A Shameful Life Page 10

  “You have to stop drinking.”

  She spoke familiarly, as though we were relatives.

  “But I think I might be an alcoholic. Even now I want a drink.”

  “You mustn’t. My husband got TB and drowned himself in liquor. Said it’d kill off the bacteria but it ended up killing him instead.”

  “I’m too frightened, I can’t. I’m too scared.”

  “I’ll give you some medicine. But you must stop drinking no matter what.”

  The woman (a widow with a son who’d gone to medical school in Chiba or someplace like that but, as soon as he got accepted he came down with the same illness that killed his father and now he was on leave, convalescing in hospital. She had a bedridden father-in-law at home and one of her legs had been useless ever since she came down with polio when she was five) stumped around the shop on her crutches taking things from this shelf and that drawer as she gathered up various medicines for me.

  This one will replenish your blood.

  These are vitamin injections. The syringe is here.

  These are calcium supplements. Diastase to settle your stomach.

  This one for this, that one for that—she went on, lovingly explaining five or six different kinds of medicines, but, in the end, even this miserable woman’s love was too much for me. Finally, she said, deftly wrapping a small box, this is for when you can’t take it anymore and absolutely must have a drink.

  It was morphine.

  She said it wouldn’t be as bad as liquor, and I believed her. What’s more, it had gotten to the point where even I had come to think there was something unclean about the way I drank. For the first time in a very long time I felt a sense of joy at the prospect of being able to escape from the Satan of liquor. So without any hesitation I promptly injected the morphine into my arm. Instantly, all my anxiety, irascibility, and timidity melted clean away. I was garrulous, cheerful. One shot of morphine and even my worries about my declining health vanished. I poured myself into my cartoons, coming up with ideas so odd and so amusing that I burst out laughing even as I drew.

  I meant to limit myself to one injection a day but before long one became two and by the time two became four I couldn’t work without it.

  “You have to stop. If you get addicted . . . Well, that would be terrible.”

  When the woman said that I figured that I must already be well and truly addicted (I was extremely susceptible to the suggestions of others. Somehow I’d managed to convince myself of the odd notion that I was obliged to disappoint people. If someone handed me money and said, “You really shouldn’t spend it but, being you, you’ll probably spend it anyway,” I felt that I had to spend the money, that it was my duty to disappoint them, and I would rush right out and spend every last coin), but the idea that I might be addicted only made me more anxious and this, in turn, caused me to crave the drug all the more.

  “Please, I’m begging you. Just one more box. I’ll pay what I owe you at the end of the month, I promise.”

  “It’s not the bill that concerns me, you can pay that whenever you like. It’s the police I’m worried about.”

  Ah, it seems I am doomed forever to have a cunning, gloomy, shadowy aura trailing about after me.

  “You’ll find a way to get around them. I’m begging you. Shall I give you a kiss?”

  She blushed, and I saw my opening.

  “Look, without the medicine I can’t get any work done at all. It’s like a stimulant.”

  “In that case you’d do better with a hormone injection.”

  “Don’t make fun of me. If I can’t drink then it’s got to be the medicine. I can’t work without either of them.”

  “But you mustn’t drink.”

  “Right? And ever since I started taking the medicine I haven’t touched a drop. Thanks to you I’m feeling much better. I’m not going to spend my whole life drawing lousy cartoons, you know. I’ll stop drinking, get my health back, work hard, and one day I’ll become a famous painter, you’ll see. This is a critical time for me. Please, I’m begging you. Here, I’ll give you a kiss.”

  At that the woman burst out laughing. “You’re hopeless, you know that? Don’t blame me if get addicted though.”

  She thumped across the floor with her crutches and took the drug from a shelf.

  “I can’t give you the whole box. You’ll go through it in no time. You can have half.”

  “Stingy, aren’t you? Still, it’s better than nothing, I suppose.”

  I injected an ampule as soon as I got home.

  “Doesn’t it hurt?” Yoshiko asked timidly.

