Confessions of a Mask

  When I got off at the station in front of the school, the snow was already melting, and I could hear the water running off the roof of the forwarding company next door. I could not shake the illusion that it was the radiance which was splashing down. Bright and shining slivers of it were suicidally hurling themselves at the sham quagmire of the pavement, all smeared with the slush of passing shoes. As I walked under the eaves, one sliver hurled itself by mistake at the nape of my neck. . . .

  Inside the school gates there was not yet a single footprint in the snow. The locker room was still closed fast, but the other rooms were open.

  I opened a window of the second-year classroom, which was on the ground floor, and looked out at the snow in the grove behind the school. There in the path that came from the rear gate, up the slope of the grove, and led to the building I was in, I could see large footprints; they came up along the path and continued to a spot directly below the window from which I was looking. Then the footprints turned back and disappeared behind the science building, which could be seen on a diagonal to the left.

  Someone had already come. It was plain that he had ascended the path from the rear gate, looked into the classroom through the window, and seeing that no one was there, walked on by himself to the rear of the science building. Only a few of the day students came to school by way of the rear gate. It was rumored that Omi, who was one of those few, came each morning from some woman's house. But he would never put in an appearance until the last moment before class formation. Nevertheless, I could not imagine who else might have made the footprints, and judging by their large size, I was convinced they were his.

  Leaning out the window and straining my eyes, I saw the color of fresh black soil in the shoe tracks, making them seem somehow determined and powerful. An indescribable force drew me toward those shoe prints. I felt that I should like to throw myself head-first out of the window to bury my face in them. But, as usual, my sluggish motor nerves protected me from my sudden whim. Instead of diving out the window, I put my satchel on a desk and then scrambled slowly up onto the window sill. The hooks and eyes on the front of my uniform jacket had scarcely pressed against the stone window sill before they were at daggers' point with my frail ribs, producing a pain mixed with a sort of sorrowful sweetness. After I had jumped from the window onto the snow, the slight pain remained as a pleasant stimulus, filling me with a trembling emotion of adventure. I fitted my overshoes carefully into the footprints.

  The prints had looked quite large, but now I found they were almost the same size as mine. I had failed to take into account the fact that the person who had made them was probably wearing overshoes too, as was the vogue among us in those days. Now that the thought occurred to me, I decided the footprints were not large enough to be Omi's.

  And yet, despite my uneasy feeling that I would be disappointed in my immediate hope of finding Omi behind the science building, I was still somehow compelled by the idea of following after the black shoe-prints. Probably at this point I was no longer motivated solely by the hope of finding Omi, but instead, at the sight of the violated mystery, was seized with a mixed feeling of yearning and revenge toward the person who had come before me and left his footprints in the snow.

  Breathing hard, I began following the tracks.

  As though walking on steppingstones, I went moving my feet from footprint to footprint. The outlines of the prints revealed now glassy, coal-black earth, now dead turf, now soiled, packed snow, now paving stones. Suddenly I discovered that, without being aware of it, I had fallen into walking with long strides, exactly like Omi's.

  Following the tracks to the rear of the science building, I passed through the long shadow the building threw over the snow, and then continued on to the high ground overlooking the wide athletic field. Because of the mantle of glittering snow that covered everything, the three-hundred-meter ellipse of the track could not be distinguished from the undulating field it enclosed. In a corner of the field two great zelkova trees stood close together, and their shadows, greatly elongated in the morning sun, fell across the snow, lending meaning to the scene, providing the happy imperfection with which Nature always accents grandeur. The great elm-like trees towered up with a plastic delicacy in the blue winter sky, in the reflection of the snow from below, in the lateral rays of the morning sun; and occasionally some snow slipped down like gold dust from the crotches formed against the tree trunks by the stark, leafless branches. The roof ridges of the boys' dormitories, standing in a row beyond the athletic field, and the copse beyond them seemed to be motionless in sleep. Everything was so silent that even the soundless slipping of the snow seemed to echo loud and wide.

  For a moment I could not see a thing in this expanse of glare.

  The snow scene was in a way like a fresh castle ruin: this legerdemain was being bathed in that same boundless light and splendor which exists solely in the ruins of ancient castles. And there in one corner of the ruin, in the snow of the almost five-meter-wide track, enormous Roman letters had been drawn. Nearest to me was a large circle, an O. Next came an M. And beyond it a third letter was still in the process of being written, a tall and thick I.

  It was Omi. The footprints I had followed led to the O, from the O to the M, and arrived finally at the figure of Omi himself, just then dragging his overshoes over the snow to finish his I, looking downward from above his white muffler, both hands thrust in his overcoat pockets. His shadow stretched defiantly across the snow, running parallel with the shadows of the zelkova trees in the field.

  My cheeks were on fire. I made a snowball in my gloved hands and threw it at him. It fell short.

  Just then he finished writing the I and, probably by chance, looked in my direction.

  "Hey!" I shouted.

  Although I feared that Omi's only reaction would be one of displeasure, I was impelled by an indescribable passion, and no sooner had I shouted out than I found myself running down the steep slope toward him. As I ran, a most undreamed-of sound came reverberating toward me—a friendly shout from him, filled with his power:

  "Hey, don't step on the letters!"

