by Osamu Dazai
Items. A large map of the suburbs of Paris. A celluloid top almost a foot in diameter. A special pen-point with which one can write letters finer than threads. All things bought by me under the impression that they were great bargains.
The clerk laughed and said, “I must be leaving now.”
“Wait!” I cried, holding him back. I finally managed to load him down with an immense stack of books for which he gave me five yen. The books on my shelves were, with a few exceptions, cheap paper-bound editions, and at that I had bought them secondhand. It was not surprising that they fetched so little.
To settle a debt of a thousand yen—five yen. That is approximately my effective strength. It is no laughing matter.
But rather than the patronizing “But being decadent is the only way to survive!” of some who criticize me, I would far prefer to be told simply to go and die. It’s straightforward. But people almost never say, “Die!” Paltry, prudent hypocrites!
Justice? That’s not where you’ll find the so-called class struggle. Humanity? Don’t be silly. I know. It is knocking down your fellow-men for the sake of your own happiness. It is a killing. What meaning has it unless there is a verdict of “Die!” It’s no use cheating.
There aren’t any decent people in our class either. Idiots, specters, penny-pinchers, mad dogs, braggarts, high-flown words, piss from above the clouds.
“Die!” Just to be vouchsafed that word would be far more than I deserve.
The war. Japan’s war is an act of desperation.
To die by being sucked into an act of desperation ….no thanks. I had rather die by my own hand.
People always make a serious face when they tell a lie. The seriousness of our leaders these days! Pooh!
I want to spend my time with people who don’t look to be respected. But such good people won’t want to spend their time with me.
When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When I pretended I couldn’t write a novel, people said I couldn’t write. When I acted like a liar, they called me a liar. When I acted like a rich man, they started the rumor I was rich. When I feigned indifference, they classed me as the indifferent type. But when I inadvertently groaned because I was really in pain, they started the rumor that I was faking suffering.
The world is out of joint.
Doesn’t that mean in effect that I have no choice but suicide?
In spite of my suffering, at the thought that I was sure to end up by killing myself, I cried aloud and burst into tears.
There is the story of how on a morning in spring as the sun shone on a branch of plum where two or three blossoms had opened, a young student of Heidelberg was dangling from the branch, dead.
“Mama, scold me please!”
“What for?”
“They say I’m a weakling.”
“Do they? A weakling…. I don’t think I need scold you about that any more.”
Mama’s goodness is unsurpassed. Whenever I think of her, I want to cry. I will die by way of apology to Mama.
Please forgive me. Just this once, please forgive me.
(New Year’s Poem)
The years!
Still quite blind
The little stork-chicks
Are growing up.
Ah! how they fatten!
Morphine, atromol, narcopon, philipon, panto-pon, pabinal, panopin, atropin.
What is self-esteem? Self-esteem!
It is impossible for a human being—no, a man—to go on living without thinking “I am one of the élite,” “I have my good points,” etc.
I detest people, am detested by them.
Test of wits.
Solemnity = feeling of idiocy.
Anyway, you can be sure of one thing, a man’s got to fake just to stay alive.
A letter requesting a loan:
“Your answer.
Please answer.
And in such a way that it will be good tidings for me.
I am moaning to myself in the expectation of humiliations of every sort.
I am not putting on an act. Absolutely not.
I beg it of you.
I feel as if I will die of shame.
I am not exaggerating.
Every day, every day, I wait for your answer; night and day I tremble all over.
Do not make me eat dirt.
I can hear a smothered laugh from the walls. Late at night I toss in my bed.
Do not humiliate me.
My sister!”
Having read that much, I shut the “Moonflower Journal” and returned it to the wooden crate. I walked to the window, threw it open, and looking down on the garden smoky with white rain, I remembered the events of those days.
