No Longer Human ( PDFDrive )

73
required of me by the movement, which had become
so frequent and frenetic that I could no longer perform
them half in the spirit of fun. I had been chosen
leader of all the Marxist student action groups in the
schools of central Tokyo. I raced about here and
there "maintaining liaison." In my raincoat pocket I
carried a little knife I had bought for use in the
event of an armed uprising. (I remember now that it
had a delicate blade hardly strong enough to sharpen
a pencil.) My fondest wish was to drink myself into
a sound stupor, but I hadn't the money. Requests for
my services came from the party so frequently that
I scarcely had time to catch my breath. A sickly body
like mine wasn't up to such frantic activity. My only
reason all along for helping the group had been my
fascination with its irrationality, and to become so
horribly involved was a quite unforeseen consequence
of my joke. I felt secretly like telling the group, "This
isn't my business. Why don't you get a regular party
man to do it?" Unable to suppress such reactions of
annoyance, I escaped. I escaped, but it gave me no
pleasure: I decided to kill myself.
There were at that time three women who showed
me special affection. One of them was the landlord's
daughter at my lodging house. When I would come
back to my room so exhausted by my errands for
the movement that I fell into bed without even