Page 7 of No Longer Human


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It was at this same period that I became the unexpected beneficiary of the kindness of a waitress in one of those big cafés on the Ginza. After just one meeting I was so tied by gratitude to her that worry and empty fears paralyzed me. I had learned by this time to simulate sufficiently well the audacity required to board a streetcar by myself or to go to the Kabuki Theatre or even to a café without any guidance from Horiki. Inwardly I was no less suspicious than before of the assurance and the violence of human beings, but on the surface I had learned bit by bit the art of meeting people with a straight face—no, that’s not true: I have never been able to meet anyone without an accompaniment of painful smiles, the buffoonery of defeat. What I had acquired was the technique of stammering somehow, almost in a daze, the necessary small talk. Was this a product of my activities on behalf of the movement? Or of women? Or liquor? Perhaps it was chiefly being hard up for cash that perfected this skill.

I felt afraid no matter where I was. I wondered if the best way to obtain some surcease from this relentless feeling might not be to lose myself in the world of some big café where I would be rubbed against by crowds of drunken guests, waitresses and porters. With this thought in my mind, I wen

t one day alone to a café on the Ginza. I had only ten yen on me. I said with a smile to the hostess who sat beside me, “All I’ve got is ten yen. Consider yourself warned.”

“You needn’t worry.” She spoke with a trace of a Kansai accent. It was strange how she calmed my agitation with those few words. No, it was not simply because I was relieved of the necessity of worrying about money. I felt, rather, as if being next to her in itself made it unnecessary to worry.

I drank the liquor. She did not intimidate me, and I felt no obligation to perform my clownish antics for her. I drank in silence, not bothering to hide the taciturnity and gloominess which were my true nature.

She put various appetizers on the table in front of me. “Do you like them?” I shook my head. “Only liquor? I’ll have a drink too.”

It was a cold autumn night. I was waiting at a sushi stall back of the Ginza for Tsuneko (that, as I recall, was her name, but the memory is too blurred for me to be sure: I am the sort of person who can forget even the name of the woman with whom he attempted suicide) to get off from work. The sushi I was eating had nothing to recommend it. Why, when I have forgotten her name, should I be able to remember so clearly how bad the sushi tasted? And I can recall with absolute clarity the close-cropped head of the old man—his face was like a snake’s—wagging from side to side as he made the sushi, trying to create the illusion that he was a real expert. It has happened to me two or three times since that I have seen on the streetcar what seemed to be a familiar face and wondered who it was, only to realize with a start that the person opposite me looked like the old man from the sushi stall. Now, when her name and even her face are fading from my memory, for me to be able to remember that old man’s face so accurately I could draw it, is surely a proof of how bad the sushi was and how it chilled and distressed me. I should add that even when I have been taken to restaurants famous for sushi I have never enjoyed it much.

Tsuneko was living in a room she rented on the second floor of a carpenter’s house. I lay on the floor sipping tea, propping my cheek with one hand as if I had a horrible toothache. I took no pains to hide my habitual gloom. Oddly enough, she seemed to like seeing me lie there that way. She gave me the impression of standing completely isolated; an icy storm whipped around her, leaving only dead leaves careening wildly down.

As we lay there together, she told me that she was two years older than I, and that she came from Hiroshima. “I’ve got a husband, you know. He used to be a barber in Hiroshima, but we ran away to Tokyo together at the end of last year. My husband couldn’t find a decent job in Tokyo. The next thing I knew he was picked up for swindling someone, and now he’s in jail. I’ve been going to the prison every day, but beginning tomorrow I’m not going any more.” She rambled on, but I have never been able to get interested when women talk about themselves. It may be because women are so inept at telling a story (that is, because they place the emphasis in the wrong places), or for some other reason. In any case, I have always turned them a deaf ear.

“I feel so unhappy.”

I am sure that this one phrase whispered to me would arouse my sympathy more than the longest, most painstaking account of a woman’s life. It amazes and astonishes me that I have never once heard a woman make this simple statement. This woman did not say, “I feel so unhappy” in so many words, but something like a silent current of misery an inch wide flowed over the surface of her body. When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom like a “withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool.” I had freed myself from fear and uneasiness.

It was entirely different from the feeling of being able to sleep soundly which I had experienced in the arms of those idiot-prostitutes (for one thing, the prostitutes were cheerful); the night I spent with that criminal’s wife was for me a night of liberation and happiness. (The use of so bold a word, affirmatively, without hesitation, will not, I imagine, recur in these notebooks.)

