Two (1/2)

by Osamu Dazai

Horiki and I.

We associated with each other while mutually despising one another, thereby debasing ourselves. If that is what "friendship" in this world truly means, then the relationship between Horiki and me was certainly nothing short of "friendship."

I was able to rely on the generosity of the madam of that stand bar in Kyobashi and make Yoshiko, from the tobacco shop, my common-law wife. We then rented a room in a small, two-story wooden apartment near Tsukiji and Sumida River and began living together. I stopped drinking, devoted myself to my manga work, and after dinner, we would go out to watch a movie, stopping by a coffee shop on the way back or buying a potted flower. More than anything, I enjoyed listening to the words of this small bride who trusted me wholeheartedly and watching her actions. Just as I was beginning to harbor the sweet thought that perhaps I could become something more human, that I might avoid a tragic death, Horiki reappeared before me.

"Hey there, you lecher! Oh? You've got a bit more sense in your face now, haven't you? Today, I'm an envoy from the lady in Koenji."

He started to say, then suddenly lowered his voice, jerking his chin towards Yoshiko, who was preparing tea in the kitchen, and asked, "Is it alright?"

"It's fine. You can say anything you want."

I answered calmly. In fact, Yoshiko was so trusting that I could almost call her a genius of trust; not only did she not doubt my relationship with the madam of the bar in Kyobashi, but even when I told her about the incident in Kamakura, she never suspected anything between Tsuneko and me. This wasn't because I was good at lying; sometimes I even spoke quite frankly, yet to Yoshiko, it always seemed to sound like a joke.

"Still carrying that burden, I see. Well, it's nothing major, but it's a message asking you to come visit Koenji sometime."

Forgotten memories, like a strange bird, flapped their wings and came rushing back, and the memories of past shame and sin vividly resurfaced, making me unable to sit still from a terror so profound I wanted to scream.

"Shall we drink?"

I said,

"Alright."

Horiki replied.

Horiki and I. Our forms were similar. Sometimes, it felt as if we were identical humans. Of course, that was only when we were drinking cheap sake here and there, but anyway, whenever we met, we would transform into dogs of the same shape and coat, and it felt as if we were running through a snowy town.

From that day on, we rekindled our old friendship, went together to that small bar in Kyobashi, and eventually, those two drunken dogs even visited and stayed overnight at Shizuko's apartment in Koenji.

I'll never forget it. It was a hot and humid summer night. Horiki came to my apartment in Tsukiji around dusk, wearing a shabby yukata. He said he had pawned his summer clothes that day out of necessity, but it would be really bad if his elderly mother found out, so he wanted to redeem them immediately and asked me to lend him money. Unfortunately, I didn't have any money either, so as usual, I told Yoshiko to take her clothes to the pawn shop to get money, which I then lent to Horiki. There was still a little left over, so with the remaining money, I had Yoshiko buy shochu, and we went to the apartment rooftop, where we held a shabby summer evening party, enjoying the occasional foul-smelling breeze blowing from the Sumida River.

At that time, we started a game of guessing "comedy nouns" and "tragedy nouns." This was a game I invented, based on the idea that while all nouns have distinctions of masculine, feminine, and neuter, they should also have distinctions of comedy nouns and tragedy nouns. For example, "steamship" and "train" are both tragedy nouns, while "streetcar" and "bus" are both comedy nouns. If someone doesn't understand why, they are not fit to discuss art. A playwright who includes even one tragedy noun in a comedy is already a failure, and the same applies to tragedies.

"Alright? How about 'tobacco'?"

I asked.

"Tra. (Abbreviation for tragedy)"

Horiki immediately replied.

"How about 'medicine'?"

"Powdered medicine? Or pills?"

"An injection."

"Tragedy."

"Is that so? There are hormone injections too, you know."

"No, it's definitely tragedy. First of all, the needle, and you, aren't you a magnificent tragedy?"

"Alright, I'll concede. But you know, medicine and doctors, they're surprisingly comedy, aren't they? What about death?"

"Rice. The pastor and the monk are the same."

"Excellent. And life is a tiger, isn't it?"

"No. That's also comedy."

"No, if that's the case, everything would be comedy. Well then, let me ask you one more thing, what about a manga artist? You can't possibly say that's comedy, can you?"

"Tragedy, tragedy. A noun of great tragedy!"

"What, you're the one who's a great tragedy."

It's a shame it's turned into such a clumsy pun, but we were proud of that game, thinking it was incredibly clever, something that had never existed in any salon in the world.

I also invented another similar game at the time. It was a guessing game for antonyms. The antonym of black is white. But the antonym of white is red. The antonym of red is black.