  He certainly seemed to be a different person this morning. As a rule, even when he went home he never did his homework, but left his schoolbooks in his locker and came to school in the mornings with both hands thrust in his overcoat pockets, barely in time to shed his coat dexterously and fall in at the tail end of class formation. What a change today! Not only must he have been whiling away the time by himself since early morning, but now he welcomed me with his inimitable smile, both friendly and rough at the same time—welcomed me, whom he had always treated as a snot-nosed child, beneath contempt. How I had been longing for that smile, the flash of those youthful white teeth!But when I got close enough to see his smiling face distinctly, my heart lost its passion of the moment before, when I had shouted "Hey!" Now, suddenly, I became paralyzed with timidity. I was pulled up short by the flashing realization that at heart Omi was a lonely person. His smile was probably assumed in order to hide the weak spot in his armor, which my understanding had chanced upon, but this fact did not hurt me so much as it hurt the image I had been constructing of him.

  The instant I had seen that enormous omi drawn in the snow, I had understood, perhaps half-unconsciously, all the nooks and corners of his loneliness—understood also the real motive, probably not clearly understood even by himself, that brought him to school this early in the morning. . . . If my idol had now mentally bent his knee to me, offering some such excuse as "I came early for the snow fight," I would certainly have lost from within me something even more important than the pride he would have lost. Feeling it was up to me to speak, I nervously tried to think of something to say.

  "The snowfight's out for today, isn't it?" I finally said. "I thought it was going to snow more though."

  "H'm." He assumed an expression of indifference. The strong outline of his jaw hardened again in his cheeks, and a sort of pitying disdain toward me revived. He was o
bviously making an effort to regard me as a child, and his eyes again began to gleam insolently. In one part of his mind he must have been grateful to me for not making a single inquiry about his letters in the snow, and I was fascinated by the painful efforts he was making to overcome this feeling of gratitude.

  "Humph! I hate wearing children's gloves," he said.

  "But even grownups wear wool gloves like these.”“Poor thing, I bet you don't even know how leather gloves feel. Here—"

  Abruptly he thrust his snow-drenched leather gloves against my cheeks.

  I dodged. A raw carnal feeling blazed up within me, branding my cheeks. I felt myself staring at him with crystal-clear eyes. . . .

  From that time on I was in love with Omi.

  For me this was the first love in my life. And, if such a blunt way of speaking be forgiven, it was clearly a love closely connected with desires of the flesh.

  I began looking forward impatiently to summer, or at least to summer's beginning. Surely, I thought, summer will bring with it an opportunity to see his naked body. Also, I cherished deeply within me a still more shamefaced desire. This was to see that "big thing" of his.

  On the switchboard of my memory two pairs of gloves have crossed wires—those leather gloves of Omi's and a pair of white ceremonial gloves. I never seem to be able to decide which memory might be real, which false. Perhaps the leather gloves were more in harmony with his coarse features. And yet again, precisely because of his coarse features, perhaps it was the white pair which became him more.

  Coarse features—even though I use the words, actually such a description is nothing more than that of the impression created by the ordinary face of one lone young man mixed in among boys. Unrivaled though his build was, in height he was by no means the tallest among us. The pretentious uniform our school required, resembling a naval officer's, could scarcely hang well on our still-immature bodies, and Omi alone filled his with a sensation of solid weight and a sort of sexuality. Surely I was not the only one who looked with envious and loving eyes at the muscles of his shoulders and chest, that sort of muscle which can be spied out even beneath a blue-serge uniform.

  Something like a secret feeling of superiority was always hovering about his face. Perhaps it was that sort of feeling which blazes higher and higher the more one's pride is hurt. It seemed that, for Omi, such misfortunes as failures in examinations and expulsions were the symbols of a frustrated will. The will to what? I imagined vaguely that it must be some purpose toward which his "evil genius" was driving him. And I was certain that even he did not yet know the full purport of this vast conspiracy against him.

  Something about his face gave one the sensation of abundant blood coursing richly throughout his body; it was a round face, with haughty cheekbones rising from swarthy cheeks, lips that seemed to have been sewn into a fine line, sturdy jaws, and a broad but well-shaped and not too prominent nose. These features were the clothing for an untamed soul. How could anyone have expected such a person to have a secret, inner life? All one could hope to find in him was the pattern of that forgotten perfection which the rest of us have lost in some far distant past.

  There were times when a whim would bring him peering into the books, erudite and far beyond my years, that I was reading. I would almost always give him a noncommittal smile and close whatever book I was holding, to keep him from seeing it. It was not out of shame : rather, I was pained by any indication that he might have an interest in such things as books, might reveal an awkwardness about them, might seem to weary of his own unconscious perfection. I found it bitter to think that this fisherman might forget, desert, deny the Ionia of his birth.

