A Shameful Life Read online

  What a disaster! I’ve made Father angry, his revenge will be terrible, I must do something right away, make amends before it’s too late! Such were my thoughts as I lay trembling in bed that night. I slipped from under my blankets and snuck down to the parlor, where I slid open the drawer containing Father’s notebook. Riffling through the pages until I found the list of presents, I licked the tip of a pencil and wrote “LION MASK” before sneaking back to bed. I didn’t want the mask at all. On the contrary, I’d have preferred a book. But I knew that Father wanted to get me the mask and the whole purpose of this late-night adventure—this sneaking into the parlor and so on—was to ingratiate myself with him and to restore his good mood.

  In the end, just as I expected, my extreme measures met with resounding success. When Father got back from Tokyo I heard his booming voice from my room, telling Mother all about it.

  “So, I’m at the shop and I open my notebook, and there it was—see, right here! ‘LION MASK.’ Not my handwriting, either. ‘What’s this?’ I think. I stood there trying to puzzle it out when it hit me. It’s one of Yōzō’s pranks! He just grinned and stood there like a lump but he must’ve wanted the mask so badly he couldn’t help himself. He’s an odd one, all right. Pretends he can’t decide but then, there it is in black and white. If he wanted it so much all he had to do was say so. I burst out laughing right there in the shop! Call him down right away.”

  Another time I gathered all the maids and servants into our Western-style room and had one of the servants pound away on the piano (we may have been out in the country but we possessed all the accoutrements of a respectable household) as I ran around in circles, whooping in an Indian dance and making everyone laugh. One of my older brothers got his camera out and took a photograph of me. When the photo was developed you could see my tiny weenie peeking out from between the folds of the loincloth (I’d worn a thin, calico cloth typically used for wrapping packages) and this only served to bring the whole household down in gales of laughter yet again. I suppose that this too qualifies as one of my surprising successes.

  In addition to the dozen or so monthly boy’s magazines I subscribed to, I ordered various books from Tokyo that I read on my own. So I knew all the stories of “Professor Nonsense” and “Dr. Whatsit” and so on by heart. I also knew all sorts of ghost stories, transcriptions of famous storytellers, scary stories from old Edo, and more, all of which meant I was never lacking in material. I kept my family laughing by saying the most outrageous things with a perfectly straight face.

  But oh, at school!

  I was on the verge of being respected at school. The idea of being respected utterly terrified me. To me, “being respected” meant fooling everyone with a near-perfect deception until someone, some omniscient, omnipotent person saw right through me, crushing my façade into a handful of dust and condemning me to a shame worse than death. That was my definition of “respect.” Even if I managed to deceive people and gain their “respect” eventually someone would find out and others would soon learn the truth. How terrible would their anger and revenge be once they realized they’d been duped? The mere thought of it made my hair stand on end.

  I was in danger of being respected less because I came from a wealthy family than because I was, as they say, “brainy.” I was a sickly child, so it wasn’t unusual for me to miss a month or two of school at a time, confined to my bed. Once I missed nearly an entire year of classes. Yet, when the year came to an end I’d ride to school in a rickshaw and take my exams where, still weak from my illness, I’d score at the top of my class. Even when I wasn’t sick I never studied and spent all my time in class drawing cartoons. I showed them to my classmates during recess, narrating as I went and making everyone roar with laughter. When we had to write compositions I always wrote funny stories, even when the teachers told me not to. I knew they secretly looked forward to them. One day I handed in a story, written in a tragic vein, about how I took a train to Tokyo with Mother and, mistaking the spittoon in the corridor for a chamber pot, peed in it by mistake. (I knew it was a spittoon all along. I only did it to make a show of my “childlike innocence.”) Certain it would make the teacher laugh, I snuck out of the classroom as soon as he left and followed at a distance as he walked down the hallway. As soon as he was outside of the classroom he pulled my composition out from among my classmates’ and, reading as he walked, began to chuckle. He stepped into the teachers’ office and, no doubt having reached the end of the story, burst out laughing, tears streaming from his eyes. I saw him pass the story around to the other teachers. I could not have been more satisfied with the result.

