A Shameful Life Read online

  Women clasp me to them only to thrust me away. When others are around they scorn me and treat me cruelly, but the moment we are alone they cling to me. They sleep deeply, like the dead. I sometimes wonder if women live only to sleep. I’d made many observations about women, even when I was young. Though they were of the same species I could not help but think of women as altogether different from men, and, oddly, these enigmatic, mercurial creatures cared for me. To say that they “fell for me” or that they “loved me” would not, in my case, be accurate. It is more apt, I think, to say they “cared for me.”

  Women were even more at ease with my clowning than men. When I acted the clown around men, they did not, as you might imagine, cackle away, on and on and on. I knew that taking my performance too far around men would end in failure, so I was always careful to wrap things up at just the right moment. Women, though, do not understand moderation. They drove me on and on, demanding more and more of my clowning, calling for one encore after another until I was utterly exhausted. Women really do laugh a lot. They are capable of gorging themselves on pleasure much more than men.

  When I was in middle school both the elder and the younger sister would visit my room on the second floor whenever they had a free moment. Each time I heard them at my door I jumped up in fright.

  “Are you studying?” a tentative voice would ask.

  “Nope,” I’d reply, grinning as I closed my book. “Today, at school, Gramps, he’s our geography teacher . . .” and I’d make myself start rattling off another funny story.

  “Yō-chan, put these glasses on,” Setchan said one night, after she and Sis had come to my room and forced me to give one performance after another.

  “Why?”

  “Never mind why, just do it. Take Sis’s glasses.”

  They were always ordering me about in this brusque manner. So the clown did as he was told and put on the glasses. The second I did so the two sisters burst out laughing.

  “It’s him! It’s Lloyd! He looks just like him!”

  Harold Lloyd, a foreign movie star known for his comedies, was very popular in Japan at the time.

  I stood up, one hand raised.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” I began, “I would like to take this opportunity to tell all my fans in Japan . . .” This made them laugh all the harder and from then on I made sure to go to the theater whenever they screened a Lloyd film so I could secretly study his mannerisms and expressions.

  Another time, I was lying in bed reading a book one autumn evening when Sis came flying into my room like a bird and threw herself onto my bed, collapsing in a fit of tears.

  “Oh, Yō-chan, you’ll save me, won’t you? Of course you will! We should leave this wretched house—just the two of us. Oh, save me! Save me!”

  She went on and on like this, raving and weeping in turn. This wasn’t the first time I’d been exposed to a woman in such a state, so I wasn’t terribly surprised at the violence of her words. On the contrary, I found her trite, empty theatrics rather tedious, and, slipping out from under my blankets, I walked over to my desk, peeled a persimmon, and handed her a slice. She sat up at this, sniffing and hiccoughing as she ate, and said, “Do you have any good books? Give me one.”

  I took down a copy of Sōseki’s I Am a Cat and passed it to her.

  “Thanks for the persimmon,” she said with an embarrassed smile and walked out of the room. She wasn’t the only woman who confused me. All women did. Trying to figure out what was going through their minds as they led their lives was more complicated, more troublesome, and more unsettling than trying to discern the thoughts of an earthworm. All I knew, as experience had taught me from a very young age, was that when a woman suddenly burst out crying like that, the best thing to do was give her something sweet. She’d start to feel better once she ate.

  Sometimes the younger sister, Setchan, would even bring her friends to my room. As usual, I’d entertain one and all equally, but once they went home she invariably started criticizing them. You’d better watch out for that one, she’s no good, she’d proclaim. In that case why go to all the trouble of bringing her up here? Thanks to Setchan, almost all of my visitors were women.

  However, Takeichi’s prediction, that women would “fall for me,” had not yet been realized. I was still nothing more than northeastern Japan’s Harold Lloyd. It would be several years yet before Takeichi’s ignorant flattery came vividly to life, revealing itself as an ominous, disturbing foretelling.

