who was a frequent visitor at my father's house in Tokyo, had served as my guarantor at school. He was a short-set man of forty, a bachelor and a henchman of my father's. His face, particularly around the eyes, looked so much like a flatfish that my father always called him by that name. I had also always thought of him as "Flatfish." I borrowed the telephone directory at the police station to look up Flatfish's number. I found it and called him. I asked if he would mind coming to Yokohama. Flatfish's tone when he answered was unrecognizably officious, but he agreed in the end to be my guarantor.
I went back to the custody room. The police chief's loud voice reached me as he barked out to the policeman, "Hey, somebody disinfect the telephone receiver. He's been coughing blood, you know." In the afternoon they tied me up with a thin hemp rope. I was allowed to hide the rope under my coat when we went outside, but the young policeman gripped the end of the rope firmly. We went to Yokohama on the streetcar. The experience hadn't upset me in the least. I missed the custody room in the police station and even the old policeman. What, I wonder, makes me that way? When they tied me up as a criminal I actually felt relieved—a calm, relaxed feeling. Even now as I write down my recollections of those days I feel a really expansive, agreeable sensation. But among my otherwise nostalgic memories there is one harrowing disaster which I shall never be able to forget and which even now causes me to break out into a cold sweat. I was given a brief examination by the district attorney in his dimly lit office. He was a
