Confessions of a Mask (18 page)

Suddenly Sonoko stopped to retie a shoelace. She seemed to be taking a curiously long time about it, so I walked on to the gate and waited, looking out at the street. I did not yet realize that she had wanted me to walk on a little ahead of her and had employed this charming technique of an eighteen-year-old girl for just that purpose.

Suddenly, from behind me, her hand plucked at the sleeve of my uniform. The shock I felt was like being hit by an automobile while walking along absentmindedly.

".. . Please . . . this . ."

The corner of a stiff foreign-style envelope touched my palm. I closed my hand upon it so quickly that I all but crushed it, just as one might strangle a baby bird. Somehow I could not believe my senses as I felt the weight of the envelope in my hand. But there it was, an envelope of the kind favored by schoolgirls, held tightly in my own hand; I blinked at it as though it were something a person ought not to look at.

"Not now—read it after you're home," she whispered in a voice that was small and choking, as though she had been tickled.

"Where shall I send a reply?" I asked.

"I wrote it—it's inside—the address in N Village. Write me there?'It is an amusing thing, but suddenly, parting became a delight for me. It was like the pleasure of that moment in a game of hide-and-seek when the person who is "it" counts and everyone runs to hide, each in the direction that pleases him. I had an odd ability to enjoy everything in this way. Because of this perverse talent my cowardice was often mistaken, even in my own eyes, for courage.

We parted at the ticket gate of the station, not even shaking hands.

I was in ecstasy over having received the first love letter of my life. I could not wait until I was home to read it, and I opened the envelope there in the elevated car, heedless of all eyes. As I did so the contents all but spilled out. There were several silhouette-cards and a sheaf of those imported colored postcards that seem to be the delight of mission-school students. Among them was a doublefold of blue notepaper, decorated with a Disney cartoon of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Under the cartoon her note was written in neat characters that smacked of painstaking penmanship:

"I was truly overwhelmed with gratitude for your kindness in lending me the books. Thanks to you, I have been able to read them with very profound interest. I pray with all my heart that you will be well even during the air raids. When I have reached my destination and settled down I shall write you again. My address there is given below. The enclosures are trifling things, but please accept them as tokens of my gratitude." . .

What a magnificent love letter! It pierced the bubble of my ecstasy. I became deathly pale and burst out laughing. Who would answer such a letter as this, I asked myself. It would be as stupid as acknowledging a printed letter of thanks.

However, from the beginning I had felt a desire to send a reply, and now, during the thirty or forty minutes that yet remained before arriving home, this desire gradually arose to the defense of the first "state of ecstasy" I had ever had. The training she receives at home, I immediately told myself, is scarcely the kind to make her proficient in the writing of love letters. Because it's only natural that her hand should be cramped by all sorts of doubts and hesitations and shyness when writing her first letter to a boy. Because every movement she made this afternoon revealed a truer story than any word in this empty letter.

Arriving home, I was suddenly seized with anger from a different quarter. Again I snarled at the Compendium of Laws and hurled it against the wall of my room. What a sluggard you are, I reproached myself. When you're face to face with a girl of eighteen you wait covetously for her to fall in love with you. Why wasn't it you who took the offensive? I know you hesitate because of that queer uneasiness of yours, which comes from you don't know where. But if that's the case, why did you ever visit her again? Think back! —when you were about fourteen you were a boy like other boys. And even at sixteen you were keeping up with them on the whole. But how about now, when you're twenty? That friend of yours said you'd die when you were nineteen, but his prediction didn't come true, and then you even lost your desire to die on a battlefield. Now that you're twenty you're at your wit's end with calf love for an eighteen-year-old girl who knows absolutely nothing. Phew! what splendid progress! At the age of twenty you're planning to exchange love letters for the first time—haven't you maybe made a mistake in counting your age? And isn't it also true that you've never even yet kissed a girl? What a sad specimen you are!

Then again a different voice mocked me, secret and persistent. This voice was filled with an almost feverish honesty, a human feeling I had never experienced before. It bombarded me with questions in quick succession: Is it love you feel? If so, all right. But do you have a desire for women? Aren't you deceiving yourself when you say that it's toward her alone that you have never had a "lustful desire"? Aren't you trying to hide from yourself the fact that actually you've never had a "lustful desire" for any woman? What right on earth do you have to use the word "lustful"? Have you ever had the slightest desire to see a woman naked? Have you ever once imagined Sonoko naked? You, with your special knack at drawing analogies—surely you must have guessed a thing as obvious as the fact that a boy your age is never able to look at a young girl without imagining how she'd look naked. Ask yourself honestly why I tell you this. Go ahead, use your analogies—you'll have to change only one small detail to understand how other boys feel. Just last night didn't you indulge in your little habit before you went to sleep? Call it something like praying if you want. Say it's just a tiny pagan ceremony that everybody performs—all right. Even a substitute is not unpleasant once you get used to it, especially when you find it to be such an instantly effective sleeping draught. But remember that it wasn't a picture of Sonoko that arose in your mind last night. Whatever it was, your fantasy was strange and unnatural enough to amaze even me who have become so accustomed to watching by your side.

