Confessions of a Mask

by Yukio Mishima

  "What? Oh, in just a minute." The cook answered without looking up from his work, as though he too were out of humor. He was chopping up some sort of salad greens. On the kitchen table there was nothing but a thick plank about three feet wide and almost twelve feet long.

  A sound of laughter came down the stone stairwell. I looked up and saw a second cook come down the stairs leading this young muscular classmate of mine by the arm. The boy was wearing slacks and a dark-blue polo shirt that left his chest bare.

  "Ah, it's B, isn't it?" I said to him offhand.

  When he reached the bottom of the stairs he stood nonchalantly, not taking his hands from his pockets. Turning to me, he began to laugh jokingly. Just at that moment one of the cooks sprang upon him from the rear and got a strangle hold around his neck.

  The boy struggled violently.As I watched his piteous struggles, I told myself : "It's a judo hold—yes, that's it, it's some judo hold, but what's the name of it? That's right, strangle him again he couldn't be really dead yet—he's just fainted—"

  Suddenly the boy's head hung limp within the crook of the cook's massive arm. Then the cook picked the boy up carelessly in his arms and dropped him on the kitchen table. The other cook went to the table and began working over the boy with business-like hands; he stripped off the boy's polo shirt, removed his wrist watch, took off his trousers, and had him stark naked in an instant.

  The naked youth lay where he had fallen, face up on the table, his lips slightly parted. I gave those lips a lingering kiss.

  "How shall it be—face up or face down?" the cook asked me.

  "Face up, I suppose," I answered, thinking to myself that in that position the boy's chest would be visible, looking like an amber-colored shield.

  The other cook took a large foreign-style platter down from a rack and brought it to the table. It was exactly the size for holding a human body and was curiously made, with five small holes cut through the rim on either side.

  "Heave ho!" the two cooks said in unison, lifting the unconscious boy and laying him face-up on the platter. Then, whistling merrily, they passed a cord through the holes on both sides of the dish, lashing the boy's body down securely. Their nimble hands moved expertly at the task. They arranged some large salad leaves prettily around the naked body and placed an unusually large steel carving knife and fork on the platter.

  "Heave ho!" they said again, lifting the platter onto their shoulders. I opened the door into the dining-room for them.

  We were greeted by a welcoming silence. The platter was put down, filling that blank space on the table, which had been glittering blankly in the light. Returning to my seat, I lifted the large knife and fork from the platter and said:

  "Where shall I begin?"

  There was no answer. One could sense rather than see many faces craning forward toward the platter.

  "This is probably a good spot to begin on." I thrust the fork upright into the heart. A fountain of blood struck me full in the face. Holding the knife in my right hand, I began carving the flesh of the breast, gently, thinly at first. . . .

  Even after my anemia was cured, my bad habit only grew the worse. The youngest of my teachers was the geometry instructor. I never tired of looking at his face during class. He had a complexion that had been burned by the seaside sun, a sonorous voice like a fisherman's. I had heard that he had formerly been a swimming coach.One winter day in geometry class I was copying into my notebook from the blackboard, keeping one hand in my pants pocket. Presently my eyes strayed unconsciously from my work and began following the instructor. He was getting on and off the platform while, in his youthful voice, he repeated the explanation of a difficult problem.

  Pangs of sex had already been intruding upon my everyday life. Now, before my eyes, the young instructor gradually changed into a vision of a statue of the nude Hercules. He had been cleaning the blackboard, holding an eraser in his left hand and chalk in the other; then, still erasing, he stretched out his right hand and began writing an equation on the board. As he did so the wrinkles that gathered in the material at the back of his coat were, to my bemused eyes, the muscle-furrows of "Hercules Drawing the Bow." And at last I had committed my bad habit there in the midst of schoolwork. . . .

  The signal for recess sounded. I hung my dazed head and followed the others onto the playground. The boy with whom I was then in love—this also was an unrequited love, another student who had failed his examinations—came up to me and asked:

  "Hey, you, didn't you finally go to Katakura's house yesterday? How was it?"

  Katakura had been a quiet classmate of ours who had died of tuberculosis. His funeral services had ended two days before. As I had heard from a friend that his face was completely changed in death and looked like the face of an evil spirit, I had waited to make my call of condolence until I was sure his body had been cremated.

  I could think of no reply to my friend's sudden question and said curtly :

  "There was nothing to it. But then he was already ashes." Suddenly I remembered a message which would flatter him. "Oh, yes, and Katakura's mother told me over and over again to be sure and give you her regards." I giggled meaninglessly. "She asked me to tell you by all means to come to see her, because she'll be lonesome now."

  "Aw, go on!" And suddenly a blow on the chest took me by surprise. Although delivered with full force, his blow was still charged with friendliness. His cheeks had become crimson with embarrassment, as though he were still a child. I saw that his eyes were shining with an unaccustomed intimacy, seeming to regard me as his accomplice in something.

