the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin." I paced back and forth, half in a frenzy, between my apartment and the pharmacy. The more I worked the more morphine I consumed, and my debt at the pharmacy reached a frightening figure. Whenever the woman caught sight of my face, the tears came to her eyes. I also wept. Inferno. I decided as a last resort, my last hope of escaping the inferno, to write a long letter to my father in which I confessed my circumstances fully and accurately (with the exception, of course, of my relations with women) . If it failed I had no choice but to hang myself, a resolve which was tantamount to a bet on the existence of God. The result was to make everything only the worse: the answer, for which I waited day and night, never came, and my anxiety and dread caused me to increase still further the dosage of the drug. I made up my mind one day to give myself ten shots that night and throw myself into the river. But on the afternoon of the very day I chose
for the event, Flatfish appeared with Horiki in tow, seemingly having managed with his diabolical intuition to sniff out my plan. Horiki sat in front of me and said, with a gentle smile, the like of which I had never before seen on his face, "I hear you've coughed blood." I felt so grateful, so happy for that gentle smile that I averted my face and wept. I was completely shattered and smothered by that