  Takeichi proffered one other, magnificent gift.

  “Look! It’s a monster!” He exclaimed when he came to my room, proudly showing me a color print, the frontispiece of some book.

  What’s this, I thought. Years later I became convinced that it was in this precise instant that the path I later stumbled down was determined. I recognized the picture. It was merely Van Gogh’s famous self-portrait. French impressionists were all the rage at the time, and, as art appreciation classes typically started off with these kinds of paintings, even middle school children in small country towns like mine could recognize works by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, and the rest. In my case, I’d seen many Van Gogh prints and been struck by his unique touch and his bright, vibrant colors, yet not once had it occurred to me to think of them as paintings of monsters.

  “Well then, how about this one? Is this a monster, too?” I pulled a collection of Modigliani’s paintings down from my bookshelf and showed Takeichi his famous portrait of a nude, her skin like burnt copper.

  “Whoa!” Takeichi exclaimed, his eyes wide and round. “It looks like one of the horses of hell!”

  “So it is a monster, then.”

  “I want to draw those kinds of monster pictures, too.”

  Contrary to what you might expect, just as timid and easily frightened people long all the more for a raging storm to grow stronger still, those who live in utter terror of human beings develop a psychological need to see, clearly and with their own two eyes, ever more frightening and terrible monsters but, alas, these artists, so wounded by that monster called humanity, are so terrorized that, in the end, they believe in visions, and monsters appear vividly before their eyes under the merciless glare of nature’s noonday sun. What’s more, they don’t attempt clowning deceptions, they try to depict things precisely as they see them, resolutely drawing “monsters,” just as Takeichi said. Here, I thought, are my future comrades, growing so flushed with excitement that hot tears trickled down my cheeks.

  “I’ll paint them, too. I’ll paint monsters. I’ll paint the horses of hell,” I told Takeichi, my voice inexplicably dropping to a faint whisper.

  Ever since elementary school I’d enjoyed both looking at pictures and painting my own. Yet my paintings never received as much attention as my written compositions. Since I placed no faith whatsoever in the language of human beings, my compositions were nothing more than a simple form of clowning. Throughout elementary and middle school they sent my teachers into paroxysms of laughter. But they meant nothing to me. It was only in my paintings (cartoons are a different story) that I struggled to express something in my own way, immature though it may have been. The model sketches from textbooks bored me, and the teacher’s drawings were execrable, so I was left to my own devices, haphazardly cobbling together random styles of painting in an attempt to discover one for myself. By the time I started middle school I’d acquired a complete oil painting set, but though I tried to emulate the touch of the impressionists, my paintings always ended up looking flat and blank, the figures like paper dolls. I was at a loss. Thanks to Takeichi, however, I realized my approach had been completely wrong. In my naiveté and ignorance I’d taken things I thought were beautiful and tried to replicate that beauty in my paintings. True masters, however, took the most unremarkable objects and, through their own interpretation, created something beautiful. Or they took the ugliest objects and, through their unabashed fascination, imbued them with the joy of expression, even as the sight of them made their stomachs turn. In short, t
he true master is not swayed in the slightest by the expectations of others. It was Takeichi who bestowed this secret, this primitive treatise upon me, and, little by little, away from the eyes of my female visitors, I set myself to the task of composing self-portraits.

  So dark and gloomy were these paintings that even I shrank from them. Yet, I told myself encouragingly, this is my true self, the one I so assiduously conceal in the depths of my heart. I smile cheerfully on the surface and make others laugh, but in truth mine is a melancholy soul. There was no point in denying it. Even so, I never showed my paintings to anyone other than Takeichi. I was afraid that people might see through my clowning and glimpse the misery it concealed, and I didn’t want to be forced to be on my guard all the time. And I feared they might not realize that the paintings were an expression of my true self but rather see them as some new extension of my clowning and treat them as a hilarious joke. That would be far too much to bear, so I concealed my paintings in the deepest corner of my closet as soon as I finished them.

