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Nevertheless I regularly attended the meetings of the Reading Society. I found it uproariously amusing to see my “comrades,” their faces tense as though they were discussing matters of life and death, absorbed in the study of theories so elementary they were on the order of “one and one makes two.” I tried to take some of the strain out of the meetings with my usual antics. That was why, I imagine, the oppressive atmosphere of the group gradually relaxed. I came to be so popular that I was considered indispensable at the meetings. These simple people perhaps fancied that I was just as simple as they—an optimistic, laughter-loving comrade—but if such was their view, I was deceiving them completely. I was not their comrade. Yet I attended every single meeting and performed for them my full repertory of farce.
I did it because I liked to, because those people pleased me—and not necessarily because we were linked by any common affection derived from Marx.
Irrationality. I found the thought faintly pleasurable. Or rather, I felt at ease with it. What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned.
People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.
People also talk of a “criminal consciousness.” All my life in this world of human beings I have been tortured by such a consciousness, but it has been my faithful companion, like a wife in poverty, and together, just the two of us, we have indulged in our forlorn pleasures. This, perhaps, has been one of the attitudes in which I have gone on living. People also commonly speak of the “wound of a guilty conscience.” In my case, the wound appeared of itself when I was an infant, and with the passage of time, far from healing it has grown only the deeper, until now it has reached the bone. The agonies I have suffered night after night have made for a hell composed of an infinite diversity of tortures, but—though this is a very strange way to put it—the wound has gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought its pain to be the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection.
For such a person as myself the atmosphere of an underground movement was curiously soothing and agreeable. What appealed to me, in other words, was not so much its basic aims as its personality. The movement served Horiki merely as a pretext for idiotic banter. The only meeting he attended was the one where he introduced me. He gave as his reason for not coming again the stupid joke that Marxists should study not only the productive aspects of society but the consumptive ones. At any rate the consumptive aspects were the only ones we observed together. When I think back on it now, in those days there were Marxists of every variety. Some, like Horiki, called themselves such out of an empty “modernity.” An attraction for its odor of irrationality led others, like myself, to participate in the movement.
I am sure that if the true believers in Marxism had discovered what Horiki and I were really interested in, they would have been furious with us, and driven us out immediately as vile traitors. Strange to say, however, neither Horiki nor I ever came close to being expelled. On the contrary, I felt so much more relaxed in this irrational world than in the world of ra
tional gentlemen that I was able to do what was expected of me in a “sound” manner. I was therefore considered a promising comrade and entrusted with various jobs fraught with a ludicrous degree of secrecy. As a matter of fact, I never once refused any of their jobs. Curiously docile, I performed whatever they asked of me with such unruffled assurance that the “dogs” (that was the name by which the comrades referred to the police) suspected nothing, and I was never so much as picked up for questioning.
Smiling, making others smile, I punctiliously acquitted myself of all their “dangerous missions.” (The people in the movement observed such excessive precautions—they were perpetually prey to life-and-death tensions—as to suggest some clumsy imitation of a detective novel. The missions on which I was employed were really of a stupefying inconsequentiality, but the comrades kept themselves worked up into a state of frantic excitement by incessantly reminding themselves how dangerous these errands were.) I felt at the time that if I should become a party member and got caught, not even the prospect of spending the rest of my life in prison would bother me: it occurred to me that prison life might actually be pleasanter than groaning away my sleepless nights in a hellish dread of the “realities of life” as led by human beings.
Even when my father and I were living in the same house, he was kept so busy receiving guests or going out that sometimes three or four days elapsed without our seeing each other. This, however, did not make his presence any the less oppressive and intimidating. I was just thinking (without as yet daring to propose it) how I would like to leave the house and find lodgings elsewhere, when I learned from our old caretaker that my father apparently intended to sell the house.
Father’s term of office as a member of the Diet would soon expire and—doubtless for many reasons—he seemed to have no intention of standing for election again. Perhaps (I do not pretend to understand my father’s thoughts any better than those of a stranger) he had decided to build a retreat somewhere at home. He never had felt much affection for Tokyo and he must have concluded that it was pointless to maintain a house with servants just for the convenience of a mere college student like myself. At any rate, the house was sold before long and I moved to a gloomy room in an old lodging house in Hongo where I was immediately beset by financial worries.
My father had been giving me a fixed allowance for spending money each month. It would disappear in two or three days’ time, but there had always been cigarettes, liquor and fruit in the house, and other things—books, stationery, and anything in the way of clothing—could be charged at shops in the neighborhood. As long as it was one of the shops my father patronized it made no difference even if I left the place without offering so much as a word of explanation.
Then suddenly I was thrown on my own in lodgings, and had to make ends meet on the allowance doled out each month from home. I was quite at my wit’s end. The allowance disappeared in the customary two or three days, and I would be almost wild with fright and despair. I sent off barrages of telegrams begging for money of my father, my brothers and my sisters by turns. In the wake of the telegrams went letters giving details. (The facts as stated in the letters were absurd fabrications without exception. I thought it a good strategy to make people laugh when asking favors of them.) Under Horiki’s tutelage I also began to frequent the pawnshops. Despite everything I was chronically short of money.
