had passed since I first stood in that apartment and watched the torn kite shake in the spring wind. Then, one evening in the season of fresh young leaves, I came back after staying away for two nights.
  Quietly I reached the door and heard voices inside. Shigeko was asking, “Why does Daddy drink?” Shizuko answered in a soft, happy voice, “He does not drink because he likes it. He is too kind, that is why.” Shigeko asked more questions, and then both of them laughed gently while chasing a small white rabbit that was jumping around the room. Through the half-open door I saw them together, happy in their small life.
  I thought, “These two are happy. I will only ruin them.” They were a good mother and daughter, and I was the foolish man standing between them like dirt in clear water. I wanted to pray just once in my life that happiness would remain with them after I disappeared. So I closed the door without a sound, turned away, and went back to Ginza. I never returned to that apartment again.
  After that I began living above a small stand bar near Kyōbashi, once more in the shape of a kept man. I told the Madam only, “I have left her,” and that was enough. She let me stay. No great punishment came from the world, no storm of public judgment fell on my head, and I began to think even more strongly that what people called society was usually only the decision of one person standing in front of another.
  In that bar I became many things at once. I was a customer, a helper, a half-owner, a poor relation, and a useless man sleeping upstairs. The regulars called me “Leaf-chan” and treated me kindly. Even so, I still needed a glass of liquor before I could face them. Without drink I could not speak to people, and with drink I sometimes spoke too much, shouting poor little theories about art to men who had asked for nothing but another glass.
  A year passed in that dirty life. My comics began to appear not only in children’s magazines but also in rough, low magazines sold at stations. Under a foolish pen name I drew vulgar pictures and wrote short verses between them. I was a minor comic artist with no pride and no clear future. I wanted some great joy, even if great suffering came after it, but each day gave me only small drink, small talk, and small shame.
  Then there was a girl who often told me to stop drinking. She worked in the tiny tobacco shop across from the bar and was seventeen or eighteen years old. Everyone called her Yoshi-chan. She had a fair face, little pointed teeth, and the clear air of a girl who had not yet been dirtied by the world. Each time I went to buy cigarettes, she smiled and said, “This is bad. You drink from noon every day.”
  One bitter winter night I went out drunk, fell into a manhole in front of her shop, and cried for help. Yoshi-chan pulled me up and treated the cut on my right arm. While wrapping it, she said quietly, without laughing, “You drink too much.” I hated the thought of becoming crippled more than I hated death, and while she worked over my arm I said, “I will stop. From tomorrow, not one drop.”
  She looked at me and asked, “Really?” I answered, “Yes. And if I stop, will you marry me?” I meant the question half as a joke. She answered at once, using the light word of young people then, “Sure.” The next day, of course, I drank again from noon, went to her shop in the evening, and confessed, “Yoshi-chan, forgive me. I drank.”
  But she would not believe me. She said the red in my face came only from the evening sun and accused me of acting. She trusted my promise so completely that even my confession sounded false to her. Looking at her white face in the dim shop, I was deeply moved. I thought that the beauty of an untouched heart, which I had always considered only a foolish dream of poets, truly existed before me.
  At that moment I decided to marry her. I did not stop to think long or fear what might happen later. I thought only that I wanted, at least once in my life, to take hold of a rough and simple happiness with my own hands. So in that one reckless moment, I stole the flower. And though the joy that came from it was not so large, the sorrow that came afterward was beyond anything I had imagined.

Part 10

  With the help of the Madam from the little bar in Kyōbashi, I was able to make Yoshi-chan my common-law wife. We rented one small room on the ground floor of a wooden apartment house near Tsukiji, not far from the Sumida River. I stopped drinking, worked more seriously at my comics, and began to live in a way that almost looked ordinary. After supper we sometimes went out to see a film, and on the way home we sat in a café or bought a flower pot for the room.
  More than any of those things, I loved listening to my small bride speak and watching her move about the room. She trusted me from the bottom of her heart. Her trust was so complete that at times I felt ashamed to stand before it. Still, because of that quiet life, a soft hope began to grow in me. I wondered if I too might little by little become something like a human being and avoid a miserable death.
