‘Even the greatest of the gods, Zeus himself, was no match for those goddesses of vengeance, the Furies.’
I drop the book, flee the bookstore and plunge back into the crowd. But as I walk along, I feel a relentless gaze on my back, on my raincoat back, the relentless gaze of the Furies –
When did this start?
But still I walk on, on and on through the twilight, until I come to Nihonbashi. Out of habit, I suppose, I enter Maruzen and go up to the second floor. Again out of habit, I skim through Strindberg’s Legender a few pages at a time; it describes an experience not much different from my own. Not only that, this edition has a yellow cover. I put it back on the shelf and then, at random, I pull down another thick volume and flick through its pages. This, too, has something for me: one of its illustrations shows rows of gears and wheels with human eyes and noses; I turn to the title page and find it is a German compilation of drawings by mental patients. I feel consumed by a sudden spirit of defiance and, with the reckless abandon and desperation of a compulsive gambler, I start to pull book after book from the shelves, opening page after page, and every page, every single page, conceals some kind of needle to stab me, whether it be a sentence or an illustration. Every single one, you ask? Well, even in Madame Bovary I can see and sense myself as the bourgeois Monsieur Bovary.
It is almost closing time now, and I seem to be the very last customer. I turn my back on the big bookcases and stride into the small display room. The first thing I see is a poster of St George running his sword through a winged dragon, and the caption is written with the same ‘Dragon’ character I use in my own name. To make matters worse, the grimacing face of the saint half hidden beneath his knight’s helmet resembles the face of one of my many enemies. I have had enough; I can’t bear it any more. I leave the exhibition, go down the broad stairway and out of the store.
Night has now fallen in Nihonbashi and, as I walk down the dark street, I think again and again about this story I am trying to write; I’ d hoped to make it more autobiographical, but it has not come as easily as I’ d imagined. I know this is because of my own pride and scepticism, and I despise these traits in myself. At the same time, I cannot help feeling that when we ‘remove a layer of skin, everybody is the same’. I am planning to call the story ‘Night of Sodom’, or maybe ‘Night of Tokyo’, or perhaps simply ‘Night’; as always, these days, I just can’t decide. Equally, I do believe that Goethe’s title Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit would suit anybody’s autobiography. But now more than ever, I also know not everyone is moved by literature and that, in particular, my own works are unlikely to appeal to anyone who is not like me, has luckily not lived a life like this –
I come to a second-hand shop and stop. In the window is a stuffed swan. It stands with its neck erect, but its wings are yellowed and moth-eaten. Both laughter and tears well up inside me; all that lies before me is either madness or suicide. I turn away from the stuffed swan and the shop window. I look up at the sky, thinking how small the earth truly is – how much, much smaller then am I – among the light of limitless, numberless stars. But the sky, which has been so clear all day, has clouded over now and, all of a sudden, I feel as though ‘something’ is determined to get me, and I decide to seek refuge in a basement restaurant across the streetcar tracks.
At the bar, I order a glass of whisky.
‘All we have is Black & White, sir.’
I pour the whisky into soda water, take a sip, light a cigarette and look around the room. To my left, I notice a portrait of Napoleon hanging on the wall and I feel anxious, uneasy again. When he was still a student, on the last page of his geography notebook, Napoleon had written: ‘Saint Helena, a small island.’ Most people would say it was pure coincidence, but it must have surely filled Napoleon with sheer terror in his last days. And staring at the portrait of Napoleon, thinking back on my own works, certain phrases drift up to haunt me: ‘Life is more hellish than Hell itself,’ I had written in Words of a Dwarf; there was the fate of the artist Yoshihide, the protagonist of my Hell Screen; and then poor Yasukichi …
I take another sip of whisky, light another cigarette, and then glance to my right, trying to escape my own thoughts and words. But sat at the bar next to me there are two men in their late twenties or early thirties. They seem to be newspaper reporters, conversing in low voices, and in French, for some reason. I keep my back turned to them but I can still feel them looking me over, up and down, from head to toe, actually feel their gazes through my raincoat, onto my flesh, and they know
