Why was that? I can’t escape the fear of death. I raise myself and open my eyes. I clutch my trembling body and peer into the dark. Today, the fear is the worst it’s ever been. I break out in a greasy sweat. I wish, I very nearly pray, that I can get married as soon as possible. My wife doesn’t have to be a beauty, but she has to have true compassion. She has to stay up and watch over me at night to make sure I don’t die in my sleep.
How can I ever escape from this fear? It hits me, how good it would be if, after I die, I could be one branch of a big tree. I would wither, but not perish, since the big tree, me included, would continue to exist. Then I wouldn’t have to feel the fear of death. But I am all alone in this world. I’m insecure and frightened. I doubt everything in this world. I can’t really understand a thing. I feel like it’s all beyond my grasp. I feel like this world belongs to the others. I don’t have the freedom to do anything. I have no friends, no buddies. Should I become a left-winger and join the Communist party? Would that solve my loneliness?
Then again, I’ve just been saying all the things the big shots in the left wing say, and I was routed by my sister, who’s nothing but a nurse. I know I can’t grasp the world the way the Left grasps it. The plain truth is, I don’t understand a thing. I don’t have what it takes to find a giant oak that can stand up to the snow and wind of eternity and will take me on as one small branch.
As long as I can’t understand, and I still have these dregs of insecurity stagnating in my head, it won’t make any difference if I join the Communists. I’ll still be insecure, and won’t be able to believe. What’s worse, it’s not likely I’d be accepted as a comrade by the Communists. Me, a dwarf who was squelched by his nearsighted sister who works at an SDF hospital.
If only this world would offer me a hand I could grasp with passion, in simplicity and trust! I feel weak. I give in. I fall back into my cabin bed and grope around under the blankets. When my fingers take hold of my sex, they force it into an erection so I can masturbate. Tomorrow I have the achievement tests for the university entrance exams and the physical education trials. If I masturbate for a second time today I’m going to be exhausted tomorrow and running the eight hundred meters will be an absolute fiasco. Tomorrow fills me with an indefinable dread, but masturbation is the only escape, however brief, from a night of fear.
The night of a city of others is moaning outside the shed. The essence of spring is being worn away by the dirty city air, but it comes out of the sultry, fragrant beech wood in the far distance to stir my flesh and blood and sweep me away into a sea of insecurity. I am seventeen years old, a poor sad Seventeen. Happy birthday, happy birthday, fumble with that crotch and go ahead and do you-know-what.
I need to imagine something obscene. I think of my mother and father, moaning and groaning as they do it. Their assholes are both stark naked. I imagine their pleasure as they fondle each other in the warm, fetid air under the quilts. Suddenly I doubt that I am actually the child of my old man’s sperm. Maybe I was born out of my mother’s infidelity. I wonder if maybe my father knows, and that’s why he’s so coldhearted.
But my orgasm is approaching. Peach flowers bloom everywhere around me, hot springs bubble up, the giant lights of Las Vegas glitter. The fear and doubt, the insecurity, the sadness and misery, that all dissolves now. What bliss it would be if my whole life were one long orgasm. If only it were always, always an orgasm!
My ejaculation wets my crotch. Still panting, I discover once more in the darkness of my shed the birthday of a poor, sad Seventeen. Dispirited and bitter, I start to sob.
*Translator’s note: An American word in the Japanese text referring to the American magazine, an important symbol to the young Japanese of that period, just as it was to American adolescents.
2
I’m not feeling very good when I wake up. My head aches, my arms are heavy, my legs are heavy, my whole body feels slightly feverish. I feel like every other in the world has come to inform my newly awakened body of the fact that I’m an impotent good-for-nothing.
I have a premonition that something bad is going to happen today. Until last year, I’d made up my mind to develop one new habit for each birthday. But my seventeenth birthday doesn’t make me want to do anything new at all. At seventeen, I’m already going downhill. Some people start downhill at fifty, and some keep on the upside until they’re sixty. But I have the sobering feeling that uphill was already over for me yesterday.
