one gentle smile. I was bundled into an automobile. Flatfish informed me in a quiet tone (so calm indeed that it might almost have been characterized as compassionate) that I should have to go for the time being to a hospital, and that I should leave everything to them. Weeping helplessly, I obeyed whatever the two of them decreed, like a man bereft of all will, decision and everything else. The four of us (Yoshiko came along) were tossed in the car for quite a long time. About dusk we pulled up at the entrance to a large hospital in the woods. My only thought was, "This must be a sanatorium." I was given a careful, almost unpleasantly considerate examination by a young doctor. "You'll need to rest and recuperate here for a while," he said, pronouncing the words with a smile I could only describe as bashful. When Flatfish, Horiki and Yoshiko were about to go, leaving me there alone, Yoshiko handed me a bundle containing a change of clothes, then silently offered from her handbag the hypodermic needle and the remaining medicine. Is it possible she actually believed after all that it was just an energy-building medicine? "No," I said, "I won't need it anymore." This was a really rare event. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that it was the one and only time in my life that I refused something offered to me. My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no. I had been intimidated by the fear that if I declined something offered me, a yawning crevice would open between the other person's heart and myself which could never be mended through all eternity. Yet I now refused in a perfectly natural manner the morphine
