by Osamu Dazai
“That’s all right. I’ll give you a receipt.”
The company continued to roar the drinking song, “Guillotine, guillotine, shooshooshoo,” without any let-up even during this conversation.
“How is Naoji?” the madam asked Chie with an earnest expression. I was taken aback.
“How should I know? I’m not his keeper,” Chie answered in confusion with a pretty blush.
The madam went on unperturbably, “I wonder if something unpleasant hasn’t happened of late between him and Mr. Uehara. They always used to be together.”
“I’m told he’s taken up dancing. He’s probably got a dancer for his sweetheart now.”
“Naoji’s not a very economical type—women on top of liquor!”
“That’s the way Mr. Uehara planned it.”
“Naoji’s character must be bad. When that kind of spoiled child goes bad—”
“Excuse me,” I said, interrupting with a half smile. I thought it would probably be more impolite to keep silent than to speak. “I am Naoji’s sister.”
The madam, obviously startled, looked again at my face. Chie said in even tones, “You’re very much like him. When I saw you standing outside, it gave me quite a turn for a minute. I thought it might be Naoji.”
“Oh, indeed?” said the madam, her voice taking on a note of respect, “And for you to come to such a dreadful place! But you knew Mr. Uehara before?”
“Yes, I met him six years ago.” I choked over my words and looked down.
The maid entered with the noodles. “Sorry to have kept you waiting.”
The madam offered me some. “Please eat before it gets cold.”
“Thank you.” I thrust my face in the steam rising from the noodles and began to suck them in quickly. I felt as if now I were experiencing what extreme misery is involved in being alive.
Mr. Uehara entered the room, humming faintly, “Guillotine, guillotine, shooshooshoo.” He plopped down beside me and without a word handed a large envelope to the madam.
The madam, not so much as glancing inside the envelope, thrust it into a drawer. She said with a laugh, “Don’t think you’ll get away with just this. I won’t be tricked out of the balance.”
“I’ll bring it. I’ll pay the rest next year.”
“Am I to believe that?”
Ten thousand yen. How many electric bulbs can you buy with that? I could easily live for a year on that.
There was something wrong about these people. But perhaps, just as it is true of my love, they could not go on living except in the way they do. If it is true that man, once born into the world, must somehow live out his life, perhaps the appearance that people make in order to go through with it, even if it is as ugly as their appearance, should not be despised. To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense undertaking before which one can only gasp in apprehension.
“At any rate,” said a gentleman’s voice in the next room, “if people like us living in Tokyo cannot henceforth greet one another in the lightest possible way, with the merest suggestion of a hello, life on a civilized plane will be finished. For people nowadays to insist on such virtues as respect or sincerity is like pulling on the feet of a man hanging by the neck. Respect? Sincerity? Rubbish! You can’t go on living with them, can you? Unless we can say hello, really casually, there are only three possible courses left—return to the farm, suicide, or becoming a gigolo.”
“A poor devil who can’t do any one of the three still has a final alternative,” said another gentleman. “He can touch Uehara for a loan and get roaring drunk.”
Guillotine, guillotine, shooshooshoo. Guillotine, guillotine, shooshooshoo.
“I don’t suppose you have anywhere to spend the night, have you?” Mr. Uehara asked half under his breath.
“I?” I was conscious of the snake with its head lifted against itself. Hostility. It was an emotion close to hatred which stiffened my body.
Mr. Uehara, paying no attention to my obvious anger, mumbled on, “Can you sleep in the same room with all the rest of us? It’s cold!”
“That’s not possible,” interpolated the madam. “Have a heart.”
Mr. Uehara clicked his tongue against his teeth. “In that case she oughtn’t to have come here in the first place.”
I remained silent. I could tell at once from something in his tone that he had read my letters and in that instant I knew that he loved me more than anyone else.