  I also kept my “monster technique” secret at school. In art classes I continued to paint as before, with a mediocre touch, drawing beautiful things beautifully.

  Takeichi was the only person I’d felt comfortable sharing my vulnerable, sensitive nature with, so I didn’t worry about showing him my self-portraits. He praised them extravagantly, and when I had drawn two or three more monster paintings, he bestowed his second foretelling on me.

  “You’ll be a famous artist someday.”

  With these two predictions branded onto my forehead by poor, simple Takeichi—that girls would fall for me and that I’d someday become a famous artist—I soon made my way to Tokyo.

  I’d rather have gone to art school, but Father had long since decided to send me to higher school with the aim of making me a government official. As usual, I was incapable of uttering a word of protest when this decision was handed down, and, without giving it much thought, I did as I was bid. I was told to give the entrance exam a try a year earlier than usual, and—being thoroughly sick of my school of sea and cherry blossoms—I passed the exam for a Tokyo higher school in my fourth year and so skipped my fifth year. I lived in a dormitory at first but was repulsed by its filth and brutality. There was no room for clowning in such a place, so, persuading a doctor to write a letter diagnosing me with pulmonary tuberculosis, I left the dormitory and moved into my father’s Tokyo villa in Sakuragi. I could never live in a communal environment. Whenever I heard people going on about the “sincerity and enthusiasm of youth” or the “pride of youth” and that kind of thing I couldn’t suppress a shudder. That kind of talk, that kind of “school spirit” was utterly alien to me. Classroom and dormitory alike seemed to me a midden heap of twisted sexual desire where my near-perfect clowning was of no avail.

  When the Diet wasn’t sitting Father only spent a week or two each month in Tokyo, and while he was away there were only three of us in the large house—me and the elderly couple who looked after the place—so I was able to skip classes now and then. Yet I never felt any desire to go out and see the sights of Tokyo (even now it seems I will end my days without ever having seen the Meiji Shrine or the bronze statue of Kusunoki Masahige or having visited the graves of the forty-seven samurai at Sengaku Temple) and instead spent the whole day at home reading and painting. When Father was in Tokyo I rushed off to class early each morning, but I sometimes stopped at Yasuda Shintarō’s Western-style painting studio in the Sendagi district of Hongō instead, spending three or four hours at a time practicing my sketching. Ever since I’d escaped from the dormitory, even when I did show up to class I felt strangely distant from my classmates, as though I were just an auditing student. Perhaps this was a result of my own biases, but it became painfully obvious to me, and I grew increasingly reluctant to attend classes. Throughout my entire time at elementary, middle, and higher schools I never managed to understand what they meant by “school spirit.” I never even bothered to learn any of my school songs.

  Not long after I began frequenting the Yasuda studio an art student introduced me to the world of liquor, cigarettes, whores, pawnshops, and Marxism. An odd combination, to be sure, but it’s true.

  His name was Horiki Masao. Born in an older part of Tokyo, he was six years older than me and a graduate of a private fine arts academy. Since he didn’t have an atelier at home, he visited the studio so he could continue his study of Western art.

  “Hey, lend me five yen, will ya?”

  I’d seen him around but we’d never spoken. Flustered, I thrust out a five-yen note.

  “Excellent! You’re a good kid. Let’s have a drink—my treat.”

  Incapable of refusing, I let myself be dragged to a café district near the studio. That was the beginning of our acquaintance.

  “Y’know, I’ve had my eye on you. For a while now. That! That shy smile, right there! That’s the look of someone with the potential to be a real artist. To our new friendship, then—cheers! Hey Kinu, what do you make of this one? He’s a pretty one, don’t you think? Don’t go falling for him, though. Since he started coming to the studio I’m only the second prettiest boy and more’s the pity.”

  Horiki had a sallow complexion with sharp, chiseled features, and, unusual for an art student, he wore a suit, favored somber neckties, and parted his pomaded hair straight down the middle.

  Unaccustomed to such places, I was in a constant state of terror. I kept crossing and uncrossing my arms, and, indeed, all I could manage was that shy smile. But after two or three glasses of beer, strangely, I began to experience a feeling of lightness, not unlike liberation.

  “I wanted to go to art school but . . .”

  “No, it’s a bore. Boring! School is boring. Our teacher is nature herself! The pathos of nature!”

  I didn’t pay the slightest attention to his words. I thought he was a bit of an idiot, and no doubt his paintings would be terrible too. For all that, though, he might be a useful companion when it came to having fun. In short, for the very first time in my life, I’d met a real, live city scoundrel. Though we looked different—insofar as we were both cut off from the workings of this world of human beings, inasmuch as we were both confused— we were the same. The essential difference separating us was that, unlike me, his clowning was wholly unconscious and he was completely ignorant of its tragic nature.

  We were just having fun. He was just someone to go out and have a good time with, I told myself. I scorned him and was even ashamed of our friendship sometimes as we walked about town together. Yet, in the end, I was destroyed even by the likes of him.

  In the beginning, however, I thought him a fine fellow indeed. So fine a fellow one hardly saw his like, and, terrified of people though I was, even I was put off my guard as I found myself thinking I had discovered the perfect guide to Tokyo. To be honest, left to my own devices, I was even terrified of the conductors when I set foot on a train. I yearned to see a Kabuki play but was frightened of the young, female ushers who lined either side of the red carpet leading up the theater steps. At restaurants I was scared of the busboys, lurking silently behind me, waiting to clear my plate. And when it came time to pay the bill—oh, how I fumbled. I grew dizzy when it came time to hand over the money. My head spun, the world went dark, and I thought I was going half mad. Not out of parsimony, you see, but because I was so nervous, so embarrassed, so anxious and terrified. Far from trying to haggle the price down, not only would I often forget to take my change, it was so bad that I often even forgot to take the thing I had just purchased. It was utterly impossible for me to go walking about Tokyo on my own. That was the real reason I spent whole days lazing about at home.

  When Horiki and I went out, I just handed him my wallet and let him do all of the haggling. He was quite adept at having fun. He could extract the greatest amount of pleasure from the smallest amount of money. We eschewed one-yen taxis, relying instead on his familiarity with the complex network of trains, buses, steamers, and every other cheap means
of transport to get us to our destination in the shortest possible time. On the way home after a long night at the brothels he knew which inn to stop at for a bath, boiled tofu, and a quick drink—though cheap, it felt almost luxurious. He equipped me with a practical education. He extolled the virtues of yakitori and beef bowls as cheap and nutritious. He avowed that there was nothing better for getting drunk fast than an electric brandy cocktail. And when it came time to pay the reckoning, he never once gave me cause for anxiety.

  Horiki’s true value, however, lay in the fact that he never paid any attention to his listener’s thoughts or feelings. He just went on and on, spouting his “pathos,” with never a break in his banal chatter (perhaps that is the definition of “passion”—the ability to ignore the opinions of one’s listener). When I was with Horiki there was never any danger that, exhausted from walking, we might lapse into one of those awkward silences. Whenever I was around others I was constantly on my guard in case one of those terrifying silences should suddenly appear. Though taciturn by nature, I felt obliged to press on with my clowning, desperately, as though some grand victory or terrible defeat hung in the balance. That fool Horiki, however, assumed the role of clown for himself without even realizing it, so I hardly ever had to speak at all. It was enough for me to smile from time to time and interject the occasional exclamation.

  It didn’t take me long to discover that liquor, cigarettes, and prostitutes were wonderfully effective ways to banish my fear of people, if only temporarily. It got to the point where I began to think that selling all I owned would not be too high a price to pay in order to continue these pursuits.