Confessions of a Mask (14 page)

I was remembering the strange impression I had received from this word destiny only a short time before. After the graduation ceremony at higher school, I had gone in an automobile with the old admiral-principal to pay a formal call of gratitude at the Palace. As we drove along, this cheerless old man, with mucous clotted in the corners of his eyes, had criticized my decision not to volunteer as a special cadet but simply await conscription as a common soldier. He had emphasized that, with my physique, I would never be able to endure the rigors of life in the ranks.

"But I've made up my mind."

"You say that because you don't realize what it means. But then the day for volunteering has already passed. So there's nothing to do about it now. It's your
destiny."
He used the English word, mispronouncing it in the old-fashioned way.

"Huh?" I asked.

"Destiny.
It's your
destiny."

He repeated himself in a monotone, using that indifferent, shy tone of voice characteristic of old men who are on their guard against being taken for fussy grandmothers.

During previous visits at Kusano's I must have seen this sister who was playing the piano. But Kusano's family was very strait-laced, not at all like the easygoing Nukada family, and whenever any of Kusano's friends came calling, the three sisters would immediately disappear from sight, leaving only their bashful smiles behind them.

As Kusano's enlistment drew nearer and nearer we visited each other with increasing frequency and were reluctant to part. The experience of hearing that piano had given me a completely wooden manner where that sister was concerned. Hearing it had been like eavesdropping on some secret of hers, and ever since I had somehow become unable to look her directly in the eye or speak to her. When she occasionally brought in the tea, I would keep my eyes lowered and see nothing but her nimble legs and feet moving lightly across the floor. I was completely carried away by the beauty of her legs, perhaps because I had not yet become accustomed to seeing city women wear the bloomer-like trousers of farm women or the slacks that had become the fashion for those perilous times. . . .

And yet it would be a mistake to leave the impression that her legs aroused any sexual excitement in me. As said before, I was completely lacking in any feeling of sexual desire for the opposite sex. This is well proved by the fact that I had never had the slightest wish to see a woman's naked body. For all that, I would begin to imagine seriously that I was in love with a girl, and the spiteful fatigue of which I have spoken would begin to clog my mind; and then next I would find delight in regarding myself as a person ruled by reason and would satisfy my vainglorious desire to appear an adult by likening my frigid and changeable emotions to those of a man who has grown weary from a surfeit of women. Such mental gyrations had become automatic with me, as though I were one of those candy machines that go to work and send a caramel sliding out the moment a coin is inserted.

I had decided I could love a girl without feeling any desire whatsoever. This was probably the most foolhardy undertaking since the beginning of human history. Without being aware of it myself, I was undertaking to be—please forgive my natural inclination toward hyperbole—a Copernicus in the theory of love. In doing so I had obviously arrived unwittingly at nothing more than a belief in the platonic concept of love.Although probably seeming to contradict what I have said earlier, I believed in this platonic concept honestly, at full face value, purely. In any case was it not purity itself rather than the concept in which I was believing? Was it not purity to which I had sworn allegiance? But more of this later.

If at times I seemed not to believe in platonic love, this too could be blamed on my brain, so apt to prefer the concept of carnal love, which was lacking in my heart, and on that fatigue produced by my artificiality, so apt to accompany any satisfaction of my craze to appear to be an adult. In short, blame it on my unrest.

The last year of the war came and I reached the age of twenty. Early in the year all the students at my university were sent to work at the N airplane factory, near the city of M. Eighty percent of the students became factory hands, while the frail students, who formed the remaining twenty percent, were given some sort of clerical jobs. I fell into the latter category. And yet at the time of my physical examination the year before, I had received the classification of 2(b). Having thus been declared eligible for military service, I had the constant worry that my summons would come tomorrow, if not today.

The airplane factory, located in a desolate area seething with dust, was so huge that it took thirty minutes simply to walk across it from one end to the other, and it hummed with the labor of several thousand workers. I was one of them, bearing the designation of Temporary Employee 953, with Identification No. 4409.

This great factory operated upon a mysterious system of production costs: taking no account of the economic dictum that capital investment should produce a return, it was dedicated to a monstrous nothingness. No wonder then that each morning the workers had to recite a mystic oath. I have never seen such a strange factory. In it all the techniques of modern science and management, together with the exact and rational thinking of many superior brains, were dedicated to a single end—Death. Producing the Zero-model combat plane used by the suicide squadrons, this great factory resembled a secret cult that operated thunderously—groaning, shrieking, roaring. I did not see how such a colossal organization could exist without some religious grandiloquence. And it did in fact possess religious grandeur, even to the way the priestly directors fattened their own stomachs.

From time to time the sirens of the air-raid signals would announce the hour for this perverted religion to celebrate its black mass.

Then the office would begin to stir. There was no radio in the room, so we had no way of knowing what was happening. Someone, speaking in a broad country accent, would say: "Wonder what's up?" About this time a young girl from the reception desk in the superintendent's office would come with some such report as: "Several formations of enemy planes sighted." Before long the strident voices of loud-speakers would order the girl students and the grade-school children to take shelter. Persons in charge of rescue work would walk about distributing red tags bearing the legend "Bleeding stopped: hour minute ." In case someone was wounded, one of these tags was to be filled in and hung about his neck, showing the time at which a tourniquet had been applied. About ten minutes after the sirens had sounded the loud-speakers would announce: "All employees take shelter."

Grasping files of important papers in their arms, the office workers would hurry to deposit them in the underground vault where essential records were stored. Then they would rush outdoors and join the swarm of laborers running across the square, all wearing air-raid helmets or padded hoods. The crowd would be streaming toward the main gate.