He continued, “It can’t be helped. Might be a good idea to ask at Fukui’s for a bed. Chie, take her over there, won’t you? No, on second thought, it would be dangerous in the streets for two women alone. Damned nuisance. I’ll have to show her the way myself.”
Outside you could tell it was the middle of the night. The wind had died down a little and the sky was filled with shining stars. We walked side by side. I said, “I could perfectly well have slept in the same room with the others.”
Mr. Uehara merely grunted sleepily.
“You wanted just the two of us to be together, didn’t you?” I spoke with a little laugh.
He twisted his mouth into a bitter smile. “That’s the nuisance of it.” I was intensely, almost painfully, aware of the fact that it was love he felt for me.
“You drink a great deal. Is it like that every night?”
“Every day. From morning.”
“Does the liquor taste so good?”
“It stinks.”
Something in his voice made me shudder. “How is your work coming?”
“No good. Whatever I write now is stupid and depressing. The twilight of life. The twilight of art. The twilight of mankind. What bathos!”
“Utrillo,” I murmured before I knew it.
“Yes, Utrillo. They say he’s still alive. A victim of alcohol. A corpse. His paintings of the last ten years have been incredibly vulgar and worthless without exception.”
“It’s not only just Utrillo, is it? All the other masters too.”
“Yes, they’ve all lost their vitality. But the new shoots have also lost their vitality, blasted in the bud. Frost. It’s as though an unseasonable frost had fallen all over the whole world.”
His arm lay lightly around my shoulders. It was as if my body were being enveloped in his cape, but I did not deny him. I nestled all the closer as we walked slowly on.
The branches of trees beside the road. Branches destitute of even a single leaf, narrow, sharp, stabbing the night sky. “Branches are beautiful, aren’t they?” I whispered, almost to myself.
“You mean the harmony between the blossoms and the black branches?” he asked in a somewhat confused tone.
“No, I’m not referring to the blossoms or the leaves or the buds or anything else. I love branches. Even when they’re perfectly bare, they’re fully alive. They’re not a bit like dead branches.”
“You mean only Nature retains her vitality?” He thereupon gave several more of his tremendous sneezes.
“Have you caught a cold?”
“No, I haven’t. I have a funny habit—whenever my drunkenness reaches the saturation point, all at once I start to sneeze like that. It’s something of a barometer of my intoxication.”
“What about love?”
“What?”
“Is there someone? Someone who is approaching the saturation point?”
“Don’t make fun of me! Women are all alike—they’re so damned complicated. Guillotine, guillotine, shooshooshoo. As a matter of fact there is someone, no, half a someone.”
“Did you read my letters?”
“Yes.”
“What answer have you to make?”
“I don’t like the aristocracy. There’s always a kind of offensive arrogance hovering around them. Your brother Naoji is a great success for an aristocrat, but every now and then even he displays an affectation I simply can’t put up with. I am a farmer’s boy, and I never go by a stream like this one without an almost painfully sharp recollection of the days when I used to fish for silver carp or scoop up
minnows with a net in the streams at home.”
We were walking on a road which followed a stream that flowed with a faint rustle at the bottom of the darkness.
“You aristocrats are not only absolutely incapable of understanding our feelings, but you despise them.”
“What about Turgenev?”
“He was an aristocrat. That’s why I dislike him.”
“Even his Sportsman’s Sketches?”
“That book—it’s his only one—is not bad.”
“It really captures the feeling of village life.”
“He was a rustic aristocrat—shall we compromise on that?”
“I’m also a country girl now. I cultivate a field. A poor country girl.”
“Do you still love me?” His voice was rough. “Do you want a child from me?”
I did not answer.
His face approached mine with the force of a landslide, and I was furiously kissed. The kisses reeked of desire. I wept as I accepted them. My tears were bitter, like tears of shame over a humiliation. The tears poured from my eyes.
As we walked again, side by side, he spoke. “I’ve made a mess of it—I’ve fallen for you.” He laughed.