  That hope had only just begun to warm itself inside me when Horiki appeared again. He came suddenly, as if a bad bird had flown down from the dark sky and landed before the door. “Hello, great lover,” he cried. “You even look a little more sensible now. I am here with a message from the lady in Kōenji.” Then, seeing Yoshiko in the kitchen making tea, he lowered his voice and jerked his chin toward her. “Is it safe?” he asked.
  “It does not matter,” I answered calmly. “You may say anything.” And in truth I believed it. Yoshiko trusted me with such perfect innocence that even if I told her openly about the Madam at the bar, or even about the Kamakura affair and Tsuneko, she only seemed to hear them as odd jokes. It was not because I lied well. Even when I spoke plainly, she smiled as if I had said something foolish and harmless.
  Horiki laughed and said, “Well then, the message is simple. They want you to come visit now and then.” At once, old pain opened inside me. Horiki always returned like a great ugly bird that comes beating its wings just when a wound has begun to close. The moment I saw him, the shame and dirt of my past stood alive again before my eyes, and I felt a fear so sharp that I could hardly remain seated.
  “Let us have a drink,” I said. “Good,” Horiki answered. That was enough. The shape of our old life returned almost at once, as if no time had passed. When Horiki and I sat together with cheap liquor between us, I often felt that we became two dogs of the same breed, with the same rough coat, running side by side through dirty streets in search of something low and easy.
  From that day our old friendship, if it can be called that, began again. We went together to the small bar in Kyōbashi, and before long those two drunken dogs even visited Shizuko’s place in Kōenji and stayed the night there. I did not want that return, but I allowed it. I always allow what should be refused. That weakness, more than anything else, has guided my life toward shame.
  I remember one hot summer evening very clearly. Horiki came to our apartment at sunset, wearing a worn cotton robe and looking more untidy than ever. He said he had pawned his summer suit for some urgent reason, but if his old mother learned it, there would be trouble, so he needed money at once to get it back. We had no money in the room. As usual, I told Yoshiko to take some of her clothes to the pawnshop so that we could raise a little cash.
  After lending the money to Horiki, there was still a small amount left. I sent Yoshiko out once more to buy cheap shōchū, and then Horiki and I went up to the roof of the apartment building. From time to time a weak wind came from the Sumida River, carrying a smell from the dirty water below. There, under that unpleasant summer sky, we began a poor little drinking party that seemed to me as low and dirty as anything in my life.
  We started one of our foolish games. It was an invention of mine. I said that nouns should not only be divided into masculine, feminine, and neuter, but also into comic nouns and tragic nouns. Ships and trains, for example, were tragic nouns, while streetcars and buses were comic ones. If a playwright mixed them carelessly, I said, he failed as an artist. Horiki and I talked as if this nonsense were a great discovery unknown to the salons of the world.
  “What about cigarettes?” I asked. “Tragic,” Horiki answered at once. “Medicine?” I asked. “What kind?” he said. “An injection,” I answered. “Tragic, of course,” he said. “The needle alone is tragic.” I argued, laughed, gave in, and then declared that doctors and medicine were secretly comic after all. Horiki answered that death itself was comic, because even priests and monks became absurd around it, and so the game went on, clever only to us.
  Then we moved to another game, also of my making. This one was a contest of opposites. “The opposite of black is white,” I said, “but the opposite of white is red, and the opposite of red is black.” We asked each other stranger and stranger examples. “What is the opposite of flower?” I asked. Horiki guessed moon, then bee, then wind, and each answer failed. At last he said, “Woman.” Then I asked, “And what is the synonym of woman?” He answered with some ugly, brutal word, and I told him he knew nothing of poetry.
  Our laughter was already growing thin by then. The special dark mood of cheap shōchū was filling our heads, that hard, glass-like sadness that makes words sharp and dirty. We went on anyway. “What is the opposite of shame?” I asked. Horiki answered by mocking my comic pen name, and from there his words moved closer and closer to my old wounds. He said he had never suffered the shame of ropes and prison, and I felt with a start that even he had never seen me as a real human being.
