No Longer Human ( PDFDrive )

88
The incident was treated rather prominently in
the press, no doubt because I was a college student.
My father's name also had some news value.
I was confined in a hospital on the coast. A
relative came from home to see me and take care of
necessary arrangements. Before he left he informed
me that my father and all the rest of my family were
so enraged that I might easily be disowned once and
for all. Such matters did not concern me; I thought
instead of the dead Tsuneko, and, longing for her, I
wept. Of all the people I had ever known, that
miserable Tsuneko really was the only one I loved.
A long letter which consisted of a string of fifty
stanzas came from the girl at my lodging house. Fifty
stanzas, each one beginning with the incredible words,
"Please live on for me." The nurses used to visit my
sickroom, laughing gaily all the time, and some would
squeeze my hand when they left.
They discovered at the hospital that my left lung
was affected. This was most fortunate for me: when,
not long afterwards, I was taken from the hospital to
the police station, charged with having been the
accomplice to a suicide, I was treated as a sick man
by the police, and quartered not with the criminals
but in a special custody room.
Late that night the old policeman standing night
duty in the room next to mine softly opened the door.