Confessions of a Mask (21 page)

That night at bedtime Sonoko came to the door of my room and, hiding herself partially behind the curtain hanging there, begged me poutingly to stay one day longer. I could only stare at her as though astonished by something. My entire calculation, which I had thought so very exact, had been destroyed by the discovery of that error I had made at the very outset, and consequently I had no idea how to analyze the feelings I had now when I looked at Sonoko.

"Must you really go?""Yes, it's a must."

I almost felt happy as I gave the answer. Again the machinery of deception had begun to work within me, superficially at first. My feeling of happiness was actually nothing but the emotion one feels upon escaping a great danger, but I interpreted it as arising out of a feeling of superiority toward Sonoko, out of the knowledge that I now possessed new power to tantalize her.

Self-deception was now my last ray of hope. A person who has been seriously wounded does not demand that the emergency bandages that save his life be clean. I arrested my bleeding with the bandages of self-deception, with which I was at least already familiar, and thought of nothing but running to the hospital. I purposely described that slipshod arsenal to Sonoko as the strictest of barracks, insisting that if I did not return to it the next day I'd probably be put in a military prison. . . .

The morning of my departure had arrived and I found myself gazing intently at Sonoko—like a traveler looking for the last time upon a scene he is about to leave.

I now realized that everything was over—even though the people around me were thinking that everything was just beginning—even though I too was wanting to deceive myself and surrender to the atmosphere of gentle vigilance with which her family surrounded me.And yet Sonoko's air of tranquillity made me feel uneasy. She was helping me pack my bag, searching the room to see if I had forgotten something. After a time she stopped before a window and stared out it, not moving. Today again there was nothing to be seen distinctly except the cloudy sky and the fresh green leaves. The invisible passage of a squirrel had set a branch to swaying. As I looked at Sonoko's back something about her posture made it abundantly clear that she was quietly but childishly waiting. Given my methodical ways, I could no more have ignored this than I can endure leaving a room without closing the closet doors. I walked up behind her and embraced her gently.

"You will come again, without fail, won't you?"

She spoke easily, in a tone of complete confidence. It somehow sounded as though she had confidence not so much in me as in something deeper, something beyond me. Her shoulders were not shaking. The lace on her blouse was rising and falling as though proudly.

"H'm, perhaps so, if I'm still alive."

I was disgusted with myself as I spoke the words. Intellectually, I would have preferred by far to be saying: "Of course I'll come! Nothing could keep me from coming to you. Never doubt it. Aren't you the girl who's going to be my wife?"

At every turn this sort of curious contradiction cropped up between my intellectual views and my emotions. I knew that what made me adopt such lukewarm attitudes—like that "H'm, perhaps so"—was not some fault in my character that I could change, but was the work of something that had existed even before I had had any hand in the matter. In short, I knew clearly that it was not my fault.

But for this very reason I had formed the habit of treating those parts of my character that were in any way my responsibility to exhortations so wholesome and sensible as to be comical. As a part of my system of self-discipline, dating from childhood, I constantly told myself it would be better to die than become a lukewarm person, an unmanly person, a person who does not clearly know his likes and dislikes, a person who wants only to be loved without knowing how to love. This exhortation of course had a possible applicability to the parts of my character for which I was to blame, but so far as the other parts were concerned, the parts for which I was not to blame, it was an impossible requirement from the beginning. Thus, in the present case even the strength of a Samson would not have been sufficient to make me adopt a manly and unequivocal attitude toward Sonoko.

So then, this image of a lukewarm man that Sonoko was now seeing, this thing that appeared to be my character, aroused my disgust, made my entire existence seem worthless, and tore my self-confidence into shreds. I was made to distrust both my will and my character, or at least, so far as my will was concerned, I could not believe it was anything but a fake. On the other hand, this way of thinking that placed such emphasis upon the will was in itself an exaggeration amounting almost to fantasy. Even a normal person cannot govern his behavior by will alone. No matter how normal I might have been, there certainly might have been a reason somewhere for doubting whether Sonoko and I were perfectly matched at every point for a happy married life, some reason that would have justified even that normal me in answering "H'm, perhaps so." But I had deliberately acquired the habit of closing my eyes even to such obvious assumptions, just as though I did not want to miss a single opportunity for tormenting myself.... This is a trite device, often adopted by persons who, cut off from all other means of escape, retreat into the safe haven of regarding themselves as objects of tragedy. . . .

"Don't worry," Sonoko said in a quiet voice. "You won't be killed. You won't be even slightly hurt. Every night I pray to the Lord Jesus for you, and my prayers are always answered."

"You're very devout, aren't you? That's probably the reason you have such peace of mind. It's enough to make me afraid."

"Why?" she asked, looking up at me with wise black eyes.

I was caught between her glance and her innocent question, both as free of doubt as is the dew, and I was overcome with confusion. I could think of no answer to make. Until now I had felt a strong desire to shake this girl, who seemed to have gone to sleep within her peace of mind, to shake her till she awakened. But instead it was the gaze of her eyes that had awakened something that had been sleeping within me. . . .

It was time for Sonoko's younger sisters to go to school and they came to take their leave. The smallest sister barely touched my palm with her hand as she said good-bye, and then fled outdoors, carrying a crimson lunch box with a gold-colored buckle. Just at that moment the sun happened to shine through the trees and I saw her wave her lunch box high over her head.

Both the grandmother and mother had come along to see me off, so my parting with Sonoko at the station was casual and innocent. We jested with each other and acted nonchalant. The train came soon and I took a seat by a window. My only thought was a prayer that the train would leave quickly. . . .