And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn’t know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment. I would rush outside either to help in the activities of the movement or to make the round of the bars with Horiki, drinking cheap saké wherever we went. I almost completely neglected both my school work and my painting. Then in November of my second year in college I got involved in a love suicide with a married woman older than myself. This changed everything.
I had stopped attending classes and no longer devoted a minute of study to my courses; amazingly enough I seemed nevertheless to be able to give sensible answers in the examinations, and I managed somehow to keep my family under the delusion that all was well. But my poor attendance finally caused the school to send my father a confidential report. My elder brother, acting on behalf of my father, thereupon addressed me a long, sternly phrased letter, warning me to change my ways. More pressing causes of grief to me were my lack of money and the jobs required of me by the movement, which had become so frequent and frenetic that I could no longer perform them half in the spirit of fun. I had been chosen leader of all the Marxist student action groups in the schools of central Tokyo. I raced about here and there “maintaining liaison.” In my raincoat pocket I carried a little knife I had bought for use in the event of an armed uprising. (I remember now that it had a delicate blade hardly strong enough to sharpen a pencil.) My fondest wish was to drink myself into a sound stupor, but I hadn’t the money. Requests for my services came from the party so frequently that I scarcely had time to catch my breath. A sickly body like mine wasn’t up to such frantic activity. My only reason all along for helping the group had been my fascination with its irrationality, and to become so horribly involved was a quite unforeseen consequence of my joke. I felt secretly like telling the group, “This isn’t my business. Why don’t you get a regular party man to do it?” Unable to suppress such reactions of annoyance, I escaped. I escaped, but it gave me no pleasure: I decided to kill myself.
There were at that time three women who showed me special affection. One of them was the landlord’s daughter at my lodging house. When I would come back to my room so exhausted by my errands for the movement that I fell into bed without even bothering to eat, she invariably would visit my room, carrying in her hand a writing pad and a pen.
“Excuse me. It’s so noisy downstairs with my sister and my little brother that I can’t collect my thoughts enough to write a letter.” She would seat herself at my desk and write, sometimes for over an hour.
It would have been so much simpler if I just lay there and pretended not to be aware of her, but the girl’s looks betrayed only too plainly that she wanted me to talk, and though I had not the least desire to utter a word, I would display my usual spirit of passive service: I would turn over on my belly with a grunt and, puffing on a cigarette, begin, “I’m told that some men heat their bath water by burning the love letters they get from women.”
“How horrid! It must be you.”
“As a matter of fact, I have boiled milk that way—and drunk it too.”
“What an honor for the girl! Use mine next time!”
If only she would go, quickly. Letter, indeed! What a transparent pretext that was. I’m sure she was writing the alphabet or the days of the week and the months.
“Show me what you’ve written,” I said, although I wanted desperately to avoid looking at it.
“No, I won’t,” she protested. “Oh, you’re dreadful.” Her joy was indecent enough to chill all feeling for her.
I thought up an errand for her to do. “Sorry to bother you, but would you mind going down to the drugstore and buying me some sleeping tablets? I’m over-exhausted. My face is burning so I can’t sleep. I’m sorry. And about the money . . .”
“That’s all right. Don’t worry about the money.”
She got up happily. I was well aware that it never offends a woman to be asked to do an errand; they are delighted if some man deigns to ask them a favor.
The second girl interested in me was a “comrade,” a student in a teacher’s training college. My activities in the movement obliged me, distasteful as it was, to see her every day. Even after the arrangements for the day’s job had been completed, she doggedly tagged along after me. She bought me presents, seemingly at random, and offered them with the words, “I wish you would think of me as your real sister.”
Wincing at the affectation I would answer, “I do,” and force a sad little smile. I was afraid of angering her, and my only thought was to temporize somehow and put her off. As a result, I spent more and more time dancing attendance on that ugly, disagreeable girl. I let her buy me presents (they were without exception in extraordinarily bad taste and I usually disposed of them immediately to the postman or the grocery boy). I tried to look happy when I was with her, and made her laugh with my jokes. One summer evening she simply wouldn’t leave me. In the hope of persuading her to go I kissed her when we came to a dark place along the street. She became uncontrollably, shamefully excited. She hailed a taxi and took me to the little room the movement secretly rented in an office building. There we spent the whole night in a wild tumult. “What an extraordinary sister I have,” I told myself with a wry smile.
The circumstances were such that I had no way of avoiding the landlord’s daughter or this “comrade.” Every day we bumped into one another; I could not dodge them as I had various other women in the past. Before I knew what was happening, my chronic lack of assurance had driven me willy-nilly into desperate attempts to ingratiate myself with both of them. It was just as if I were bound to them by some ancient debt.
