He got up mumbling incoherently. “Crime and an empty stomach. Empty stomach and beans. No. Those are synonyms.”
Crime and punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged ‘crime’ and ‘punishment’ side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment—absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski’s mind—no, I still didn’t quite see . . . Such thoughts were flashing through my head like a revolving lantern when I heard a voice.
“Extraordinary beans you’ve got here. Come have a look.”
Horiki’s voice and color had changed. Just a minute before he had staggered off downstairs, and here he was back again, before I knew it.
“What is it?”
A strange excitement ran through me. The two of us went down from the roof to the second floor and were half-way down the stairs to my room on the ground floor when Horiki stopped me and whispered, “Look!” He pointed.
A small window opened over my room, through which I could see the interior. The light was lit and two animals were visible.
My eyes swam, but I murmured to myself through my violent breathing, “This is just another aspect of the behavior of human beings. There’s nothing to be surprised at.” I stood petrified on the staircase, not even thinking to help Yoshiko.
Horiki noisily cleared his throat. I ran back up to the roof to escape and collapsed there. The feelings which assailed me as I looked up at the summer night sky heavy with rain were not of fury or hatred, nor even of sadness. They were of overpowering fear, not the terror the sight of ghosts in a graveyard might arouse, but rather a fierce ancestral dread that could not be expressed in four or five words, something perhaps like encountering in the sacred grove of a Shinto shrine the white-clothed body of the god. My hair turned prematurely grey from that night. I had now lost all confidence in myself, doubted all men immeasurably, and abandoned all hopes for the things of this world, all joy, all sympathy, eternally. This was truly the decisive incident of my life. I had been split through the forehead between the eyebrows, a wound that was to throb with pain whenever I came in contact with a human being.
“I sympathize, but I hope it’s taught you a lesson. I won’t be coming back. This place is a perfect hell . . . But you should forgive Yoshiko. After all, you’re not much of a prize yourself. So long.” Horiki was not stupid enough to linger in an embarrassing situation.
I got up and poured myself a glass of gin. I wept bitterly, crying aloud. I could have wept on and on, interminably.
Without my realizing it, Yoshiko was standing haplessly behind me bearing a platter with a mountain of beans on it. “He told me he wouldn’t do anything . . .”
“It’s all right. Don’t say anything. You didn’t know enough to distrust others. Sit down. Let’s eat the beans.”
We sat down side by side and ate the beans. Is trustfulness a sin, I wonder? The man was an illiterate shopkeeper, an undersized runt of about thirty, who used to ask me to draw cartoons for him, and then would make a great ado over the trifling sums of money he paid for them.
The shopkeeper, not surprisingly, did not come again. I felt less hatred for him than I did for Horiki. Why, when he first discovered them together had he not cleared his throat then, instead of returning to the roof to inform me? On nights when I could not sleep hatred and loathing for him gathered inside me until I groaned under the pressure.
I neither forgave nor refused to forgive her. Yoshiko was a genius at trusting people. She didn’t know how to suspect anyone. But the misery it caused.
God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?
It was less the fact of Yoshiko’s defilement than the defilement of her trust in people which became so persistent a source of grief as almost to render my life insupportable. For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces, Yoshiko’s immaculate trustfulness seemed clean and pure, like a waterfall among green leaves. One night sufficed to turn the
waters of this pure cascade yellow and muddy. Yoshiko began from that night to fret over my every smile or frown.
She would jump when I called her, and seemed at a loss which way to turn. She remained tense and afraid, no matter how much I tried to make her smile, no matter how much I played the clown. She began to address me with an excessive profusion of honorifics.
Is immaculate trustfulness after all a source of sin?