I was incapable of laughter. I contracted my brows and pursed my lips. If I were to have expressed my feelings in words, it would have been something like “It can’t be helped.” I realized that I was dragging my feet in a desolate walk.
“I’ve made a mess of it,” the man said again. “Shall we go through with it?”
“Don’t strike a pose!”
“You devil!” Mr. Uehara rapped my shoulder with his fist and again gave a great sneeze.
Everyone seemed to be asleep at Mr. Fukui’s house.
“Telegram, telegram! Mr. Fukui, it’s a telegram!” Mr. Uehara shouted, beating on the door.
“Is that you, Uehara?” a man’s voice called.
“Quite correct. The prince and the princess have come to beg a night’s lodgings. It’s so cold that all I can do is sneeze, and after going to so much trouble, our lovers’ journey is winding up as a comedy.”
The front door was opened. A short bald man of about fifty in gaudy pajamas greeted us with a curiously shy smile.
“Please.” This was the only word Mr. Uehara spoke as he charged into the house, without so much as removing his coat. “Your atelier is hopelessly cold. I’ll take the second-floor room. Come on.” He took me by the hand and led me through the hall to a staircase at the end, which we climbed. We entered a dark room. Mr. Uehara switched on the lights.
“It’s like a private dining-room in a restaurant, isn’t it?” I said.
“The tastes of the nouveau riche. Still, it’s much too good for a rotten artist like Fukui. When you’ve got the devil’s own luck, you’re immune from the usual run of disasters. Such people must be utilized. Well, to bed, to bed.”
He started pulling bedding out of the cupboard as if he were in his own home. “You sleep here. I’m going. I’ll come for you tomorrow morning. The toilet is downstairs and to the right.” He thumped so loudly down the stairs that it sounded as though he had rolled down. That was all. The place became absolutely still.
I switched off the light again, removed my velvet coat made of material Father once had brought back as a souvenir from abroad, and crawled into bed still in my kimono, barely loosening my obi. My body felt heavy, probably because of the liquor I had drunk when I was already fatigued, and I soon dozed off.
I don’t know when it happened, but I opened my eyes to find him lying next to me. For almost an hour I maintained a determined wordless resistance.
Suddenly I felt sorry for him and yielded.
“Is this life you are leading the only relief you can get?”
“That’s about it.”
“But doesn’t it tell on your body? I’m sure you’ve coughed blood.”
“How do you know? As a matter of fact, I had a rather serious bout the other day, but I haven’t told anyone.”
“It’s the same smell as before Mother died.”
“I drink out of desperation. Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, loneliness, crampedness—they’re heartbreaking. Whenever you can hear the gloomy sighs of woe from the four walls around you, you know that there’s not a chance of happiness existing just for you. What feelings do you suppose a man has when he realizes that he will never know happiness or glory as long as he lives? Hard work. All that amounts to is food for the wild beasts of hunger. There are too many pitiful people.—Is that a pose again?”
“No.”
“Only love. Just as you wrote in your letters.”
“Yes.”
My love was extinguished.
When the room became faintly light, I stared at the face of the man sleeping beside me. It was the face of a man soon to die. It was an exhausted face.
The face of a victim. A precious victim.
My man. My rainbow. My Child. Hateful man. Unprincipled man.
It seemed to me then a face of a beauty unmatched in the whole world. My breast throbbed with the sensation of resuscitated love. I kissed him as I stroked his hair.
The sad, sad accomplishment of love.
Mr. Uehara, his eyes still shut, took me in his arms. “I was all wrong. What do you expect of a farmer’s son?”
I could never leave him.
“I am happy now. Even if I were to hear the four walls all shriek in anguish, my feeling of happiness would still be at the saturation point. I am so happy I could sneeze.”
Mr. Uehara laughed. “But it’s too late now. It’s dusk already.”
“It’s morning!”
That morning my brother Naoji committed suicide.