Six years have already passed since then. Naoji’s drug addiction eventually led to my divorce. No, I shouldn’t say that. I have the feeling that my divorce was settled from the moment I was born, that even if Naoji had not been addicted to drugs the divorce would have occurred sooner or later for some other cause. Naoji was in difficulties about paying the pharmacist and frequently importuned me for money. I had just been married and could not be entirely free about money. Besides, I felt strongly that it was most improper for me to slip furtively into the hands of my brother money I had received from my husband. After talking the matter over with my maid Oseki, who had come with me from my mother’s house, I decided to sell my bracelets, necklaces, and dresses. Naoji had sent me a letter concluding, “I feel such anguish and shame that I can’t bear to meet you or even to talk to you over the telephone. Please send the money with Oseki to the apartment [he gave the address] of the novelist Uehara Jirō, whom I’m sure you must know, at least by name. Mr. Uehara has the reputation of being an evil man, but he is not actually like that at all, and there is no need to worry about sending me the money at his address. I have arranged with Uehara to let me know immediately by telephone when the money arrives, so please do it that way. I want to keep my addiction from Mama, at least. Somehow I intend to cure myself before she learns of it. If I get the money from you this time, I will pay back the pharmacist all that I owe him. I may go afterward to our villa in the mountains to recuperate. I really mean it. The day I pay back my whole debt I intend to give up drugs completely. I swear it to God. Please believe me. Please keep it a secret from Mama, and send the money to Mr. Uehara’s.”
That is more or less what was in the letter. I followed his directions and had Oseki take the money secretly to Mr. Uehara’s apartment, but the promise in Naoji’s letter was, as always, false. He didn’t go to the villa to recuperate. Instead, his drug taking seems to have turned into a kind of poisoning and grown steadily more serious. The style of the letters he sent imploring me for money took on an anguished tone which was all but a shriek. Each time I read his words “I promise to give up drugs now,” followed by an oath so heart-rending that it made me want to turn my face away from the paper, I realized perfectly well that he might be lying again, but I would nevertheless send Oseki out to sell a piece of jewelry and to take the money to Mr. Uehara.
“What sort of man is Mr. Uehara?”
“He’s a short, dark, disagreeable man,” Oseki answered, adding, “but he’s seldom at home when I call. Usually there’s just his wife and a little girl about six years old. His wife is not particularly pretty, but she seems a sweet, intelligent person. You don’t have to worry about entrusting your money to a lady like her.”
If you were to compare what I was like then to what I am like now—no, I was so different that no comparison is possible—I had my head in the clouds and was always very easy-going. All the same, I began to be terribly worried what with one sum of money after another being extorted from me, and the whole thing gradually assumed the proportions of a nightmare. One day, returning from the theatre, I sent back the car and walked by myself to Mr. Uehara’s apartment.
Mr. Uehara was alone in his room reading a newspaper. He was dress
ed in a Japanese costume which made him look old and young at the same time. I received a strange first impression as if from a rare beast that I had never before seen.
“My wife has gone with the child to collect the rations.” His voice was slightly nasal, and he clipped his words. He seemed to have mistaken me for a friend of his wife’s. When I told him that I was Naoji’s sister, Mr. Uehara barked a laugh. A cold shiver went through me; I don’t know why.
“Shall we go out?” Scarcely had he uttered these words than he threw on a cloak, stepped into a new pair of sandals, and dashed out ahead of me into the hallway.
An early winter’s evening. The wind was icy. It felt as if it were blowing in from the river. Mr. Uehara walked in silence, his right shoulder slightly raised as if against the wind. I followed behind him, half running.
We entered the basement of a building behind the Tokyo Theatre. Four or five groups of customers were sitting around tables in a long narrow room, quietly drinking.
Mr. Uehara drank his sake from a tumbler, instead of the usual little cup. He asked them to bring another glass and offered me some. I drank two glass-fuls but did not feel anything.
Mr. Uehara drank and smoked, still without uttering a word. This was the first time in my life that I had ever come to such a place, but I felt quite at home and rather happy.
“Liquor would be better, but still….”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, your brother. It would be a good thing if he switched to some kind of alcohol. I was once a dope addict myself, a long time ago, and I know what a poor view people take of it. Alcohol is the same sort of thing, but about that they’re surprisingly indulgent. I think I’ll make an alcoholic of your brother. How does that suit you?”