  “’Course it hurts. But I’ve got no choice. If I’m going to get through all this work, I’ve got to do it, whether I like it or not. I’m a lot better these days, right? Now I’ve got work to do. Work, work, work.” I chattered away cheerfully.

  Once I even showed up in the dead of night, pounding on the shop door. When she came tottering out on crutches, still in her nightclothes, I grabbed her, kissing her, and pretending to cry.

  Wordlessly, she handed me a box.

  By the time I realized that the drug was just as vile as shōchū—no, even worse—I was a full-blown addict. I had truly reached the depths of degradation. Desperate for the drug, I’d started copying erotic prints again, and it wasn’t long before the crippled woman and I began, quite literally, an ugly affair.

  I want to die. Now more than ever, I want to die. There is no going back. There is nothing I can do. Nothing can help. I can only add more layers of shame. Dreams of bicycle rides and forest waterfalls are not for me. My lot is to lay one filthy, contemptible crime atop another, to suffer ever more violent anguish. I want to die. I have to die. Life itself is the root of all crime.

  Near mad and consumed with these thoughts, I nevertheless continued to spend each day running back and forth between my room and the pharmacy.

  The more I worked, the more I needed the drug, and before long I’d accumulated a terrifying debt. Whenever the lady from the pharmacy saw me tears welled up in her eyes even as they trickled down my cheeks.

  Hell.

  This was my last chance to escape from hell. If it fails, I thought, there is nothing left for me but a noose around my neck. Thus resolved, as though wagering everything on the existence of God, I wrote a long letter to Father. In it I confessed everything (except for the woman. Even I couldn’t bring myself to write about that) about my current state.

  The outcome was even worse than I had imagined. Days passed one after another yet no reply came. I grew restless and anxious and this, in turn, made me take even more of the drug.

  Tonight, I secretly resolved, tonight I’ll inject ten ampules and jump in the river. That very afternoon, as though possessed of the devil’s own intuition, Flounder showed up, Horiki tagging along behind him.

  “I hear you’ve been coughing up blood?”

  Horiki sat cross-legged in front of me. So kind and gentle was his smile that I thought I’d never seen its like before. I was overwhelmed with gratitude and so overjoyed by his kindly smile I had to turn away lest they see the tears streaming down my cheeks. That one, gentle smile utterly destroyed me. I was buried alive.

  I was put in a car. The most important thing is to get you to a hospital. We’ll take care of everything else, Flounder urged quietly (so gentle were his words I could almost describe them as compassionate), and, as though all will and judgment of my own had vanished, I wept softly as I obeyed every command, the very soul of meekness. Yoshiko climbed in the car too, and the four of us jostled and swayed as we drove for what seemed a very long time. Just as the sky began to darken the car stopped at the entrance to a large hospital deep in a forest.

  A sanatorium. I was certain of it.

  A young doctor subjected me to a disconcertingly courteous, tender examination.

  “Well, I think you should rest here for a little while,” he said with an almost shy smile. Flounder, Horiki, and Yoshiko were to return home, leaving me there all on
my own. As they turned to go, Yoshiko handed me a cloth bundle containing a change of clothes and then, wordlessly, held out the syringe and remaining ampules of morphine. It seems she really had believed me when I said it was just a stimulant.

  “No, I don’t need it anymore.”

  This was truly remarkable. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this solitary instance was the only time in my entire life I rejected something offered me. Mine was the misery of one who cannot say no. I was terrified that, should I refuse, an irreparable, eternal crack would snake through the both of us. Yet, at that instant, though half-mad with cravings, I refused the morphine without a second thought. Perhaps I’d been moved by Yoshiko’s “divine ignorance.” I wonder if my addiction did not cease at that precise moment.

  After that the young doctor with the shy smile showed me to one wing of the hospital, and then I heard the lock clang shut. I was in a lunatic asylum.

  I want to go someplace where there aren’t any women. That careless remark, uttered after the Dial incident, had been, it seems, realized in the most peculiar manner. My wing of the hospital held only men who were insane. Even the nurses were men. Not a single woman to be seen.

