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Do it or don’t do it, I don’t care—whatever you like. . . . If I’ve eaten, I’ll eat again when I get home. Look, I’m hanging up. Mr. Kawaji here is getting jealous. . . . Yes, I see. I understand. All right, goodbye.” Dandy that he was, Ryosuke put on an air of bourgeois contentment among his colleagues.
    Etsuko waited. Then she waited some more. He didn’t come home. Was it because on the rare evenings that he did spend at home Etsuko never nagged him or called him to account? All she did was look at her husband with sadness in her eyes. Those bitch’s eyes, those dumb, sad eyes, made Ryosuke angry. It was the something for which the woman waited, her hands held out like a beggar’s. Something for which the woman with eyes more and more like a beggar’s waited. For Ryosuke, it sniffed out all the desolate fears of their ugly skeleton of a marital relationship and flensed it of the detail of life.
    He turned his solid—more precisely his “stolid”—back and feigned sleep. One night in summer he felt his wife’s lips touch his body as he slept, and he slapped her for it. “Don’t you have any shame?” he said in a sleepy voice, slapping her. Without emotion, as if he were striking a mosquito that had landed on him.
    It started that summer. He began to take pleasure in making his wife’s jealousy overflow.
    Etsuko noticed that he was acquiring neckties she had not seen before. One morning he called her to him as he stood in front of the full-length mirror and asked her to tie his necktie. Etsuko’s fingers shook in joy and anxiety; she couldn’t seem to get it tied. Finally it was done. Ryosuke stepped away from her brusquely and asked: “How do you like it? Nice pattern?”
    “Oh? I didn’t notice. It’s new, isn’t it? Did you buy it?”
    “Come on! You noticed; I can tell.”
    “Well, it suits you.”
    “I should say it does.”
    From the drawer of Ryosuke’s desk, a woman’s handkerchief protruded—as if he had placed it there deliberately. It reeked of cheap perfume. After that there were things even worse, things that filled the air of the house with a bitter smell. Etsuko put a match to the pictures of a woman he had arranged on his desk and burned them one by one. Her husband had anticipated as much. “Where are my pictures?” he asked when he came home. Etsuko stood before him with arsenic tablets in one hand and a glass of water in the other. He swept the tablets from her hand, and she fell over a mirror stand and cut her forehead.
    But, oh, the fervor of her husband’s caresses that night! That capricious storm one night long! That ironic caricature of happiness!
    The evening that Etsuko resolved to poison herself again her husband came home. Two days later he took sick. Two weeks later he died.
    “My head! My head! I can’t stand it!” Ryosuke said in the entranceway; he didn’t come in.
    Etsuko had intended to take poison again when he returned. Now that was thwarted. It looked as if her husband had come home to torture her. This evening she did not feel the joy she usually felt at the return of this husband—a joy that exasperated her with herself. She rested her hand coldly on the sliding door, looked down at her husband sitting unmoving on the step, and felt proud. It was a pride in the success of the wager she had not proposed, with death as the stakes. She did not realize that the idea of death had already flown lightly out of her mind.
    “Have you been drinking?” she asked.
    Ryosuke shook his head and glanced up at her. He wasn’t conscious that in his eyes as he looked up was the same dog’s look he loathed, the look his wife always wore. A sluggish, feverish, earnest look—like that of an animal ignorant as to why a disease is developing within itself. It was the earnest, pleading look an animal might turn to its keeper. Perhaps now, for the first time, Ryosuke had an inkling that something inexplicable was happening in his body. He was sick; but