virtue I long had prized, the unbearably pitiful one called immaculate trustfulness. Is immaculate trustfulness a sin? Now that I harbored doubts about the one virtue I had depended on, I lost all comprehension of everything around me. My only resort was drink. My face coarsened markedly and my teeth fell out from the interminable drinking bouts to which I surrendered myself. The
cartoons I drew now verged on the pornographic. No, I'll come out with it plainly: I began about this time to copy pornographic pictures which I secretly peddled. I wanted money to buy gin. When I looked at Yoshiko always averting her glance and trembling, doubt gave birth to fresh doubt: it was unlikely, wasn't it, that a woman with absolutely no defences should have yielded only that once with the shopkeeper. Had she been also with Horiki? Or with somebody I didn't even know? I hadn't the courage to question her; writhing in my usual doubts and fears, I drank gin. Sometimes when drunk I timidly attempted a few sneaking ventures at indirect questioning. In my heart I bounded foolishly from joy to sorrow at her responses, but on the surface I never ceased my immoderate clowning. Afterwards I would inflict on Yoshiko an abominable, hellish caressing before I dropped into a dead sleep. Towards the end of that year I came home late one night blind drunk. I felt like having a glass of sugar-water. Yoshiko seemed to be asleep, so I went myself to the kitchen to look for the sugar bowl. I took off the lid and peered inside. There was no sugar, only a thin black cardboard box. I took it absentmindedly in my hand and read the label.
