Confessions of a Mask

by Yukio Mishima

  "Novels you mean? Well, I've read Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles, and then—"

  I broke in. "You haven't read?" I said, naming a novel then in vogue.

  "That one with the naked woman?" she said. "Huh?" I said, surprised.

  "It's disgusting—that picture on the cover."

  Two years before she would never have been able to look one in the face and say "naked woman." The mere fact that she had used these words, trivial though they were, brought with it a painfully clear realization that Sonoko was no longer the virginal girl I had known.

  She came to a halt as we reached a corner and said: "This where I turn off. My house is at the end of this street."

  Feeling a pain at the thought of parting from her, I lowered my eyes and looked at the bucket in her hand. It was filled with konnyaku, a jostling, gelatinous mass bathed in sunlight, looking like a woman's skin tanned by the sun at the seashore.

  "Konnyaku will spoil beyond eating if you leave it in the sun too long," I said.

  "That's right," Sonoko answered in a loud joking voice. "it's a big responsibility.""Well, good-bye."

  "Yes, good luck." She began walking away.

  I called her back and asked if she ever went to visit her family. She replied easily that she happened to be going there the following Saturday.

  Then we parted, and for the first time I noticed an important thing—today it seemed as though she had forgiven me. Why had she forgiven me? Could there be any greater insult than such magnanimity? But maybe, I told myself, my pain might be healed if I were to be clearly insulted by her just once more.

  Saturday seemed long in coming. Kusano was attending the university in Kyoto, but as luck would have it he was home for a visit. Saturday afternoon I went to see him.

  As we were talking I heard a sound that made me doubt my own ears. It was the sound of a piano. The playing was no longer immature, but full bodied, full of reverberations that seemed to flow and spread freely, replete, sparkling.

  "Who's that playing?" I asked.

  "It's Sonoko. She's visiting here today," Kusano answered, knowing nothing.

  With a painful flash, all the old memories came back, one by one.

  I was depressed by the fact that, out of his good will for me, Kusano had never said a word about my indirect refusal of Sonoko. I wanted some proof that she had been at least slightly hurt at that time; I wanted to discover some unhappiness in her corresponding to my own. But once again "time" had intervened, growing as rank as weeds between Kusano and Sonoko and myself, and any frank expression of feelings, uncolored by pride or vanity or prudence, had become impossible for us.

  The piano stopped. Kusano had the wit to ask if he should get her to join us. He went out and soon returned with her. The three of us started gossiping, with much meaningless laughter, about acquaintances at the Foreign Office, where Sonoko's husband was working.

  Presently Kusano's mother called him and he went to her. Sonoko and I were left alone in the room together, just as we had been on that day two years earlier.

  Sonoko told me with no little childish pride how it had been her husband's efforts that had saved the Kusano house from requisitioning by the Occupation Forces. From the beginning I had always found her boastfulness attractive. An overly modest woman is without charm, as is a haughty woman also, and there was an innocent, likeable quality of womanliness about Sonoko's quiet and restrained bragging.

  "By the way," she said, still speaking quietly, "there's something I've been wanting and wanting to ask you but haven't been able to ask before. I've kept wondering why we didn't marry. After I got the answer that you sent my brother I simply couldn't understand anything at all about the world. Every day I did nothing but wonder and wonder. Even yet I can't understand why we couldn't have married. . . ."

  She turned her face away from me slightly, with an appearance of anger, showing her slightly blushing cheeks, and then went on speaking as though reading aloud:

  "Was it because you disliked me?"

  Her question sounded as straightforward as a simple business inquiry, and my heart responded to it with a sort of violent and pathetic joy. Then in a flash this vicious joy turned into pain. It was a truly subtle pain. A certain amount of the pain was genuine, but beyond this there was also the agony of hurt pride at discovering that the revival of the "trivial" events of two years before could make my heart ache so. I had wanted to be liberated from her. But I found it as impossible as ever.

