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The madam of the bar in Kyobashi was the recipient of Flatfish’s discourse.
I called, “Madam.”
“What? Have you come to?” She held her smiling face directly over mine as she spoke.
I burst into tears. “Take me away from Yoshiko.” The words came as a surprise even to myself.
The madam rose to her feet and breathed a barely audible sigh.
Then I made an utterly unpremeditated slip of the tongue, one so comic, so idiotic that it all but defies description. I said, “I’m going somewhere where there aren’t any women.”
Flatfish was the first to respond, with loud guffaws; the madam tittered; and in the midst of my tears I turned red and smiled despite myself.
“An excellent idea,” said Flatfish still continuing his inane laughter. “You really ought to go to a place with no women. Everything goes wrong as soon as women are around you. Yes, a place without women is a fine suggestion.”
A place without women. And the worst of it was that my delirious ravings were later to be realized in a most ghastly way.
Yoshiko seemed to have got the idea that I had swallowed the overdose of sleeping pills by way of atonement for her sin, and this made her all the more uncertain before me. She never smiled, and she looked as if she could hardly be persuaded to open her mouth. I found the apartment so oppressive that I would end by going out as usual to swill cheap liquor. After the Dial incident, however, I lost weight noticeably. My arms and legs felt heavy, and I often was too lazy to draw cartoons. Flatfish had left some money when he came to visit me. (He said, “It’s a little gift from me,” and offered it exactly as if it were his own money, though I gathered that it actually came from my brothers as usual. This time, unlike when I ran away from Flatfish’s house, I was able to get a vague glimpse through his theatrical airs of importance; I too was clever and, pretending to be completely unaware of what was going on, humbly offered Flatfish my thanks for the money. It nevertheless gave me a strange feeling, as if at the same time I could and could not understand why people like Flatfish resorted to such complicated tricks.) I did not hesitate to use the money to go by myself to the hot springs of southern Izu. However, I am not the kind to make a leisurely tour of hot springs, and at the thought of Yoshiko I became so infinitely forlorn as to destroy completely the peaceful frame of mind which would have permitted me to gaze from my hotel window at the mountains. I did not change into sports clothes. I didn’t even take the waters. Instead I would rush out into the filthy little bars that looked like souvenir stands, and drink gin until I fairly swam in it. I returned to Tokyo only sicklier for the trip.
The night I returned to Tokyo the snow was falling heavily. I drunkenly wandered along the rows of saloons behind the Ginza, singing to myself over and over again, so softly it was only a whisper, “From here it’s hundreds of miles to home . . . From here it’s hundreds of miles to home.” I walked along kicking with the point of my shoes the snow which was accumulating. Suddenly I vomited. This was the first time I had brought up blood. It formed a big rising-sun flag in the snow. I squatted there for a while. Then with both hands I scooped up snow from places which were still clean, and washed my face. I wept.
“Where does this little path go?
Where does this little path go?”
I could hear indistinctly from the distance, like an auditory hallucination, the voice of a little girl singing. Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in this world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarely, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles. My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody. If I had ever attempted to voice anything in the nature of a protest, even a single mumbled word, the whole of society—and not only Flatfish—would undoubtedly have cried out flabbergasted, “Imagine the audacity of him talking like that!” Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit? I really don’t know myself, but since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent.
I got up from the snowbank with the thought: I ought to get the proper kind of medicine without delay. I went into a pharmacy nearby. The proprietress and I exchanged looks as I entered; for that instant her eyes popped and she held her head lifted, as if caught in the light of a flash bulb. She stood ramrod stiff. But in her wide-open eyes there was no trace of alarm or dislike; her look spoke of longing, almost of the seeking for salvation. I thought, “She must be unhappy too. Unhappy people are sensitive to the unhappiness of others.” Not until then did I happen to notice that she stood with difficulty, supporting herself on crutches. I suppressed a desire to run up beside her, but I could not take my eyes from her face. I felt tears starting, and saw then the tears brimming from her big eyes.
That was all. Without saying a word I went out of the pharmacy and staggered back to my apartment. I asked Yoshiko to prepare a salt solution. I drank it. I went to sleep without telling her anything. The whole of the following day I spent in bed, giving as excuse a lie to the effect that I felt a cold coming on. At night my agitation over the blood I had secretly coughed became too much for me, and I got out of bed. I went to the pharmacy again. This time I confessed with a smile to the woman what my physical condition was. In humble tones I asked her advice.
“You’ll have to give up drinking.”
We were like blood relatives.
“I may have alcoholic poisoning. I still want to drink.”
“You musn’t. My husband used to soak himself in liquor in spite of his T.B. He claimed that he killed the germs with liquor. That’s how he shortened his life.”
“I feel so on edge I can’t stand it. I’m afraid. I’m no good for anything.”
“I’ll give you some medicine. But please cut out the drinking a
t least.”
She was a widow with an only son. The boy had been attending a medical school somewhere in the provinces, but was now on leave of absence from school with the same illness that killed his father. Her father-in-law lay abed in the house with palsy. She herself had been unable to move one side of her body since she was five, when she had infantile paralysis. Hobbling here and there in the shop on her crutches she selected various medicines from the different shelves, and explained what they were.
This is a medicine to build your blood.
This is a serum for vitamin injections. Here is the hypodermic needle.
These are calcium pills. This is diastase to keep you from getting an upset stomach.
Her voice was full of tenderness as she explained each of the half-dozen medicines. The affection of this unhappy woman was however to prove too intense. At the last she said, “This is a medicine to be used when you need a drink so badly you can’t stand it.” She quickly wrapped the little box.
It was morphine.
She said that it was no more harmful than liquor, and I believed her. For one thing, I was just at the stage where I had come to feel the squalor of drunkenness, and I was overjoyed to be able to escape after such long bondage to the devil called alcohol. Without a flicker of hesitation I injected the morphine into my arm. My insecurity, fretfulness and timidity were swept away completely; I turned into an expansively optimistic and fluent talker. The injections made me forget how weak my body was, and I applied myself energetically to my cartoons. Sometimes I would burst out laughing even while I was drawing.
