Dialogue in the Dark

I

A Voice: You turned out to be a completely different man from what I had imagined.

I: That is not my responsibility.

A Voice: But you yourself helped create that misunderstanding.

I: I never helped create it, not once.

A Voice: And yet you loved refined elegance, or at least pretended to.

I: I do love refined elegance.

A Voice: Which do you love, then? Refined elegance? Or one particular woman?

I: I love both.

A Voice: (with a cold laugh) You do not seem to think that a contradiction.

I: Who says it is a contradiction? A man who loves one particular woman may not love an old Seto tea bowl. But that is only because he lacks the sensibility to love an old Seto tea bowl.

A Voice: A man of taste must choose one or the other.

I: Unfortunately, I was born far greedier than any man of taste. Though perhaps one day I may choose an old Seto tea bowl over one particular woman.

A Voice: Then you are inconsistent.

I: If that is what you call inconsistency, then the man who still takes cold-water rubdowns after catching influenza must be more consistent than anyone alive.

A Voice: Stop putting on a brave face. Inwardly you are shaken. You only talk like this to fend off the social condemnation coming your way.

I: Of course that is what I mean to do. Just think about it. If I did not fend it off, I would be crushed.

A Voice: What an impudent fellow you are.

I: I am not impudent in the least. My heart grows cold and trembles as if touched by ice even over trivial things.

A Voice: You think yourself one of the strong, do you?

I: Of course I am one of the strong. But not the strongest. If I were the strongest, I would have become an idol in perfect peace, like that man Goethe.

A Voice: Goethe's love was pure.

I: That is a lie. A literary historian's lie. At exactly the age of thirty-five Goethe suddenly fled to Italy. Yes, fled is the only word for it. Aside from Goethe himself, perhaps only Frau von Stein knew that secret.

A Voice: What you are saying is self-defense. Nothing is easier than self-defense.

I: Self-defense is not easy. If it were, the profession of lawyer could not exist.

A Voice: You slick-tongued idler! Before long no one will have anything to do with you.

I: I still have trees and water that move me. And I possess more than three hundred books from Japan, China, and the West.

A Voice: But you will lose your readers forever.

I: I have readers in the future.

A Voice: Will future readers give you bread?

I: Even present-day readers hardly do. The highest fee I ever received was ten yen a page.

A Voice: But you had property, did you not?

I: My property is nothing more than a cat's forehead of land in Honjo. Even at my best, my monthly income never exceeded three hundred yen.

A Voice: But you have a house. And that modern literature reader...

I: The ridgepole of that house weighs heavily on me. As for the royalties from that Modern Literature Reader, I can lend them to you any time. I received only four or five hundred yen.

A Voice: But you edited that reader. That alone ought to shame you.

I: What, exactly, are you telling me to be ashamed of?

A Voice: You have joined the ranks of educators.

I: Quite the reverse. It is the educators who have joined our ranks. I merely took that work back.

A Voice: And you still call yourself a disciple of Natsume-sensei?

I: Of course I am a disciple of Natsume-sensei. You may know Soseki-sensei, the man at home in letters. But you do not know Natsume-sensei, that almost mad genius.

A Voice: You have no such thing as a coherent philosophy. Whatever ideas you do have are riddled with contradictions.

I: That is proof that I am still progressing. A fool goes on forever believing the sun is smaller than a washbasin.

A Voice: Your arrogance will kill you.

I: I sometimes think so myself. Perhaps I am not the sort of man who will die peacefully on a tatami mat.

A Voice: You do not seem to fear death, do you? Do you?

I: I am afraid of dying. But dying is not difficult. I have hanged myself two or three times. After about twenty seconds of suffering, one even begins to feel a kind of pleasure. If I should meet with something more unpleasant than death, I do not think I would hesitate to die.

A Voice: Then why do you not die? By anyone's reckoning, are you not a criminal in the eyes of the law?

I: I know that too. Like Verlaine. Like Wagner. Or the great Strindberg.

A Voice: But you have not atoned.

I: No, I have atoned. There is no atonement greater than suffering.

A Voice: You are a hopelessly wicked man.

I: On the contrary, I am a good man. If I were wicked, I would not suffer as I do. More than that, I would surely exploit love and squeeze money out of women.

A Voice: Then perhaps you are a fool.