  "You still don't know anything at all about the world," I told her. "That's one of your good points, your ignorance of worldly things. But listen, the world is not made just so two people who are in love can always get married. That's exactly what I wrote your brother. Besides"—I felt that I was about to say a womanish thing and wanted to shut up, but could not stop—"besides, nowhere in that letter did I say definitely that marriage was out of the question. As I said, it was only because I was not yet twenty-one, and was still a student, and it was too sudden. And then while I was hesitating you went and got married in such a hurry."

  "Well, as for me, I have no reason to regret it. My husband loves me and I also love him. I'm truly happy. There's nothing more I could ask for. And yet—maybe it's bad to think so, but sometimes—I wonder what's the best way to say it—Sometimes in my imagination I see another me leading a different life. Then I become confused and feel I'm about to say something I oughtn't say. I feel I'm about to think something I oughtn't think, and become so upset I can't stand it. My husband is a great help at such times. He treats me gently, -just like a child."

  "It may sound conceited, but shall I tell you what I think? At those times you're hating me. You're hating me violently."

  Sonoko did not even know the meaning of hating.

  Gently, seriously, she pretended to pout and said: "You're welcome to think whatever you like.”“Can't we meet once more, just we two alone?"

  Abruptly, I found myself pleading with her as though something were rushing me onward. "There wouldn't be anything to be ashamed of. I'd be satisfied lust to look at your face. I no longer have a right to say anything. Even if you don't say a word it'll be all right. Even only thirty minutes will be all right."

  "Then what would be the use of meeting? And anyway, if we met once, wouldn't you just say let's meet again? At my house my mother-in-law is strict and every time I go out she even asks where I'm going and when I'll be back. To meet with such uncomfortable feelings—but if—" Her speech faltered an instant. "Well, there's something called the human heart, and no one knows what makes it beat."

  "That's right. But you're as much a Miss Dainty as ever, aren't you? Why can't you think about things more cheerfully and casually?" (What lies I was telling!)

  "That's all right for a man. But not for a married woman. You'll understand all right when you have a wife. I don't think it's possible to be too careful about such things."

  "Now you're sounding like somebody's elder sister giving advice. . . ."

  Just then Kusano returned and our conversation was broken off.

  Even during our conversation my mind had been filled with an endless swarm of doubts. I swore by God that my mood of wanting to meet Sonoko was a genuine one. But in it there was clearly not the slightest sexual desire. So then, what kind of desire was it that made me want to meet her so? Might it not be only self-deception again, this passion that so obviously was not sexual desire? In the first place, can there be such a thing as love that has no basis whatsoever in sexual desire? Isn't that a clear and obvious absurdity?

  But then another thought occurred to me: if we grant that human passion has the power to rise above all absurdity, how can it be argued that it does not have the power to rise above the absurdities of passion itself?

  Since that decisive night I had cleverly managed to avoid women. Since that night I had not touched the lips of a single woman—much less the ephebic lips that so genuinely called to my desire—not even if I found myself in a situation in which it was r
ude not to do so. . . . So then, the advent of summer threatened my solitude even more than the spring had done. And full summer lashed the galloping horses of my sexual desire. It consumed and tortured my flesh. To endure it I had to resort to my bad habit sometimes as much as five times in one day.

  My ignorance had been enlightened by reading the theories of Hirschfeld, who explains inversion as a perfectly simple biological phenomenon. I realized now that even that decisive night had been a natural consequence and that there was no cause for shame. My imaginative lust for the ephebe, although never once turning to pederasty, had taken a well-defined form, which the investigators have shown to be almost equally prevalent. It is said that the same impulse as this I was feeling is not uncommon among Germans. The diary of Count von Platen provides a most representative example. Winckelmann also was the same. And, turning to Renaissance Italy, it is clear that Michelangelo was the possessor of impulses in the same category as mine.But this does not mean that my emotional life was set to rights by my intellectual understanding of these scientific theories. It was difficult for inversion to become an actuality in my case simply because in me the impulse went no further than sexuality, went no further than being a dark impulse crying out in vain, struggling helplessly, blindly. Even the excitement aroused in me by an attractive ephebe stopped short at mere sexual desire. To give a superficial explanation, my soul still belonged to Sonoko. Although it does not mean that I accept the concept outright, I can conveniently use the medieval diagram of the struggle between soul and body to make my meaning clear: in me there was a cleavage, pure and simple, between spirit and flesh. To me Sonoko appeared the incarnation of my love of normality itself, my love of things of the spirit, my love of everlasting things.

