That morning I had had an odd hawking cough, and every time I coughed I covered my mouth with my handkerchief. The handkerchief was spattered with blood, but it was not blood from my throat. The night before I had been picking at a pimple under my ear, and the blood was from that pimple. Realizing at once that it would be to my advantage not to reveal the truth, I lowered my eyes and sanctimoniously murmured, “Yes.”
The police chief finished writing the paper. “It’s up to the district attorney whether or not they bring action against you, but it would be a good idea to telephone or telegraph a guarantor to come to the district attorney’s office in Yokohama. There must be someone, isn’t there, who will guarantee you or offer bail?”
I remembered that a man from my home town, an antique dealer who was a frequent visitor at my father’s house in Tokyo, had served as my guarantor at school. He was a short-set man of forty, a bachelor and a henchman of my father’s. His face, particularly around the eyes, looked so much like a flatfish that my father always called him by that name. I had also always thought of him as “Flatfish.”
I borrowed the telephone directory at the police station to look up Flatfish’s number. I found it and called him. I asked if he would mind coming to Yokohama. Flatfish’s tone when he answered was unrecognizably officious, but he agreed in the end to be my guarantor.
I went back to the custody room. The police chief’s loud voice reached me as he barked out to the policeman, “Hey, somebody disinfect the telephone receiver. He’s been coughing blood, you know.”
In the afternoon they tied me up with a thin hemp rope. I was allowed to hide the rope under my coat when we went outside, but the young policeman gripped the end of the rope firmly. We went to Yokohama on the streetcar.
The experience hadn’t upset me in the least. I missed the custody room in the police station and even the old policeman. What, I wonder, makes me that way? When they tied me up as a criminal I actually felt relieved—a calm, relaxed feeling. Even now as I write down my recollections of those days I feel a really expansive, agreeable sensation.
But among my otherwise nostalgic memories there is one harrowing disaster which I shall never be able to forget and which even now causes me to break out into a cold sweat. I was given a brief examination by the district attorney in his dimly lit office. He was a man of about forty, with an intelligent calm about him which I am tempted to call “honest good looks” (in contrast to my own alleged good looks which, even if true, certainly are tainted with lewdness). He seemed so simple and straightforward that I let down my guard completely. I was listlessly recounting my story when suddenly I was seized with another fit of coughing. I took out my handkerchief. The blood stains caught my eye, and with ignoble opportunism I thought that this cough might also prove useful. I added a couple of extra, exaggerated coughs for good measure and, my mouth still covered by the handkerchief, I glanced at the district attorney’s face.
The next instant he asked with his quiet smile, “Was that real?”
Even now the recollection makes me feel so embarrassed I can’t sit still. It was worse, I am sure, even than when in high school I was plummeted into hell by that stupid Takeichi tapping me on the back and saying, “You did it on purpose.” Those were the two great disasters in a lifetime of acting. Sometimes I have even thought that I should have preferred to be sentenced to ten years imprisonment rather than meet with such gentle contempt from the district attorney.
The charge against me was suspended, but this brought no joy. I felt utterly wretched as I sat on a bench in the corridor outside the district attorney’s office waiting for the arrival of my guarantor, Flatfish.
I could see through the tall windows behind my bench the evening sky glowing in the sunset. Seagulls were flying by in a line which somehow suggested the curve of a woman’s body.
THE THIRD NOTEBOOK: PART ONE
One of Takeichi’s predictions came true, the other went astray. The inglorious prophecy that women would fall for me turned out just as he said, but the happy one, that I should certainly become a great artist, failed to materialize.
I never managed to become anything more impressive than an unknown, second-rate cartoonist employed by the cheapest magazines.
I was expelled from college on account of the incident at Kamakura, and I went to live in a tiny room on the second floor of Flatfish’s house. I gathered that minute sums of money were remitted from home every month for my support, never directly to me, but secretly, to Flatfish. (They apparently were sent by my brothers without my father’s knowledge.) That was all—every other connection with home was severed. Flatfish was invariably in a bad humor; even if I smiled to make myself agreeable, he would never return the smile. The change in him was so extraordinary as to inspire me with thoughts of how contemptible—or rather, how comic—human beings are who can metamorphize themselves as simply and effortlessly as they turn over their hands.
Flatfish seemed to be keeping an eye on me, as if I were very likely to commit suicide—he must have thought there was some danger I might throw myself into the sea after the woman—and he sternly forbade me to leave the house. Unable to drink or to smoke, I spent my whole days from the moment I got up until I went to bed trapped in my cubicle of a room, with nothing but old magazines to read. I was leading the life of a half-wit, and I had quite lost even the energy to think of suicide.
