To Takeichi (and to him alone) I could display my easily wounded sensibilities, and I did not hesitate now to show him my self-portraits. He was very enthusiastic, and I painted two or three more, plus a picture of a ghost, earning from Takeichi the prediction, "You'll be a great painter some day." Not long afterwards I went up to Tokyo. On my forehead were imprinted the two prophecies uttered by half-wit Takeichi: that I would he "fallen for," and that I would become a great painter.
I wanted to enter an art school, hut my father put me into college, intending eventually to make a civil servant out of me. This was the sentence passed on me and I, who have never been able to answer back, dumbly obeyed. At my father's suggestion I took the college entrance examinations a year early and I passed. By this time I was really quite weary of my high school by the sea and the cherry blossoms. Once in Tokyo I immediately began life in a dormitory, but the squalor and violence appalled me. This time I was in no mood for clowning; I got the doctor to certify that my lungs were affected. I left the dormitory and went to live in my father's town house in Ueno. Communal living had proved quite impossible for me. It gave me chills just to bear such words as "the ardor of youth" or "youthful pride": I could not by any stretch of the imagination soak myself in "college spirit." The classrooms and the dormitory seemed like the dumping grounds of distorted sexual desires, and even my virtually perfected antics were of no use there. When the Diet was not in session my father spent only a week or two