  But such a simple explanation does not dispose of the problem. The emotions have no liking for fixed order. Instead, like tiny particles in the ether, they fly about freely, float haphazardly, and prefer to be forever wavering. . . .

  A year passed before Sonoko and I awakened. I had been successful in the civil-service examinations, graduated from the university, and had an administrative job in one of the ministries. During that year we managed to meet several times, now as though by chance, now under the pretext of some trivial business, but only every two or three months and even then only for a daylight hour or so—meeting without anything happening, and parting the same way. That was all. No one could have censured my behavior. Nor did Sonoko venture beyond trifling reminiscences or conversations making modest fun of our present situation. Our connection could never have been called an intrigue, and one would even have hesitated to call it a relationship. Even when we met we would be thinking of nothing but how to make each parting a clean-cut break.

  I was satisfied with this. More than that, I was thankful to something for the mystic richness of this desultory relationship. There was not a day in which I did not think of Sonoko, and each time we met I experienced a tranquil happiness. It seemed as though the delicate tension and pure symmetry of our rendezvous extended to every corner of my life and imposed on it a clear though exceedingly fragile discipline.

  But a year passed and we awakened. We discovered that we were living in a nursery no longer but were inhabitants of an adult edifice where any door that opened only part way had to be repaired promptly. Our relationship was just such a door, one that could never be opened beyond a certain point, and it was sure to require repairing sooner or later. Beyond this there was also the fact that adults cannot endure the monotonous games that delight children. The many meetings which we examined one by one were nothing but stereotyped things, each of like size and thickness—a pack of playing cards whose edges matched to a fraction of an inch when stacked one above the other.Moreover, from this relationship I was cunningly extracting an immoral delight, which only I could understand. My immorality was a subtle one, going even a step beyond the ordinary vices of the world, and like an exquisite poison, it was pure corruption. Since immorality was the very basis and first principle of my nature I found an all the more truly fiendish flavor of secret sin in my virtuous behavior, in this blameless relationship with a woman, in my honorable conduct, and in being regarded as a man of lofty principles.

  We had stretched out our arms to each other and supported something in our joined hands, but this thing we were holding was like a sort of gas that exists when you believe in its existence and disappears when you doubt. The task of supporting it seems simple at first glance, but actually requires an ultimate refinement of calculation and a consummate skill. I had called an artificial "normality" into being in that space within our hands, and had induced Sonoko to take part in the dangerous operation of trying to sustain an almost chimerical "love" from moment to moment. She seemed to have become party to the plot without realizing it. This lack of realization on her part was probably the only reason her assistance was so effective.

  But the time came when even Sonoko became dimly aware of the indomitable force of this nameless danger, this danger that differed completely from the- usual roughhewn dangers of the world in having a precise, measurable density.

  One day in late summer I met Sonoko, who had just returned from a mountain resort, at a restaurant called the Coq d'Or. As soon as we met I told her about my having resigned from the civil service.

  "What'll you do now?"

  "Oh, let the future take care of itself."

  "Well, it is a surprise." She did not have anything else to say about the matter. This sort of etiquette of noninterference was already well established between us.

  Sonoko had been tanned by the mountain sun, and her skin had lost its radiant whiteness there above her breasts. The large pearl in her ring had become gloomily clouded from the heat. The sound of her high voice, always a blend of sadness and indolence, was most appropriate to the season.

