to have acquired before I was aware of it a certain offensive atmosphere which clung inseparably to me. This was a quite unexpected by-product of my experience, but gradually it
became more manifest, until Horiki pointed it out, to my amazement and consternation. I had, quite objectively speaking, passed through an apprenticeship in women at the hands of prostitutes, and I had of lute become quite adept. The severest apprenticeship in women, they say, is with prostitutes, and that makes it the most effective. The odor of the "lady-killer" had come to permeate me, and women (not only prostitutes) instinctively detected it and flocked to me. This obscene and inglorious atmosphere was the "bonus" I received, and it was apparently far more noticeable than the recuperative effects of my apprenticeship. Horiki informed me of it half as a compliment, I suppose, but it struck a painful chord in me. I remembered now clumsily written letters from bar girls; and the general's daughter, a girl of twenty, whose house was next to mine, and who every morning when I went to school was always hovering around her gate, all dressed up for no apparent reason; and the waitress at the steak restaurant who, even when I didn't say a word .... ; and the girl at the tobacco shop I patronized who always would put in the package of cigarettes she handed me ...; and the woman in the seat next to mine at the Kabuki Theatre . . . ; and the time when I was drunk and fell asleep on the streetcar in the middle of the night; and that letter burning with passion that came unexpectedly from a girl relative in the country; and