  To him, I understood, I had long been only a creature that could be used for amusement, a failed man, half alive and half dead. The thought hurt me, though I also felt it was only right. Had I not been such a child from the beginning, one with no proper place among human beings? So instead of protesting, I turned the talk in another direction. “What is the opposite of sin?” I asked, trying to keep my face easy and empty.
  “Law,” Horiki answered. In the red light from a neon sign on a nearby building, his face looked almost grand for a moment, like that of a hard police detective. “Sin cannot be so simple as that,” I said. Yet perhaps many people do live by such simple ideas. Perhaps they think sin exists only where the police can see it. Still, the question would not leave me. If I could find the true opposite of sin, I thought, perhaps I might at last understand what sin itself really was.
  “God, maybe,” Horiki said carelessly. “Or goodness. Or some church word like that.” I shook my head. “Goodness is only the opposite of evil,” I said. “That is different.” I began speaking almost to myself then, not even to Horiki. “God has Satan as an opposite. Rescue has suffering. Love has hate. Light has dark. Good has evil. Prayer, regret, confession—none of them answer it. None of them. What is the opposite of sin?”
  “The opposite of sin is honey,” Horiki said stupidly. “Sweet as syrup. More important, I am hungry. Go bring us something to eat.” That was too much. “You go and get it yourself,” I shouted. The anger in my own voice shocked me. It was almost the first time in my life that such a hard and open cry had come out of my mouth.
  Horiki rose unsteadily to his feet, still joking in his drunken way. He muttered something about Yoshiko, about sin, about hunger, about broad beans cooking downstairs. Then he laughed, swayed toward the stairs, and started down from the roof. At that same moment, through the drink and the confusion in my head, another pair of words flashed suddenly across my mind: Crime and Punishment. I felt for one instant that I was close to some terrible answer, but I could not catch it. Then Horiki’s footsteps went below, and I was left under the wet summer night sky, listening.

Part 11

  “Hey! It is a fine kind of broad bean. Come here!” Horiki shouted from the stairs, and his voice had changed so much that I rose at once. He had gone down only a moment before, yet already he had come back up, pale and excited. “What is it?” I asked. We ran down from the roof to the second floor, and then to the stairway that led toward my room below. There Horiki stopped, bent his head, and pointed.
  A small high window above my room stood open, and through it we could see into the room because the light was still on. Inside there were two bodies. I could not think clearly, yet I knew at once what I was seeing. My mind said only, “This too is part of human life. This too is what people are,” and the words repeated inside me like blows.
  I did not go to Yoshiko. I did not cry out. I did not strike the man or rush into the room. I only stood there on the stairs, breathing hard and feeling the whole world swing around me. Then Horiki made a loud dry cough, and I, like a coward escaping from fire, turned and ran back up to the roof.
  On the roof I fell down on my back and stared at the summer sky, which held the smell of coming rain. The feeling that seized me was not anger. It was not disgust. It was not even sorrow. It was a huge old fear, rough and sacred, like the fear one might feel in a dark wood before some god too ancient for words.
  From that night my first white hairs began to appear. From that night I lost the little trust I had still been holding, and also the little confidence I had still kept in my own life. From that night every human face hurt me more sharply than before. It was as if my forehead had been split open straight down the middle, and the wound never closed again. I knew at once that this was one of the decisive events of my whole life.
  Horiki came up after a little while, already ready to leave. “I feel sorry for you,” he said, “but perhaps now you understand a little better. I will never come here again. This place is hell. Still, forgive Yoshi-chan. You are not much yourself, after all.” Having said that, he left quickly, because he was not the kind of man to remain long in an uncomfortable place.
  I sat up, drank the rest of the cheap liquor by myself, and cried aloud. I could have cried forever. Then, without my noticing when she had come, Yoshiko was standing behind me with a plate full of broad beans in her hands. She looked empty and confused and said only, “He said he would not do anything.” I answered, “Good. Say nothing more. You did not know how to doubt people. Sit down. Let us eat the beans.”