  For a time we again carried on a meaningless, endlessly revolving, insincere conversation. At times it seemed nothing but a great skidding through empty air. It gave us a feeling that we were overhearing a conversation being carried on by two strangers. It was a feeling like that felt at the borderline between sleeping and waking, when one's impatient efforts to go back to sleep without awakening from a happy dream only make the recapture of the dream all the more impossible. I discovered how our hearts, as though infected with some malignant virus, were being eaten away by the uneasy awakening that was brazenly intruding upon our dream, by the futile pleasure of our dream seen at the threshold of consciousness. As though at a signal previously agreed upon, the disease had attacked both our hearts almost simultaneously. We reacted with a show of gaiety. As though each of us feared what the other might say at any moment, we capped joke upon joke.

  Even though her sun tan introduced a tiny note of discord, there beneath her fashionable upswept coiffure the same tranquillity as always was overflowing from her softly moist eyes, her youthful eyebrows, her slightly heavyish lips. Whenever other women passed our table they always noticed Sonoko. A waiter was moving about the room, carrying a silver tray on which iced desserts were arranged on a large block of ice carved in the shape of a swan. Sonoko was softly jingling the clasp of her plastic handbag, and a ring glittered on her finger.

  "Are you bored with this?" I asked.

  "Don't say that."

  Her tone of voice sounded full of a weariness that was somehow strange. It could even have been called charming. She had turned her head and was looking out the window at the summer street. When she spoke again her words came slowly:

  "Sometimes I become confused. I wonder why we're meeting like this. And yet in the end I always meet you again."

  "Probably because at least it's not a meaningless minus. Even if it certainly is a meaningless plus."

  "But I have something called a husband, remember. Even if the plus is meaningless, there oughtn't to be room for any plus at all.""It's tiresome arithmetic, isn't it?"

  I perceived that Sonoko had finally arrived at the doorway to doubt. She had begun to feel that the d
oor that opened only halfway could not be left as it was. Perhaps by now this sort of sensitivity to disorder had come to absorb the largest part of the feelings Sonoko and I shared in common. I too was still far from the age when one is willing to accept things the way they are.

  And yet it seemed as though I had suddenly been confronted with clear proof that my nameless fear had infected Sonoko unawares and, moreover, that the sole possession we shared in common was the sign of fear. Sonoko again gave voice to this fear. I tried not to listen. But my mouth made flippant replies.

  "If we go on like this," she said, "what do you think will happen? Won't we be driven into some corner we can't escape from?"

  "I think that I respect you and that there's nothing to be ashamed of before anybody. Why is it wrong for two friends to meet?"

  "That's the way it's been up to now. It's been just like you say. I think you've acted very honorably. But I don't know about the future. Even though we don't do the slightest thing to be ashamed of, I still somehow have terrible dreams. Then I feel as though God is punishing me for future sins."

  The solid sound of this word future made me shudder. "If we keep on like this," she continued, "I'm afraid that one day something will happen that will hurt us both. And after we're hurt won't it be too late? Because isn't what we're doing the same as playing with fire?”“What kind of thing do you mean when you say playing with fire?"

  "Oh, all sorts of things."

  "But you can't regard what we're doing as playing with fire. It's just like playing with water."

  She did not smile. During the occasional pauses in our conversation she had been pressing her lips together fiercely.

  "Lately I've begun to think I'm an awful woman. I can't think of myself as anything but a bad woman with a filthy soul. Even in my dreams I oughtn't think about anyone except my husband. I've made up my mind to be baptized this fall."

  I guessed that in this idle sort of confession, due partly to an intoxication with the sound of her own words, Sonoko was approaching the feminine paradox of meaning the opposite of what she said and was unconsciously wanting to say what must not be said. As for me, I had the right neither to rejoice at this nor to lament it. In the first place, how could I, who felt not the slightest jealousy of her husband, have exercised these rights either by claiming or refusing them? I was silent. The sight of my own hands, white and frail at the height of summer, filled me with despair.