his jaw in the direction of Yoshiko, who was preparing tea in the kitchen, as much as to ask whether it was all right to continue. I answered nonchalantly, "It doesn't matter. You can say anything before her." As a matter of fact, Yoshiko was what I should like to call a genius at trusting people. She suspected nothing of my relations with the madam of the bar in Kyobashi, and even after I told her all about the incident which occurred at Kamakura, she was equally unsuspicious of my relations with Tsuneko. It was not because I was an accomplished liar —at times I spoke quite bluntly, but Yoshiko seemed to take everything I said as a joke. "You seem to be just as cocksure of yourself as ever. Anyway, it's nothing important. She asked me to tell you to visit her once in a while." Just when I was beginning to forget, that bird of ill-omen came flapping my way, to rip open with its beak the wounds of memory. All at once shame over the past and the recollection of sin unfolded themselves before my eyes and, seized by a terror so great it made me want to shriek, I could not sit still a moment longer. "How about a drink?" I asked. "Suits me," said Horiki. Horiki and myself. Though outwardly he appeared to be a human being like the rest, I sometimes felt he was exactly like myself. Of course that was only after we had been making the round of the bars, drinking cheap liquor here and there. When the two of us met face to face it was as if we immediately metamorphosed into dogs of the same shape and pat, and we bounded out through the streets covered with fallen snow. That was how we happened to warm over, as it were, the embers of
