our old friendship. We went together to the bar in Kyobashi and, eventually, we two soused dogs visited Shizuko's apartment in Koenji, where I sometimes spent the night.
I shall never forget. It was a sticky hot summer's night. Horiki had come to my apartment about dusk wearing a tattered summer kimono. He told me that an emergency bad come up and he had been obliged to pawn his summer suit. He asked me to lend him some money because he was anxious to redeem the suit before his aged mother found out. The matter apparently concerned him genuinely. As ill luck would have it, I hadn't any money at my place. As usual I sent Yoshiko out to the pawnshop with some of her clothes. I lent Horiki what he needed from the money she received, but there was still a little left over, and I asked Yoshiko to buy some gin with it. We went up on the roof of the apartment house, where we celebrated the evening cool with a dismal little party. Faint miasmic gusts of wind blew in from the river every now and then. We began a guessing game of tragic and comic nouns. This game, which I myself had invented, was based on the proposition that just as nouns could be divided into masculine, feminine and neuter, so there was a distinction between tragic and comic nouns. For example, this system decreed that steamship and steam engine were both tragic nouns, while streetcar and bus were comic. Persons who failed to see why this was true were obviously unqualified to discuss art, and a playwright who included even a single tragic noun in a comedy showed himself a failure if for no other reason. The same held equally true of comic nouns in tragedies.