Outside the gate there was a desolate, bare, yellow field. Some seven or eight hundred meters beyond it, numerous shelters had been excavated in a pine grove on a gentle slope. Heading for these shelters, two separate streams of the silent, impatient, blind mob would rush through the dust—rushing toward what at any rate was not Death, no matter if it was only a small cave of easily collapsible red earth, at any rate it was not Death.I went home on my occasional off days, and there one night at eleven o'clock I received my draft notice. It was a telegram ordering me to report to a certain unit on February the fifteenth.

At my father's suggestion, I had taken my physical examination, not at Tokyo, but at the headquarters of the regiment located near the place where my family maintained its legal residence, in H Prefecture of the Osaka-Kyoto region. My father's theory was that my weak physique would attract more attention in a rural area than in the city, where such weakness was no rarity, and that as a result I would probably not be drafted. As a matter of fact, I had provided the examining officials with cause for an outbreak of laughter when I could not lift—not even as far as my chest—the bale of rice that the farm boys were easily lifting above their heads ten times. And still, in the end I had been classified 2(b).

So now I was summoned—to join a rough rural unit. My mother wept sorrowfully, and even my father seemed no little dejected. As for me, hero though I fancied myself, the sight of the summons aroused no enthusiasm in me; but on the other hand, there was my hope of dying an easy death. All in all, I had the feeling that everything was as it should be.

A cold that I had caught at the factory became much worse as I was going on an interisland steamer to join my unit. By the time I reached the home of close family friends in the village of our legal residence—we had not owned a single bit of land there since my grandfather's bankruptcy—I had such a violent fever that I was unable to stand up. Thanks, however, to the careful nursing I received in that house and especially to the efficacy of the vast quantity of febrifuge I took, I was finally able to make my way through the barracks gate, amidst a spirited send-off given me by the family friends.

My fever, which had only been checked by the medicines, now returned. During the physical examination that preceded final enlistment I had to stand around waiting stark naked, like a wild beast, and I sneezed constantly. The stripling of an army doctor who examined me mistook the wheezing of my bronchial tubes for a chest rattle, and then my haphazard answers concerning my medical history further confirmed him in his error. Hence I was given a blood test, the results of which, influenced by the high fever of my cold, led to a mistaken diagnosis of incipient tuberculosis. I was ordered home the same day as unfit for service.

Once I had put the barracks gate behind me, I broke into a run down the bleak and wintry slope that descended to the village. Just as at the airplane factory, my legs carried me running toward something that in any case was not Death—whatever it was, it was not Death. . . .

On the train that night, shrinking from the wind that blew in through a broken window glass, I suffered with fever chills and a headache. Where shall I go now? I asked myself. Thanks to my father's inherent inability to make a final decision about anything, my family still remained unevacuated from our Tokyo house. Shall I go there, to that house where everyone is cowering with suspense? To that city hemming the house in with its dark uneasiness? Into the midst of those crowds where all the people have eyes like cattle and seem always to be wanting to ask each other: "Are you all right? are you all right?" Or to the dormitory of the airplane factory, filled with nothing but the spiritless faces of tubercular university students?

Loosened by the pressure of my back, the wooden planks of the seat against which I leaned were shifting with the vibrations of the train. From time to time I closed my eyes and pictured a scene in which my entire family was annihilated in an air raid that took place while I was visiting them. The mere thought filled me with inexpressible disgust. Nothing gave me such a strange feeling of repugnance as the thought of a connection between everyday life and death. Doesn't even a cat hide itself when death approaches, so that no one may see its dying? Just the thought that I might see the cruel deaths of my family, and that they might see mine, made a retching nausea rise in my chest. The thought of Death's bringing a family to such a pass, of how mother and father and sons and daughters would be overtaken by Death and would share in common the sensation of dying, of the glances they would exchange with one another—to me all this seemed nothing but an obscene travesty on scenes of perfect family happiness and harmony.

What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity. . . .

If such were the case, wasn't the army ideal for my purpose? Why had I looked so frank as I lied to the army doctor? Why had I said that I'd been having a slight fever for over half a year, that my shoulder was painfully stiff, that I spit blood, that even last night I had been soaked by a night sweat? (This latter happened to be the truth, but small wonder considering the number of aspirin I had taken.) Why when sentenced to return home the same day had I felt the pressure of a smile come pushing so persistently at my lips that I had difficulty in concealing it? Why had I run so when I was through the barracks gate? Hadn't my hopes been blasted? What was the matter that I hadn't hung my head and trudged away with heavy feet?

I realized vividly that my future life would never attain heights of glory sufficient to justify my having escaped death in the army, and hence I could not understand the source of the power which had made me run so rapidly away from the gate of the regiment. Did it mean that I wanted to live after all? And that completely automatic reaction which always made me dash so breathlessly for an air-raid shelter—what was this but a desire to live?

Then suddenly my other voice spoke up within me, telling me that never even once had I truly wanted to die. At these words my sense of shame overflowed the dam behind which it had been confined. It was a painful admission to make, but at that moment I knew I had been lying to myself when I said it was for the sake of death that I wanted to enter the army. At that moment I realized I had been secretly hoping that the army would provide me at last with an opportunity for gratifying those strange sensual desires of mine. And I knew that, far from desiring death, the only thing that had made it at all possible for me to look forward to army life was the firm conviction—arising out of a belief in the primitive art of magic, common to all men —that I alone could never die. . . .