Confessions of a Mask

by Yukio Mishima

  Sugiko was a healthy girl, overflowing with life. I myself had never been able to go to sleep easily, and when staying at her house and lying in the same room on the pallet next to hers, I would watch with a mixture of envy and admiration how Sugiko always fell asleep instantly upon lowering her head to the pillow, exactly like a machine.

  I had many times more freedom at Sugiko's house than at my own. As the imaginary enemies who must want to steal me away—my parents, in short—were not present, my grandmother had no qualms about giving me more liberty. There was no need to keep me always within reach of her eyes, as when at home.

  And yet I was unable to take any great pleasure in this freedom that was allowed me. Like an invalid taking his first steps during convalescence, I had a feeling of stiffness as though I were acting under the compulsion of some imaginary obligation. I missed my bed of idleness. And in this house it was tacitly required that I act like a boy. The reluctant masquerade had begun. At about this time I was beginning to understand vaguely the mechanism of the fact that what people regarded as a pose on my part was actually an expression of my need to assert my true nature, and that it was precisely what people regarded as my true self which was a masquerade.

  It was this unwilling masquerade that made me say:

  "Let's play war."

  As my companions were two girls—Sugiko and another cousin—playing at war was hardly a suitable game. Still less did the opposing Amazons show any signs of enthusiasm. My reason for proposing the game also lay in my inverted sense of social duty: in short, I felt that I must not fawn upon the girls, but must somehow give them a hard time.

  Although mutually bored, we continued playing our clumsy game of war in and out of the twilit house.From behind a bush Sugiko was imitating the sound of a machine gun:

  "Bang! bang! bang!"

  I finally decided it was about time to put an end to the business and led a wild flight into the house. The female soldiers came running after me, giving a continuous fusillade of bang-bang-bang's. I clutched at my heart and collapsed limply in the center of the parlor.

  "What's the matter, Kochan?" they asked, approaching with worried faces.

  "I'm being dead on the battlefield," I replied, neither opening my eyes nor moving my hand.

  I was enraptured with the vision of my own form lying there, twisted and fallen. There was an unspeakable delight in having been shot and being on the point of death. It seemed to me that since it was I, even if actually struck by a bullet, there would surely be no pain. . . .

  The years of childhood . . .

  My memory runs head-on into a scene that is like a symbol of those years. To me as I am today, that scene represents childhood itself, past and irrecoverable. When I saw the scene I felt the hand of farewell with which childhood would take its leave of me. I had a premonition at that instant that all my feeling of subjective time, or timelessness, might one day gush forth from within me and flood into the mold of that scene, to become an exact imitation of its people and movements and sounds; that simultaneous with the completion of this copy, the original might melt away into the distant perspectives of real and objective time; and that I might be left with nothing more than the mere imitation or, to say it another way, with nothing more than an accurately stuffed specimen of my childhood.

  Everyone experiences some such incident in his childhood. In most cases, however, it assumes such a slight form, hardly worthy of being called even an incident, that it is apt to pass by unnoticed. . . .

  The scene of which I speak took place once when a crowd celebrating the Summer Festival came surging in through our gate.

  Both for my sake and because of her bad leg, my grandmother had persuaded the neighborhood firemen to arrange for the festival processions of the district to pass along the street before our gate. Originally there had been another prescribed route for the festivals, but the chief fireman took it upon himself to arrange some slight detour each year, and it had become a custom to pass our house.

  On this particular day I was standing in front of the gate with other members of the household. Both leaves of the vine-patterned iron gate had been thrown open, and water had been sprinkled neatly on the paving stones outside the gate. The hesitant sound of drums was drawing near.The plaintive melody of a chant, in which individual words only gradually became distinguishable, pierced through the confused tumult of the festival, proclaiming what might be called the true theme of this outwardly purposeless uproar—a seeming lamentation for the extremely vulgar mating of humanity and eternity, which could be consummated only through some such pious immorality as this. In the tangled mass of sound I could gradually distinguish the metallic jingle of the rings on the staff carried by the priest at the head of the procession, the stuttering roar of the drums, and the medley of rhythmic shouts from the youths shouldering the sacred shrine. My heart was beating so suffocatingly that I could scarcely stand. (Ever since then violent anticipation has always been anguish rather than joy for me.)

  The priest carrying the staff was wearing a fox mask. The golden eyes of this occult beast fastened themselves too intently upon me, as though to bewitch me, and the procession passing before my eyes aroused in me a joy akin to terror. Before I knew it, I felt myself grab hold of the skirt of whoever it was from our house that was standing beside me: I was ready to run away at the first excuse. (Ever since those days this has been the attitude with which I have always confronted life: from things too much waited for, too much embellished with anticipatory daydreams, there is in the end nothing I can do but run away.)