  I watched Omi incessantly, both in the classroom and on the playgrounds. While doing so, I fashioned a perfect, flawless illusion of him. Hence it is that I cannot discover a single flaw in the image that remains imprinted on my memory. In a piece of writing such as this, a character should be brought to life by describing some essential idiosyncrasy, some lovable fault, but from my memory of Omi I can extract not a single such imperfection. There were, however, numberless other impressions that I got from Omi, of infinite variety, all filled with delicate nuances. In a phrase, what I did derive from him was a precise definition of the perfection of life and manhood, personified in his eyebrows, his forehead, his eyes, his nose, his ears, his cheeks, his cheekbones, his lips, his jaws, the nape of his neck, his throat, his complexion, the color of his skin, his strength, his chest, his hands, and countless other of his attributes. With these as a basis, the principle of selection came into operation, and I completed a systematic structure of likes and dislikes: Because of him I cannot love an intellectual person. Because of him I am not attracted to a person who wears glasses. Because of him I began to love strength, an impression of overflowing blood, ignorance, rough gestures, careless speech, and the savage melancholy inherent in flesh not tainted in any way with intellect. . . .

  And yet, from the outset, a logical impossibility was involved for me in these rude tastes, making my desires forever unattainable. As a rule there is nothing more logical than the carnal impulse. But in my case, no sooner would I begin to share intellectual understanding with a person who had attracted me than my desire for that person would collapse. The discovery of even the slightest intellectualism in a companion would force me to a rational judgment of values. In a reciprocal relationship such as love, one must give the same thing he demands from the other; hence my desire for ignorance in a companion required, however temporarily, an unconditional "revolt against reason" on my part. But for me such a revolt was absolutely impossible.

  Thus, when confronting those possessors of sheer animal flesh unspoiled by intellect—young toughs, sailors, soldiers, fishermen—there was nothing for me to do but be forever watching them from afar with impassioned indifference, being careful never to exchange words with them. Probably the only place in which I could have lived at ease would have been some uncivilized tropical land where I could not speak the language. Now that I think of it, I realize that from earliest childhood I felt a yearning toward those intense summers of the kind that are seething forever in savage lands. . . .

  Well, then, there were the white gloves of which I was going to speak.

  At my school it was the custom to wear white gloves on ceremonial days. Just to pull on a pair of white gloves, with mother-of-pearl buttons shining gloomily at the wrists and three meditative rows of stitching on the backs, was enough to evoke the symbols of all ceremonial days—the somber assembly hall where the ceremonies were held, the box of Shioze sweets received upon leaving, the cloudless skies under which such days always seem to make brilliant sounds in midcourse and then collapse.It was on a national holiday in winter, undoubtedly Empire Day. That morning again Omi had come to school unusually early.

  The second-year students had already driven the freshmen away from the swinging-log on the playground at the side of the school buildings, taking cruel delight in doing so, and were now in full possession. Although outwardly scornful of such childish playground equipment as the swinging-log, the second-year students still had a lingering affection for it in their hearts, and by forcibly driving the freshmen away, they were able to adopt the face-saving pretense of indulging in the amusement half-derisively, without any seriousness. The freshmen had formed a circle at a distance around the log and were watching the rough play of the upperclassmen, who, in turn, were quite conscious of having an audience. The log, suspended on chains, swung back and forth rhythmically, with a battering-ram motion, and the contest was to make each other fall off the log.

  Omi was standing with both feet planted firmly at the mid-point of the log, eagerly looking around for opponents ; it was a posture that made him look exactly like a murderer brought to bay.

  No one in our class was a match for him. Already several boys had jumped up onto the log, one after another, only to be cut down by Omi's quick hands; their feet had trampled away the frost on the earth around the log, which had been
glittering in the early morning sunlight.After each victory Omi would clasp his hands together over his head like a triumphant boxer, smiling profusely. And the first-year students would cheer, already forgetting he had been a ringleader in driving them away from the log.

  My eyes followed his white-gloved hands. They were moving fiercely, but with marvelous precision, like the paws of some young beast, a wolf perhaps. From time to time they would cut through the winter-morning's air, like the feathers of an arrow, straight to the chest of an opponent. And always the opponent would fall to the frosty ground, landing now on his feet, now on his buttocks. On rare occasions, at the moment of knocking an opponent off the log, Omi himself would be on the verge of falling; as he fought to regain the equilibrium of his careening body, he would appear to be writhing in agony there atop the log, made slippery by the faintly gleaming frost. But always the strength in his supple hips would restore him once again to that assassin-like posture.

  The log was moving left and right impersonally, swinging in unperturbed arcs. . . .

  As I watched, I was suddenly overcome with uneasiness, with a racking, inexplicable uneasiness. It resembled a dizziness such as might have come from watching the swaying of the log, but it was not that. Probably it was more a mental vertigo, an uneasiness in which my inner equilibrium was on the point of being destroyed by the sight of his every perilous movement.And this instability was made even more precarious by the fact that within it two contrary forces were pulling at me, contending for supremacy. One was the instinct of self-preservation. The second force—which was bent, even more profoundly, more intensely, upon the complete disintegration of my inner balance—was a compulsion toward suicide, that subtle and secret impulse to which a person often unconsciously surrenders himself.