The realization that I’m sinking myself in the quagmire of gloom from the minute I open my eyes robs me of the strength to get up. I lie in bed without moving, with my eyes open, in the warmth of the blankets. No matter how lousy I felt, no matter what pain-in-the-ass job I was stuck with, until last year, at least in the moment when I opened my eyes in the morning, I could feel a warm lump of happiness in my breast. I loved the morning. I felt like that lump in my chest was urging me to dash out the door, like I had to say hello to the morning world. I could smile in sympathy and accept the unaccountably sunny cries of the morning-radio exercise instructor. Why? Because it was morning. It made me want to call out, “Aren’t you bubbling with hope and happiness too, because it’s morning?”
But now, the junior high student next door, who’d go along with anything with a smile on his face, has the radio blasting away at full volume. When I hear the arrogant, put-on voice on the radio cheering me on, it only fills me with irritation and anger. Nobody has the right to call out the count for anybody else. That’s what I’d like to tell him.
Rays of sunlight shine through the doors and the wall and the cracks in the roof, giving a golden color to the dusty saddle of the child’s bicycle. The bicycle of my happy childhood. Once when I was riding in the roller-skating rink in the park, a foreign woman chased after me, wanting to take my picture. While I was resting, with the bike parked against the wisteria trellis, that oversized blond woman suddenly materialized from behind me. She pressed her cheek against the bicycle saddle and smiled at me with a face that had turned crimson. I was as embarrassed as if she’d touched my bare buttocks, and ran home, leaving my bike standing there. But the woman’s crazy laughter followed me, rising and falling in what sounded like convulsive spasms. After I started to learn English, I recalled what that giant woman had screamed at me. I remembered because I was so terrified.
“Oh pretty little boy. Please come back! Pretty little boy.”
I was a pretty little boy. The days of childhood, when my heart could pound with that kind of happiness, are over, but I really was a pretty little boy. I felt good, everybody in the world was happy, the entire cosmos felt good as it turned around the sun. But forget about the cosmos. Dark shoots of evil are all I find now in this tiny shed, and even in my own body. Signs of constipation, headache, like the grinding and scratching of sand that’s found its way into my every joint, so many grains for each spot. As I lie here with my blanket pulled over me, I sink deeper and deeper into this black mood. But hiding and crying under my blanket isn’t going to make me feel any better, not without some kind of miracle. Because outside this shed, all the others in the world were up early and working hard at ruining my mood.
Just give up on the whole business, I think. I yawn as I crawl down from my bed. My eyes are wet with what I guess you’d call transparent muck. I don’t know if it’s tears or some other fluid. I hang my head as I pull up my trousers. My sex has shrunken in on itself and sits small and quiet, like a fat sparrow crouching on a cold roof. It gives me a certain masochistic pleasure to see how impotent it looks, even in the morning. I can almost see myself at the age of forty, with my pants down around my knees, showing my impotent little potato to the psychologist: “I had the first symptoms on my seventeenth birthday. Yes sir. Done too much of that, hadn’t I. . .”
I pick up signs that my sister and my old man are leaving the house, talking in tones that sound like they’re arguing about something. My sister’s voice is sullen, but my father, level-headed and nasty in his superiority, speaks i
n a balmy voice. But the old man’s mood is definitely not balmy. He’s trying to put on the voice of American individualism.