“I once saw an alcoholic. I was about to set out on New Year’s calls when I noticed a friend of our chauffeur’s with a hideously red face asleep in the car and snoring loudly. I was so surprised that I screamed. The driver told me the man was a hopeless alcoholic. He dragged the man out of the car and slung him over his shoulders. The man’s body flopped about as if he hadn’t any bones, and all the while he kept mumbling something. That was the first time I ever saw an alcoholic. It was fascinating.”
“I’m also an alcoholic, you know.”
“Oh, but not the same kind, are you?”
“And so are you, an alcoholic.”
“No, that isn’t true. I’ve seen a real alcoholic, and it’s entirely different.”
Mr. Uehara for the first time gave a genuine smile. “Then perhaps your brother won’t be able to become an alcoholic either, but at least it would be a good idea for him to take up drinking. Let’s go. You don’t want to be late, do you?”
“It doesn’t make any difference.”
“To tell the truth, this place is too crowded for me. Waitress! The bill.”
“Is it very expensive? If it isn’t too much, I have a little money with me.”
“In that case, you take care of the bill.”
“There may not be enough.” I looked inside my bag and told Mr. Uehara how much money I had.
“With that much you have enough to drink at two or three more places. Don’t be silly.” He spoke with a scowl, then laughed.
“Would you like to go drinking somewhere else?”
He shook his head. “No, I’ve had enough. I’ll get a taxi for you. You had better go back.”
We climbed up the dark stairs from the basement. Mr. Uehara, who was one step ahead of me, turned around suddenly and gave me a quick kiss. I took his kiss with my lips tightly shut. I felt no special attraction for him, but all the same, from that moment on my “secret” came into being. Mr. Uehara clattered up the stairs, and I slowly followed, with a strangely transparent feeling. When I stepped outside, the wind from the river felt wonderful against my cheek.
He hailed a taxi for me, and we separated without saying anything.
I felt, as I was tossed in the decrepit old taxi, as if the world had suddenly opened wide as the sea.
One day, when I was feeling depressed after a quarrel with my husband, I suddenly took it in my head to say, “I have a lover.”
“I know. It’s Hosoda, isn’t it? Can’t you possibly give him up?”
I remained silent.
Whenever there was any unpleasantness between my husband and myself, this matter would always be brought up. “It’s all over now,” I thought. It was like buying the wrong material for a dress—once you have cut it you can’t sew the material together again, and you’d best throw the whole thing away and start afresh on another piece of material.
One night my husband asked me if the child I was carrying was Hosoda’s. I was so frightened that I shook all over. I realize now that my husband and I were both very young. I did not know what love was. I did not even understand simple affection. I was so wild about Mr. Hosoda’s pictures that I used to tell people I met that every day of one’s life would be filled with beauty if one were the wife of such a man, and that marriage was meaningless unless it were to a man with taste like his. And so everyone misunderstood, and I, who knew nothing of love or affection, would publicly say without any embarrassment that I loved Mr. Hosoda. I never attempted to take back my words, which made things terribly complicated. That was why even the little infant then sleeping within me became the object of my husband’s suspicions. Although neither of us openly spoke of divorce, the atmosphere grew increasingly chilly, and I returned to my mother’s house. The child was stillborn. I took ill and was confined to my bed. My relations with my husband had come to an end.
Naoji, perhaps feeling a kind of responsibility for my divorce, bellowed that he would die, and his face decomposed with weeping. I asked him how much he still owed the pharmacist. He mentioned a fantastically large figure. Later I learned that Naoji had lied, being unable to confess the actual amount, which was close to three times what he told me.
I said, “I’ve met your Mr. Uehara. He’s a delightful man. Don’t you think it would be amusing if the three of us went drinking together sometime? I was simply amazed how cheap sake is. As long as you stick to sake, I can always foot the bill. And don’t worry about paying the pharmacist. It will be arranged somehow.”
