which I had so desperately craved. Was it because I was struck by Yoshiko's divine ignorance? I wonder if I had not already ceased at that instant to be an addict. The young doctor with the bashful smile immediately ushered me to a ward. The key grated in the lock behind me. I was in a mental
hospital. My delirious cry after I swallowed the sleeping pills—that I would go where there were no women—had now materialized in a truly uncanny way: my ward held only male lunatics, and the nurses also were men. There was not a single woman. I was no longer a criminal—I was a lunatic. But no, I was definitely not mad. I have never been mad for even an instant. They say, I know, that most lunatics claim the same thing. What it amounts to is that people who get put into this asylum are crazy, and those who don't are normal. God, I ask you, is non-resistance a sin? I had wept at that incredibly beautiful smile Horiki showed me, and forgetting both prudence and resistance, I had got into the car that took me here. And now I had become a madman. Even if released, I would be forever branded on the forehead with the word "madman," or perhaps, "reject." Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being. I came at the beginning of summer. Through the iron bare over the windows I could see water-lilies blossoming in the little pond of the hospital. Three months later, when the cosmos were beginning to bloom in the garden, my eldest brother and Flatfish came, to my great surprise, to take me out. My brother informed me in his habitually