  Behind the priest came a group of firemen, carrying on their shoulders the offertory chest, festooned with sacred garlands of twisted straw, and then a crowd of children carrying a tiny, frivolously bouncing shrine. Finally the principal shrine of the procession drew near, the majestic black and gold omikoshi. From afar we had already seen the golden phoenix on its peak, swaying and rocking dazzlingly above the din and bustle, like a bird floating to and fro among the waves; already the sight had filled us with a sort of bewildered feeling of uneasiness. Now the shrine itself came into view, and there was a venomous state of dead calm, like the air of the tropics, which clung solely about the shrine. It seemed a malevolent sluggishness, trembling hotly above the naked shoulders of the young men carrying the omikoshi. And within the thick scarlet-and-white ropes, within the guardrails of black lacquer and gold, behind those fast-shut doors of gold leaf, there was a four-foot cube of pitch-blackness.

  This perfect cube of empty night, ceaselessly swaying and leaping, to and fro, up and down, was boldly reigning over the cloudless noonday of early summer.

  The shrine drew closer and closer. The young men who carried it were wearing summer kimono, all of the same pattern, the thin cotton material revealing almost all their bodies, and their motions made it seem as though the shrine itself were staggering-drunk. Their legs seemed to be one great tangle, and it was as though their eyes were not looking upon things of this earth. The young man who carried the great round fan of authority was running around the edges of the group, urging them on with wonderfully loud shouts. From time to time the shrine would tilt crazily. Then, with even more frenzied shouting, it would be recovered.

  At this point—perhaps because the adults in my family had intuitively perceived that, although the young men seemed outwardly to be parading along just as before, there was some power in them that was demanding an outlet—I was suddenly shoved back by the hand of the person onto whom I had been clinging.

  "Look out!" someone shouted.

  I could not tell what happened after that. Pulled by the hand, I ran fleeing through the entry garden and dashed into the house through a side door.

  I rushed up to the second floor with someone and out onto the balcony. From there I looked down upon the scene, breathlessly. Just at that moment they had come swarming into the entry garden, bearing their black shrine.

  Even long after, I wondered what force impelled them to such an action. I
still do not know. How could those scores of young men have suddenly arrived at the decision, instantaneous and single-minded, to come rushing in through our gate?

  They took delight in wanton destruction of the plants. It was a rout in every sense of the word. The entry garden, which had long since been exhausted of all interest for me, was suddenly transformed into a different world. The shrine was paraded over every inch of it, and the shrubs, ripped apart crashingly, were trampled underfoot. It was difficult for me so much as to tell what was happening. The noises were neutralizing each other, and it seemed exactly as though my ears were being struck by recurrent waves of frozen silence and meaningless roaring. Likewise with the colors—gold and vermilion, purple and green, yellow and dark blue, all throbbed and boiled up and seemed like a single color in which now gold and now vermilion was the dominant hue.

  Through it all there was only one vividly clear thing, a thing that both horrified and lacerated me, filling my heart with unaccountable agony. This was the expression on the faces of the young men carrying the shrine—an expression of the most obscene and undisguised drunkenness in the world. . . .

  CHAPTER TWO

  For over a year now I had been suffering the anguish of a child provided with a curious toy. I was twelve years old.

  This toy increased in volume at every opportunity and hinted that, rightly used, it would be quite a delightful thing. But directions for its use were nowhere written, and so, when the toy took the initiative in wanting to play with me, my bewilderment was inevitable. Occasionally my humiliation and impatience became so aggravated that I even thought I wanted to destroy the toy. In the end, however, there was nothing for it but to surrender on my side to the insubordinate toy, with its expression of sweet secrecy, and wait passively to see what would happen.

  Then I took it into my head to try listening more dispassionately to the toy's wishes. When I did so, I found that soon it already possessed its own definite and unmistakable tastes, or what might be called its own mechanism. The nature of its tastes had become bound up, not only with my childhood memories, but, one after another, with such things as the naked bodies of young men seen on a summer's seashore, the swimming teams seen at Meiji Pool, the swarthy young man a cousin of mine married, and the valiant heroes of many an adventure story. Until then I had mistakenly thought I was only poetically attracted to such things, thus confusing the nature of my sensual desires with a system of esthetics.

  The toy likewise raised its head toward death and pools of blood and muscular flesh. Gory dueling scenes on the frontispieces of adventury-story magazines, which I borrowed in secret from the student houseboy; pictures of young samurai cutting open their bellies, or of soldiers struck by bullets, clenching their teeth and dripping blood from between hands that clutched at khaki-clad breasts ; photographs of hard-muscled sumo wrestlers, of the third rank and not yet grown too fat—at the sight of such things the toy would promptly lift its inquisitive head. (If the adjective "inquisitive" be inappropriate, it can be changed to read either "erotic" or "lustful.")

