Confessions of a Mask (13 page)

At that time I had a friend with whom I was on intimate terms even though we were not in the least compatible, not even in our conversation. This was a frivolous classmate named Nukada. He seemed to have chosen me as a readily agreeable partner with whom he could be at ease while asking various questions about first-year German lessons, with which he was having great difficulty. As I am always enthusiastic about a new thing until its newness is gone, I gave the appearance of being an excellent German student, though only during that first year. Nukada must have realized intuitively how much I secretly detested the label of honor student that I had been given and how I longed for a "bad reputation." Honor student—I told myself it was a label that would better become a theology major, and yet I could find no other that would provide me with better camouflage. Nukada's friendship contained something that appealed to this weak point of mine—because he was the object of much jealousy on the part of the "tough boys" in our school; because through him I caught faint echoes of communications from the world of women, in exactly the same way that one communicates with the spirit world through a medium.

Omi had been the first medium between me and the world of women. But at that time I had been more my natural self, and so had been content to count his special qualifications as a medium as but a part of his beauty. Nukada's role as a medium, however, became the supernatural framework for my curiosity. This was probably due, at least in part, to the fact that Nukada was not at all beautiful.

The lips that had become my obsession were those of Nukada's elder sister, whom I saw when I went to visit at his house. It was easy for this beautiful girl of twenty-three to treat me as a child. By watching the men who surrounded her, I came to realize that I possessed not a single trait that could attract a woman. Thus, at long last, I admitted to myself that I could never become an Omi and, upon further consideration, that my desire to become like Omi had in fact been love for Omi.

And yet I was still convinced that I was in love with Nukada's sister. Acting exactly like any other inexperienced higher-school student of my age, I hung about the neighborhood of her house, patiently passing long hours at a nearby bookshop, hoping for a chance of stopping her if she should pass; I hugged a cushion and imagined the feeling of embracing her, drew countless pictures of her lips, and talked to myself as though out of my mind. And what was the good of it all? Those artificial efforts only inflicted some strange, numbed tiredness upon my mind. The realistic portion of my mind sensed the artificiality in the eternal protestations with which I persuaded myself that I was in love with her, and it fought back with this spiteful fatigue. There seemed to be some terrible poison in this mental exhaustion.

Between the intervals of these mental efforts I was making toward artificiality I would sometimes be overwhelmed with a paralyzing emptiness and, in order to escape, would turn shamelessly to a different sort of daydream. Then immediately I would become quick with life, would become myself, and would blaze toward strange images. Moreover, the flame thus created would remain in my mind as an abstract feeling, divorced from the reality of the image that had caused it, and I would distort my interpretation of the feeling until I believed it to be evidence of passion inspired by the girl herself.

. Thus once again I deceived myself.

If there are those who would reproach me, saying that what I have been describing is too much of a generalization, too abstract, I can only reply that I have had no intention of giving a tedious description of a period of my life whose outward aspects differed in no way from those of normal adolescence. Excepting the shameful portion of my mind, my adolescence was, even in its inner aspects, altogether ordinary, and during that period I was exactly like any other boy. The reader need only picture to himself a fairly good student, not yet twenty; with average curiosity and average appetite for life; of a retiring disposition probably for no other reason than that he is too much given to introspection; quick to blush at the slightest word; and, lacking the confidence that comes from being handsome enough to appeal to girls, clinging perforce only to his books. It will be quite enough to picture to oneself how that student yearns for women, how his breast is afire, and how he is in useless agony.

Can there be anything more prosaic or easy to imagine? It is right that I should omit these tedious details, which would only repeat what everyone already knows. Suffice it to say, then, that—always excepting the one shameful difference I am describing—in that most colorless phase of the bashful student I was exactly like the other boys, that I had sworn unconditional loyalty to the stage manager of the play called adolescence.

During this time the attraction I had formerly felt only toward older youths had little by little been extended to include younger boys as well. This was only natural as by this time even these younger boys were the same age Omi had been when I was in love with him.

But this transference of my love to persons in a different
_a
ge group was also related to a more fundamental change in the nature of my love. Just as before, I kept this new feeling hidden in my heart, but to my love for the savage there had now been added a love for the graceful and gentle. Along with my natural growth there was developing in me something like a guardian's love, something akin to boy-love.

Hirschfeld divides inverts into two categories : androphils, who are attracted only by adults; and ephebophils, who are fond of youths between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. I was coming to understand the feelings of the ephebophils. In ancient Greece a young man was called an ephebe from the age of eighteen to twenty, while receiving military training; the term is derived from the same Greek word appearing in the name of Hebe, daughter of Zeus and Hera, cupbearer to the gods on Olympus, wife of the immortal Hercules, and symbol of the springtime of life.

There was a beautiful boy, not yet seventeen, who had just entered higher school. He had a light complexion, gentle lips, and perfectly curved eyebrows. I had learned that his name was Yakumo. His features appealed to me greatly.

Without his being aware of it, he began presenting me with a series of gifts, each consisting of a full week of pleasure. The section monitors of the senior class, of whom I was one, gave commands by weekly turns at morning assembly, morning calisthenics, and afternoon drill. (This latter, as required in higher school in those days, consisted of about thirty minutes of naval gymnastics, after which we would shoulder tools and go to dig air-raid trenches or to mow grass.) My turn for giving commands came around every fourth week. Even our school, for all its fastidious ways, appeared to be succumbing to the rude fashions of the times, and with the arrival of summer we were ordered to strip to the waist both for morning exercises and for naval gymnastics in the afternoon.