Naoji seemed enchanted that I had met and liked Mr. Uehara. That night, as soon as he had obtained money from me, he rushed off to Mr. Uehara’s place.
Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit. I praised Mr. Uehara and borrowed his novels from my brother. When I had read them, I told Naoji what a wonderful writer I thought Mr. Uehara. Naoji was astonished that I could understand him, but seemed very pleased all the same, and made me read other works by Mr. Uehara. Before I knew it I had begun to read his novels in earnest, and Naoji and I gossiped a great deal about him. Naoji staggered off almost every night to drinking parties at Mr. Uehara’s. Bit by bit, as Mr. Uehara had planned, Naoji was switching to alcohol. Without Naoji’s knowledge, I asked Mother what to do about the pharmacist’s bill. She covered her face with one hand and for a while sat motionless. Presently she looked up and said with a smile, “I can’t think of anything to do. I don’t know how many years it may take, but we’ll have to pay back a little each month.”
Six years have gone by since then.
Moonflowers. Yes, it must have been painful for Naoji, too. Even now his path is blocked, and he probably still has no idea what to do in what way. His drinking every day must be only in the hope of death.
I wonder how it would be if I let go and yielded myself to real depravity. Perhaps that might make things easier for Naoji.
“I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved,” Naoji wrote in his notebook. Those words made me feel depraved myself, and my uncle and even Mother somehow then seemed depraved. Perhaps by depravity he actually meant tenderness.
CHAPTER FOUR / LETTERS
I couldn’t make up my mind whether to write to him or what to do. Then, this morning the words of Jesus—“wise as serpents and harmless as doves”—flashe
d into my head and in a sudden burst of courage I decided to write him a letter.
I am Naoji’s sister. If you have forgotten me, please try to remember.
I must apologize that Naoji has again been such a nuisance and caused you such bother. (As a matter of fact, I cannot help feeling that Naoji’s affairs are for Naoji to decide, and it is nonsensical for me to offer an apology.) Today I am writing to ask you a favor not for Naoji but for myself. I heard from Naoji that your old place was destroyed during the war and that you have since moved to your present address. I had thought of paying a visit to your house (which seems to be very far out in the suburbs from Tokyo), but of late my mother’s health has been rather poor, and I can’t possibly leave her to go up to Tokyo. That is why I made up my mind to write you a letter.
There is something I would like to discuss with you.
The matter I have to discuss may appear extremely dubious from the point of view of the usual “Etiquette for Young Women,” or even a positive crime, but I—no, we—cannot go on living as we have. I must therefore ask you, the person whom my brother Naoji respects most in the whole world, to be so kind as to listen to my plain, unadorned feelings and to give me the benefit of your guidance.
My present life is unendurable. It is not a matter of like or dislike—we (my mother, Naoji, and myself)—cannot possibly go on living this way.
Yesterday I was in pain and feverish. I was hardly able to breathe and felt at a complete loss what to do with myself. A little after lunch the girl from the farmer’s house down the road came in the rain with a load of rice on her back. I handed over to her the clothes I had promised. The girl sat facing me in the dining-room, and as she drank some tea she said, in a really down-to-earth tone, “How much longer can you go on by selling your things?”
“Six months. Perhaps a year,” I answered. Then, half covering my face with my right hand, I murmured, “I’m sleepy. I’m so terribly sleepy.”
“You’re exhausted. It’s nervous exhaustion.”
“You may be right.” At this moment, as I stood on the verge of tears, the words “realism” and “romanticism” welled up within me. I have no sense of realism. And that this very fact might be what permits me to go on living sends cold chills through my whole body. Mother is half an invalid and spends as much time in bed as up. Naoji, as you know, is mentally very sick. While he is here he spends most of his time at the local drinking place, and once every couple of days he takes whatever money we have from selling our clothes and goes off to Tokyo. But that is not what hurts me. I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day. That is what I find impossible to bear, and why I must escape from my present life, even if it means violating the whole code of young ladies’ etiquette. And now I am asking your advice.