At any rate, I’m relieved to know that I didn’t blind my sister. What’s more, I can get by without seeing her this morning. I’m always too worried about things. I imagine the worst possible outcome in every situation and every time somebody’s sick. But I’ve never gotten myself into anything I couldn’t get myself out of. I’m not the type of man to really do anything. I’m a man who can’t even kick out his sister’s eye. I’m the kind of man who ends up repenting, and feels relieved to be saved. I’m a man who can’t do the slightest thing to change the real world. I’m the man who can’t. I am an impotent Seventeen. To tell you the one thing I can do, all I can do is escape from the eyes of other people, hide, and masturbate. The ones who’re recreating and shoring up the world like so many architects are all the others. While I’m locked up in this shed I call a ship’s cabin doing you-know-what, all those others are monkeying around with the world and saying, “Yes, this is it!” Especially when it comes to politics. That’s a job for them, beginning to end. Even when I’m marching in a demonstration, I’m always alone inside, thinking it’s all a waste of time. There’s no chance that I’m going to have any effect on politics, so I know that kind of thing is completely pointless. And the politicians are others even among the others. They do their politics in the Diet and the teahouses, just clapping their hands and saying, “Yes, this is it!”
That’s politics.
When I turn twenty, I’ll cast my vote in the trash can. You’ll see me dead before you’ll see me in a voting booth.
The ideas my sister brandished last night seem to fit the real me a lot better than the opinions I was screaming out in every direction. I boil over with a shame that turns my flesh and blood to gall. After all, I am an idiot who doesn’t know the first thing about politics. I don’t have a single idea of my own. I’d do just as well if I were a speechless chimpanzee doing nothing but you-know-what.
Again I feel a masochistic pleasure. It’s like I enjoy the horrible things done to me by others.
“Oh, Carol!” I sing as I go out of the shed. Out, under a dazzlingly clear blue sky, into the shining world of others.
As I go out, this is what I sing: You hurt me, and you made me cry. But if you leave me, I will surely die. Oh, oh, Carol, you treat me cruel!
§ § §
I’m twenty minutes late for school. To make matters worse, the achievement test has already started. Willy-nilly, I pick up the question and answer sheets and sit down at a desk in the very back row. As I sit, I sneak a look at the guy beside me. The bastard’s answer sheet is already a quarter full. The penciled letters march together in close rows, like the foot-prints of lead soldiers. When I think about what a handicap it is to be late for an exam, I’d like to murder the bunch of bastards who show up early and sit calmly at their desks, with their pencils sharpened and ready.
It’s the Japanese test. I read the questions, but I’m in such a panic that not one thing comes to me. Instead, the blood comes rushing to my head, practically boiling over. I’m seized with fear as I read, and then reread the questions. I try to concentrate, but other things come bubbling up into my head, and I can’t think properly.
The moon was sinking over the hills in a crystal-clear sky, the wind was very cold, and the voices of the insects in the grass brought to her the urge. She found it really difficult to get up and leave these grasses. Even though the crickets cry themselves into exhaustion, my tears still fall until the long night ends. Still she was reluctant to get under way. In the reeds where the insects are singing incessantly, the person from above the clouds sprinkles the dew. Complaints are about to be uttered.
What work is this from, and by whom? Surely it has to be the Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, but I’m not confident. “Brought to her the urge,” I think, but to do what? I don’t have any idea.
Urge sounds erotic, I think. Suddenly I fall into a lewd fantasy. In a magazine I was reading in a bookstore sometime or another, I recall that there was a woman called Sasanoha Ogin, in ancient times, and she definitely said to some wandering samurai, I’ve got the urge.
There’s a couplet in the quotation, but is it by one person or not? I put the dialogue in quotation marks. Still, the phrase “In the reeds where the insects are singing incessantly, the person from above the clouds sprinkles the dew,” reminds me of the wet feeling in my crotch after I abuse myself. I’m a feeble-minded sex maniac.
I’ve only finished a third of the test when the bell rings.
“Dead out!” I mutter, trying to pass it off as a joke. To my surprise, it hits like lead in the pit of my stomach. I almost forget to write my name.
The classroom is a disgusting sight after the test. They’ve all written their answers with such enthusiasm, without once taking their eyes off the page, and now their cheeks are flushed and they’re bleary-eyed. They have the obscene expression of kids who’ve just finished a petting session. They’re either feverishly excited, or else utterly dejected. I’m one of the utterly dejected. They form into groups, each according to his taste, and start talking about the exam results. But even then I stay in my chair. My head droops like I’ve had the stuffings knocked out of me.
