No Longer Human

I felt pity for Tsuneko; for the first time in my life I was conscious of a positive (if feeble) movement of love in my heart.

I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast.

I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind—of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.

What superficiality—and what stupidity—there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty.

I never could think of prostitutes as human beings or even as women. They seemed more like imbeciles or lunatics. But in their arms I felt absolute security.

The odor of the “lady-killer” had come to permeate me, and women (not only prostitutes) instinctively detected it and flocked to me.

I felt sure that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings. Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed.

I want to be a painter." I said this with conviction. "Wha-a-t?" I can never forget the indescribably crafty shadow that passed over Flatfish’s face as he laughed at me, his neck drawn in.

I’m sure I’m better than Horiki at cartoons if nothing else." These clownish words of deceit were taken more seriously than the truth.

Man’s life is like a flowing river. What is there to fret over? On the river bank a willow tree . . .

Human beings never submit to human beings. Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except in terms of a single then-and-there contest.

The joy I obtained as a result of this action was not necessarily great or savage, but the suffering which ensued was staggering—so far surpassing what I had imagined that even describing it as “horrendous” would not quite cover it.

Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit? I really don’t know myself, but since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent.

How about it? Have you anything which might be described as aspirations for the future? I suppose one can’t expect people one helps to understand how difficult it is to help another person.