“Extraordinary beans you’ve got here. Come
have a look.”

Horiki’s voice and color had changed. Just a
minute before he had staggered off downstairs, and
here he was back again, before I knew it.

‘‘What is it?”

A strange excitement ran through me. The two of
us went down from the roof to the second floor and
were half-way down the stairs to my room on the
ground floor when Horiki stopped me and whispered,
“Look!” He pointed.

A small window opened over my room, through
which I could sec the interior. The light was lit and
two animals were visible.

My eyes swam, but I murmured to myself tlirough
my violent breathing, “This is just another aspect of
the behavior of human beings. There’s nothing to be
surprised at.” I stood petrified on the staircase, not
even thinking to help Yoshiko.

Horiki noisily cleared his throat. I ran back up
to the roof to escape and collapsed there. The feelings
which assailed me as 1 looked up at the summer night
sky heavy with rain were not of fury or hatred, nor
even of sadness. They were of overpowering fear, not
the terror the sight of ghosts in a graveyard might
arouse, but rather a fierce ancestral dread that could
not be expressed in four or five words, something per-
haps like encountering in the sacred grove of a Shinto
shrine the white-clothed body of the god. My hair
turned prematurely grey from that night. I had now
lost all confidence in myself, doubted all men im-
measurably, and abandoned all hopes for the things
of this world, all joy, all sympathy, eternally. This
was truly the decisive incident of my life. I had been
split through the forehead between the eyebrows, a
wound that was to throb with pain whenever I came in
contact with a human being.

“I sympathize, but I hope it’s taught you a lesson.
I won’t be coming back. This place is a perfect hell
. . . But you should forgive Yoshiko. After all, you’re
not much of a prize yourself. So long.” Horiki was
not stupid enough to linger in an embarrassing situa-
tion.

I got up and poured myself a glass of gin. I wept
bitterly, crying aloud. I could have wept on and on,
interminably.

Without my realizing it, Yoshiko was standing
haplessly behind me bearing a platter with a moun-
tain of beans on it. “He told me he wouldn’t do any-
thing . . .”

“It’s all right. Don’t say anything. You didn’t
know enough to distrust others. Sit down. Let’s eat
the beans.”

We sat down side by side and ate the beans. Is
trustfulness a sin, I wonder? The man was an illiterate
shopkeeper, an undersized runt of about thirty, who
used to ask me to draw cartoons for him, and then
would make a great ado over the trifling sums of
money he paid for them.

The shopkeeper, not surprisingly, did not come
again. I felt less hatred for him than I did for Horiki.
Why, when he first discovered them together had he
not cleared his throat then, instead of returning to
the roof to inform me? On nights when I could not
sleep hatred and loathing for him gathered inside me
until I groaned under the pressure.

I neither forgave nor refused to forgive her.
Yoshiko was a genius at trusting people. She didnH
know how to suspect anyone. But the misery it caused.

God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?