There was a time when, unable to bury myself alive in books, I soaked my soul in liquor and tried to forget myself. I do not say I liked wine. But since I was of a constitution that could drink if I drank, I merely relied on quantity and strove to crush my heart with it. This shallow expedient, after a while, only made me the more pessimistic. In the very midst of drunken stupor I would suddenly become aware of my own position. I would realize that I was a fool deliberately playing such tricks to deceive myself. Then, with a shudder, both eyes and mind would snap awake. Sometimes, no matter how much I drank, I could not even enter into this masquerade, and would simply sink down without remedy. Moreover, after buying merriment with artifice, there was always a gloomy reaction. I had to show this side of myself at all times to my most beloved wife and her mother. And yet they, from their own natural standpoint, would set about interpreting me.
The wife’s mother seemed at times to say awkward things to her. The wife hid these from me. But apparently she herself could not be at ease without singly blaming me. Though she blamed, it was never in harsh words. Hardly once did I fly into a passion because of something my wife said. My wife often begged me to tell her frankly what it was that displeased me. Then she advised me, for my future’s sake, to give up drink. Once she wept and said, “You have become a different man of late.” That alone would have been bearable, but she added, “If Mr. K were alive, you would not have come to this either.” I once answered that perhaps that was so, but since the meaning of my answer and the meaning she understood were utterly different, I was sad at heart. Still, I could not bring myself to explain anything to my wife.
I sometimes apologized to my wife. It was mostly the morning after returning late drunk. My wife smiled. Or she was silent. Occasionally she would let tears fall drop by drop. Either way, I was unbearably wretched with myself. So my apologizing to my wife amounted, in the end, to the same thing as apologizing to myself. At last I quit drinking. It would be more fitting to say I quit because I grew sick of it myself, rather than that I quit at my wife’s advice.
Though I quit drink, I had no mind to do anything. Having no choice, I read books. But having read, I simply left them be. I was often asked by my wife what I was studying for. I only smiled bitterly. Yet deep down, it grieved me to think that even the one person in the world I most trusted and loved did not understand me. It grieved me the more to think that though I had the means to make her understand, I could not summon the courage to do so. I was desolate. Often I felt as if, severed from everywhere, I alone lived in the world.
At the same time, I turned over and over in my mind the cause of K’s death. Perhaps because at the time my head was ruled by nothing but the word love, my observation was rather simple and linear. I at once concluded that K had died precisely of a broken heart. But as I came to face the same phenomenon with a gradually calmer mind, it no longer seemed so easily resolved. The clash of reality and ideal—even that was still insufficient. At last I began to suspect that K, like me, having become utterly lonely and unable to bear it alone, had abruptly made his decision. And I shuddered. For now and then, like wind, there began to cross my breast a presentiment that I too was treading the path K had walked, even as K had.