  So we sat side by side and ate the beans. The man was a small ignorant merchant of about thirty who sometimes came to my room, asked me to draw things for him, and then left a little money in a grand way. He never came again after that night. Yet strangely enough, I hated him less than I hated Horiki, because Horiki had not stopped it at once. He had first gone back to call me, and that act seemed to me endlessly ugly.
  There was no question of forgiving Yoshiko or not forgiving her. She was a genius of trust. She had not known that suspicion even existed. What broke me was not that her body had been touched. It was that her trust had been touched and dirtied. For a man like me, who could not trust anyone and who had secretly loved her clear innocent heart as if it were fresh water falling over green leaves, that loss was unbearable.
  From the next day onward Yoshiko changed. When I called to her, she gave a little start. She watched my face in fear, searching for signs of anger. However hard I tried to joke and make light of things, she only grew more uneasy, used polite words with me, and seemed always ready to apologize. It was as if the simple bright girl I had married had turned in one night into a person living on the edge of a blow.
  I even read stories about married women who had been attacked or tempted, thinking perhaps I would find some shape for my pain there. But none of those stories were like ours. In those books, the husband usually decides whether to forgive, or to cast the wife away, and that decision becomes the center of the matter. In my case I felt that I had no such right. Yoshiko had been injured through the very quality I had most loved in her, and the guilt seemed somehow to move back toward me.
  So I drank more and more. My face became ugly, my teeth began to break, and my comics turned nearly into obscene pictures. To buy shōchū, I even copied dirty prints and sold them in secret. When I saw Yoshiko, now always nervous and never meeting my eyes, new suspicions grew in me. Was it really only that one time? Had there been others? Had Horiki also been involved? Yet I still had no courage to ask openly, so I only drank, hinted, feared, and then clung to her in a foul half-mad way before falling into sleep.
  Near the end of that year I came home late one night, drunk and wanting sugar water. Yoshiko seemed to be asleep, so I went into the kitchen alone, found the sugar jar, and opened it. There was no sugar inside. Instead I found a narrow black paper box. When I looked at the label, though most of it had been scratched away with a fingernail, I could still read the letters: DIAL.
  It was a strong sleeping medicine. Even then I knew that one box held more than enough to kill a person. The seal had not yet been broken, but there was no doubt in my mind that Yoshiko had hidden it there for the day when she might decide to die. She had scratched away the label because she could not read the English letters fully and thought that would hide the danger. “It is not your fault,” I thought, though I did not say it aloud.
  Very quietly I filled a glass with water, opened the box, put all the tablets into my mouth at once, and drank the water. Then I turned out the light and lay down. For three days and three nights, they later told me, I was like a dead man. When I began to wake, the first thing I said again and again was, “I want to go home,” though even now I do not know what home I meant.
  When the mist in my head cleared a little, I saw Flatfish sitting by my pillow with a very bad face, and the Madam from the little bar was there too. “Madam,” I said, and when she bent over me smiling, I began to cry. “Make me leave Yoshiko,” I said. Then, to my own shame, I added a foolish line that made even me blush as I spoke it. “I am going somewhere where there are no women.”
  Flatfish roared with laughter, and the Madam laughed too, though more softly. I also smiled weakly through my tears, because there was nothing else I could do. Yet that foolish talk later came true in a dark way. Yoshiko seemed to believe that I had taken the poison in her place, and from then on she became even more careful with me than before, hardly speaking at all. Because of that, I could not bear to remain in the room, and so I went out again and again to drink cheap liquor in the city.
  After the poison, my body grew thin very quickly. My hands and feet felt heavy, and I could not work steadily anymore. Once I even went alone to a warm spring in South Izu with money Flatfish had brought, but I could not rest there either. I did not change into the inn robe, hardly entered the bath, and spent the time drinking in dirty little shops until I came back to Tokyo feeling worse than before. The world gave me no place where I could heal.