  Coming to understand these matters, I began to seek physical pleasure consciously, intentionally. The principles of selection and arrangement were brought into operation. When the composition of a picture in an adventure-story magazine was found defective, I would first copy it with crayons, and then correct it to my satisfaction. Then it would become the picture of a young circus performer dropping to his knees and clutching at a bullet wound in his breast; or a tight-rope walker who had fallen and split his skull open and now lay dying, half his face covered with blood. Often at school I would become so preoccupied with the fear that these bloodthirsty pictures, which I had hidden away in a drawer of the bookcase at home, might be discovered during my absence that I would not even hear the teacher's voice. I knew I should have destroyed them promptly after drawing them, but my toy was so attached to them that I found it absolutely impossible to do so.

  In this manner my insubordinate toy passed many futile days and months without achieving even its secondary goal—what I shall call my "bad habit"—let alone its ultimate, its primary goal.

  Various changes had been taking place about me. The family had divided into two and, leaving the house where I was born, had moved into separate houses, not over half a block apart on the same street. My grandparents and I were in one house, while my parents and my sister and brother were in the other. During this time my father was sent abroad on official business, toured several countries in Europe, and returned home. Before long my parents moved again. My father had finally reached the belated resolve to reclaim me back into his own household and took this opportunity to do so. I underwent a scene of parting with my grandmother —"modern melodrama" my father called it—and thus finally went to live with my parents. Now I was separated from the house where my grandparents lived by several stops on the government railway and the municipal streetcar line. Day and night my grandmother clasped my photograph to her bosom, weeping, and was instantly seized with a paroxysm if I violated the treaty stipulation that I should come to spend one night each week with her. At the age of twelve I had a true-love sweetheart, aged sixty.

  Presently my father was transferred to Osaka. He went alone, the rest of us remaining behind in Tokyo.

  One day, taking advantage of having been kept from school by a slight cold, I got out some volumes of art reproductions, which my father had brought back as souvenirs of his foreign travels, and took them to my room, where I looked through them attentively. I was particularly enchanted by the photogravures of Grecian sculptures in the guidebooks to various Italian museums. When it came to depictions of the nude, among the many reproductions of masterpieces, it was these plates, in black and white, that best suited my fancy.This was probably due to the simple fact that, even in reproductions, the sculpture seemed the more lifelike.

  This was the first time I had seen these books. My miserly father, hating to have the pictures touched and stained by children's hands, and also fearing—how mistakenly!—that I might be attracted by the nude women of the masterpieces, had kept the books hidden away deep in the recesses of a cupboard. And for my part, until that day I had never dreamed they could be more interesting than the pictures in adventure-story magazines.

  I began turning a page toward the end of a volume. Suddenly there came into view from one corner of the next page a picture that I had to believe had been lying in wait there for me, for my sake.

  It was a reproduction of Guido Reni's "St. Sebastian," which hangs in the collection of the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa.

  The black and slightly oblique trunk of the tree of execution was seen against a Titian-like background of gloomy forest and evening sky, somber and distant. A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk of the tree. His crossed hands were raised high, and the thongs binding his wrists were tied to the tree. No other bonds were visible, and the only covering for the youth's nakedness was a coarse white cloth knotted loosely about his loins.

  I guessed it must be a depiction of a Christian martyrdom. But, as it was painted by an esthetic painter of the eclectic school that derived from the Renaissance, even this painting of the death of a Christian saint has about it a strong flavor of paganism. The youth's body —it might even be likened to that of Antinous, beloved of Hadrian, whose beauty has been so often immortalized in sculpture—shows none of the traces of missionary hardship or decrepitude that are to be found in depictions of other saints; instead, there is only the springtime of youth, only light and beauty and pleasure.

  His white and matchless nudity gleams against a background of dusk. His muscular arms, the arms of a praetorian guard accustomed to bending of bow and wielding of sword, are raised at a graceful angle, and his bound wrists are crossed directly over his head. His face is turned slightly upward and his eyes are open wide, gazing with profound tranquility upon the glory of heaven. It is not pain that hovers about his straining chest, his tense abdomen, his slightly contorted hips, but some flicker of
melancholy pleasure like music. Were it not for the arrows with their shafts deeply sunk into his left armpit and right side, he would seem more a Roman athlete resting from fatigue, leaning against a dusky tree in a garden.

  The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy. But there is no flowing blood, nor yet the host of arrows seen in other pictures of Sebastian's martyrdom. Instead, two lone arrows cast their tranquil and graceful shadows upon the smoothness of his skin, like the shadows of a bough falling upon a marble stairway.

  But all these interpretations and observations came later.

  That day, the instant I looked upon the picture, my entire being trembled with some pagan joy. My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in wrath. The monstrous part of me that was on the point of bursting awaited my use of it with unprecedented ardor, upbraiding me for my ignorance, panting indignantly.

  My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught. I felt a secret, radiant something rise swift-footed to the attack from inside me.