No Longer Human pdfdrive com

particle of harm on me, and I offered no explanations. As long as the madam
was so inclined, everything was all right.
At the bar I was treated like a customer, like the owner, like an errand boy,
like a relative of the management; one might have expected that I would be
considered a very dubious character, but "society" was not in the least suspicious
of me, and the regular customers of the bar treated me with almost painful
kindness. They called me by my first name and bought me drinks.
I gradually came to relax my vigilance towards the world. I came to think
that it was not such a dreadful place. My feelings of panic had been molded by
the unholy fear aroused in me by such superstitions of science as the hundreds of
thousands of whooping-cough germs borne by the spring breezes, the hundreds
of thousands of eye-destroying bacteria which infest the public baths, the
hundreds of thousands of microbes in a barber shop which will cause baldness,
the swarms of scabious parasites infecting the leather straps in the subway cars;
or the tapeworm, fluke and heaven knows what eggs that undoubtedly lurk in
raw fish and in undercooked beef and pork; or the fact that if you walk barefoot
a tiny sliver of glass may penetrate the sole of your foot and after circulating
through your body reach the eye and cause blindness. There is no disputing the
accurate, scientific fact that millions of germs are floating, swimming, wriggling
everywhere. At the same time, however, if you ignore them completely they lose
all possible connection with yourself, and at once become nothing more than
vanishing "ghosts of science." This too I came to understand. I had been so
terrorized by scientific statistics (if ten million people each leave over three
grains of rice from their lunch, how many sacks of rice are wasted in one day; if
ten million people each economize one paper handkerchief a day, how much
pulp will be saved?) that whenever I left over a single grain of rice, whenever I
blew my nose, I imagined that I was wasting mountains of rice, tons of paper,
and I fell prey to a mood dark as if I had committed some terrible crime. But
these were the lies of science, the lies of statistics and mathematics: you can't
collect three grains of rice from everybody. Even as an exercise in multiplication
or division, it ranks as one of the most elementary and feeble-minded problems,

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about on a par with the computation of the percentage of times that people slip in
dark, unlighted bathrooms and fall into the toilet, or the percentage of passengers
who get their feet caught in the space between the door of a subway train and the
edge of the platform, or other such footling exercises in probability. These
events seem entirely within the bounds of possibility, but I have never heard a
single instance of anyone hurting himself by falling into the toilet. I felt pity and
contempt for the self which until yesterday had accepted such hypothetical
situations as eminently factual scientific truths and was terrified by them. This
shows the degree to which I had bit by bit arrived at a knowledge of the real
nature of what is called the world.
Having said that, I must now admit that I was still afraid of human beings,
and before I could meet even the customers in the bar I had to fortify myself by
gulping down a glass of liquor. The desire to see frightening things—that was
what drew me every night to the bar where, like the child who squeezes his pet
all the harder when he actually fears it a little, I proclaimed to the customers
standing at the bar my drunken, bungling theories of art.
A comic strip artist, and at that an unknown one, knowing no great joys nor,
for that matter, any great sorrows. I craved desperately some great savage joy, no
matter how immense the suffering that might ensue, but my only actual pleasure
was to engage in meaningless chatter with the customers and to drink their
liquor.
Close to a year had gone by since I took up this debased life in the bar in
Kyobashi. My cartoons were no longer confined to the children's magazines, but
now appeared also in the cheap, pornographic magazines that are sold in railway
stations. Under a silly pseudonym I drew dirty pictures of naked women to
which I usually appended appropriate verses from the Rubaiyat.