  Then one night, when a great snow was falling over Tokyo, I wandered through the back streets of Ginza drunk, kicking at the snow and softly singing an old country song. Suddenly I bent over and threw up. It was my first coughing of blood. On the white snow there appeared a large red shape like the flag of Japan, and I crouched there for some time. Then I scooped up clean snow in both hands, washed my face with it, and began to cry.

Part 12

  A strange little song seemed to come to me through the snow, as if some poor child far away were calling in a lost voice. I thought then of unhappiness. There are many unhappy people in this world, perhaps nothing but unhappy people, yet most of them can still protest. They can point to some clear cause and say, “This hurt me.” Others will understand them and feel pity. My own unhappiness was different. It came from my own sins, my own weakness, my own shame, and so I could protest to no one.
  If I tried even for a moment to complain, people would surely stare and say, “How dare you speak like that?” I did not know whether I was too selfish or too weak, and perhaps I was both. In any case, I only knew that my life kept moving toward greater misery by its own weight, and I could find no real way to stop it. So I went looking for medicine. I entered a nearby pharmacy and lifted my face toward the woman inside.
  The moment she saw me, she froze. But her eyes did not show disgust. They showed something like fear, longing, and pity all at once, as if she had recognized another wounded creature. Then I noticed that she stood with crutches. Her leg had been damaged since childhood, and her body itself seemed to carry its own history of pain. We looked at each other in silence until tears came into my eyes. Then tears came into hers as well.
  I left without speaking that night, but the next evening I returned and told her plainly what had been happening to my body. She advised me first to stop drinking. I confessed that I might already be close to drink addiction and that I wanted liquor even while speaking to her. She said her late husband had also ruined himself with alcohol while suffering from lung disease, and then she began gathering medicines for me from shelves and drawers, moving slowly on her crutches. Her care was deep, warm, and dangerous.
  She gave me medicine for the blood, vitamins, stomach medicine, and calcium. Then, at the end, she handed me a small package and said this was for the moments when the desire for alcohol became too strong to bear. Inside was morphine. She told me it was less harmful than liquor, and I believed her. The first time I injected it into my arm, all fear, shame, and inner trembling vanished like smoke.
  Under that drug I became lively, bold, and talkative. My body no longer felt weak, and my comic work moved quickly. Ideas came one after another, and I even laughed at my own drawings while making them. One injection became two, then four, and before long I could not work without it. The pharmacist warned me not to become addicted, but once she said the word, I began to feel its shadow even more strongly, and that fear itself drove me back to her again and again.
  I begged her for more on credit. I joked, flattered, and shamed myself. I told her the drug was necessary for my work, that it was almost a medicine for strength, that I would become a great painter if only I could keep going a little longer. She would blush, laugh sadly, and at last give me half a box. Then I would rush home and inject it at once. Soon Yoshiko began to watch me with timid eyes and ask whether it hurt, and I answered like a fool that it was needed for work and that I had never been so full of energy.
  By then I was completely enslaved. To get money for the drug, I copied obscene prints again and sank into an ugly relationship with that crippled widow, who was herself lonely and unhappy. I hated the whole thing, yet I could not stop. I wanted to die, and still I kept running half mad between the pharmacy and my room, staining myself more and more deeply. At last, in what I thought was my final effort to escape hell, I wrote a long letter to my father, confessing everything except the women. No answer came.
  The silence made me worse. I decided secretly that one night I would inject ten doses in a row and then throw myself into the great river. But on the very day I had fixed in my mind for that end, Flatfish appeared with Horiki, as if some evil smell had led them straight to my door. Horiki sat before me and, in the gentlest smile I had ever seen on his face, said he had heard I was coughing blood. That smile broke me completely. I turned my face away and wept.
  They put me in a car. Flatfish spoke in a quiet, almost holy voice and said I must enter a hospital and leave the rest to them. Yoshiko came too, and when we reached the place, I still believed it was only a sanatorium for rest. A young doctor, soft-spoken and almost shy, examined me politely and then led me onward. Before Yoshiko left, she pulled from her sash the syringe and the remaining morphine, still thinking perhaps that it was only some kind of tonic. For the first and only time in my life, when something was offered to me, I refused naturally and without fear.