"What's the antonym of flower?"

When I asked, Horiki twisted his mouth in thought and said,

"Uh, there was a restaurant called Kagetsu, so it's moon."

"No, that's not an antonym. It's more like a synonym. Even star and violet are synonyms, aren't they? Not antonyms."

"I got it, it's a bee."

"A bee?"

"For a peony... an ant?"

"What, that's a painting subject. Don't try to trick me."

"I got it! Clouds over flowers..."

"It's clouds over the moon, isn't it?"

"Right, right. Wind for flowers. It's wind. The antonym of flower is wind."

"That's no good, that's a line from a Naniwabushi song, isn't it? It reveals your true nature."

"No, it's a biwa."

"That's even worse. The antonym of flower, you know... you should name something that is the least like a flower in this world."

"So, that... wait, a woman?"

"By the way, what's a synonym for woman?"

"Organs."

"You really don't know poetry, do you? In that case, what's the antonym of organs?"

"Milk."

"This is somewhat interesting. Keep it up, one more. Shame. Antonym of 'onto'."

"Shamelessness. Ikuta, the popular manga artist boss."

"Masao Horiki?"

From this point, the two gradually stopped laughing and became gloomy, a melancholy feeling peculiar to shochu intoxication, as if their heads were filled with shards of glass.

"Don't be impertinent. I haven't yet suffered the humiliation of being tied up like you have."

I was startled. Horiki, deep down, hadn't treated me as a decent human being. He saw me as nothing more than a failed suicide, a shameless, idiotic monster, in other words, a "living corpse." When I thought that, I certainly didn't feel good. However, it was understandable that Horiki saw me that way; I had always been a child unworthy of being human. I reconsidered, thinking that perhaps I deserved to be scorned even by Horiki, and then,

"Sin. What would be the antonym of sin? This is difficult."

I said, feigning a casual expression.

"Law."

Horiki answered so calmly that I looked at his face again. Bathed in the red light of the flickering neon sign of a nearby building, Horiki's face had the dignity of a demon detective. I was utterly astonished and said,

"Sin, my friend, isn't something like that, is it?"

The antonym of sin is law! But perhaps everyone in society thinks so simply and lives serenely. Sin lurks where there are no detectives, they might think.

"Well then, what is it, God? You have a somewhat Christian-like air about you. It's distasteful."

"Don't dismiss it so lightly. Let's think about it a bit more together. Isn't this an interesting theme, though? I feel like one answer to this theme can reveal everything about a person."

"No way... The antonym of sin is goodness. A good citizen. In other words, someone like me."

"Let's not joke around. However, good is the antonym of evil. Not the antonym of sin."

"Are evil and sin different?"

"I think they are. The concepts of good and evil are man-made. They are moral words that humans arbitrarily created."

"Shut up. Then it must be God after all. God, God. You can't go wrong if you attribute everything to God. I'm hungry."

"Yoshiko is boiling broad beans downstairs right now."

"Thank goodness. They're my favorite."

He clasped his hands behind his head and lay down on his back.

"You seem to have absolutely no interest in sin."

"Of course not, because I'm not a sinner like you. Even if I indulge in pleasures, I don't cause women to die or extort money from them."

A faint, yet desperate voice of protest arose somewhere in his heart, saying he hadn't caused her death, he hadn't extorted money, but then this habit of immediately thinking it was his own fault again.

He simply couldn't engage in a direct argument. He desperately suppressed the feeling that his mood was growing harsher by the minute due to the gloomy intoxication of shochu, and spoke almost to himself.

"However, being put in jail isn't the only sin. If I could understand the antonym of sin, I feel like I could grasp the essence of sin, but... God... salvation... love... light... but God has Satan as an antonym, and the antonym of salvation must be suffering, and love has hatred, light has darkness as an antonym, and good has evil, sin and prayer, sin and regret, sin and confession, sin and... oh, they're all synonyms, what's the antonym of sin?"

"The antonym of 'tsumi' (sin) is 'mitsu' (honey). Sweet like honey. I'm hungry. Bring me something to eat."

"Why don't you bring it yourself!"

A fierce voice of anger, almost for the first time in his life, came out.

"Alright, then, I'll go downstairs and commit a sin with Yoshiko. Practical inspection over argument. The antonym of sin is 'mitsumame' (bean jelly), no, 'soramame' (broad beans)?"

He was so drunk he could barely articulate his words.

“Do as you please. Go somewhere far away!”

“Sin and hunger, hunger and broad beans—no, are these synonyms?”

I got up, muttering nonsense.

Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky. That thought briefly crossed my mind, and I suddenly realized. What if Mr. Dostoevsky didn't consider crime and punishment as synonyms, but rather as antonyms? Crime and punishment, things that are absolutely incompatible, like ice and charcoal. Dostoevsky's murky blue, rotten pond, the depths of his tangled mind, where he considered crime and punishment as antonyms... Ah, I was starting to understand, no, not yet... Just as these thoughts were swirling like a kaleidoscope in my head,

“Hey! What a broad bean. Come on!”

Horiki’s voice and expression had changed. Horiki, who I thought had just stumbled downstairs, had come back.

“What is it?”

With an unusual bloodlust, the two of us descended from the rooftop to the second floor, and halfway down the stairs from the second floor to my room below, Horiki stopped,

“Look!”

he whispered, pointing.

The small window above my room was open, and I could see inside. The light was still on, and there were two animals in the room.

I stood rooted to the stairs, dizzy and swaying, muttering to myself with heavy breaths, “This, too, is the form of a human. This, too, is the form of a human. There’s nothing to be surprised about,” forgetting to help Yoshiko.

Horiki coughed loudly. He ran up to the rooftop alone, as if escaping, lay down, and looked up at the summer night sky, heavy with rain. The emotion that seized him at that moment was not anger, disgust, or sorrow, but a terrifying fear. It was not the fear of ghosts in a graveyard, but an ancient, raw sense of terror, like encountering a white-robed deity in a cedar grove at a shrine. His prematurely gray hair began that night, and he lost all confidence, became profoundly suspicious of people, and was forever separated from the expectations, joys, and resonance of worldly affairs. Indeed, it was a decisive event in his life. He felt as if his brow had been split open, and that wound ached whenever he approached any human being.

"I sympathize, but I suppose you've learned your lesson a bit now. I'm never coming back here again. It's like hell... But forgive Yoshichan. You're not much of a person yourself anyway. Excuse me."

Horiki was not so foolish as to linger long in an awkward place.

He got up, drank shochu alone, and gradually began to cry out loud. He could cry as much as he wanted, for as long as he wanted.

Before he knew it, Yoshiko was standing vaguely behind him, holding a plate piled high with broad beans.

"I said I wouldn't do anything..."

"It's fine. Don't say anything. You didn't know how to suspect people. Sit down. Let's eat the beans."

The two sat side by side and ate the beans. Ah, was trust a sin? The other man was an uneducated, small merchant in his late twenties who would have him draw manga and then grudgingly leave him a small amount of money.

The merchant never came back after that, but for some reason, rather than hatred for him, a surge of resentment and anger towards Horiki, who hadn't coughed loudly when he first saw him, welled up in him during sleepless nights.

There is no question of forgiving or not forgiving. Yoshiko was a genius of trust. She didn't know how to doubt people. But because of that, tragedy.

I ask God: Is trust a sin?

More than the fact that Yoshiko was defiled, the defilement of her trust became a source of such long-lasting, unbearable anguish for him that he could barely live. For someone like him, who was so obsequious and timid, always trying to read people's expressions, and whose ability to trust others had cracked, Yoshiko's innocent trust felt as refreshing as a waterfall among green leaves. In one night, it turned into yellow sewage. Look, from that night on, Yoshiko began to be careful even with her every facial expression and smile.

"Hey."

When he called, she flinched, already looking uncomfortable about where to put her eyes. No matter how much he tried to make her laugh, she became flustered, timid, and started using overly polite language.

Indeed, is innocent trust the source of sin?

He searched for and read various books about stories of married women being violated. However, he thought that there was not a single woman who had been violated as tragically as Yoshiko. In the first place, this was not a story or anything at all. If there had been even a slight feeling resembling love between that small merchant and Yoshiko, his feelings might have been a little easier, but it was just one summer night when Yoshiko trusted him, and that was it. Moreover, because of that, her glabella was split straight down the middle, her voice became hoarse, gray hairs began to appear, and Yoshiko had to live in constant distress for the rest of her life. Most stories seemed to focus on whether the husband would forgive his wife's "act," but to him, that did not seem like such a painful major problem. To forgive or not to forgive, a husband who reserves such rights is fortunate. If he thought he could not forgive her, why not divorce his wife quickly and marry a new one without making such a fuss? If he couldn't do that, he would "forgive" her and endure it. In any case, he even felt that everything would work out smoothly with just the husband's feelings. In other words, such an incident, although certainly a great shock to the husband, was a "shock" and not something that would continuously wash over him like an endless wave. It seemed to him like a problem that could be dealt with in any way by the anger of the husband who had the right. However, in their case, the husband had no rights, and when he thought about it, he felt as if everything was his fault. Far from being angry, he couldn't even utter a single complaint, and his wife was violated because of the rare beautiful quality she possessed. Moreover, that beautiful quality was the innocent trust that the husband had always longed for,an irresistibly lovely thing.

