Currency
Dazai Osamu
In some foreign languages, nouns have genders, male and female.
And in those languages, ‘currency’ is female.
I am one-hundred yen bill No. 77851. Check your wallet; I might be among the bills inside. Or I might be in the purse of some stranger, crumpled with exhaustion. Or even in a wastepaper basket; I’ve heard rumors that sometime soon there’ll be modern currency that’ll make us obsolete, and we’ll all be incinerated. At this stage I am no longer concerned with thoughts of if I will die; now I think that when I am all burned up I desire to be taken into the hands of the Creator. Where I will go after I die is in His hands, but I must confess that I fear there is some chance I may be destined for hell.
I was not born in the wretched state you see today. These days there are more sought after bills than me: two-hundred yen bills, and even one-thousand yen bills! But when I was born, I was the queen of the land of money. Why, the first time a teller at the largest bank in Tōkyō gave me to a customer, it was enough to make his hands tremble! It’s true! He was a young carpenter. He deposited me gently into the pocket of his apron, without folding me, and as he walked and sat on the train, he kept his left hand clutched against his belly, as though he had a stomachache. When he got home from the bank, he immediately placed me atop the family shrine. It was a fortuitous beginning to my new life. I wanted to stay in the carpenter’s home forever. But I was only allowed a single night. That evening the carpenter was in very good spirits, and he indulged in his spirits freely. “Who’s laughing now?” he slurred to his little thing of a wife. “This is a man’s wages!” he bragged, taking me from the shrine, parading me around, and laughing at his wife. A fight ensued, and I ended up being folded into quarters and slipped into the woman’s handbag. And the next morning I was taken to a pawn-shop, where the young wife exchanged me for several items of clothing.
Just when I thought I would perish in the depths of the pawn-shop’s cold, dank strongbox, I caught a glimpse of the light. This time I was in the hands of a medical student who had pawned his microscope. He took me far, far away, to a small island in the middle of the inland sea. He threw me down on the counter of a small inn and I spent most of the next month in the receptionist’s cash register. One day I overheard from one of the maids that the medical student, shortly after paying for his room, had thrown himself into the sea. “What a fool, to die alone!” said the stout, forty-something maid, her face festooned with pimples. “Handsome fellow like that, I’d die with him any time.” Her co-workers all laughed.
I bounced around the lower islands—Kyūshu and Shikoku—for the next five years. I looked much older. I looked upon myself with scorn, and when I finally returned to Tōkyō after six years I had nothing but loathing for unrecognizable appearance. The only work I could find was in the hands of a runner for a black-market dealer. This was my first time in Tōkyō in five or six years, and I thought I had changed! At around eight in the evening, I took up with a slightly tipsy broker, who took me from Tōkyō Station to Nihonbashi, then to Kyōbashi where he got off and walked through Ginza to Shinbashi. By then it was pitch-black. It was as though we were walking through a desolate forest, with not even a stray cat crossing the road. It was the part of town where you could meet an ugly end. And then, even when the air-raid sirens started up, I was passed from hand to hand, all day, every night. A bewildering journey like some mad relay race. I was crumpled again and again, but beyond that, I started to take on the stink of the places I was. I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to do with myself. Much like Japan at the time, I suppose.
You, dear reader, already know enough about from whose hands to whose hands I was traded, for what purpose, accompanied by what vile conversation, so I will not go into much detail. However, it was apparent to me that those soldier boys were not the only ones who acted like rabid beasts. Neither was it just the Japanese; all peoples were guilty of it. It has been thought that if a man thinks that this may be the night that he will die, he would leave behind his carnal and materialistic desires, but I have seen that this is not the case. Men cornered in an alley will tear each other apart with expressionless faces. As long as there is a single unhappy person in this world, someone who thinks that he cannot be happy—and that is a very human thought—he will do anything for a single moment of happiness for himself or his family. He will curse his neighbor, abuse him, push him down. (Yes, even you! Perhaps without realizing it, which is all the more terrifying. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. If you are human, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Because shame is an emotion only man can feel.) A tragic farce: the dead grappling with each other in hell.
And yet, I cannot say that even in the vulgar employ of my runner there were not one or two moments which made me glad to be alive. Even in my wrinkled state, so far gone into senility that I would not hazard a guess as to where I am, I still have faint, unforgettable joyous memories of this time. Let me tell you about the time an old woman who worked for the black-market took me on a train to a small city several hours outside of Tōkyō. Until then I had been passed back and forth between the black-market dealers, but this woman treated me with twice the value that the men did. A woman’s greed is so much more abject and terrible than a man’s. Take the old lady who had brought me here. She was no ordinary woman. I had ended up in her employ in Tōkyō when she sold a man a beer. She had come here to buy wine wholesale. Now a bottle of wine back then would cost you about fifty or sixty yen on the black-market, but the old woman simply would not budge. She persisted. She whispered to the dealer, occasional letting out a rotten chuckle. And in the end she left me with the seller and walked away with four bottles of wine. She didn’t even grunt as she hefted the heavy bottles. Just to put things in perspective, she had got me for a bottle of beer and traded me away for four bottles of wine. And after she’d watered it down properly and rebottled it in empty beer bottles she’d have probably twenty bottles of wine. This transcendental greed is what I’m talking about when I talk about a woman’s greed. And even after all that, she didn’t so much as smile. “What is this world coming to?” was all she muttered before she left.