  I was no longer a mere criminal. I was mad. But no, I certainly wasn’t insane or anything like it. I’d never, not for a moment, gone mad. Ah, but I suppose that’s the sort of thing a lunatic would say. I suppose that if they put you in this hospital it means you’re crazy, and if they don’t, it means you’re normal.

  I ask you, God. Is it a crime not to resist?

  I was moved to tears by Horiki’s strangely beautiful smile, I abandoned all judgment and resistance, I got in the car, I was brought here, I became a lunatic. Even were I to leave right now, I would still be branded a lunatic. No. Not a lunatic. A cripple.

  A human, failed.

  I had, utterly and completely, ceased to be human.

  When I arrived it was early summer, and, peering through the bars of my window, I could see the red blossoms of lilies floating atop the small pond in the hospital garden. Three months later the cosmos were starting to bloom, and, my eldest brother, with Flounder in tow, appeared out of the blue to get me out. Father had died of a gastric ulcer at the end of last month. We don’t care about your past. We don’t want you to worry about money. You don’t have to do anything. In exchange, you have to leave everything, get out of Tokyo right away, and go to the countryside to recover. We know you still have unfinished business in Tokyo but Shibuta has already taken care of most of the loose ends so you don’t need to worry about it. My brother spoke in his characteristically tense, somber manner.

  I could almost see the mountains and rivers of my hometown floating before my eyes. I gave a weak nod.

  Truly, a cripple.

  My last pillar crumbled when I heard that Father was dead. He was no more. That presence, comforting and terrifying, had always been with me. Gone. It was as though the vessel of anguish had run dry. I even wondered if it was because of Father that this vessel had weighed so heavily upon me. All motivation fled me. I’d lost even the ability to suffer.

  My brother was true to his word and did all that he promised. Four or five hours south of my hometown by train there is a hot springs region near the sea that is unusually warm for northeast Japan. He bought me a house on the outskirts of a small village there. It had five rooms, crumbling walls, and pillars chewed away by insects. It was so dilapidated as to be almost beyond repair. He also provided me with a servant, an ugly woman of almost sixty years with horrible rust-colored hair.

  I’ve been here a little more than three years now and have been subjected to any number of odd violations by that old servant, Tetsu. Sometimes we argue like an old married couple. Sometimes my lung disease worsens, sometimes it improves. I grow thinner and I grow fatter. Sometimes I cough up blood. Yesterday I sent Tetsu to the pharmacy to buy me a box of Carmotine, my usual sedative. The box she brought back was different from the usual one, but I didn’t take particular note of it. Though I took ten tablets before going to bed I still didn’t feel at all sleepy. Just as I started to wonder at this, my stomach suddenly started rumbling, and, rushing to the toilet, I suffered a terrible attack of diarrhea. I had to run to the toilet three more times that night. Growing suspicious, I looked at the box more carefully and saw that it was actually Crapotine, a laxative.

  I lay flat on my back in bed, a hot water bottle atop my stomach, thinking about what I would say to Tetsu.

  “Look here, this isn’t Carmotine at all—it’s Crapotine!” But before I could go any further, I started to giggle. I guess, in the end, “cripple” is a comic noun. The cripple tries to sleep but takes a laxative instead. To top it off, the laxative is called “Crapotine.”

  I am beyond joy or misery now.

  All things pass.

  That is the only truth I have encountered in all the days I’ve spent in this cold hell of a world of so-called “humans.”

  All things pass.

  I will be twenty-seven years old this year. My hair has turned gray and most people would say I look over forty.

  EPILOGUE

  I never actually met the madman who composed these journals. I do, however, have a passing acquaintance with the woman described as “the Madam of the Kyōbashi bar.” She is a small woman with a sallow complexion. She has narrow, pinched eyes, a prominent nose, and a general steeliness about her associated less with a “beautiful woman” than, perhaps, with a “handsome youth.” The Tokyo described in the journals appears to be mainly that of 1930 to 1932, but since my friend didn’t take me to the Kyōbashi bar for highballs until around the time “militarists” started parading about openly—1935 or so—I never had the opportunity to meet the author who wrote these pages.

