et qui est d’éviter les grandes joies barbares
de même que les grandes douleurs
comme un crapaud contorne une pierre sur son chemin. . . .
When I first read in translation these verses by Guy-Charles Cros, I blushed until my face burned.
The toad.
(That is what I was—a toad. It was not a question of whether or not society tolerated me, whether or not it ostracized me. I was an animal lower than a dog, lower than a cat. A toad. I sluggishly moved—that’s all.)
The quantities of liquor I consumed had gradually increased. I went drinking not only in the neighborhood of the Koenji station but as far as the Ginza. Sometimes I spent the night out. At bars I acted the part of a ruffian, kissed women indiscriminately, did anything as long as it was not in accord with “accepted usage,” drank as wildly—no more so—as before my attempted suicide, was so hard pressed for money that I used to pawn Shizuko’s clothes.
A year had passed since I first came to her apartment and smiled bitterly at the torn kite. One day, along when the cherry trees were going to leaf, I stole some of Shizuko’s underrobes and sashes, and took them to a pawnshop. I used the money they gave me to go drinking on the Ginza. I spent two nights in a row away from home. By the evening of the third day I began to feel some compunctions about my behavior, and I returned to Shizuko’s apartment. I unconsciously hushed my footsteps as I approached the door, and I could hear Shizuko talking with Shigeko.
“Why does he drink?”
“It’s not because he likes liquor. It’s because he’s too good, because . . .”
“Do all good people drink?”
“Not necessarily, but . . .”
“I’m sure Daddy’ll be surprised.”
“Maybe he won’t like it. Look! It’s jumped out of the box.”
“Like the funny man in the comics he draws.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” Shizuko’s low laugh sounded genuinely happy.
I opened the door a crack and looked in. I saw a small white rabbit bounding around the room. The two of them were chasing it.
(They were happy, the two of them. I’d been a fool to come between them. I might destroy them both if I were not careful. A humble happiness. A good mother and child. God, I thought, if you listen to the prayers of people like myself, grant me happiness once, only once in my whole lifetime will be enough! Hear my prayer!)
I felt like getting down on my knees to pray then and there. I shut the door softly, went to the Ginza, and did not return to the apartment.
My next spell as a kept man was in an apartment over a bar close by the Kyobashi Station.
Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is the struggle between one individual and another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything. Human beings never
submit to human beings. Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except in terms of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one’s country and suchlike things, but the object of their efforts is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual’s needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment.
When I left the apartment in Koenji I told the madam of the bar in Kyobashi, “I’ve left her and come to you.” That was all I said, and it was enough. In other words, my single then-and-there contest had been decided, and from that night I lodged myself without ceremony on the second floor of her place. “Society” which by all rights should have been implacable, inflicted not a particle of harm on me, and I offered no explanations. As long as the madam was so inclined, everything was all right.
At the bar I was treated like a customer, like the owner, like an errand boy, like a relative of the management; one might have expected that I would be considered a very dubious character, but “society” was not in the least suspicious of me, and the regular customers of the bar treated me with almost painful kindness. They called me by my first name and bought me drinks.
I gradually came to relax my vigilance towards the world. I came to think that it was not such a dreadful place. My feelings of panic had been molded by the unholy fear aroused in me by such superstitions of science as the hundreds of thousands of whooping-cough germs borne by the spring breezes, the hundreds of thousands of eye-destroying bacteria which infest the public baths, the hundreds of thousands of microbes in a barber shop which will cause baldness, the swarms of scabious parasites infecting the leather straps in the subway cars; or the tapeworm, fluke and heaven knows what eggs that undoubtedly lurk in raw fish and in undercooked beef and pork; or the fact that if you walk barefoot a tiny sliver of glass may penetrate the sole of your foot and after circulating through your body reach the eye and cause blindness. There is no disputing the accurate, scientific fact that millions of germs are floating, swimming, wriggling everywhere. At the same time, however, if you ignore them completely they lose all possible connection with yourself, and at once become nothing more than vanishing “ghosts of science.” This too I came to understand. I had been so terrorized by scientific statistics (if ten million people each leave over three grains of rice from their lunch, how many sacks of rice are wasted in one day; if ten million people each economize one paper handkerchief a day, how much pulp will be saved?) that whenever I left over a single grain of rice, whenever I blew my nose, I imagined that I was wasting mountains of rice, tons of paper, and I fell prey to a mood dark as if I had committed some terrible crime. But these were the lies of science, the lies of statistics and mathematics: you can’t collect three grains of rice from everybody. Even as an exercise in multiplication or division, it ranks as one of the most elementary and feeble-minded problems, about on a par with the computation of the percentage of times that people slip in dark, unlighted bathrooms and fall into the toilet, or the percentage of passengers who get their feet caught in the space between the door of a subway train and the edge of the platform, or other such footling exercises in probability. These events seem entirely within the bounds of possibility, but I have never heard a single instance of anyone hurting himself by falling into the toilet. I felt pity and contempt for the self which until yesterday had accepted such hypothetical situations as eminently factual scientific truths and was terrified by them. This shows the degree to which I had bit by bit arrived at a knowledge of the real nature of what is called the world.
Having said that, I must now admit that I was still afraid of human beings, and before I could meet even the customers in the bar I had to fortify myself by gulping down a glass of liquor. The desire to see frightening things—that was what drew me every night to the bar where, like the child who squeezes his pet all the harder when he actually fears it a little, I proclaimed to the customers standing at the bar my drunken, bungling theories of art.
A comic strip artist, and at that an unknown one, knowing no great joys nor, for that matter, any great sorrows. I craved desperately some great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue, but my only actual pleasure was to engage in meaningless chatter with the customers and to drink their liquor.
Close to a year had gone by since I took up this debased life in the bar in Kyobashi. My cartoons were no longer confined to the children’s magazines, but now appeared also in the cheap, pornographic magazines that are sold in railway stations. Under a silly pseudonym I drew dirty pictures of naked women to which I usually appended appropriate verses from the Rubaiyat.
Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit
Of This and That endeavour and dispute;