Confessions of a Mask (12 page)

The principal difference was the fact that the other boys seemed to derive unusual excitement from the mere word woman. They always blushed if the word so much as floated through their minds. I, on the other hand, received no more sensual impression from "woman" than from "pencil," or "automobile," or "broom." Even in my conversation with friends I often manifested a similar deficiency in the faculty of associating ideas, as in the incident concerning Katakura's mother, and made remarks that sounded altogether incoherent to them. My friends solved this puzzle to their satisfaction by considering me a poet. But for my part I definitely did not want to be thought a poet: I had heard that members of the breed of men called poets were invariably jilted by women. So in order to make my conversation consistent with my friends', I cultivated an artificial ability to make the same association of ideas as they.

I never guessed that they could be sharply distinguished from me, not only in their inner feelings, but even in hidden external signs. I did not realize, in short, that they immediately had an erection when they saw a picture of a woman's nude body, that I was alone in remaining unmoved at such a time. Nor did I realize that an object that would incite an erection in my case (strangely enough, from the very first such objects were confined to that class of things which are the characteristic sexual objects of inversion), say a statue of a naked youth cast in the Ionian mold, would not have excited them in the slightest.

My purpose in having given a detailed description of several instances of erection in the preceding chapter was to make more understandable this important point of my ignorance concerning myself. Because my lack of knowledge as to the objects that excited other boys served to strengthen the autohypnosis of considering myself to be like them. Where could I have obtained enlightenment? Novels abound in kissing scenes, but none that I had read made any reference to such a thing as erections on such occasions. This was only natural, as it is scarely a subject to be described in a novel. But even the sex encyclopedia said nothing concerning erection as a physiological accompaniment of the kiss, leaving me instead with the impression that erection occurred only as prelude to carnal relations or in response to a mental picture of the act. I thought that when the time came, even if there were to be no desire, I too would suddenly have an erection, exactly as though it were an inspiration from beyond the skies. A small something deep inside me continued whispering: "No, maybe in your case alone it will not happen." And this small doubt was manifested in all my feelings of insecurity.

But at the moment of indulging in my bad habit did I never even once picture to myself some part of a woman? Not even experimentally? No, never. I explained this strange lapse to myself as being due simply to my laziness.

In short, I knew absolutely nothing about other boys. I did not know that each night all boys but me had dreams in which women—women barely glimpsed yesterday on a street corner—were stripped of their clothing and set one by one to parading before the dreamers' eyes. I did not know that in the boys' dreams the breasts of a woman would often float up like beautiful jellyfish rising from the sea of night. I did not know that in those dreams the precious part of a woman would open its moist lips and keep singing a siren's melody, tens of times, hundreds of times, thousands of times, eternally. . . .

Was it out of laziness that I had no such dreams? Could it have been because of laziness? I kept asking myself. All of my earnestness toward life as a whole arose out of this suspicion that I was simply lazy. And in the end this earnestness spent itself in defending myself against the charge of laziness on this one point, insuring that my laziness could remain laziness still.This earnestness led me in the first place to resolve to gather together all my memories concerning women, starting back at the very beginning. What an extremely meager collection it turned out to be!

I remembered one incident that had taken place when I was about thirteen or fourteen. It was the day of my father's transfer to Osaka, and we had all gone to Tokyo Station to see him off. Afterwards, a number of relatives had returned to the house with us. Among them was my second cousin Sumiko, an unmarried girl of about twenty.

Sumiko's front teeth protruded the tiniest bit. They were exceedingly white and beautiful teeth, and when she laughed they gleamed so brightly that one wondered whether she was not laughing on purpose to show them off. Their slight appearance of prominence added a subtle attractiveness to her smile; in her case the defect of protruding teeth was like a pinch of spice dropped into the harmonious grace and beauty of her face and figure, emphasizing the harmony and adding an accent of flavor to the beauty.

If the word "love" is not applicable, at least I "liked" this cousin. Ever since childhood I had enjoyed watching her from a distance. I would sit beside her for hours as she embroidered, doing nothing but stare at her vacantly.

After a time my aunts went into an inner room, leaving Sumiko and me alone in the parlor. We remained just as we were, seated side by side on a sofa, saying nothing. Our heads were still buzzing with the bustle of the station platform. I felt unusually weary.

"Oh, I'm tired," she said, giving a little yawn. She lifted her white hand wearily and tapped her mouth lightly several times with her white fingers, as though performing some superstitious ritual. "Aren't you tired too, Kochan?"

For some unknown reason, as she said this she covered her face with both sleeves of her kimono and buried it with a plop upon my thigh. Then, rolling her cheek slowly against my trousers, she turned her face up and remained motionless for a time.

The trousers of my uniform trembled at the honor of serving as her pillow. The fragrance of her perfume and powder confused me. I looked upon her unmoving profile as she lay there with her tired, clear eyes wide open; I was at a loss. . . .

That is all that happened. And yet I never forgot the feeling of that luxurious weight pressing for a moment upon my thigh. It was not a sexual feeling, but somehow simply an extremely luxurious pleasure, like that feeling produced by the weight of a decoration hanging on the breast.

I often encountered an anemic young lady on the buses I took to school. Her cold attitude caught my interest. She always stared disinterestedly out the window as though very bored with everything, and as she did so, the willfulness of her slightly pouting lips was striking. When she was not on the bus, something seemed to be missing, and before I realized it I was breathlessly hoping to see her every time I got on the bus.