CHAPTER SEVEN / THE TESTAMENT
Naoji’s testament:
Kazuko.
It’s no use. I’m going.
I cannot think of the slightest reason why I should have to go on living.
Only those who wish to go on living should.
Just as a man has the right to live, he ought also to have the right to die.
There is nothing new in what I am thinking: it is simply that people have the most inexplicable aversion to this obvious—not to say primitive—idea and refuse to come out with it plainly.
Those who wish to go on living can always manage to survive whatever obstacles there may be. That is splendid of them, and I daresay that what people call the glory of mankind is comprised of just such a thing. But I am convinced that dying is not a sin.
It is painful for the plant which is myself to live in the atmosphere and light of this world. Somewhere an element is lacking which would permit me to continue. I am wanting. It has been all I could do to stay alive up to now.
When I entered high school and first came in contact with friends of an aggressively sturdy stock, boys who had grown up in a class entirely different from my own, their energy put me on the defensive, and in the effort not to give in to them, I had recourse to drugs. Half in a frenzy I resisted them. Later, when I became a soldier, it was as a last resort for staying alive that I took to opium. You can’t understand what I was going through, can you?
I wanted to become coarse, to be strong—no, brutal. I thought that was the only way I could qualify myself as a “friend of the people.” Liquor was not enough. I was perpetually prey to a terrible dizziness. That was why I had no choice but to take to drugs. I had to forget my family. I had to oppose my father’s blood. I had to reject my mother’s gentleness. I had to be cold to my sister. I thought that otherwise I would not be able to secure an admission ticket for the rooms of the people.
I became coarse. I learned to use coarse language. But it was half—no, sixty per cent—a wretched imposture, an odd form of petty trickery. As far as the “people” were concerned, I was a stuck-up prig who put them all on edge with my affected airs. They would never really unbend and relax with me. On the other hand, it is now impossible for me to return to those salons I gave up. Even supposing that my coarseness is sixt
y per cent artifice, the remaining forty per cent is genuine now. The intolerable gentility of the upper-class salon turns my stomach, and I could not endure it for an instant. And those distinguished gentlemen, those eminent citizens, as they are called, would be revolted by my atrocious manners and soon ostracize me. I can’t return to the world I abandoned, and all the “people” give me (with a fulsome politeness that is filled with malice) is a seat in the visitor’s gallery.
It may be true that in any society defective types with low vitality like myself are doomed to perish, not because of what they think or anything else, but because of themselves. I have, however, some slight excuse to offer. I feel the overwhelming pressure of circumstances which make it extremely difficult for me to live.
All men are alike.
I wonder if that might be a philosophy. I don’t believe that the person who first thought up this extraordinary expression was a religious man or a philosopher or an artist. The expression assuredly oozed forth from some public bar like a grub, without anyone’s having pronounced it, an expression fated to overturn the whole world and render it repulsive.
This astonishing assertion has absolutely no connection with democracy, or with Marxism for that matter. Without question it was the remark at a bar hurled by an ugly man at a handsome one. It was simple irritation, or, if you will, jealousy and had nothing to do with ideology or anything of the kind.
But what began as an angry cry of jealousy in a public bar assumed a peculiarly doctrinaire cast of countenance to strut among the common people, and a remark which obviously had no possible connection with democracy or Marxism attached itself before one knew it onto political and economic doctrine and created an unbelievably sordid mess.
I imagine that Mephisto himself would have found the trick of converting such an absurd utterance into doctrine so great an affront to his conscience that he would have hesitated over it.
All men are alike.
What a servile remark that is. An utterance that degrades itself at the same time that it degrades men, lacking in all pride, seeking to bring about the abandonment of all effort. Marxism proclaims the superiority of the workers. It does not say that they are all the same. Democracy proclaims the dignity of the individual. It does not say that they are all the same. Only the lout will assert, “Yes, no matter how much he puts on, he’s just a human being, same as the rest of us.”