I was put into the black-market dealer’s sizable wallet, and just as I was starting to drift off, I was tugged out and handed over to a middle-aged army captain. He seemed to be an acquaintance of the dealer. I was traded for a carton of a hundred (though from what the captain said later, when the dealer checked he would only find eighty, and he would probably call him a cheap bastard, but at any rate a carton that said it contained a hundred) Honor cigarettes, a brand only available to soldiers. He thrust me unceremoniously into his pocket and that night we went out to dinner at a shady establishment. The captain liked his drink. As he sipped away at his grappa, his behavior became more and more loutish, and he started to verbally abuse the serving girl.
“I look at your face, and all I can see is a fex. (I don’t know where he was from, but he pronounced ‘fox’ like fex.) Lemme tell you how. A fex, its face comes to a point an’ there’s whiskers all around it. Four on the left, three on the right. And when it farts, it’s the worst thing you’ve ever smelled. You can practically see the gas comin’ off of it. A hound gets a good whiff of that, he just turn around and fall over. You think I’m kiddin’ you? You got a really yellow face. And I mean really yellow. Kinda like someone let one rip. Man, it stinks! And I’m pretty sure you’re the one settin’ off stink bombs here! Don’t you got no self-respect? How fuckin’ dumb do you gotta be to pass gas in the presence of a military officer?! I’m a sensitive guy! How do you expect me sit here in peace with a fex’s fart hangin’ in the air?”
The captain’s tirade was interrupted by the cry of a baby coming from the first floor.
“Shut that brat up! I can’t concentrate! Like I said, I’m a sensitive guy. Seriously? The kid’s yours? Strange, I can’t tell if that’s a baby or a fex kit. What are you thinkin’, you selfish bitch, bringin’ a kid with you to a fine establishment like this? It’s cause of selfish bitches like you don’t know their place that we’re losin’ this war! Right, you’re so fuckin’ dumb you probably still think we’re winnin’ this thing. So fuckin’ dumb. Lemme put it in terms you’ll understand. The fex and the dog. We’re the dog who got a good whiff of that fart, spun around, and fell over dead. What are we supposed to do? So every night I come here, have a drink, and get a happy ending with one of you ladies. Tell me, is that so bad?”
“Yes!” said the serving girl, her face gone pale. “So I’m a fox! If you don’t like it why don’t you go someplace else? Oh, that’s right, you can’t. Nowadays this is the only place where you can get drunk and abuse some poor woman. Who do you think pays your salary, huh? Half of what I earn goes straight to the imperial crown, and then His Majesty sprinkles some down back to you so you can afford to have a drink here. And don’t you dare make fun of me. A woman’s got to have a baby. And you couldn’t even imagine what it’s like to have a young baby right now! There’s not a drop of milk left in my breasts; there’s nothing there for my baby—that is, when she even has the strength to suckle. Yes, that’s right. The fox kit. Pointy chin, wrinkled head. She cries all day long. Would you like to hold her? No, I didn’t think so. And despite everything, I have endured. We have endured. What have you done?!”
As if to punctuate her words, air-raid sirens filled the air, followed immediately by the sound of explosions. The paper screens glowed red.
“This is it. This is the end!” slurred the captain. He leapt to his feet, but, full of liquor, he swayed unsteadily.
With the agility of a cat, the serving girl dashed downstairs and reappeared moments later with a baby on her back. “We’ve got to go!” she shouted to the captain. “Quick! It’s not safe here! Move!” She grabbed the captain, limp as a rag-doll, from behind and walked him down the stairs, where they put on their shoes. She led the captain to a nearby shrine, where he promptly laid down spread-eagled, cursing the aerial detonations.
Flames rained down on them. The shrine was starting to catch fire.
“I’m begging you, sir! We need to run a little farther! Do you want to die here like a dog in the street? Run, if you can!”
This pallid slip of a woman, working what is oft considered the lowest of the trades, looked to me more radiant than anything else in my dim life. There were no thoughts of greed, or of glory, the twin causes of Japan’s downfall. This serving girl, without greed, without glory, was just trying to save some old drunkard. She got him under her shoulder and walked him further away towards a farm. Just after they evacuated the grounds of the shrine it turned into a sea of fire.
The serving girl dragged the captain across the field, its barley recently harvested, and laid him down behind a small embankment. She half-sat, half-fell down and heaved a ragged sigh of exhaustion. The captain started snoring.
That night, the whole city burned. The captain awoke with the break of dawn. He gave a bleary look at the city, still on fire, and then suddenly became aware of the serving girl nodding off next to him. In a terrible confusion, he stood and started to run, but after several steps, he turned back towards the girl. From his jacket pocket he took five of my fellow one-hundred yen bills, and then he took me out of his pocket. He folded us six bills neatly and tucked us into the back of the baby’s clothes, then took off running in a frenzy. This was the happiest moment of my life. How happy would I have been if money was always used for things like this? The baby’s back was dry and bony, but I still said to my fellow currency:
“Never has there been anything better than this! We are happy! Oh, to lie against the baby’s back forever, feeling her grow big and strong!”
All the other bills nodded in silent agreement.