A clear voice called to me from an unexpected direction. It was certainly Sonoko's voice, but accustomed as I had become to it, I was startled to hear it as a fresh, distant cry. The realization that it was Sonoko's voice streamed into my heart like morning sunlight. I turned my eyes in the direction from which it came. Sonoko had slipped in through the porters' gate and was clinging to the black wooden railing bordering the platform. A mass of lace on her blouse overflowed from her checked bolero and fluttered in the breeze. Her vivacious eyes stared widely at me. The train began to move. Her slightly heavy lips seemed to be forming words, and in just that way she passed out of my view.

Sonoko! Sonoko! I repeated the name to myself with each sway of the train. It sounded unutterably mysterious. Sonoko! Sonoko! With each repetition my heart felt heavier, at each throb of her name a cutting, punishing weariness grew deeper within me. The pain I was feeling was crystal clear, but of such a unique and incomprehensible nature that I could not have explained it even if I had tried. It was so far off the beaten path of ordinary human emotions that I even had difficulty in recognizing it as pain. If I should try to describe it, I could only say it was a pain like that of a person who waits one bright midday for the roar of the noon-gun and, when the time for the gun's sounding has passed in silence, tries to discover the waiting emptiness somewhere in the blue sky. His is the rending impatience of waiting for a longed-for thing that is overdue, the horrible doubt that it may never come after all. He is the only man in the world who knows that the noon-gun did not sound promptly at noon.

"It's all over, it's all over," I muttered to myself. My grief resembled that of a fainthearted student who has failed an examination: I made a mistake! I made a mistake! Simply because I didn't solve that X, everything was wrong. If only I'd solved that X at the beginning, everything would have been all right. If only I had used deductive methods like everyone else to solve the mathematics of life. To be half-clever was the worst thing I could have done. I alone depended upon the inductive method, and for that simple reason I failed.

My mental turmoil was so apparent that the two passengers who sat in the facing seat began eyeing me suspiciously. One of them was a Red Cross nurse wearing a dark-blue uniform, and the other a poor farm-woman who seemed to be the nurse's mother. Becoming conscious of their stares, I glanced at the nurse and saw a fat girl, with a complexion as red as a winter-cherry. I surprised her looking directly at me; to cover her confusion she began to coax her mother:

"Please, I'm so hungry."

"No, it's too early yet."

"But I'm hungry, I tell you. Please, please."

"Don't be so demanding."

But at last the mother yielded and got out their lunch box. The poverty of its contents made their lunch even more dreadful than the food we received at the arsenal. There was only boiled rice, heavily mixed with taro-root and garnished with two slices of pickled radish, but the girl began eating it with gusto.

Somehow the habit of eating had never before appeared so ridiculous to me, and I rubbed my eyes.Presently I realized that my point of view came from having completely lost the desire to live.

When I arrived at the house in the suburbs that night I seriously contemplated suicide for the first time in my life. But as I thought about it, the idea became exceedingly tiresome, and I finally decided it would be a ludicrous business. I had an inherent dislike of admitting defeat. Moreover, I told myself, there's no need for me to take such decisive action myself, not when I'm surrounded by such a bountiful harvest of so many types of death—death in an air raid, death at one's post of duty, death in the military service, death on the battlefield, death from being run over, death from disease—surely my name has already been entered in the list for one of these: a criminal who has been sentenced to death does not commit suicide. No—no matter how I considered it, the season was not auspicious for suicide. Instead I was waiting for something to do me the favor of killing me. And this, in the final analysis, is the same as to say that I was waiting for something to do me the favor of keeping me alive.

Two days after my return to the arsenal I received an impassioned letter from Sonoko. There was no doubt that she was truly in love. I felt jealous. Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love? . . .She wrote that after parting from me at the station she got on her bicycle and went to work. But she was so absent-minded that her fellow workers asked if she felt well. She made many errors in filing the papers. Then she went home to lunch, but as she was returning to work after lunch she made a detour by way of the golf course, where she stopped. She looked around and saw where the yellow camomile lay trampled just as we had left it. Then, as the fog dissolved, she saw the flanks of the volcano shining brightly with the color of burnt ochre, looking as though the mountain had been washed. She also saw traces of dark fog arising from the gorges in the mountain, and saw the two silver birch, like loving sisters, their leaves trembling as with some faint premonition. . . .

And at that very time I had been on the train, cudgeling my brain for a way to escape the very love which I myself had implanted in Sonoko! . . . And yet there were moments in which I felt reassured, surrendering myself to a plea of self-justification that, however pitiful, was probably nearest the truth. This was the plea that I had to escape from her for the very reason that I did love her.

I continued writing Sonoko frequent letters, and while I was careful not to say anything that might develop the matter further, at the same time I used a tone that would reveal no cooling off on my part. Within less than a month she wrote telling me that they were all going to visit Kusano again at the regiment near Tokyo to which he had been transferred. Weakness urged me to go with them. Strangely enough, even though I had resolved so firmly to escape from her, still I was irresistibly drawn to another meeting.

And when I did meet her I found that I had completely changed, while she remained just the same as ever. It had become impossible now for me to make a single joke. Sonoko and Kusano, and even her mother and grandmother, noticed the change in me, but they ascribed it to nothing more than my sincerity of purpose. During the visit Kusano made a remark to me which, even though spoken with his usual gentleness, made me tremble with apprehension:

"In a few days I'll be sending you a rather important letter. Be on the lookout for it, will you?" . . .

A week later I went to the house in the suburbs where my family were, and found his letter had arrived. it was written in that handwriting so characteristic of him, revealing in its very immaturity the sincerity of his friendship: