A Shameful Life Read online

  “Don’t worry.”

  She spoke with a faint Kansai accent. And, oddly, her simple words soothed my jangling nerves. No, not because I didn’t have to worry about money; it was because I got the sense that I didn’t have to worry about being with her.

  I drank. I felt relaxed around her, and, not feeling compelled to play the clown, I let my true nature show through, drinking in gloomy, taciturn silence.

  “Would you like any of these?” she asked, laying a variety of dishes out on the table. I just shook my head.

  “Just liquor? I’ll join you, then.”

  It was a cold, autumn night. At Tsuneko’s request (I think that’s what she called herself but my memory has faded so I can’t be sure. That says a lot about the kind of person I am. I even forget the name of the person I tried to commit suicide with), I went to a sushi stall in one of the alleys of Ginza and, eating truly terrible sushi (though I can’t recall her name, the sushi—or rather, how bad it was—remains firmly fixed in my memory. I remember the old man running the stand had a crew cut and a face like a Japanese rat snake. He made a show of flailing about as he made the sushi, pretending he actually knew what he was doing. I can see all of this as clearly as if it were right before me. Years later and more than a few times I have caught myself looking at a face that seems oddly familiar before realizing, with a wry smile, that it looks like that old man from the sushi stand. Though the woman’s name and, by now, even her face have faded from my mind, the fact that I can still recall that old man’s face so clearly I could draw it from memory shows how bad the sushi was and how cold and miserable it made me feel. In any case, though I’ve been taken to supposedly famous sushi restaurants, I’ve never enjoyed sushi. The pieces are too big. Why couldn’t they just make them smaller? Why not just make them thumb-sized?), I waited for her to finish her shift.

  She lived in a rented room over a carpenter’s workshop in Honjo. I made no effort to conceal my gloomy nature as I sat in her room, drinking tea, one hand pressed to my cheek, as though I had a terrible toothache. Oddly, rather than being repelled, she seemed drawn to this attitude of mine. She too seemed utterly alone. A cold, early winter wind blew about her, with only dead leaves whirling crazily about her.

  As we lay there she told me she was two years older than me, from Hiroshima . . . I have a husband, he was a barber back in Hiroshima but we ran off, came to Tokyo last spring, he never bothered with a proper job after that, he got arrested for fraud, he’s in prison now, I visit him every day, I bring him all sorts of gifts, starting tomorrow I’m not going back. On and on she went, telling me the story of her life. I’m not sure why but I always get bored when women start telling me about their lives. Maybe it’s because they aren’t very good storytellers—they emphasize all the wrong parts—but it all goes in one ear and out the other.

  Forlorn.

  Had a woman but whispered that one word it would have evoked more sympathy from me than the thousands and millions of other words they expended talking about themselves. It seems strange and almost mysterious that I’ve never heard a woman speak that one word. Though Tsuneko never uttered the word “forlorn” aloud, it seemed to eddy about her, like a current of air an inch thick, and when I was near, it enveloped me as well, blending and merging perfectly with my own stinging current of melancholy. Just as “The autumn leaf settles on a stone in water’s depths,” I was able to distance myself from my fear and my anxiety.

  The night I spent with this wife of a man imprisoned for fraud was, for me, joyous (I doubt I will again so unhesitatingly employ such bold and positive language in the entirety of my journals) and liberating in a manner completely different from the deep, peaceful sleep I found in the arms of those simple-minded prostitutes (who were nothing if not cheerful).

  Yet, it was only the one night. When I woke in the morning, I jumped up and once again dressed myself in the guise of the frivolous clown. The true coward is frightened even by happiness. He is bruised even by cotton wool. He is wounded even by joy. Panicking, I wanted to escape, quickly, before I got hurt, so I surrounded myself in the familiar smoke screen of the clown.

  “You know that old saying? ‘Love flies out by the window when poverty comes in by the door’? Most people have it all wrong. It doesn’t mean the woman leaves when the man runs out of money. It’s, when a man runs out of money he . . . he loses heart, he’s no good. He gets so weak he can’t even laugh, he gets this strange inferiority complex, he gets desperate, and he’s the one who pushes the woman away. At that point he’s half mad and he starts pushing and shoving and shoving until he breaks free. Well, at least that’s what it says in a book I read. Sad, isn’t it? Alas, I know the feeling all too well.”

  I seem to recall saying something stupid along those lines, making Tsuneko burst out laughing. “Well, there’s no point in dawdling,” I said, and with a “thanks for everything,” I left without so much as washing my face. My silly story about “love flying out when poverty comes in” created unexpected complications later.

  A month or so went by before I saw my benefactor of that evening again. With each passing day the joy I had experienced faded and the fleeting kindness she’d shown filled me with a growing sense of dread. Even the most mundane things, such as when Tsuneko paid my bill at the café, aroused in me a terrible sense of obligation, and this came to distress me more and more. Before long I started thinking of Tsuneko much as I thought of the girl from my boarding house or the “comrade” from the women’s teacher’s college. I came to see her only as a threat and, though she was far away, I lived in constant terror of her. To make things worse I couldn’t help thinking that, should I run into a woman I’d once slept with, she would suddenly explode in a furious rage. The prospect of meeting my former lover was thus extremely disagreeable to me, and I kept a respectful distance from Ginza. Now, this attitude of mine was not born of cunning but from the simple fact that I had yet to come to terms with one of the stranger aspects of women. I could not comprehend how a woman could sleep with me and then wake up the next morning as though her memory had been wiped clean and, in the most splendid manner, go on with her life as if the world of night and the world of day were completely cut off from one another.

  Toward the end of November Horiki and I were drinking at a cheap stand bar on the side of the road in Kanda. When we left, my disreputable friend insisted we go somewhere else and keep drinking. Let’s drink, let’s drink, he kept saying over and over again, although neither of us had any money. I was fairly drunk by this point and, feeling particularly daring, said, “All right, then. I’ll take you to the land of dreams. Prepare yourself! I’ll take you to a feast, to lakes of liquor, to forests of food. . . .”

  “A café?”

  “Yup.”

  “Let’s go!”

  And with that we hopped on a streetcar. Horiki, in high spirits, announced, “I’m starving for a woman! Can I kiss the waitress?”

  Horiki knew that I disliked it when he played the vulgar drunk, so he persisted, trying to gain my permission.

  “I’m really going to do it. You wait and see—whoever sits next to me, I’m going to kiss her. You’ll see!”

  “Do what you like.”

  “You are too kind. I’m starving for a woman.”

  We got off at Ginza 4-chōme and, putting all our faith in Tsuneko’s generosity, walked into that massive café, that veritable lake of liquor and forest of food despite not having a single coin between us. We stopped at the first empty booth we saw, and Horiki and I sat down facing one another. Tsuneko and another waitress came running up to us. The other woman sat next to me. I let out a faint gasp when Tsuneko dropped down next to Horiki. She was about to be kissed.

  I didn’t feel any regret. I wasn’t a particularly possessive person and, even should I feel the occasional glimmer of jealousy, I lacked the spirit to fight for my claim. So much so that, later, I would even stand and, without a single word of protest, watch my common-law wife being violated.
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br />   I wanted to keep as far away from the squabbling of human beings as I could. I was terrified of being drawn into that maelstrom. My relationship with Tsuneko had been limited to that one night. She didn’t belong to me. There was no reason for me to feel regret or any other kind of arrogant desire. Nevertheless, I gasped.

  It was a gasp of pity, of pity for poor Tsuneko, about to be roughly kissed by Horiki, right in front of me. Defiled by Horiki, she would no doubt feel obliged to break with me and I, I lacked the necessary passion to stop her. Though I gasped at that moment, at Tsuneko’s misfortune, thinking that everything was over now, I was also filled with a sense of resignation, as pure as water, and I smirked as I looked from Horiki to Tsuneko and back again.

  To my surprise, however, things turned out much worse than I expected.

  “I can’t!” Horiki exclaimed, his mouth twisting. “Not even I could kiss such a dreary woman.” He grimaced, as though at a complete loss, and, arms crossed, he stared at Tsuneko.

  “Bring us something to drink. We don’t have any money,” I muttered to Tsuneko. In truth, I wanted to drown myself in liquor. In the eyes of a philistine, Tsuneko might be nothing but a glum, penniless woman, not even worth the kiss of a lecherous drunk. This thought hit me, unexpectedly and unintentionally, like a thunderclap. That night I drank and I drank, I drank more than I’d ever drunk before. I drank until I could barely stand. Tsuneko and I gazed into one another’s eyes, smiling sadly. No, there was no denying it. She was an oddly frayed woman, she reeked of poverty. And yet, even as I thought this, I felt an affinity with her, the affinity of one poor person for another (I am convinced that, hackneyed though it may be, the fundamental incompatibility of the rich and the poor remains one of the great, timeless dramatic themes), and that, that intimacy, filled my heart. A fondness for her began to grow in me and, for the first time in my life, I sensed the stirrings of what was, for me, a passionate, though somewhat feeble, love. I vomited. I can’t remember anything before or after that point. It was the first time I’d drunk so much that I completely lost myself.

  When I awoke Tsuneko was sitting beside my pillow. I was in her room above the carpenter’s shop.

  “I thought you were joking, all that talk about love flying out when poverty comes in, but you were serious, weren’t you? You never came back. Not a very clean break, though, was it? What if I make enough for the both of us? Would that work?”

  “No.”

  Then she lay down next to me. It was around dawn when she first spoke of death. It seemed that she too was weary of living the life of a human being and, for my part, when I thought of my own terror of the world, with all its complications, of money, of the movement, of women, of school—I didn’t see how I could possibly go on. So I blithely assented to her plan.

  None of it seemed real to me at the time, though. The true import of her words, “let’s die,” had escaped me. They seemed to conceal an element of “play.”

  Later that morning we were wandering around the sixth ward of Asakusa. We went to a coffee shop and I drank a glass of milk.

  “Can you get the bill?”

  I stood and, taking my coin purse from the sleeve of my kimono, I discovered that I had only three copper coins. I was assailed not so much by shame as by horror. Instantly the desolate scene of my room at the boarding house appeared before my eyes, nothing but a bed and my school uniform. Not a single item left to be pawned, my only other possessions the clothes on my back. This is my life. The realization forced itself on me. I could not go on.

  Seeing my confusion, Tsuneko stood up and peered into my purse.

  “Oh, is that all you’ve got?”

  She spoke innocently enough, yet even so, pain pierced me to the bone. It was the first time that the mere voice of someone I loved caused me pain. Whether or not it was all I had didn’t matter. Those three coins weren’t money. They were a special kind of humiliation, one I’d never tasted before. An unendurable humiliation. I suppose that I hadn’t yet managed to get away from thinking of myself as a “rich boy.” At that moment, now fully aware of what it meant, I resolved to seek my own death.

  That night, the two of us jumped into the sea at Kamakura. I borrowed this from a friend at the café, she said, unwinding her obi, and, folding it carefully, she placed it on a boulder. I took off my cloak, lay it next to the obi, and we leapt into the sea.

  The woman died. I alone was saved.

  Being a higher school student and, perhaps because Father’s name possessed some measure of what they call “news value,” the incident was splashed all over the papers and became quite the scandal.

  I was admitted to a hospital by the sea, and one of my relatives from home rushed down to handle all of the arrangements. Before he left he told me that everyone at home—Father first and foremost—was furious with me and that I’d be lucky not to be disowned. I didn’t care about any of that, though. I missed Tsuneko and couldn’t stop weeping at the thought of her. Of all the people I’d known, poor, threadbare Tsuneko was the only one I’d truly loved.

  I received a long letter from the girl at my boarding house, a composition of fifty poems, each beginning with the peculiar phrase, “Live for me!” Fifty. The nurses too were always stopping by to see me, smiling brightly. Some of them even took my hand, squeezing it tightly as they left.

  It was then that they discovered an abnormality in my left lung. This was a wonderfully convenient turn of events for me, as, when the police eventually came and took me in for the crime of abetting suicide, they treated me as an invalid and put me in a special holding cell apart from the others.

  Later the night of my arrest, the old policeman standing the night watch in the guard’s quarters next to my cell came over and slid the door open quietly.

  “Hey,” he said, calling out to me. “You must be freezing in there. Come on over here—sit by the fire.”

  I made a show of shuffling dejectedly out of my cell and into the guardroom, and sat on a chair next to the charcoal brazier.

  “You really miss her, don’t you, the girl who died?”

  “Yes.” So faint were my words they seemed to vanish.

  “Well, that’s love, isn’t it?” The guard was working himself up to something.

  “So, where did you first establish relations with her?” He began questioning me, acting for all the world like an officer of the court. He spoke condescendingly, as though I were a mere child and he the chief prosecutor in charge of the investigation. In the end, his real motive was simply to while away the tedium of a long autumn night by getting me to recount all the salacious details. I saw through him at once, and it was hard not to laugh. Of course, I knew I was under no obligation to answer any of the questions in his “unofficial interrogation,” but I went along with his charade to add a bit of spice to the dull evening. I acted like I believed, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he was no less a figure than the chief investigator himself and that my fate lay wholly in his hands. I made up one absurd “statement” after another, all intended to more or less satisfy his prurient curiosity.

  “Yes, I see now. I think I understand the situation. You know, we take it into account when people are forthcoming and answer all of our questions honestly.”

  “Thank you very much. I am in your debt.”

  I have to say mine was a masterful performance. An impassioned performance that did not stand to benefit me in the slightest.

  When morning came I was summoned to the chief’s office. Now it was time for the official interrogation.

  The moment I opened the door and entered the office the chief exclaimed, “Well now, here’s a fine young man. This isn’t your fault at all—it’s your mother’s fault for having such a handsome young son!”

  The chief was a young man with a slightly swarthy complexion and the educated air of one who’d been to university. His sudden exclamation made me feel wretched. I felt hideously disfigured, as if my face were half-covered with port wine stains.

  He
had the build of someone who practiced judo or kendo and, in stark contrast to the assiduous, lascivious questioning of the old policeman the night before, his interrogation was straightforward and to the point. When he’d finished and was putting the forms together to be sent to the prosecutor’s office, he turned to me and said, “You really have to start taking better care of yourself. Look, you’re coughing up blood, aren’t you?”

  I did have an odd cough that morning, and each time I coughed I would cover my mouth with my handkerchief. The handkerchief, spotted all over with blood, looked like it’d been pelted with red hail. But the blood wasn’t from my coughing; it was from a boil on my ear that I’d been picking at the night before. It occurred to me then that things might go easier for me if I failed to correct the chief, so, eyes downcast and voice penitent, I simply said, “Yes,” and left it at that.

  The chief finished with the forms.

  “It’s all up to the prosecutor now. He’ll decide whether or not to indict, but, in any event, you’d do well to call someone or send a telegram. Ask them to meet you at the Yokohama Prosecutor’s Office so you can be released into their custody. Is there someone you can call? A guardian or someone who can vouch for you?”

  I thought of Mr. Shibuta, my guarantor at school. He was a short, fat man, a bachelor of about forty who came from the same village as me. He traded in art and antiques and was forever going in and out of Father’s villa in Tokyo, playing the role of professional sycophant. His face, and his eyes in particular, had the look of a flounder, and that had become Father’s nickname for him. I’d since picked up the habit as well.