Is innocent trust a sin?

Even doubting the only virtue he relied on, he became completely confused about everything, and his only direction was towards alcohol. His facial expression became extremely vulgar, drinking shochu from the morning, his teeth crumbling, and he began to draw cartoons that were almost pornographic. No, I will say it clearly. Since that time, he had been copying shunga and selling it secretly. He wanted money to buy shochu. Whenever he saw Yoshiko, who was always looking away and flustered, he thought that she was a woman completely unaware of danger, and wondered if she had not been with that merchant just once, and what about Horiki? No, perhaps with someone he didn't know? Doubts bred more doubts, and yet he lacked the courage to confront it head-on, writhing in his usual anxiety and fear, simply drinking shochu to get drunk, timidly attempting something like a mean-spirited leading question, feeling foolishly elated and dejected inside, while outwardly being overly playful, and then, after that, adding a dreadful caress to Yoshiko, he would fall asleep like a lump of mud.

At the end of that year, I returned home late at night, completely drunk. I felt like drinking sugar water, and seeing Yoshiko asleep, I decided to go to the kitchen myself. I searched for the sugar jar, and when I opened the lid, I found it completely empty, and instead, there was a small black elongated box inside. Casually picking up the box and looking at the label, I was astonished. The label had been scratched off more than half with a nail, but the part with the letters remained, and it clearly said "DIAL".

Diarl. At that time, I was only drinking shochu and didn't use hypnotics, but insomnia was like a chronic illness for me, and I was familiar with most hypnotics. This one box of Diarl certainly contained more than a lethal dose of the drug. The seal on the box hadn't been broken yet, but I must have hidden it here, intending to use it someday. Poor thing, she probably couldn't read the foreign letters on the label and thought, "This will be fine," after scratching off half of it with her nail. (You are not guilty.)

I quietly filled a glass with water, careful not to make a sound, and slowly broke the seal on the box. Then, I threw all of it into my mouth at once, calmly drank the water in the glass, turned off the light, and went to sleep just like that.

I apparently slept like the dead for three days and three nights. The doctor considered it an accident and apparently postponed reporting it to the police. When I was about to wake up, the first words I mumbled were, "I want to go home." I didn't even know what "home" referred to, but I said it anyway and apparently cried terribly.

Gradually, the fog cleared, and when I opened my eyes, Hirame was sitting by my pillow with a grumpy look on his face.

"It was the end of the year last time too, you know. We're both so busy our heads are spinning, and if this keeps happening every year-end, we won't last."

The person listening to Hirame's story was the madam of the bar in Kyobashi.

"Madam,"

I called out.

"Hmm, what is it? Are you awake?"

The madam smiled and said, leaning over my face.

Tears streamed down my face,

"Let me break up with Yoshiko,"

I said, words that even surprised myself.

The madam sat up and let out a faint sigh.

Then I made another truly unexpected, almost comical or foolish slip of the tongue that is hard to describe.

"I'm going somewhere where there are no women."

Then Hirame burst out laughing, Madam chuckled, and I, blushing and shedding tears, forced a bitter smile.

"Yes, that's better,"

Hirame said, continuing to laugh sloppily.

"You should go somewhere without women. Things always go wrong when women are around. Going somewhere without women is a good idea."

Somewhere without women. However, this foolish delirium of mine would later come true in a very grim way.

Yoshiko seemed to believe that I had taken poison in her stead, and she was even more flustered around me than before. She didn't laugh at anything I said, and could barely speak, so I grew tired of being in my apartment room and ended up going out to drink cheap alcohol as usual. However, ever since that incident with G.R., my body had become noticeably thinner, my limbs felt heavy, and I tended to neglect my manga work.

With the money Hirame had left as a get-well gift (Hirame presented it as if it were his own, saying, "This is Shibuta's goodwill," but it was actually money from his brothers back home), I impulsively went to a hot spring in Minami-Izu alone. However, I wasn't the type for such leisurely hot spring tours. Thinking of Yoshiko, my loneliness was boundless, and I was far from a calm state of mind where I could gaze at the mountains from my inn room. I didn't even change into a padded kimono or get into the bath. Instead, I rushed outside, stumbled into a dingy teahouse-like place, drank shochu as if bathing in it, further worsened my physical condition, and simply returned to Tokyo.