I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness. The remaining ninety-nine percent is just living in waiting. In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions all together occupy a bare one percent of our time. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves-it was not for the likes of me. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. And the year before that nothing happened.” I feigned an innocent optimism I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.” I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. “I have always shook with fright before human beings. From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?” “Know thy particular fearsomeness, thy knavery, cunning and witchcraft!” What I said, however, as I wiped the perspiration from my face with a handkerchief was merely, “You’ve put me in a cold sweat!” I smiled. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?’ Words, words of every kind went flitting through my head. It’s you, isn’t it?’ ‘Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society.’ ‘It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it - right?’ ‘If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it’ ‘It’s not society.
‘Society won’t stand for it.’ ‘It’s not society. But I held the words back, reluctant to anger him. “What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called “society”? I had spent my whole life thinkng that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words “Don’t you mean yourself?” come to the tip of my tongue. “Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.”
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