Flatfish’s house was near the Okubo Medical School. The signboard of his shop, which proclaimed in bold letters “Garden of the Green Dragon, Art and Antiques,” was the only impressive thing about the place. The shop itself was a long, narrow affair, the dusty interior of which contained nothing but shelf after shelf of useless junk. Needless to say, Flatfish did not depend for a living on the sale of this rubbish; he apparently made his money by performing such services as transferring possession of the secret property of one client to another—to avoid taxes. Flatfish almost never waited in the shop. Usually he set out early in the morning in a great hurry, his face set in a scowl, leaving a boy of seventeen to look after the shop in his absence. Whenever this boy had nothing better to do, he used to play catch in the street with the children of the neighborhood. He seemed to consider the parasite living on the second floor a simpleton if not an outright lunatic. He used even to address me lectures in the manner of an older and wiser head. Never having been able to argue with anybody, I submissively listened to his words, a weary though admiring expression on my face. I seemed to recall having heard long ago from the people at home gossip to the effect that this clerk was an illegitimate son of Flatfish, though the two of them never addressed each other as father and son. There must have been some reason for this and for Flatfish’s having remained a bachelor, but I am congenitally unable to take much interest in other people, and I don’t know anything beyond what I have stated. However, there was undoubtedly something strangely fish-like about the boy’s eyes, leading me to wonder if the gossip might not be true. But if this were the case, this father and son led a remarkably cheerless existence. Sometimes, late at night, they would order noodles from a neighborhood shop—just for the two of them, without inviting me—and they ate in silence, not exchanging so much as a word.
The boy almost always prepared the food in Flatfish’s house, and three times a day he would carry on a separate tray meals for the parasite on the second floor. Flatfish and the boy ate their meals in the dank little room under the stairs, so hurriedly that I could hear the clatter of plates.
One evening towards the end of March Flatfish—had he enjoyed some unexpected financial success? or did some other strategem move him? (even supposing both these hypotheses were correct, I imagine there were a number of other reasons besides of so obscure a nature that my conjectures could never fathom them)—invited me downstairs to a dinner graced by the rare presence of saké. The host himself was impressed by the unwonted delicacy of sliced tuna, and in his admiring delight he expansively offered a little saké even to his listless hanger-on.
He asked, “What do you plan to do, in the future I mean?”
I did not answer, but picked up some dried sardines with my chopsticks from a plate on the table and, while I examined the silvery eyes of the little fish, I felt the faint flush of intoxication rise in me. I suddenly became nostalgic for the days when I used to go from bar to bar drinking, and even for Horiki. I yearned with such desperation for “freedom” that I became weak and tearful.
Ever since coming to this house I had lacked all incentive even to play the clown; I had merely lain prostrate under the contemptuous glances of Flatfish and the boy. Flatfish himself seemed disinclined to indulge in long, heart-to-heart talks, and for my part no desire stirred within me to run after him with complaints.
Flatfish pursued his discourse. “As things stand it appears that the suspended sentence passed against you will not count as a criminal record or anything of that sort. So, you see, your rehabilitation depends entirely on yourself. If you mend your ways and bring me your problems—seriously, I mean—I will certainly see what I can do to help you.”
Flatfish’s manner of speech—no, not only his, but the manner of speech of everybody in the world—held strange, elusive complexities, intricately presented with overtones of vagueness: I have always been baffled by these precautions so strict as to be useless, and by the intensely irritating little maneuvers surrounding them. In the end I have felt past caring; I have laughed them away with my clowning, or surrendered to them abjectly with a silent nod of the head, in the attitude of defeat.
In later years I came to realize that if Flatfish had at the time presented me with a simple statement of the facts, there would have been no untoward consequences. But as a result of his unnecessary precautions, or rather, of the incomprehensible v
anity and love of appearances of the people of the world, I was subjected to a most dismal set of experiences.
How much better things would have been if only Flatfish had said something like this, “I’d like you to enter a school beginning in the April term. Your family has decided to send you a more adequate allowance once you have entered school.”
Only later did I learn that this in fact was the situation. If I had been told that, I should probably have done what Flatfish asked. But thanks to his intolerably prudent, circumlocutious manner of speech, I only felt irritable, and this caused the whole course of my life to be altered.
“If you do not feel like confiding your problems to me I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for you.”