The Box Man Read Online Free PDF

and the girl the girl. It was all right to assume that her hurrying on ahead was an expression of her delicacy, that she was simply ashamed of her charitable act.
    But no matter how much I chain smoke, the executioner will not wait. Indeed the time for execution is drawing closer. By dawn the wound in my shoulder had begun to fester and the pain had constricted me like an overly narrow rubber tunnel. When I slipped out of the box, I found myself at the hospital at the top of the slope. The bicycle girl holding a hypodermic needle and the air rifle man grasping a scalpel were waiting for me. Rather than being surprised by this turn of events, it seemed that I had been expecting it from the very beginning.
    After a while I awoke in a bed; the bicycle girl was peering at me and there was a heavy smell of disinfectant and vitamins. Apparently the white nurse’s uniform had the function of stopping time. When time stopped, the causal relationship among things was naturally interrupted; and no matter what indecent act I might commit, I had absolutely no fear of being blamed. Unfortunately, as a matter of fact, I was not relaxed enough to try anything indecent, but with the box off, I experienced such a sense of release that it made me forget that I was showing my naked face. With each random detail I told her about myself she smiled encouragingly, a smile hewn of solidified air, so transitory and yet so defenseless, as if colored with a brush of light, that I had the illusion of having been made a confession of love to. Her face was so wreathed in smiles that it even made me forget the fact that her legs were quite hidden by the overly low hemline of her uniform. I beat my wings like a little bird starting to fly for the first time (clumsily, incompetently, yet in a daze). Then my wings took the air-now I’m going to fly!-and intoxicated with her airy smile, I felt that I no longer need return to the box. Before I realized it I was making a promise I myself did not understand, a promise to buy the box for her for fifty thousand yen directly from the box man. I had had an acquaintance with box men (quite naturally); I even stressed that I would sell it to her for nothing. I thought I had best inquire on the spot just what she planned to do with it. But I was powerless before her smile. It seemed foolish even to discuss the uses of a box.
    As soon as I had left the hospital, her smile vanished. When I returned to the place where I had concealed my box under the bridge, I began to have stomach spasms and vomited for some time. It seemed that I had been drugged without knowing it. Though at last I realized that I had apparently been taken in, I could not hate her.
    (Here a score or more lines of marginal addenda. The writing and, of course, the color of the ink are all but indistinguishable from those of the main text.)
    -I’m talking about the beggar who wore a box over his head, she said.
    -I know, because I’m a photographer. A photographer’s a Peeping Tom. His specialty is boring holes . . anywhere. By nature a churl…
    -A wornout cardboard box…
    -I thought perhaps it was a friend of mine. I guess I was wrong. But I can’t claim to be completely mistaken. A fellow photographer happened to take a picture of the box man without realizing it himself. Then he got interested and ran around chasing him all over, but he didn’t run into him again. Instead, he got interested in photographing the town. The seamy side of town that has an aversion to being seen … and since he took pictures of what had an aversion to being seen, he was obliged to do it on the sly so that he wouldn’t be noticed. It suddenly occurred to him to put on a box and go around taking pictures in the guise of a box man. Since he himself had not seen the box man when he had been looking straight at him, nobody would take any notice of him with a box on his head. In effect no one did seem to notice him, and he was able to take as many pictures as he wanted.