During the day you walk down the street and see no one but the sailors and soldiers. They're the youths for you—just the age you like, well tanned by the sun, unsophisticated lips, and not a trace of the intellectual about them. Whenever you see one you immediately take his measure with your eye. Apparently you intend to become something like a tailor when you graduate from law school—is that it? You have a great fondness for the lithe body of a simple young man of around twenty, a body like that of a lion cub, don't you? How many such young men didn't you mentally strip of their clothes yesterday? Your imagination is like one of those kits used for collecting plant specimens. Into it you gather the naked bodies of all these ephebes seen during the day, and then when you're home and in bed you select from your collection the ritual sacrifice for your pagan ceremony, singling out one who has caught your particular fancy. What follows then is thoroughly disgusting:

You lead your victim to a curious hexagonal pillar, hiding a rope behind you. Then you bind his naked body to the pillar with the rope, stretching his arms above his head. You insist that he put up plenty of resistance and scream loudly. You give the victim an elaborate description of his approaching death, and all the while a strange, innocent smile plays about your lips. Taking a sharp knife from your pocket, you press close to him and tickle the skin of his straining chest with the point of the knife, lightly and caressingly. He gives a despairing cry, twisting his body in an effort to escape the knife; his breath roars with terrified panting; his legs tremble and his knees knock together with a clatter. Slowly the knife is driven into the side of his chest. (That's the outrageous thing you did!) The victim arches his body, giving a lonely, piteous shriek, and there is a spasm in the muscles around the wound. The knife has been buried in the rippling flesh as calmly as though being inserted in a scabbard. A fountain of blood bubbles up, pours out, and goes flowing down toward his smooth thighs.

The pleasure you experience at this moment is a genuine human feeling. I say so because at this precise moment you possess the normality that is your obsession. Whatever the form of your fantasy, you are sexually excited to the very depths of your physical being, and such excitement is entirely normal, differing not a jot from that of other men. Your mind quivers under the rush of primitive, mysterious excitement. The deep joy of a savage is reborn in your breast. Your eyes shine, the blood blazes up throughout your body, and you overflow with that manifestation of life worshiped by savage tribes. Even after ejaculation a fevered, savage chant of exultation remains in your body; you are not attacked by that sadness which follows intercourse with a woman. You glitter with debauched loneliness. For a
little
while you
are
floating in the memory of a huge, ancient river. Perhaps by some chance the memory of the deepest emotion in the life force of your savage ancestors has taken utter possession of your sexual functions and pleasures. But you're too busy with your pretending to notice, aren't you? I cannot understand why you, who can thus sometimes feel the deep pleasure of human
existence,
find it necessary to utter such drivel about love and soul.

I tell you what—how about this idea? What if
you
were to present your magnum opus of a quaint doctoral thesis in the presence of Sonoko? It's a profound dissertation entitled "Concerning the Functional Relationships between an Ephebe's Torso-Curves and Rate of flood Flow." In short, the torso you select for your daydream is one that is smooth and supple and solid, above all a young torso on which the blood will trace the most subtle curves as it flows from the knife wound. Isn't that right? Don't you select the torso that will produce the most beautiful and natural patterns in the flowing blood, patterns like those made by a meandering stream which flows across a plain, or like the grain in a cross section of an ancient tree? Can you deny this . . .

I could not deny it.

And yet my powers of self-analysis were constructed in a way that defied definition, like one of those hoops made by giving a single twist to a strip of paper and then pasting the ends together. What appeared to be the inside was the outside, and what appeared the outside was the inside. Although in later years my self-analysis traversed the rim of the hoop more slowly, when I was twenty it was doing nothing but spin blindfolded through the orbit of my emotions, and lashed on by the excitement attending the war's final disastrous stages, the speed of the revolutions had become enough to make me all but completely lose my sense of balance. There was no time for a careful consideration of causes and effects, no time for either contradictions or correlations.So the contradictions spun on through the orbit just as they were, rubbing together with a speed that no eye could comprehend.

After almost an hour of this, the only thought that remained in my mind was that of composing some clever answer to Sonoko's letter. . . .

Meanwhile the cherry trees had blossomed. But no one seemed to have time for flower-viewing; the students from my school were probably the only people in Tokyo who had the opportunity of seeing the cherry blossoms. On my way home from the university, either alone or with two or three friends, I often strolled beneath the cherry trees around S Pond.

The blossoms seemed unusually lovely this year. There were none of the scarlet-and-white-striped curtains that are set up among the blossoming trees so invariably that one has come to think of them as the attire of cherry blossoms; there were no bustling tea-stalls, no holiday crowds of flower-viewers, no one hawking balloons and toy windmills; instead there were only the cherry trees blossoming undisturbed among the evergreens, making one feel as though he were seeing the naked bodies of the blossoms. Nature's free bounty and useless extravagance had never appeared so fantastically beautiful as it did this spring. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that Nature had come to reconquer the earth for herself. Certainly there was something unusual about this spring's brilliance. The yellow of the rape blossoms, the green of the young grass, the fresh-looking black trunks of the cherry trees, the canopy of heavy blossoms that bent the branches low —all these were reflected in my eyes as vivid colors tinged with malevolence. It seemed to be a conflagration of colors.

One day several of us walked along on the grass between the rows of cherry trees and the banks of the pond, arguing some nonsensical legal theory as we went. At the time I was fond of the irony of Professor Y's lectures on international law. In the very midst of the air raids, there the professor was, broad-mindedly continuing his seemingly endless lectures about the League of Nations. I felt as though I were listening to lectures on mahjong or chess. Peace! peace!—I could not believe that this bell-like sound which was perpetually tolling in the distance was anything more than a ringing in my ears.

"But isn't it a question of the absolute nature of real-property claims?" suggested A, continuing our discussion. Although this countrified student seemed to be a strapping fellow with a healthy complexion, an advanced case of lung seepage had saved him from being drafted.

"Let's cut out such foolish talk," broke in B. He was a pale student and, as could be told at a glance, was suffering from tuberculosis.

"In the air enemy planes, on the ground law-humph!" I laughed scornfully. "Is this what you mean by glory in the heavens and peace on earth?"