  "Go on!" he said again, "haven't you become dirty minded! You and your way of laughing!"

  For a moment I did not grasp his meaning. I smiled lamely and for a full thirty seconds failed to understand him. Then I caught on: Katakura's mother was a widow, still young, with a lovely slender figure.

  I felt miserable. It was not so much because my slowness in comprehending could only have arisen from stupidity, but rather because the incident had revealed such an obvious difference between his focus of interest and my own. I felt the emptiness of the gulf that separated us, and was filled with mortification at having been surprised by such a belated discovery of something I ought naturally to have foreseen. I had given him the message from Katakura's mother without stopping to consider what his reaction would be, simply knowing unconsciously that here I had a chance to curry favor with him. Now I was appalled by the ugly sight of my callowness, as ugly as the streaks of dried tears on a child's face.

  On this occasion I was too exhausted to ask myself the question I had asked so many thousands of times before : Why is it wrong for me to stay just the way I am now? I was fed up with myself and, for all my chastity, was ruining my body. I had thought that with "earnestness" (what a touching thought!) I too could escape from my childish state. It was as though I had not yet realized that what I was now disgusted with was my true self, was clearly a part of my true life; it was as though I believed instead that these had been years of dreaming, from which I would now turn to "real life."

  I was feeling the urge to begin living. To begin living my true life? Even if it was to be pure masquerade and not my life at all, still the time had come when I must make a start, must drag my heavy feet forward.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Everyone says that life is a stage. But most people do not seem to become obsessed with the idea, at any rate not as early as I did. By the end of childhood I was already firmly convinced that it was so and that I was to play my part on the stage without once ever revealing my true self. Since my conviction was accompanied by an extremely naïve lack of experience, even though there was a lingering suspicion somewhere in my mind that I might be mistaken, I was still practically certain that all men embarked on life in just this way. I believed optimistically that once the performance was finished the curtain would fall and the audience would never see the actor without his make-up. My assumption that I would die young was also a factor in th
is belief. In the course of time, however, this optimism or, better said, this daydream was to suffer a cruel disillusionment.By way of precaution I should add that it is not the usual matter of "self-consciousness" to which I am referring here. Instead it is simply a matter of sex, of the role by means of which one attempts to conceal, often even from himself, the true nature of his sexual desires. For the present I do not intend to refer to anything beyond that.

  Now it may well be that the so-called backward student is the product of heredity. I nevertheless wanted to receive regular promotions along with the rest of my generation in the school of life, and I hit upon a makeshift way of doing so. This device consisted, in brief, of copying my friends' answers during examinations, without any understanding of what I was writing, and handing in my paper with studied innocence. There are times when such a method, more stupid and shameless than cunning, reaps an outward success, and the pupil is promoted. In the grade to which he has advanced, however, he is presumed to have mastered the materials of the lower grades, and as the lessons progress in difficulty, he becomes completely lost. Even though he hears what the teacher says, he understands not a word of it. At this point only two courses are open to him: either he goes to the dogs, or else he bluffs his way through by pretending with all his might that he does understand. The choice between these two courses will be determined by the nature, not the quantity, of his weakness and boldness. Either course requires the same amount of boldness, or of weakness, and either requires a kind of lyrical and imperishable craving for laziness.

  One day I joined a group of classmates who were walking along outside the school walls, noisily discussing the rumor that one of our friends, who was not present, had fallen in love with the conductress of a bus on which he went back and forth to school. Before long the gossip turned to a theoretical argument as to what one could find to like about bus conductresses.

  At this point I spoke up, deliberately adopting a cold-blooded tone and speaking brusquely, as though flinging out the words :

  "It's their uniforms! Because they fit so tight to their bodies."

  Needless to say, I had never felt the slightest such sensual attraction toward bus conductresses as my words suggested. I had spoken by analogy—a perfect analogy, in which I saw the same sort of tight uniform on a different body—and also out of a desire, then very strong in me, to pose as a mature, cynical sensualist about everything.

  The other boys reacted immediately. They were all of that type known as "honor students," of unimpeachable deportment, and—as was so often the case at my school—correspondingly prudish. Their shocked disapproval of my words was clear from their half-joking remarks:"Ugh! You know all about it, don't you?"

  "Nobody'd dream of such a thing unless he'd been doing a lot he shouldn't."

  "Hey, you're really awful, aren't you?"

  Encountering such naïve, excited criticism, I feared my medicine had been a bit too effective. I reflected that I could probably have shown my profundity off to better advantage if, even in saying the same thing, I had used a little less sophisticated and startling way of speaking, that I ought to have been more reserved.

  When a boy of fourteen or fifteen discovers that he is more given to introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty, that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration, and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork.

