The sea at Kamakura – Extract from No Longer Human

The two of us spent that morning wandering around Asakusa. We went into a lunch stand and drank a glass of milk.

She said, “You pay this time.”

I stood up, took out my wallet and opened it. Three copper coins. It was less shame than horror that assaulted me at that moment. I suddenly saw before my eyes my room in the lodging house absolutely empty save for a school uniform and the bedding – a bleak cell devoid of any object which might be pawned. My only other possessions were the kimono and coat I was wearing. These were the hard facts. I perceived with clarity that I could not go on living.

As I stood there hesitating, she got up and looked inside my wallet. “Is that all you have?”

Her voice was innocent, but it cut me to the quick. It was painful as only the voice of the first woman I had ever loved could be painful. “Is that all?” No, even that suggested more money than I had – three copper coins don’t count as money at all. This was a humiliation more strange than any I had ever tasted before, a humiliation I could not live with. I suppose I had still not managed to extricate myself from the part of the rich man’s son. It was then I myself determined, this time as a reality, to kill myself.

We threw ourselves into the sea at Kamakura that night. She untied her sash, saying she had borrowed it from a friend at the cafe, and left it folded neatly on a rock. I removed my coat and put it in the same spot. We entered the water together.

She died. I was saved.

From No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene

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