Takeichi uttered that idiotic compliment, that women would fall for me, because I had been kind enough to clean the discharge from his ears. My reaction at the time was merely to blush and smile, without saying a word in return but, to tell the truth, I already had a faint inkling of what his prophecy implied. No, to speak in those terms of the atmosphere engendered by so vulgar an expression as “to fall for” is to betray a precocity of sentiment not even worthy of the dialogue of the romantic lead in a musical comedy; I certainly was not moved by the farcical, self-satisfied emotions suggested by the phrase “to have a faint inkling.”
I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male. In my immediate family women outnumbered the men, and many of my cousins were girls. There was also the maidservant of the “crime.” I think it would b
e no exaggeration to say that my only playmates while I was growing up were girls. Nevertheless, it was with very much the sensation of treading on thin ice that I associated with these girls. I could almost never guess their motives. I was in the dark; at times I made indiscreet mistakes which brought me painful wounds. These wounds, unlike the scars from the lashing a man might give, cut inwards very deep, like an internal hemorrhage, bringing intense discomfort. Once inflicted it was extremely hard to recover from such wounds.
Women led me on only to throw me aside; they mocked and tortured me when others were around, only to embrace me with passion as soon as everyone had left. Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. Who knows? Women may live in order to sleep. These and various other generalizations were products of an observation of women since boyhood days, but my conclusion was that though women appear to belong to the same species as man, they are actually quite different creatures, and these incomprehensible, insidious beings have, fantastic as it seems, always looked after me. In my case such an expression as “to be fallen for” or even “to be loved” is not in the least appropriate; perhaps it describes the situation more accurately to say that I was “looked after.”
Women were also less demanding than men when it came to my clowning. When I played the jester men did not go on laughing indefinitely. I knew that if I got carried away by my success in entertaining a man and overdid the role, my comedy would fall flat, and I was always careful to quit at a suitable place. Women, on the other hand, have no sense of moderation. No matter how long I went on with my antics they would ask for more, and I would become exhausted responding to their insatiable demands for encores. They really laugh an amazing amount of the time. I suppose one can say that women stuff themselves with far more pleasures than men.
The two cousins in whose house I was living while attending school used to visit my room whenever they had the time. Their knock on my door, no matter how often it came, never failed to startle me so that I almost jumped in fright.
“Are you studying?”
“No,” I would say with a smile, shutting my book. I would launch into some silly story, miles removed from what I was thinking. “Today at school the geography teacher, the one we call the Walrus . . .”
One evening my cousins came to my room and after they had compelled me to clown at unmerciful lengths, one of them proposed, “Yozo, let’s see how you look with glasses on.”
“Why?”
“Don’t make such a fuss. Put them on. Here, take these glasses.”
They invariably spoke in the same harsh, peremptory tones. The clown meekly put on the older girl’s glasses. My cousins were convulsed with laughter.
“You look exactly like him. Exactly like Harold Lloyd.”
The American movie comedian was very popular at the time in Japan.
I stood up. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, raising one arm in greeting, “I should like on this occasion to thank all my Japanese fans—”
I went through the motions of making a speech. They laughed all the harder. From then on whenever a Harold Lloyd movie came to town I went to see it and secretly studied his expressions.
One autumn evening as I was lying in bed reading a book, the older of my cousins—I always called her Sister—suddenly darted into my room quick as a bird, and collapsed over my bed. She whispered through her tears, “Yozo, you’ll help me, I know. I know you will. Let’s run away from this terrible house together. Oh, help me, please.”
She continued in this hysterical vein for a while only to burst into tears again. This was not the first time that a woman had put on such a scene before me, and Sister’s excessively emotional words did not surprise me much. I felt instead a certain boredom at their banality and emptiness. I slipped out of bed, went to my desk and picked up a persimmon. I peeled it and offered Sister a section. She ate it, still sobbing, and said, “Have you any interesting books? Lend me something.”
I chose Sôseki’s I am a Cat from my bookshelf and handed it to her.
“Thanks for the persimmon,” Sister said as she left the room, an embarrassed smile on her face. Sister was not the only one—I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm. Long personal experience had taught me that when a woman suddenly bursts into hysterics, the way to restore her spirits is to give her something sweet.
Her younger sister, Setchan, would even bring friends to my room, and in my usual fashion I amused them all with perfect impartiality. As soon as a friend had left Setchan would tell me disagreeable things about her, inevitably concluding, “She’s a bad girl. You must be careful of her.” “If that’s the case,” I wanted to say, “you needn’t have gone to the trouble of bringing her here.” Thanks to Setchan almost all the visitors to my room were girls.
This, however, by no means implies that Takeichi’s compliment, “Women’ll fall for you” had as yet been realized. I was merely the Harold Lloyd of Northeast Japan. Not for some years would Takeichi’s silly statement come palpitatingly alive, metamorphosed into a sinister prophecy.
Takeichi made one other important gift to me.
One day he came to my room to play. He was waving a brightly colored picture which he proudly displayed. “It’s a picture of a ghost,” he explained.
I was startled. That instant, as I could not help feeling in later years, determined my path of escape. I knew what Takeichi was showing me. I knew that it was only the familiar self-portrait of van Gogh. When we were children the French Impressionist School was very popular in Japan, and our first introduction to an appreciation of Western painting most often began with such works. The paintings of van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Renoir were familiar even to students at country schools, mainly through photographic reproductions. I myself had seen quite a few colored photographs of van Gogh’s paintings. His brushwork and the vividness of his colors had intrigued me, but I had never imagined his pictures to be of ghosts.
I took from my bookshelf a volume of Modigliani reproductions, and showed Takeichi the familiar nudes with skin the color of burnished copper. “How about these? Do you suppose they’re ghosts too?”
“They’re terrific.” Takeichi widened his eyes in admiration. “This one looks like a horse out of hell.”
“They really are ghosts then, aren’t they?”
“I wish I could paint pictures of ghosts like that,” said Takeichi.
There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes. And the more nervous they are—the quicker to take fright—the more violent they pray that every storm will be . . . Painters who have had this mentality, after repeated wounds and intimidations at the hands of the apparitions called human beings, have often come to believe in phantasms—they plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature. And they did not fob people off with clowning; they did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared. Takeichi was right: they had dared to paint pictures of devils. These, I thought, would be my friends in the future. I was so excited I could have wept.