times that people slip in dark, unlighted bathrooms and fall into the toilet, or the percentage of passengers who get their feet caught in the space between the door of a subway train and the edge of the platform, or other such footling exercises in probability. These events seem entirely within the bounds of possibility, but I have never heard a single instance of anyone hurting himself by falling into the toilet. I felt pity and contempt For the self which until yesterday had accepted such hypothetical situations as eminently factual scientific truths and was terrified by them. This shows the degree to which I had bit by bit arrived at a knowledge of the real nature of what is called the world. Having said that, I must now admit that I was still afraid of human beings, and before I could meet even the customers in the bar I bad to fortify myself by gulping down a glass of liquor. The desire to see frightening things—that was what drew me every night to the bar where, like the child who squeezes his pet all the harder when he actually fears it a little, I proclaimed to the customers standing at the bar my drunken, bungling theories of art. A comic strip artist, and at that an unknown one, knowing no great joys nor, for that matter, any great sorrows. I craved desperately some
great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue, hut my only actual pleasure was to engage in meaningless chatter with the customers and to drink their liquor. Close to a year had gone by since I took up this debased life in the bar in Kyobashi. My cartoons were no longer confined to the children's magazines, but now appeared also in the cheap, pornographic