  Perhaps it was Yoshiko’s pure ignorance that gave me that strength. Yet the next moment the young doctor took me into a ward, shut the door, and turned the key. It was a mental hospital. My foolish words from the night of the poison had come true in a cruel form: I had gone to a place with no women at all. There were only male patients and male attendants. I was no longer merely a sinner. I was now a madman in the eyes of the world.
  I do not believe I was ever truly insane. But I know well that every madman says the same thing. So perhaps the rule of this world is simple: the ones shut inside are mad, and the ones left outside are normal. I asked God in my heart whether helplessness itself is a sin. Because of Horiki’s beautiful smile, I had forgotten judgment, forgotten resistance, gotten into the car, and come to this place. When I left it, I knew, the mark on my forehead would still remain. Disqualified from being human—that was the truth I accepted.
  I entered the hospital in early summer. Through the iron bars I could see a small pond with red water lilies in the garden. Three months later cosmos flowers began to bloom there, and then my elder brother came to take me away. Flatfish stood beside him. My brother told me that our father had died of a stomach illness at the end of the previous month. He also said that they would no longer ask about my past, that they would not let me starve, and that I must leave Tokyo at once and live quietly in the country. I nodded faintly.
  After learning of my father’s death, I became even more empty. That dear and terrible presence, always fixed somewhere inside my chest, had at last disappeared from the world. It was as if the jar that had held my suffering had suddenly been emptied, and with it I lost even my power to struggle. My brother kept his promise. He bought an old house near a warm seaside hot spring in the north, gave it to me, and set an ugly red-haired old servant woman there to care for me.
  More than three years passed. My lung illness improved and worsened by turns. I grew thinner, then fatter, then coughed blood again. That old servant, Tetsu, sometimes behaved toward me in ways so strange and shameless that we almost seemed like an old married pair quarreling in a ruined home. One night, before sleeping, I sent her to buy me a sleeping powder. She returned with the wrong medicine. I swallowed ten tablets, waited for sleep, and instead was struck by terrible stomach pain and violent diarrhea.
  When I looked at the box, I saw that it was not a sleeping medicine at all but a strong laxative with a foolishly similar name. Lying on my back with a hot water bottle on my belly, I meant to scold Tetsu and say, “This is not the one I asked for.” But while beginning to speak, I suddenly laughed. A ruined man who takes a laxative instead of a sleeping drug and lies groaning in an old country house—there was something absurd in that, almost comic. Happiness and unhappiness had both become dull words to me.
  Only one thing still seemed true. Everything passes. The so-called human world in which I had lived among cries, fear, lust, shame, and confusion had taught me at least that. Everything passes. I am now twenty-seven years old, yet because of the white hair that has spread over my head, most people think I am past forty.

Afterword

  This is where Yōzō’s notebook ended. After I finished reading it, I went back to the café and asked the Madam whether the man was still alive. She said she did not know. About ten years earlier, a parcel containing the three notebooks and the three photographs had been sent to her old bar in Kyōbashi. There had been no return address, not even a name, but she had felt sure that it came from Yōzō. The parcel had survived the air raids by chance, and only recently had she finally read all the notebooks.
  I asked if she had cried. She answered that it was not quite crying. It was more like the feeling that once a human being had fallen so far, nothing more could be done. I said that perhaps, if all the notebooks were true and if I had been his friend, I too might have wanted to take him to a hospital. She listened quietly. Then, in a very ordinary voice, she said that his father had been the one at fault.
  After a short silence, she added something that has remained with me more strongly than anything else in the notebooks. “The Yō-chan we knew,” she said, “was a very gentle boy, very quick to notice other people’s needs. If only he had not drunk—no, even if he drank—he was like an angel. He was such a good boy.” And for some reason, hearing those words, I felt that the three strange photographs had at last become even more painful than before.