A man loved a woman, but the woman ignored him and married one of his acquaintances, so with a grudge against her he plotted to kill the husband. But not merely kill him. The murderer would gain no real satisfaction unless the crime occurred before the wife's eyes. Furthermore, he would have to kill the man in so complicated a way that the wife, seeing him do it and knowing that he was the murderer, could do nothing but look on as a spectator, unable to take any action against him. To accomplish this he devised a scheme. The opportunity to carry it out occurred at a dinner party, where he began to feign sudden attacks of violent fits. His performance as a madman was so realistic that everyone present believed him quite insane. He secretly congratulated himself on the success of his ruse. After repeating his act a few times in the social arena, where he was easily able to attract attention, he succeeded in gaining the reputation of being a dangerous man susceptible to fits of mental derangement. His intention was to perform through these elaborate preparations an act of homicide that no one would be able to do anything about. As his frequent fits began to darken the lively atmosphere of the parties he attended, many homes which until then had been on familiar terms with him cut him off completely. But that didn't bother him in the least. He still had one house freely available to him, the very home of his friend and the friend's wife, the former of whom he was to kick into the region of death.
One day he casually knocked at his friend's door. There, apparently whiling away the time in idle gossip, he was secretly watching for the chance to pounce upon the man. Picking up a heavy paperweight lying on a desk, he suddenly asked, "Could you kill a man with this?" His friend, of course, didn't take the question seriously. Without waiting for a response, the man put all his strength behind the paperweight and struck dead the beloved husband before the very eyes of his wife. The murderer, on a charge of insanity, was sent to a madhouse. With remarkable powers of thought, discretion, and reason, he vigorously pleaded his sanity, basing his arguments on the circumstances I've just told you about. But then he began to doubt his own self-vindication. Moreover, he tried to vindicate his own doubts. Was he, after all, sane or insane?
With that book in my hand I trembled in fear.
My head seems to have been created to restrain my heart, which seems the normal way of man. Judging from the results of my conduct, I haven't had much to regret in my past. It is, however, enormously painful, as everyone knows, to have your heart, whenever it gets stirred up, kept under the pressure of your solemn head. Obstinate as I am, I'm rather short-tempered in a negative way, so I've seldom suffered the pain you feel when your heart gets worked up and is suddenly restrained by reason, like a wildly careening automobile that's suddenly checked. Even so, I have on occasion felt within me a combustion of vital energy that could only be described as a powerful twist given to the axis of life. Whenever a struggle occurred between these two forces, I used to obey the orders of my head, thinking at times my head could rule because it was strong, thinking at other times that my heart obeyed because it was weak. And knowing somehow that the struggle was an inevitable one for my life, I could not free myself from the secret awe of its being a struggle that would consume my life.
Therefore, the hero of Gedanke overwhelmed me. He had thought no more of his friend's life than he did an insect's, and he refused to admit any contradiction or antipathy between reason and feeling. He felt no repentance whatever in using his entire intellect as fuel for revenge and letting it serve as the means for the dextrous accomplishment of a brutal murder. He was a superb actor who with careful control of his thoughts could pour over the head of his antagonist the venomous blood of vengeance. Either that, or he was a madman possessed of a combination of brain power and passion beyond those of ordinary mortals. When I compared myself with him, I envied his ability to act so intently without reflection. At the same time I was so terrified by all of this that I had broken out into a sweat. How thoroughly satisfying it must be to act that way, I thought. But I also thought that after such a deed one's conscience must be put through unbearable tortures.
Nevertheless, I wondered what would happen if the jealousy I had of Takagi took some strange course and grew a hundred times more powerful in consuming me. But I could not imagine how I would feel at that moment. At first I was about to abandon my thoughts simply from the standpoint that I would never be able to follow the novel's hero, since I had not been made that way. But then it occurred to me that I myself might, in fact, be capable of attaining the same degree of revenge. I finally began to believe that only a person like myself who was usually undecided while suffering from the conflict between head and heart would be bold enough to commit such an atrocity coolly, methodically, calculatedly. I myself don't know why I ultimately came to entertain such an idea. But when I hit on that thought, an unusual mood unexpectedly came over me. It was not simply one of terror or misgiving or unpleasantness— it seemed far more complex than these. From the way in which it revealed itself on the whole to my heart, it was similar to the mood of a man who, while otherwise gentle in nature, has become emboldened by alcohol and feels satisfied in being capable of doing anything because of the state he is in, yet at the same time is made aware that he has degraded himself into a being far more inferior than he usually is, but that since the degradation has been brought about by liquor, there is no way of escaping no matter how much he tries to ward it off, so he abandons himself to despair. In this strange mood, I was lost in the wide-eyed daydream of taking a heavy paperweight and striking Takagi from the top of his skull to the bottom, all before Chiyoko's eyes. Suddenly amazed, I stood up.
I went directly into the bath downstairs and poured water over my skull again and again. I saw by the clock in the sitting room that it was past noon, just the time to have lunch. As usual, Saku waited on me. After eating a few mouthfuls of rice, I asked her all at once if there was anything unusual about my complexion.
Saku's eyes opened wide in surprise, and she replied that there wasn't. A pause followed, and then she asked if anything was the matter.
"No, nothing much," I replied.
"I guess since it's become so hot out. . "
In silence I finished two bowls of rice. Drinking the tea she poured me, I again said to her suddenly, "It's better to be quiet at home than to be in that muddle at Kamakura."
"But I suppose it's cooler there than in Tokyo," she said.
"No, it's even hotter than in Tokyo," I explained. "It's no good living in such a place. You only get into a fret there."
"Will Madam be staying for some days more?" she asked.
"She'll be back soon," I replied.
Saku's figure before me looked like a morning glory drawn with one stroke of the brush. My only regret was that the drawing was not by the hand of a master. And yet to me her mind could only have been composed as simply as that kind of drawing. You may ask what possible use it is to compare her character to a drawing. Probably not much, but the truth was that while she waited on me, I was comparing myself, who had just read through Gedanke, with Saku, who was now sitting quietly, a black-lacquer tray on her knees, and I was jolted by the thought of why my own mind was as complicated as a painting done in thick oils. I had to confess that until then I had been proud of my mind working in a way more complicated than that of others, evidence of the high education it had received. But somehow the functioning of that mind was exhausting me without my having been aware that it was. As ill luck would have it, I found it sad to realize I could not live without analyzing everything minutely. As I put down my ricebowl on the table, I saw in Saku's face something sacred.