But it lasted only one night. In the morning, when I woke and got out of bed, I was again the shallow poseur of a clown. The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness. I was impatient to leave her while things still stood the same, before I got wounded, and I spread my usual smokescreen of farce.

“They say that love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, but people generally get the sense backwards. It doesn’t mean that when a man’s money runs out he’s shaken off by women. When he runs out of money, he naturally is in the dumps. He’s no good for anything. The strength goes out of his laugh, he becomes strangely soured. Finally, in desperation, he shakes off the woman. The proverb means that when a man becomes half-mad, he will shake and shake and shake until he’s free of a woman. You’ll find that explanation given in the Kanazawa Dictionary, more’s the pity. It isn’t too hard for me to understand that feeling myself!”

I remember making Tsuneko laugh with just such stupid remarks. I was trying to get away quickly that morning, without so much as washing my face, for I was sure that to stay any longer would be useless and dangerous. Then I came out with that crazy pronouncement on “love flying out the window,” which was later to produce unexpected complications.

I didn’t meet my benefactor of that night again for a whole month. After leaving her my happiness grew fainter every day that went by. It frightened me even that I had accepted a moment’s kindness: I felt I had imposed horrible bonds on myself. Gradually even the mundane fact that Tsuneko had paid the bill at the café began to weigh on me, and I felt as though she was just another threatening woman, like the girl at my lodging house, or the girl from the teacher’s training college. Even at the distance which separated us, Tsuneko intimidated me constantly. Besides, I was intolerably afraid that if I met again a woman I had once slept with, I might suddenly burst into a flaming rage. It was my nature to be very timid about meeting people anyway, and so I finally chose the expedient of keeping a safe distance from the Ginza. This timidity of nature was no trickery on my part. Women do not bring to bear so much as a particle of connection between what they do after going to bed and what they do on rising in the morning; they go on living with their world successfully divided in two, as if total oblivion had intervened. My trouble was that I could not yet successfully cope with this extraordinary phenomenon.

At the end of November I went drinking with Horiki at a cheap bar in Kanda. We had no sooner staggered out of that bar than my evil companion began to insist that we continue our drinking somewhere else. We had already run out of money, but he kept badgering me.

Finally—and this was because I was drunker and bolder than usual—I said, “All right. I’ll take you to the land of dreams. Don’t be surprised at what you see. Wine, women and song . . .”

“You mean a café?”

“I do.”

“Let’s go!” It happened just as simply as that. The two of us got on a streetcar. Horiki said in high spirits, “I’m starved for a woman tonight. Is it all right to kiss the hostess?”

I was not particularly fond of Horiki when he played the drunk that way. Horiki knew it, and he deliberately labored the point. “All right? I’m going to kiss her. I’m going to kiss whichever hostess sits next to me. All right?”

“It won’t make any difference, I suppose.”

“Thanks! I’m starved for a woman.”

We got off at the Ginza and walked into the café of “wine, women and song.” I was virtually without a penny, and my only hope was Tsuneko. Horiki and I sat down at a vacant booth facing each other. Tsuneko and another hostess immediately hurried over. The other girl sat next to me, and Tsuneko plopped herself down beside Horiki. I was taken aback: Tsuneko was going to be kissed in another few minutes.

It wasn’t that I regretted losing her. I have never had the faintest craving for possessions. Once in a while, it is true, I have experienced a vague sense of regret at losing something, but

never strongly enough to affirm positively or to contest with others my rights of possession. This was so true of me that some years later I even watched in silence when my own wife was violated.

I have tried insofar as possible to avoid getting involved in the sordid complications of human beings. I have been afraid of being sucked down into their bottomless whirlpool. Tsuneko and I were lovers of just one night. She did not belong to me. It was unlikely that I would pretend to so imperious an emotion as “regret.” And yet I was shocked.

It was because I felt sorry for Tsuneko, sorry that she should be obliged to accept Horiki’s savage kisses while I watched. Once she had been defiled by Horiki she would no doubt have to leave me. But my ardor was not positive enough for me to stop Tsuneko. I experienced an instant of shock at her unhappiness; I thought, “It’s all over now.” Then, the next moment, I meekly, helplessly resigned myself. I looked from Horiki to Tsuneko. I grinned.

But the situation took an unexpected turn, one very much for the worse.

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