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 didn't know how to suspect anyone. But the misery it caused. God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin? It was less the fact of Yoshiko's defilement than the defilement of her trust in people which became so persistent a source of grief as almost to render my life insupportable. For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces, Yoshiko's immaculate trustfulness seemed clean and pure, like a waterfall among green leaves. One night sufficed to turn the waters of this pure cascade yellow and muddy. Yoshiko began from that night to fret over my every smile or frown.
She would jump when I called her, and seemed at a loss which way to turn. She remained tense and afraid, no matter how much I tried to make her smile, no matter how much I played the clown. She began to address me with an excessive profusion of honorifics. Is immaculate trustfulness after all a source of sin?