I: Yes, perhaps I am a fool. That book called Diary of a Madman was written by a fool very much like me.

A Voice: On top of that, you know nothing of the world.

I: If worldly wisdom is the highest thing, then businessmen must be the noblest of all.

A Voice: You used to despise love. Yet now it turns out that, in the end, you were a worshiper of love above all.

I: No, even now I am absolutely no worshiper of love above all. I am a poet. An artist.

A Voice: And yet for love you threw away your parents, your wife, and your children.

I: Watch your words. I threw away my parents, my wife, and my children only for my own sake.

A Voice: Then you are an egoist.

I: Unfortunately, I am not an egoist. But I would like to become one.

A Voice: Unhappily, you have been infected by this modern worship of the ego.

I: That is precisely what makes me a modern man.

A Voice: Modern men are inferior to the men of old.

I: The men of old were once modern men too.

A Voice: Do you not pity your wife and children?

I: Who could help pitying them? Read Gauguin's letters.

A Voice: You mean to justify what you did to the very end.

I: If I meant to justify it to the very end, I would not be arguing with you at all.

A Voice: Then you still cannot bring yourself to justify it?

I: I have merely resigned myself.

A Voice: But what of your responsibility?

I: One quarter is my heredity, one quarter my circumstances, one quarter accident. My responsibility is only one quarter.

A Voice: What a low creature you are!

I: Anyone is about that low.

A Voice: Then you are a Satanist.

I: Unfortunately, I am no Satanist. Least of all do I feel anything but contempt for Satanists in safe places.

A Voice: (silent for a while) At any rate, you are suffering. I can at least grant you that.

I: No, do not flatter me so carelessly. Perhaps I even take pride in my suffering. Besides, fearing loss after gaining something is hardly the way of the strong.

A Voice: Perhaps you are an honest man. But perhaps you are a clown.

I: I think it is one or the other myself.

A Voice: You always believed yourself a realist.

I: That only means I was that much of an idealist.

A Voice: Perhaps you will be destroyed.

I: But whatever made me will make a second me.

A Voice: Then suffer as you please. I have only to leave you now.

I: Wait. Before that, tell me this. You who are always questioning me, you whom I cannot see, what are you?

A Voice: Me? I am the angel who wrestled with Jacob at the dawn of the world.

II

A Voice: You possess, I must say, a certain courage.

I: No, I possess no courage. If I had any, I would not throw myself into the lion's mouth but wait to be eaten.

A Voice: But what you did has a human quality.

I: The most human things are at the same time the most animal.

A Voice: What you did was not evil. You suffer only because of the social institutions of the modern age.

I: Even if social institutions changed, my action would still be bound to make certain people unhappy.

A Voice: And yet you did not kill yourself. At any rate, you have strength.

I: I tried to kill myself many times. In particular, trying to die a natural-looking death, I ate ten flies a day. Tearing them to pieces and swallowing them whole was nothing. But crushing them with my teeth seemed filthy.

A Voice: Instead, you will become great.

I: I seek no greatness. All I want is peace. Read Wagner's letters. He writes that if only he had a beloved wife, two or three children, and enough money to live without hardship, he would be satisfied even without creating great art. Even Wagner was like that. Even Wagner, with all his monstrous self-will.

A Voice: At any rate, you are suffering. You are not a man without a conscience.

I: I have no conscience. I have nothing but nerves.

A Voice: Your family life was unhappy.

I: And yet my wife was always faithful to me.

A Voice: Your tragedy is that you possess an intellect stronger than that of other people.

I: Careful. My comedy is that I possess less worldly wisdom than other people.

A Voice: But you are honest. Before anything came to light, you confessed everything to the husband of the woman you loved.

I: That too is not quite so noble. I did not confess until I reached a point where I could not bear not to.

A Voice: You are a poet. An artist. Everything is permitted to you.

I: I am a poet. An artist. But I am also a member of society. It is no wonder that I must bear my cross. Even so, it is probably still too light.

A Voice: You forget your ego. Respect your individuality and despise the vulgar masses.

I: I respect my individuality well enough without your telling me to. But I do not despise the masses. Once I said this: "Jewels may shatter, but roof tiles do not." Shakespeare, Goethe, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, all of them may one day perish. But the womb that gave birth to them, the great masses, will not perish. All art, whatever form it takes, will surely be born from them again.

A Voice: What you have written is original.

I: No, not original at all. To begin with, who has ever been original? Even the works of geniuses past and present have prototypes everywhere. As for me, I have stolen many times.

A Voice: But you teach as well.

I: The only things I taught were the things I could not do. If they had been things I could do, I would have done them before ever teaching them.

A Voice: Convince yourself that you are a superman.

I: No, I am no superman. None of us are supermen. The only superman is Zarathustra. And even Nietzsche himself did not know what kind of death that Zarathustra met.

A Voice: Even you are afraid of society?

I: Who has ever not been afraid of society?

A Voice: Look at Wilde, who spent three years in prison. Wilde said, "To commit suicide rashly is to be defeated by society."

I: Wilde attempted suicide many times while in prison. And the only reason he did not kill himself was that he had no means.

A Voice: Trample good and evil underfoot.

I: From now on, if anything, I intend to become an even better man.

A Voice: You are far too simple.

I: No, I am too complicated.

A Voice: Still, be at ease. Your readers will not disappear.

I: Not until after my copyright expires.

A Voice: You are suffering for love.

I: For love? Spare me that literary-young-man flattery. I merely stumbled in an affair.

A Voice: Anyone can stumble in an affair.

I: That means no more than that anyone can drown in greed for money.

A Voice: You are nailed to the cross of life.

I: That is nothing to boast of. Murderers of mistresses and kidnappers too are nailed to the cross of life.

A Voice: Life is not such a dark thing.

I: Except for the chosen few, everyone knows life is dark. And those "chosen few" are merely another name for fools and villains.

A Voice: Then suffer as you please. Do you know who I am, I who came all this way to comfort you?

I: You are a dog. The devil who once entered Faust's room in the form of a dog.

III

A Voice: What are you doing?

I: I am only writing.

A Voice: Why are you writing?

I: Only because I cannot help writing.

A Voice: Then write. Write until you die.

I: Of course. There is no other way.

A Voice: You are calmer than one would expect.

I: No, not calm in the least. If there are people who know me, they must know my suffering.

A Voice: Where has your smile gone?

I: It has returned to the gods above. To smile upon life, one must first have a well-balanced character, second, money, and third, nerves stronger than mine.

A Voice: Still, you must feel lighter now.

I: Yes, I do feel lighter. In exchange, I must carry the burden of a lifetime on my bare shoulders.

A Voice: There is nothing for it but for you to live as yourself. Or perhaps to...

I: Yes. There is nothing for it but to die as myself.

A Voice: You will become a new self, different from the self you once were.

I: I am always myself. Only the skin may change, like a snake shedding its skin.

A Voice: You understand everything.

I: No, I understand nothing of the sort. What I am conscious of is only one part of my soul. The part I am not conscious of, the Africa of my soul, stretches out endlessly in desolation. That is what I fear. No monsters live in the light. But in measureless darkness, something is still asleep.

A Voice: You too were one of my children.

I: Who are you, who kissed me? No, I know you.

A Voice: Then who do you think I am?

I: The one who stole my peace. The one who shattered my Epicureanism. The one who robbed me, and not only me, but also the spirit of moderation once taught by the sages of China. The things sacrificed to you lie everywhere, across literary history and newspaper articles alike.

A Voice: And what do you call that?

I: I... I do not know what to call it. But borrowing another's word, you are a power beyond us. A daimon that rules us.

A Voice: Then bless yourself. I do not come to speak with just anyone.

I: No, more than anyone, I mean to guard myself against your coming. Where you come, there is no peace. And yet you penetrate everything like X-rays.

A Voice: Then do not let your guard down from now on.

I: Of course I will not. Only, when I am holding a pen...

A Voice: You mean that when you are holding a pen, I should come.

I: Who says you should come? I am one minor writer among many. And I want to remain one minor writer among many. Peace can be found nowhere else. But when I am holding a pen, I may become your captive.

A Voice: Then take care always. For I may carry out each and every one of your words. Farewell for now. I will come see you again someday.

I: (left alone) Ryunosuke Akutagawa! Ryunosuke Akutagawa, set your roots down firmly. You are a reed blown by the wind. The sky may change at any moment. Just plant your feet and hold fast. That is for your own sake. And at the same time for the sake of your children. Do not become vain. But do not become servile either. From here on, you must begin again.

(Showa 2 [1927], posthumous manuscript)