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“I would like my real Daddy back.”
I felt dizzy with the shock. An enemy. Was I Shigeko’s enemy, or was she mine? Here was another frightening grown-up who would intimidate me. A stranger, an incomprehensible stranger, a stranger full of secrets. Shigeko’s face suddenly began to look that way.
I had been deluding myself with the belief that Shigeko at least was safe, but she too was like the ox which suddenly lashes out with its tail to kill the horsefly on its flank. I knew that from then on I would have to be timid even before that little girl.
“Is the lady-killer at home?”
Horiki had taken to visiting me again at my place. I could not refuse him, even though this was the man who had made me so miserable the day I ran away. I welcomed him with a feeble smile.
“Your comic strips are getting quite a reputation, aren’t they? There’s no competing with amateurs—they’re so foolhardy they don’t know when to be afraid. But don’t get overconfident. Your composition is still not worth a damn.”
He dared to act the part of the master to me! I felt my usual empty tremor of anguish at the thought, “I can imagine the expression on his face if I showed him my ‘ghost pictures’.” But I protested instead, “Don’t say such things. You’ll make me cry.”
Horiki looked all the more elated with himself. “If all you’ve got is just enough talent to get along, sooner or later you’ll betray yourself.”
Just enough talent to get along—I really had to smile at that. Imagine saying that I had enough talent to get along! It occurred to me that a man like myself who dreads human beings, shuns and deceives them, might on the surface seem strikingly like another man who reveres the clever, wordly-wise rules for success embodied in the proverb “Let sleeping dogs lie.” Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death?
Horiki, I had to admit, participated in the settlement after my running away, though reluctantly, under pressure from Shizuko, and he was now behaving exactly like the great benefactor to whom I owed my rehabilitation or like the go-between of a romance. The look on his face as he lectured me was grave. Sometimes he would barge in late at night, dead-drunk, to sleep at my place, or stop by to borrow five yen (invariably five yen).
“You must stop your fooling around with women. You’ve gone far enough. Society won’t stand for more.”
What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called “society”? I had spent my whole life thinking that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words “Don’t you mean yourself?” come to the tip of my tongue. But I held the words back, reluctant to anger him.
Society won’t stand for it.
It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it—right?
If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it.
It’s not society. It’s you, isn’t it?
Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society.
It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?
Words, words of every kind went flitting through my head. “Know thy particular fearsomeness, thy knavery, cunning and witchcraft!” What I said, however, as I wiped the perspiration from my face with a handkerchief was merely, “You’ve put me in a cold sweat!” I smiled.
From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?
From the moment I suspected that society might be an individual I was able to act more in accordance with my own inclinations. Shizuko found that I had become rather self-willed and not so timid as before. Horiki remarked that it was funny how stingy I had become. Or, as Shigeko had it, I had stopped being so nice to Shigeko.
Without a word, without a trace of a smile, I spent one day after the next looking after Shigeko and drawing comic strips, some of them so idiotic I couldn’t understand them myself, for the various firms which commissioned them. (Orders had gradually started coming in from other publishers, all of an even lower class than Shizuko’s company—third-rate publishers, I suppose they’d be called.) I drew with extremely, excessively depressed emotions, deliberately penning each line, only to earn money for drink. When Shizuko came home from work I would dash out as if in relay with her, and head for the outdoor booths near the station to drink cheap, strong liquor.
Somewhat buoyed after a bout, I would return to the apartment. I would say, “The more I look at you the funnier your face seems. Do you know I get inspiration for my cartoons from looking at your face when you’re asleep?”
“What about your face when you sleep? You look like an old man, a man of forty.”
“It’s all your fault. You’ve drained me dry. ‘Man’s life is like a flowing river. What is there to fret over? On the river bank a willow tree . . .’”
“Hurry to bed and stop making such a racket. Would you like something to eat?” She was quite calm. She did not take me seriously.
“If there’s any liquor left, I’ll drink it. ‘Man’s life is like a flowing river. Man’s river . . .’ no, I mean ‘the river flows, the flowing life’.”
I would go on singing as Shizuko took off my clothes. I fell asleep with my forehead pressed against her breast. This was my daily routine.
. . . et puis on recommence encore le lendemain
avec seulement la même règle que la veille