  It was this past February when I went to pay a visit on an acquaintance who had evacuated Tokyo for the city of Funabashi, just to the east in Chiba Prefecture. He was a friend from my university days and now holds a post lecturing at a women’s college. The purpose of my visit was to ask his assistance with arrangements surrounding the marriage of one of my relatives. As Funabashi was near the shore, I thought I might as well get some fresh seafood while I was there and treat my family to a feast. Thus, backpack slung across my shoulders, I set out.

  Funabashi is a fairly large city overlooking the muddy sea. My friend’s house was in a newer part of the city, and, though I showed the locals his address and asked directions, nobody seemed to know quite where it was. Not only was I getting cold, the straps of my backpack were digging into my shoulders, and so, drawn by the sound of classical music, I opened the door to a coffee shop.

  The woman running the shop looked familiar and, inquiring, I discovered she was none other than the Madam of that tiny Kyōbashi bar of some ten years ago. She apparently recognized me too and we greeted one another, laughing with exaggerated surprise. Dispensing with the all-too-familiar stories of air raids burning us out of house and home, we seemed to grow almost boastful as we talked.

  “Look at you! You haven’t changed at all!”

  “Nonsense. I’m an old lady with aching bones now. You’re as young as ever, though!”

  “I wish I were. I’ve got three kids now. They’re the reason I’m out here today—foraging for food.”

  We continued in this vein for a little while, exchanging the sort of pleasantries you’d expect to hear from two companions meeting after a long absence. We were speaking of mutual acquaintances and what had become of them when she suddenly grew serious and asked me if I knew Yō-chan. When I told her I didn’t she went into the back and returned with three notebooks and three photographs.

  “They might give you ideas for a novel,” she said, handing them to me.

  Normally I find it impossible to write about material that someone else has foisted on me, and I was about to hand the journals back when the photos caught my eye (I describe these very peculiar photos in the preface), so I took the journals and told her I would stop by again on my way home.
I asked if she knew the lecturer at the woman’s college at such and such an address and it turned out that she did, being a newly established resident herself. He lived just down the street and even stopped by the coffee shop from time to time.

  That night my friend and I shared what little liquor he had on hand, and he invited me to spend the night. I stayed up the whole time, absorbed in the journals.

  Though they describe events of some time ago, I was certain they would be of great interest to readers even today. Rather than make a botch of things by trying to rewrite them myself I thought it better by far to find a magazine willing to publish them as they were.

  The only gifts I’d been able to find for my children were dried seafood so, settling my pack on my shoulders, I left my friend’s house and stopped in at the coffee shop again.

  “It was nice seeing you again yesterday. By the way, may I hold on to these notebooks a little while longer?” I said, getting straight to the point.

  “Of course. Please do.”

  “Is he still alive? The man who wrote them?”

  “Well now, I’m afraid I have no idea. The journals and photos were sent to my old place in Kyōbashi about ten years ago. It must have been Yō-chan who sent them but there was no return address, not even a name. It’s a wonder they weren’t lost along with everything else in the air raids. It was only the other day that I read them all the way through.”

  “Did you cry?”

  “Cry? No, I didn’t cry. Only . . . well, it’s just no good. There’s nothing you can do when someone gets like that.”

  “If that was ten years ago, I suppose he might’ve died by now. He must’ve sent them by way of thanking you. No doubt he exaggerated a bit here and there but it sounds like you went through a lot as well. If it’s all true and I were his friend, I suppose I would’ve been tempted to take him to an asylum too.”

  “It’s all his father’s fault,” she said absently. “The Yō-chan I knew was kind and so gentle. If only he didn’t drink—no, even when he did drink . . . He was such a good boy. An angel.”