No Longer Human ( PDFDrive )

152
pletely settled in whichever way the husband's feelings
dictate. In other words, even though such an
incident certainly comes as a great shock to the husband,
it is a shock and not an endless scries of waves
which lash back at him over and over again. It seemed
to me a problem which could be disposed of by the
wrath of any husband with authority. But in our case
the husband was without authority, and when I
thought things over, I came to feel that everything
was my fault. Far from becoming enraged, I could
not utter a word of complaint; it was on account of
that rare virtue she possessed that my wife was violated,
a virtue I long had prized, the unbearably pitiful
one called immaculate trustfulness.
Is immaculate trustfulness a sin?
Now that I harbored doubts about the one virtue
I had depended on, I lost all comprehension of everything
around me. My only resort was drink. My face
coarsened markedly and my teeth fell out from the
interminable drinking bouts to which I surrendered
myself. The cartoons I drew now verged on the pornographic.
No, I'll come out with it plainly: I began
about this time to copy pornographic pictures which
I secretly peddled. I wanted money to buy gin. When
I looked at Yoshiko always averting her glance and
trembling, doubt gave birth to fresh doubt: it was
unlikely, wasn't it, that a woman with absolutely no