I looked up various novels in which married women are violated. I tried reading them, but I could not find a single instance of a woman violated in so lamentable a manner as Yoshiko. Her story obviously could never be made into a novel. I might actually have felt better if anything in the least resembling love existed between that runt of a shopkeeper and Yoshiko, but one summer night Yoshiko was trusting, and that was all there was to it . . . And on account of that incident I was cleft between the eyebrows, my voice became hoarse, my hair turned prematurely grey, and Yoshiko was condemned to a life of anxiety. In most of the novels I read emphasis was placed on whether or not the husband forgave the wife’s “act.” It seemed to me, however, that any husband who still retains the right to forgive or not to forgive is a lucky man. If he thinks that he can’t possibly forgive his wife, he ought, instead of making such a great fuss, to get divorced as quickly as possible and find a new wife. If he can’t do that he should forgive and show forbearance. In either case the matter can be completely settled in whichever way the husband’s feelings dictate. In other words, even though such an incident certainly comes as a great shock to the husband, it is a shock and not an endless series of waves which lash back at him over and over again. It seemed to me a problem which could be disposed of by the wrath of any husband with authority. But in our case the husband was without authority, and when I thought things over, I came to feel that everything was my fault. Far from becoming enraged, I could not utter a word of complaint; it was on account of that rare virtue she possessed that my wife was violated, a virtue I long had prized, the unbearably pitiful one called immaculate trustfulness.
Is immaculate trustfulness a sin?
Now that I harbored doubts about the one virtue I had depended on, I lost all comprehension of everything around me. My only resort was drink. My face coarsened markedly and my teeth fell out from the interminable drinking bouts to which I surrendered myself. The cartoons I drew now verged on the pornographic. No, I’ll come out with it plainly: I began about this time to copy pornographic pictures which I secretly peddled. I wanted money to buy gin. When I looked at Yoshiko always averting her glance and trembling, doubt gave birth to fresh doubt: it was unlikely, wasn’t it, that a woman with absolutely no defences should have yielded only that once with the shopkeeper. Had she been also with Horiki? Or with somebody I didn’t even know? I hadn’t the courage to question her; writhing in my usual doubts and fears, I drank gin. Sometimes when drunk I timidly attempted a few sneaking ventures at indirect questioning. In my heart I bounded foolishly from joy to sorrow at her responses, but on the surface I never ceased my immoderate clowning. Afterwards I would inflict on Yoshiko an abominable, hellish caressing before I dropped into a dead sleep.
Towards the end of that year I came home late one night blind drunk. I felt like having a glass of sugar-water. Yoshiko seemed to be asleep, so I went myself to the kitchen to look for the sugar bowl. I took off the lid and peered inside. There was no sugar, only a thin black cardboard box. I took it absent-mindedly in my hand and read the label. I was startled: somebody had scratched off most of the writing, but the part in Western letters remained intact. The word DIAL was legible.
DIAL. At the time I relied entirely on gin and never took sleeping pills. Insomnia, however, was a chronic complaint with me, and I was familiar with most sleeping pills. The contents of this one box of Dial was unquestionably more than sufficient to cause death. The seal of the box was unbroken. I must have hidden it here at some time or other in the past when I felt I might need it, after first scratching off the label. The poor child could not read Western letters, and I must have thought it was enough if I just scratched off with my nails the part of the label in Japanese. (You have committed no sin.)
I very quietly filled a glass with water, careful not to make the least noise, and deliberately broke the seal of the box. I poured the whole contents into my mouth. I calmly drained the glass of water in one gulp. I switched off the light and went to bed at once.
For three days and nights I lay as one dead. The doctor considered it an accident, and was kind enough to postpone reporting to the police. I am told that the first words I murmured as I began to recover consciousness were, “I’m going home.” It’s not clear even to myself what place I meant by “home,” but in any case these were the words I said, accompanied, I was told, by profuse weeping.
Gradually the fog cleared, and when I regained consciousness there was Flatfish sitting at my pillow, a most unpleasant expression on his face.
“The last time was also at the end of the year, wasn’t it? He always chooses the end of the year, just when everybody is frantically busy. He’ll prove the death of me if he keeps on doing such things.”