I wondered if this could be what was called love. I simply did not know. I had not the faintest idea that there was any connection between love and sexual desire. Needless to say, during the time of my infatuation with Omi I had made no effort to apply the word love to that diabolical fascination he exercised over me. And now again, even while I was wondering if the vague emotion I was feeling toward the girl on the bus could be love, at the same instant I could feel attracted to the rough young bus-driver, his hair gleaming with heavy pomade.

My ignorance was so profound that I did not perceive the contradiction involved here. I did not see that in my way of looking at the profile of the young bus-driver there was something inevitable, suffocating, painful, oppressive, whereas it was with rather studied, artificial, and easily tired eyes that I regarded the anemic young lady. So long as I remained unaware of the difference in these two viewpoints, both of them lived together within me without bothering each other, without any conflict.

For a boy of my age I seem to have been singularly uninterested in what is called "moral cleanliness" or, to use another phrase, to have been lacking the talent for "self-control." Even if I could explain this tact by saying that my excessively intense curiosity did not naturally dispose me toward an interest in morality, there would still remain the fact that this curiosity of mine both resembled the hopeless yearnings of a bedridden invalid for the outside world and was also somehow inextricably tangled up with a belief in the possibility of the impossible. It was this combination—one part unconscious belief, one part unconscious despair—that so quickened my desires that they appeared to be desperate ambitions.

Even though still young, I did not know what it was to experience the clear-cut feeling of platonic love. Was this a misfortune? But what meaning could ordinary misfortune have for me? The vague uneasiness surrounding my sexual feelings had practically made the carnal world an obsession with me. My curiosity was actually purely intellectual, not far removed from the desire for knowledge, but I became skillful at convincing myself that it was carnal desire incarnate. What is more, I mastered the art of delusion until I could regard myself as a truly lewd-minded person. As a result I assumed the stylish airs of an adult, of a man of the world. I affected the attitude of being completely tired of women.

Thus it was that I first became obsessed with the idea of the kiss. Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter. I can say so now. But at that time, in order to delude myself that this desire was animal passion, I had to undertake an elaborate disguise of my true self. The unconscious feeling of guilt resulting from this false pretense stubbornly insisted that I play a conscious and false role.

But, it may well be asked, can a person be so completely false to his own nature? even for one moment? If the answer is no, then there is no way to explain the mysterious mental process by which we crave things we actually do not want at all, is there? If it is granted that I was the exact opposite of the ethical man who suppresses his immoral desires, does this mean my heart was cherishing the most immoral desires? In any case, were my desires not exceedingly petty? Or had I deceived myself completely? was I actually acting in every last detail as a slave of convention? . . . The time was to come when I could no longer shirk the necessity of finding answers to these questions. . . .

With the beginning of the war a wave of hypocritical stoicism swept the entire country. Even the higher schools did not escape: all during middle school we had longed for that happy day of graduation to higher school when we could let our hair grow long, but now, when the day arrived, we were no longer allowed to gratify our ambition—we still had to shave our heads. The craze for gaudy socks was likewise a thing of the past. Instead, periods of military drill became absurdly frequent and various other ridiculous innovations were undertaken.Thanks, however, to our school's long practice at giving an adroit but mere outward appearance of conformity, we were able to continue our school life without b
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ing particularly affected by the new restrictions. The colonel assigned to the school by the War Ministry was an understanding man, and even the warrant officer whom we had nicknamed Mr. Zu because of his countrified way of pronouncing "su" as "zu," as well as his colleagues Mr. Booby and the pug-nosed Mr. Snout, got the hang of our school spirit and fell in with it sensibly enough. Our principal was a womanish old admiral, and with the support of the Imperial Household Ministry, he kept his position by following a dawdling and inoffensive principle of moderation in all things.

During this time I learned to smoke and drink. That is to say, I learned to make a pretense at smoking and drinking. The war had produced a strangely sentimental maturity in us. It arose from our thinking of life as something that would end abruptly in our twenties; we never even considered the possibility of there being anything beyond those few remaining years. Life struck us as being a strangely volatile thing. It was exactly as though life were a salt lake from which most of the water had suddenly evaporated, leaving such a heavy concentration of salt that our bodies floated buoyantly upon its surface. Since the moment for the curtain to fall was not so far distant, it might have been expected that I would enact with all the more diligence the masquerade I had devised for myself. But even while telling myself that I would start tomorrow—tomorrow for sure—my journey into life was postponed day after day, and the war years were going by without the slightest sign of my departure.

Was this not a unique period of happiness for me? Though I still felt an uneasiness, it was only faint; still having hope, I looked forward to the unknown blue skies of each tomorrow. Fanciful dreams of the journey to come, visions of its adventure, the mental picture of the somebody I would one day become in the world and of the lovely bride I had not yet seen, my hopes of fame—in those days all these things were neatly arranged in a trunk against the moment of my departure, exactly like a traveler's guidebooks, towel, toothbrush, and tooth paste. I found childish delight in war, and despite the presence of death and destruction all around me, there was no abatement of the daydream in which I believed myself beyond the reach of harm by any bullet. I even shuddered with a strange delight at the thought of my own death. I felt as though I owned the whole world. And little wonder, because at no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless.In time my obsession with the idea of kissing became fixed upon a single pair of lips. Even here I was probably inspired by nothing more than a desire to give my dreams pretensions to a nobler pedigree. As I have already suggested, although I actually experienced neither desire nor any other emotion in regard to those lips, I nevertheless tried desperately to convince myself that I did desire them. In short, I was mistaking as primary desire something that actually was only the irrational and secondary desire of wanting to believe I desired them. I was mistaking the fierce, impossible desire of not wanting to be myself for the sexual desire of a man of the world, for the desire that arises from his being himself.