The honor students crowd together in their own little group, talking in cool tones. Until last year I belonged to that group, but now I don’t have the courage to join them. Still, I prick up my ears and try to catch what they’re saying. The honor students are in the know about everything. They’ve got their ways of sniffing out the teachers’ plans. They talk with the despicable complacency of technicians—technicians in getting good grades. They’re arrogant and full of virtue, and don’t have the least interest in the likes of me.
“Kiritsubo was a long shot,” they’re saying. “I thought They’d serve up something laced with classical Chinese. I was betting on the Great Mirror or something like that.”
But, of course, that type has turned in perfect answers.
“I heard they’re putting together a special class for Tokyo University if you average over 85 on the next test. I’m out for that.”
“Mr. Modesty, aren’t you? If you don’t make it, there won’t be anybody in the Tokyo class.”
The honor students make me want to puke. At the same time, I remember what my old man said last night. I have the despairing feeling that I’ve been driven into a corner. I don’t stand a chance of getting into the Tokyo course. Those bastards are going to be studying with the chosen ones, with all the grace and good fortune of high-society American bridegrooms, while I’m left to fight a losing struggle in a low-level class, where the teachers don’t make any effort to teach.
“Still, they were good questions. Above the average, I must say.”
“But as something out of Genji, wasn’t it too standard? The real battle won’t be like that. It would’ve been simple enough to make a more complicated question about court ladies’ language. If you add the next line in the paragraph, it gets confusing, and you can’t tell who the polite language is meant for.”
“Oh, it’s the real battle, is it? It sounds like you’re already on your way to Tokyo.”
“Don’t make me laugh! I’m talking about the entrance exam for prep school.”
They make me want to vomit. I’m so angry I feel like I could throw up. Those bastards are so happy they’re actually licking their chops over what’s left of the excitement from the exam.
There’s also a group of different, more straightforward people. They’re getting laughs from the people around them, especially the girls. One comedian is roaring away in an amazingly loud voice.
“Me, now, I thought she was feeling the urge to piss. See, during the Heian Era, they didn’t have public toilets, now did they? So, you see, she just couldn’t hold it anymore, and she sprinkled the dew in the reeds where the crickets were singing.”
Everybody laughs at this. The boy is smart, but he’s stra
nge, and he acts like he’s constantly aware of the fact. His nickname is Shintoho, after a film company that specializes in soft-core pornography. He refuses to watch anything else, and goes out to the suburbs, or even to Chiba Prefecture to catch the Triple Feature Week when they’re showing erotic-grotesque films.
“And what about ‘complaints are about to be uttered,’ Shintoho?”
The girl who asks this sounds like she’s interested in him. She giggles as she waits for some ludicrous answer.
“The cop on the beat had complained. You see, she’d violated the Minor Offenses Act.”
“So they had beat cops in the Heian Era, Shintoho?”
“You’re really a green one,” our hero says. “But let me tell you the true story. In fact she’s trying to fool him about the sound, saying ‘it seems that the long-horned beetles are crying.’ Then she wipes herself.”
“My God, what a pervert,” the girl squeals, writhing with lascivious excitement. She runs out of the room, and our hero is swamped with applause. He raises his hands as though he wants to quiet the crowd, but actually he’s following the model of a popular American TV-show host. He’s in high spirits.
Still, at least he must have understood the question more deeply and accurately than I did. With that thought, I’m completely knocked out. Suddenly I can’t stand to sit here by myself. I see myself standing on a narrow path of crumbling sand, between the abyss of insecurity and the abyss of impotence. I leave my seat, but I don’t have the courage to go near the group of honor students. But when Shintoho makes a gesture inviting me into his group, I feel like I’m being unfairly treated, as an inferior being. I feel insulted. I turn my back on this popular entertainer and leave the classroom.