The order of events was for the monitor first to give the commands for morning assembly from the platform. Then when assembly was over he would give the command "Jackets off!" After everyone had started stripping, he would come down and stand at one side of the formation. Then he would give the order for the students to bow to the gymnastics instructor, who had taken his place on the platform. At this point the monitor's job was finished, as the instructor directed the exercises, so he would run back to the last row of his section, where he too would strip to the waist and join in the exercises.

I dreaded having to give commands so much that the mere thought made me feel chill, and yet the stiff military formality of the ceremony provided me with such a rare opportunity that I somehow looked forward to the week when my turn would come: thanks to it, Yakumo's body, Yakumo's half-naked body, was placed directly before my eyes, and without the danger of his seeing my unlovely nakedness.

As a rule Yakumo stood immediately in front of the platform, in the first or second row. His hyacinthine cheeks flushed readily, and I delighted in seeing them, puffing slightly, when he would come running to assembly and take his place in line. Gasping for breath, he would always unfasten the hooks on his blouse with rough movements. Then he would jerk his shirttail violently from his trousers as though to rip it to shreds.

Even when I was determined not to look at him, from my place on the platform I found it impossible to keep my gaze off his smooth, white body when it was thus exposed to public view with such indifference. (Once my blood was frozen by a friend's innocent remark: "You always keep your eyes lowered when you're giving commands from the platform—are you really that chickenhearted?") But on these occasions I had no chance to get closer to his rosy half-nakedness.

Then in the summer all the upper classes went for a week of study and observation at a naval engineering school at M. One day while there, we were all taken to swim in the pool. Rather than admit that I could not swim, I begged off on the pretext of having an upset stomach. I had expected to remain a mere spectator. But then some captain said sunbathing was medicine for any illness, and even those of us who had claimed to be too sick to swim were made to strip to our shorts.

Suddenly I noticed Yakumo was one of our group. He was lying with his white, muscular arms folded, exposing his lightly tanned chest to the breeze, and steadily chewing his lower lip as though teasing it with his white teeth. The self-styled invalids had begun to gather in the shade of a tree beside the pool, and I had no difficulty in drawing near him. Sitting beside him, I measured his slim waist with my eye and gazed at his gently breathing abdomen. As I did so I recalled a line from Whitman :

The young men float on their backs—their
white bellies bulge to the sun . . .

But now again I said not a word. I was ashamed of my own thin chest, of my bony, pallid arms. . . .

In September, 1944, the year before the end of the war, I graduated from the school I had attended ever since childhood and entered a certain university. Given no other choice by my father, I entered the Law Department. But I was not greatly annoyed by this as I was convinced that I would soon be called into the army and would die in battle, and that my family also would mercifully be killed in the air raids, leaving not a single survivor.As was the common practice in those days, I borrowed a university uniform from an upperclassman who was going to war just when I was matriculating, promising to return it to his family when I myself should be called up. I put on the uniform and began going to classes. The air raids were becoming more frequent. I was uncommonly afraid of them, and yet at the same time I somehow looked forward to death impatiently, with a sweet expectation. As I have remarked several times, the future was a heavy burden for me. From the very beginning, life had oppressed me with a heavy sense of duty. Even though I was clearly incapable of performing this duty, life still nagged at me for my dereliction. Thus I longed for the great sense of relief that death would surely bring if only, like a wrestler, I could wrench the heavy weight of life from my shoulders. I sensuously accepted the creed of death that was popular during the war. I thought that if by any chance I should attain "glorious death in battle" (how ill it would have become me!), this would be a truly ironical end for my life, and I could laugh sarcastically at it forever from the grave. . . . And when the sirens sounded, that same me would dash for the air-raid shelters faster than anyone. . . .

I heard the sound of a piano, clumsily played.

It was at the home of a friend who had decided to volunteer shortly as a special cadet. His name was Kusano, and I thought highly of him, regarding him as the only friend I had had in higher school with whom I could talk even slightly of serious matters. Indeed I still value his friendship today. I am a person who has no particular desire to have friends, but I am made miserable by something inside me that forces me to tell what follows, even though it is quite likely to destroy the sole friendship I have.

"Does whoever's playing that piano show promise? Sometimes the playing sounds a little uneven, doesn't it?"

"That's my sister. Her teacher's just gone and she's reviewing the lesson."

We ceased talking and listened intently. As Kusano's enlistment was close at hand, it was probably not just the sound of the piano in the next room that rang in his ears but rather a familiar, everyday thing, a kind of clumsy, irritating beauty, that he would soon have to leave behind. In the tonal color of those piano sounds there was a feeling of intimacy, like amateurish candy made while looking at the recipe book, and I could not resist asking:

"How old is she?"

"Seventeen," Kusano answered. "She's the sister just younger than I."

The more I listened the more I could hear that It was indeed the sound of a piano played by a seventeen- year-old girl, full of dreams and still unaware of her own beauty, whose fingertips still retained traces a childhood. I prayed that her practice would continue forever.

My prayer was answered. In my heart the sound of that piano still continues today, five years later. How many times have I tried to convince myself it is only a hallucination! How many times has my reason ridiculed this delusion! How many times has my weak will laughed at my capacity for self-deception? And for all that the fact remains that the sound of that piano took possession of me, and that for me it was—if the dark connotations can be omitted from the word—veritably a thing of "destiny."