  My uneasiness was the same as that of which Stephan Zweig speaks when he says that "what we call evil is the instability inherent in all mankind which drives man outside and beyond himself toward an unfathomable something, exactly as though Nature had bequeathed to our souls an ineradicable portion of instability from her store of ancient chaos." This legacy of unrest produces strain and "attempts to resolve itself back into super-human and super-sensory elements." So then, it was this same instability that drove me on, while the other boys, having no need for self-awareness, could dispense with introspection.

  Bus conductresses possessed not the slightest sexual attraction for me, and yet I saw that my words, spoken deliberately both because of the analogy and the other considerations I have mentioned, had not only actually shocked my friends and made them blush with embarrassment, but had also played upon their adolescent susceptibility to suggestive ideas and produced an obscure sexual excitement in them. At this sight, a spiteful feeling of superiority naturally arose in me.

  But my feelings did not stop there. Now it was my own turn to be deceived. I sobered up from my feeling of superiority, but distortedly, one-sidedly. The process was like this:

  One part of my feeling of superiority became conceit, became the intoxication of considering myself a step ahead of mankind. Then, when this intoxicated part became sober more swiftly than the rest, I committed the rash error of judging everything with my sobered consciousness, not taking into consideration the fact that part of me was still drunk. Therefore the intoxicating thought of "I am ahead of others" was amended to the diffidence of "No, I too am a human being like the rest." Because of the miscalculation, this in turn was amplified into "And also I am a human being like them in every respect." The part of me that was not yet sober made such an amplification possible and supported it. And at last I arrived at the conceited conclusion that "Everyone is like me." The way of thinking that I have called a steppingstone to aberration came powerfully into play in reaching this conclusion. . . .

  Thus I had succeeded in hypnotizing myself. And from that time on, ninety percent of my life came to be governed by this autohypnosis, this irrational, idiotic, counterfeit hypnosis, which even I definitely knew to be counterfeit. It may well be wondered if there has ever been a person more given to credulity.

  Will the reader understand? There was a very simple reason why I had been able to use even the slightest of sensual words when speaking of bus conductresses. And this was the very point I had failed to perceive. . . . It was truly a simple reason—nothing more than that, where women were concerned, I was devoid of that shyness which other boys possess innately.

  In order to escape the charge that I am simply crediting the person I was in those days with powers of judgment I did not possess until today, let me cite here a passage from something I wrote at the age of fifteen:

  . . . Ryotaro lost no time in making himself a part of this new circle of friends. He believed confidently that he could conquer his reasonless melancholy and ennui by being—or pretending to be—even a little cheerful. Credulity, the acme of belief, had left him in a state of incandescent repose. Whenever he joined in some mean jest or prank he always told himself: "Now I'm not blue, now I'm not bored." He styled this "forgetting troubles."

  Most people are always doubtful as to whether they are happy or not, cheerful or not. This is the normal state of happiness, as doubt is a most natural thing.

  Ryotaro alone declares “I am happy," and convinces himself that it is true.

  Because of this, people are inclined to believe in his so-called "unquestionable happiness." And at last a faint but real Ming is confined in a powerful machine of falsehood. The machine sets to work mightily. And people do not even notice that he is a mass of "self-deceit." . . .

  ". . . The machine sets to work mightily. . . ." Was it not actually working mightily in my case?

  It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.

  So then, the time had come when somehow or other I had to make a start in life. The supply of knowledge with which I was equipped for the journey consisted of littl
e more than the many novels I had read, a sex encyclopedia for home use, the pornography that passed from hand to hand among the students, and an abundance of naïve dirty jokes heard from friends on nights of field exercises. Finally, even more important than all these, there was also the burning curiosity that would be my faithful traveling companion. To begin my journey I had to take a posture of departure at the gate, and for this the determination to be "a machine of falsehood" was sufficient.

  I studied many novels minutely, investigating how boys my age felt about life, how they spoke to themselves. I was cut off from dormitory life ; I took no part in school athletics ; moreover, my school was full of little snobs who, once outgrowing that meaningless game of Dirty which I have described, rarely had anything to do with vulgar matters; and to top it all, I was extremely bashful. All of these facts taken together made it difficult for me to know the psychology of any of my schoolmates. As a result, my only recourse was to infer from theoretical rules what "a boy my age" would feel when he was all alone.

  The period called adolescence—I had my full share of it so far as burning curiosity was concerned—seemed to have come to pay us a sick visit. Having attained puberty, the boys seemed to do nothing but always think immoderately about women, exude pimples, and write sugary verses out of heads that were in a constant dizzy reel. They had read, first this study of sex, which emphasized the harmful effects of masturbation, and then that, which spoke reassuringly of no great harmful effects; as a result, they too appeared to have finally become enthusiastic practitioners. Here was another point, I told myself, where I am completely identical with them. In my state of autohypnosis I overlooked the fact that, in spite of the identical nature of the physical action, there was a profound difference so far as its mental objects were concerned.

  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.