  A scamp.

  I’d succeeded in presenting myself as a scamp. I had successfully avoided being respected. When grades came out I got ten out of ten in everything except “behavior,” in which I received sixes or sevens. This too was a source of no small amusement at home.

  My true nature, however, was very nearly the antithesis of a scamp. Young though I was, I had already been violated and exposed to the most desolate things by our maids and servants. To this day I maintain that performing such acts, on a small child, is the vilest, the crudest, and the cruelest crime that one human being can perpetrate on another. Yet I endured it. Sometimes I even laughed, weakly, thinking that in this I had discovered yet another of those “special qualities” peculiar to human beings. Had I been in the habit of telling the truth I might’ve gone to Mother or Father, without shame, telling them of these crimes and begging for their help. Yet even my own mother and father were incomprehensible to me. Appealing to human beings for help? The idea was laughable. Even had I appealed to Father, to Mother, to a policeman, to the government—wouldn’t those people, adept as they were at getting their own way, just make up some story or other and that would be the end of the matter?

  I knew all too well that I would never get a fair hearing. In the end, there was no use in appealing to others for help. All I could do, I thought, was to keep silent, to endure, and to persist with my clowning.

  What’s that you say? That I have no faith in people? Since when did I convert to Christianity? When did I start believing that all people are sinners? Perhaps some people will scorn me thus. But why should a lack of faith in humans lead you straight down the path to religion? Even the people who mock me, don’t they live their lives happily, with never a thought for Jehovah or any deity, despite distrusting, and being distrusted by, everyone around them? This was also when I was very young, but one time a famous person from my father’s political party came to town to give a speech and a group of servants took me to see it. The hall was packed and I saw a number of people who were particularly close to my father, all clapping with great enthusiasm. When it ended and the audience dispersed, each group made its own way home on the dark, snowy streets, and I heard them savagely criticizing the speech. Some of these voices belonged to Father’s close friends. These so-called “allies” muttered angrily as they complained about Father’s terrible introduction, that they hadn’t been able to make heads nor tails of the speech. Then these very same people later came by our house and, stepping into our parlor, enthused over how successful the speech had been, their faces seemingly suffused with joy. Even the servants were guilty of this. When Mother asked them about the speech, they said it was fascinating. This, after spending the whole walk home complaining that there was nothing in the world so tedious as a speech.

  This is but one example and an insignificant one at that. People spend their entire lives deceiving and lying to one another, yet, odder still, nobody seems especially offended by it. Human life is so full of pure, vivid, merry duplicity that I begin to think they don’t even realize they are deceiving one another. For my part, I’m not particularly troubled by the deceptions. After all, what is my clowning but a lie I tell the whole day through? Questions of morality and the notions of right and wrong you find in ethics textbooks have never interested me. What I find incomprehensible are the people who can lead such pure, vivid, merry
lives even as they lie to one another. Where do they get the confidence? Nobody has shared this secret with me. Had they done so perhaps I wouldn’t have had to live in such terror of people, or to seek so desperately to please them. Perhaps I would’ve been able to avoid being excluded from the lives of human beings, perhaps I would’ve been able to live my life without tasting the hell of my nightly torments. In the end, it wasn’t because of my distrust of others or because of Christianity that I was unable to seek help even when the servants inflicted their hateful crimes upon me. It was because human beings had sealed their hard shell of trust against me, against this “I” known as Yōzō. Even Mother and Father sometimes did things that were incomprehensible to me.

  It seems to me that women have an instinctive ability to sniff out the scent of my isolation, my inability to appeal to others. That, I think, is one of the factors that led to me being taken advantage of at various times in later years.

  To women, I was a man who could be trusted with the secret of their love.

  THE SECOND JOURNAL

  A score or more of towering, black-barked cherry trees lined the shore, so close to the water that the waves seemed to lap at their roots. At the start of the new school year their blossoms burst forth, a dazzling pink against the blue of the sea and the rust brown of sticky, newly sprouted leaves. The countless blossoms scattered in a blizzard of petals to form a heaving tapestry atop the surface of the sea, pulled away with each wave only to come crashing back to shore again. Despite neglecting my studies I had somehow managed to gain admittance to a middle school in Japan’s northeast, and this petal-strewn beach was part of its grounds. The figure of these flowers blossomed on the badge of our school caps and even on each button of our uniforms.

  One of the reasons Father chose this school of sea and cherry blossoms for me is that distant relations lived all but next door to it. I was left in their care. I was a lazy student in general and, living so close to the school, I always waited until the last minute before rushing off at the sound of the morning assembly bell. Even so, thanks to my clowning I grew more and more popular among my classmates with each passing day.

  This was my first experience of living in an “unfamiliar land,” and I decided that life in a foreign place was far easier than in one’s own hometown. This might be put down to the fact that my clowning had by then become second nature and didn’t require nearly so much effort. But I think it was due more to the gap in difficulty between performing for one’s parents versus complete strangers, between one’s hometown and a foreign place. Surely even the most gifted actors, even Jesus Christ the Son of God, was sensitive to that difference. Don’t they say that the actor’s most difficult stage is his hometown? Wouldn’t even the most famous actor hesitate when confronted with a room filled with parents, siblings, wife, and children? Still, I managed it. What’s more, my performances met with considerable success. Surely someone as cunning as I need not fear even the most unlikely of missteps in such a distant town.

  My terror of people hadn’t receded in the slightest—it may have even grown—and though fear still writhed deep in my breast I became so adept in my performances that I was forever making my classmates laugh. Even my homeroom teacher, who often complained about how much better the class would be if only I weren’t in it, had to hide his grins behind his hand. I could even make the military drill instructor, with his barbaric shouting and voice like a thunderclap, collapse in laughter with the greatest of ease.

  Just when I began to think I had finally managed to conceal my true nature entirely—just as I heaved a sigh of relief—to my utter astonishment I felt a knife pierce me from behind. The one doing the stabbing was, as you might expect, the scrawniest boy in the class. He had a pale, bloated face and wore baggy, hand-me-down robes that must have come from his father or an elder brother. The absurdly long sleeves made him look like Prince Shōtoku from an ancient scroll painting. He got terrible grades in all his classes and always sat on the sidelines during P.E. or military drill practice, and we naturally thought he was a bit simple. It never occurred to me that I should be on my guard even around him.

  It was during P.E. and Takeichi (I can’t remember his surname but I think his given name was something like Takeichi) was sitting on the sidelines as usual while we practiced the high bar. When it was my turn I deliberately arranged my face in a determined expression. I gave a great shout as I leapt but, instead of jumping up to grab the bar, I went straight ahead in a long jump, crashing down on my bottom with a thump in the sandpit. It was a completely planned failure. As I had intended, everyone burst out laughing, and I climbed to my feet, brushing the sand away with a sheepish grin. It was then that I felt a poke in my back and saw that it was Takeichi, suddenly standing behind me.

  “Show off,” he muttered.

  I shuddered. That Takeichi, of all people, should see through me, see that my blundering was all an act—it was all too unexpected. For a moment I felt as though the whole world had turned red, that I burned in the crimson fires of hell. It was only with the greatest of effort that I managed to suppress the mad shriek welling up inside me.

  The days that followed were filled with anxiety and terror.

  On the surface, I continued to play the hapless clown, making everyone around me laugh, but from time to time a heavy sigh would escape as I realized that, no matter what I did, Takeichi had seen through me, and everything turned to ash. Certain that he would expose me to everyone who would listen, an oily sweat broke out across my brow and I glared about me, eyes rolling wildly with the vacant gaze of a madman. If I could have managed it, I would’ve spent every moment at Takeichi’s side—watching him twenty-four hours a day to make sure he didn’t let my secret slip. I would spare nothing to convince him that it was not an act, that my clowning was real. I wanted to become his dearest friend if I could. Should that fail, I thought, I would have no choice but to pray for his death. Yet, amid all of this, it never once occurred to me to actually try to kill him. Throughout my life I have wished more times than I can remember that someone might kill me, but I have never considered killing somebody else. Doing so, I thought, might only grant those terrifying people a measure of happiness.

  In my quest to tame Takeichi I put on a “benevolent” grin, not unlike the smile of a fake Christian, and, head tilted to the left, I gently clasped his thin shoulder, inviting him to come to my house to play, my voice soothing, honeyed. He merely looked back at me in vacant silence. But then one day, near the start of summer I think, a sudden downpour turned the air white with rain just as classes ended, and everyone was milling about near the exit, wondering what to do. I lived just next door so the rain didn’t bother me, and, just as I was about to make a run for it, I noticed Takeichi standing disconsolately in the shadows by the shoe locker. Come on, I’ll lend you my umbrella, I grabbed his hand even as he flinched from me, pulling him out into the rain and running to my house. After asking my aunt to dry our jackets, I succeeded in getting Takeichi to visit my room on the second floor.

  There were only three other people in the house. My aunt in her fifties, her elder daughter, about thirty, wearing glasses, tall and sickly looking (apparently she’d been married once but had since returned home. I followed the others’ example and called her Sis) and, lastly, the younger daughter called “Setchan,” who had only just graduated from a women’s college and who, unlike her sister, was short and round-faced. They ran a small shop on the first floor that sold stationery, balls, and bats and the like, but most of their money came from the rent on the five or six row houses that my aunt’s late husband had left them.

  “My ears hurt,” Takeichi said, standing in the middle of my room. “They got wet and now they hurt.”

  Looking more closely, I saw that both of his ears were in a terrible state. They were so full of pus they looked ready to overflow at any moment.

  “Oh, how terrible!” I cried in exaggerated surprise. “That must really hurt!”

  “I’m so sor
ry I pulled you out into the rain,” I spoke tenderly, in an almost womanly manner, as I made my “gentle” apology. I ran downstairs to fetch alcohol and cotton balls and made Takeichi rest his head on my lap as I carefully cleaned his ears. Not even Takeichi saw the evil intent behind this hypocritical act. He even made an attempt at ignorant flattery as he lay there.

  “You know, I bet girls will fall for you.”

  Many years later and to my regret, I was to discover that these words were a prediction. A prediction so terrible I doubt even Takeichi was aware of it. The words themselves are silly: to “fall for” someone, to have someone “fall for” you. Crude and absurdly foppish, no matter how ostensibly “austere” one’s surroundings, their mere utterance is enough to cause the walls of even the most depressing temple to collapse before your eyes, leaving you feeling blank and empty. Yet it is a peculiar thing. If we move away from such crude notions as how difficult it is to have girls falling for you and instead, to phrase it in literary terms, consider the anxiety of being loved, then those depressing temple walls remain intact.

  When Takeichi proffered this absurd flattery, saying that girls would fall for me, I just smiled and blushed as I cleaned his ears and did not say a word. Yet, in fact, I did have an inkling—if only faintly—that there might be something to what he said. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t write “there might be something to what he said” in that absurd, self-satisfied, boastful sense that such uncouth expressions as “girls will fall for you” typically evoke. That would be too much, even coming from one of the dissolute young men who appear in rakugo stories. Clearly, I did not think, “there might be something to it” in this kind of ridiculous, smirking manner.

  Women were a hundred times more difficult for me to understand than men. There were more women than men in my family and, even among my more distant relatives, there were many girls. There were also the maids who had “violated” me, and it is no exaggeration to say I grew up playing exclusively with girls. Yet, despite that, when I was with women I always behaved as though I were walking on thin ice. They seemed to me almost completely beyond understanding. I stumbled about blindly, sometimes accidentally treading on the tail of the tiger and suffering a terrible mauling as a result. Unlike the beatings I received at the hands of men, however, these wounds did not show. Like a kind of internal bleeding, they attacked me from the inside and in the most unpleasant manner imaginable. Such wounds were long and difficult to heal.