“I’ve had enough,” Horiki said with a scowl. “Not even a lecher like myself can kiss a woman who looks so poverty-stricken.”
He folded his arms and stared, seemingly in utter disgust, at Tsuneko. He forced a smile.
“Some liquor. I haven’t got any money.” I spoke under my breath to Tsuneko. I felt I wanted to drink till I drowned in it. Tsuneko was in the eyes of the world unworthy even of a drunkard’s kiss, a wretched woman who smelled of poverty. Astonishingly, incredibly enough, this realization struck me with the force of a thunderbolt. I drank more that night than ever before in my life, more . . . more, my eyes swam with drink, and every time Tsuneko and I looked in each other’s face, we gave a pathetic little smile. Yes, just as Horiki had said, she really was a tired, poverty-stricken woman and nothing more. But this thought itself was accompanied by a welling-up of a feeling of comradeship for this fellow-sufferer from poverty. (The clash between rich and poor is a hackneyed enough subject, but I am now convinced that it really is one of the eternal themes of drama.) I felt pity for Tsuneko; for the first time in my life I was conscious of a positive (if feeble) movement of love in my heart. I vomited. I passed out. This was also the first time I had ever drunk so much as to lose consciousness.
When I woke Tsuneko was sitting by my pillow. I had been sleeping in her room on the second floor of the carpenter’s house. “I thought you were joking when you told me that love flew out the window when poverty came in the door. Were you serious? You didn’t come any more. What a complicated business it is, love and poverty. Suppose I work for you? Wouldn’t that be all right?”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
She lay down beside me. Towards dawn she pronounced for the first time the word “death.” She too seemed to be weary beyond endurance of the task of being a human being; and when I reflected on my dread of the world and its bothersomeness, on money, the movement, women, my studies, it seemed impossible that I could go on living. I consented easily to her proposal.
Nevertheless I was still unable to persuade myself fully of the reality of this resolution to die. Somehow there lurked an element of make-believe.
The two of us spent that morning wandering around Asakusa. We went into a lunch stand and drank a glass of milk.
She said, “You pay this time.”
I stood up, took out my wallet and opened it. Three copper coins. It was less shame than horror that assaulted me at that moment. I suddenly saw before my eyes my room in the lodging house, absolutely empty save for my school uniform and the bedding—a bleak cell devoid of any object which might be pawned. My only other possessions were the kimono and coat I was wearing. These were the hard facts. I perceived with clarity that I could not go on living.
As I stood there hesitating, she got up and looked inside my wallet. “Is that all you have?”
Her voice was innocent, but it cut me to the quick. It was painful as only the voice of the first woman I had ever loved could be painful. “Is that all?” No, even that suggested more money than I had—three copper coins don’t count as money at all. This was a humiliation more strange than any I had tasted before, a humiliation I could not live with. I suppose I had still not managed to extricate myself from the part of the rich man’s son. It was then I myself determined, this time as a reality, to kill myself.
We threw ourselves into the sea at Kamakura that night. She untied her sash, saying she had borrowed it from a friend at the café, and left it folded neatly on a rock. I removed my coat and put it in the same spot. We entered the water together.
She died. I was saved.
The incident was treated rather prominently in the press, no doubt because I was a college student. My father’s name also had some news value.
I was confined in a hospital on the coast. A relative came from home to see me and take care of necessary arrangements. Before he left he informed me that my father and all the rest of my family were so enraged that I might easily be disowned once and for all. Such matters did not concern me; I thought instead of the dead Tsuneko, and, longing for her, I wept. Of all the people I had ever known, that miserable Tsuneko really was the only one I loved.
A long letter which consisted of a string of fifty stanzas came from the girl at my lodging house. Fifty stanzas, each one beginning with the incredible words, “Please live on for me.” The nurses used to visit my sickroom, laughing gaily all the time, and some would squeeze my hand when they left.
They discovered at the hospital that my left lung was affected. This was most fortunate for me: when, not long afterwards, I was taken from the hospital to the police station, charged with having been the accomplice to a suicide, I was treated as a sick man by the police, and quartered not with the criminals but in a special custody room.
Late that night the old policeman standing night duty in the room next to mine softly opened the door. “Hey,” he called to me, “you must be cold. Come here, next to the fire.”
I walked into his room, sat on a chair, and warmed myself by the fire. I feigned an air of utter dejection.
“You miss her, don’t you?”
“Yes.” I answered in a particularly faint and faraway voice.
“That’s human nature, I guess.” His manner had become increasingly self-important. “Where was it you first took up with this woman?” The question was weighted with an authority almost indistinguishable from that of a judge. My jailor, despising me as a mere child who wouldn’t know the difference, acted exactly as if he were charged with the investigation. No doubt he was secretly hoping to while away the long autumn evening by extracting from me a confession in the nature of a pornographic story. I guessed his intent at once, and it was all I could do to restrain the impulse to burst out laughing in his face. I knew that I had the right to refuse to answer any queries put me by the policeman in an “informal interrogation” of this sort, but in order to lend some interest to the long night ahead, I cloaked myself in a kind of simple sincerity, as if I firmly, unquestioningly believed that this policeman was responsible for investigating me, and that the degree of severity of my punishment depended solely on his decision. I made up a confession absurd enough to satisfy—more or less—his prurient curiosity.
“Hmmm. I’ve got a pretty good idea now. We always take it into consideration when a prisoner answers everything honestly.”
“Thank you very much. I hope you will do what you can to help me.”
My performance was all but inspired—a great performance which brought me no benefit whatsoever.
In the morning I was called before the police chief. This time it was the real examination.
As soon as I opened the door and entered his office, the police chief said, “There’s a handsome lad for you! It wasn’t your fault, I can see. Your mother’s to blame for having brought such a handsome boy into the world.”
He was still young, a dark-complexioned man with something about him which suggested a university education. His words caught me off-guard, and made me as wretched as if I had been born deformed, with a red macula covering half my face.
The examination conducted by this athletic-looking police chief was simple and to the point, a world removed from the furtive, tenaciously obscene “examination” the old policeman had given me the night before. After he finished his questioning, he filled out a form to send to the district attorney’s office. He commented as he wrote, “You mustn’t neglect your health that way. You’ve been coughing blood, haven’t you?”