Confessions of a Mask (15 page)

But how disagreeable these thoughts were for me! I much preferred to think of myself instead as a person who had been forsaken even by Death. In the same way that a doctor, performing surgery upon some internal organ, delicately focuses all his faculties upon the operation and still remains impersonal, I delighted in picturing the curious agonies of a person who wanted to die but had been refused by Death. The degree of mental pleasure I thus obtained seemed almost immoral.

The university and the airplane factory had had a difference of opinion, and we had all been withdrawn from the factory at the end of February. The plan was for us to attend lectures again during March and then be mobilized to a different factory in April. But toward the end of February almost a thousand enemy fighter-planes struck, and it became obvious that the lectures scheduled for March would be held in name only.

Thus it came about that we were given a month's vacation at the height of the war. It was like being given a gift of damp fireworks. Nevertheless, I would much rather have received the damp fireworks than some sort of stupidly practical gift that would have been more typical of the university, say a box of soda crackers. It was the sheer extravagance of the thing that pleased me so. The mere fact that it was absolutely useless made it an enormous gift in those days.

A few days after I recovered from my cold, Kusano's mother telephoned. She said that visits to Kusano's regiment near M City were to be allowed for the first time, on March the tenth, and asked if I wouldn't like to go with them to visit Kusano.

I accepted the invitation, and a short time later went to the Kusano house to make arrangements. In those days the hours between dusk and 8 P.M. were regarded as the safest time of day. When I arrived, the family had just finished supper.

As Kusano's father was dead, the family now consisted solely of his mother, grandmother, and three sisters. I was invited to join them around the footwarmer where they were sitting. The mother introduced me to the sister whom I had heard playing the piano that time.

Her name was Sonoko.

Because there was a well-known pianist with the same name, I made a slightly caustic joke concerning the fact that I had previously overheard her practicing the piano. The eighteen-year-old girl blushed in the dim light of the blackout-lamp and said nothing. She was wearing a red-leather jacket.

On the morning of March the ninth I waited for the Kusano family on the platform of a station near their house. The row of shops across the tracks had been condemned by the government to make way for a firebreak, and the work of demolition, already begun, could be seen in detail. The activity tore through the clear air of early spring with fresh, crashing noises. Among the demolished structures there could be seen newly exposed surfaces of naked wood, dazzling to the eye.

The mornings were still cold. For several days not a single air-raid warning had sounded. During that interval the air had become more and more brightly burnished and had been stretched so thin that it now seemed in danger of bursting. The atmosphere was like the tautly tuned string of a samisen, ready to reverberate piercingly at the first pluck. It reminded one of those few moments of silence, rich in emptiness, that are fulfilled in a burst of music. Even the cold sunlight that fell upon the deserted platform was quivering with something like a premonition of music.

Then Sonoko appeared, wearing a blue coat, coming down the opposite stairway with her two sisters. She was holding her smaller sister by the hand, watching her carefully and coming down the steps one at a time. The other sister, then about fourteen or fifteen, seemed impatient at this slow rate of progress, but instead of gradually outstripping the other two she was deliberately coming zigzag down the empty staircase.

Sonoko seemed not to have noticed me yet. From where I stood I could see her clearly. In all my life my heart had never before been so touched by the sight of beauty in a woman. My breast throbbed; I felt purified.

The reader who has followed me this far will probably refuse to believe anything I am saying. He will doubt me because there will seem to be no difference between my artificial and unrequited love of Nukada's sister and the throbbing of the breast of which I am now speaking, because there will seem to be no apparent reason why on this occasion alone I should not have subjected my emotions to that merciless analysis I had used in the former case. If the reader persists in such doubts, then the act of writing has become a useless thing from the beginning: he will think that I say a thing simply because I want to say it so, without any regard for truth, and anything I say will be all right so long as I make my story consistent. Nevertheless, it is a very accurate part of my memory that proclaims a fundamental point of difference between the emotions I had had before this and those that the sight of Sonoko now aroused in me. The difference was that now I had a feeling of remorse.

When she was almost at the bottom of the steps Sonoko noticed me and smiled. Her fresh cheeks were flushed from the cold. Her eyes—their large black pupils and rather heavy lids gave her a slightly sleepy appearance—were glistening as though trying to speak. Then, entrusting the hand of her baby sister to the second sister, she came running down the platform toward me with a graceful motion like the trembling of light.

What I saw come running toward me was not a girl, not that personification of flesh which I had been forcibly picturing to myself since boyhood, but something like the herald of the morning tidings. Had it not been for this fact, I could have met her with my usual fraudulent hopes. But, to my perplexity, my instinct was forced to recognize a different quality in Sonoko alone. This gave me a profound, bashful feeling of being unworthy of Sonoko, and yet it was not a feeling of servile inferiority. Each second while I watched Sonoko approach, I was attacked by unendurable grief. It was a feeling such as I had never had before. Grief seemed to undermine and set tottering the foundations of my existence. Until this moment the feeling with which I had regarded women had been an artificial mixture of childlike curiosity and feigned sexual desire. My heart had never before been swayed, and at first glance, by such a deep and unexplainable grief, a grief moreover that was no part of my masquerade.

I was conscious that the feeling was one of remorse. But had I committed a sin for which I should be remorseful? Although a patent contradiction, is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed? Had the sight of her called out to me and awakened this remorse? Or was my feeling possibly nothing but a presentiment of sin? . . . Sonoko was already standing demurely before me. She had already begun her bow, but finding me lost in thought, she now began it over again, very precisely. "Have I kept you waiting? Mother and Grandmother—" She had used the honorific forms in referring to these members of her own family, and now she stopped and blushed, suddenly aware how inappropriate her words were when addressed to someone outside the family circle. "Well, they hadn't finished getting ready yet and will be a little late. So wait a little—" She stopped again, and then corrected herself modestly: "So if you will please wait a little and if they still haven't come, we'll go on ahead to the train station—that is, if you like." Having at last managed to blurt out this long speech in faltering, formal language, she gave a big sigh of relief.

Sonoko had a large build and was tall enough to reach to my forehead. Her body was unusually graceful and well proportioned, and she had beautiful legs. Her round, childlike face, on which she used no make-up, seemed the reflection of an immaculate and unadorned soul. Her lips were slightly chapped and seemed all the redder for it.

We exchanged a few awkward words. Even though I detested myself in the role, I tried with all my might to appear lighthearted and gay, to show myself as a young man abounding in wit.

Any number of elevated trains stopped beside us with shrieking, grating noises, and then departed. The press of passengers getting on and off became heavier and heavier. Each time a train came up we were cut off from the stream of sunlight that was bathing us in its pleasant warmth. And each time a train moved away I would be terrified anew by the gentleness of the sunlight that was let fall again upon my cheeks.

I took it for an ill-omened sign that the richly blessed sunshine should fall upon me thus, that my heart should be thus filled with moments that left nothing to be desired. Surely in a few minutes a sudden air raid or some equally calamitous event would come and kill us where we stood. Surely, I thought, we do not deserve even a little happiness. Or perhaps we had acquired the bad habit of regarding even a little happiness as a big favor, which we would have to repay. This was precisely the feeling I got from being face to face with Sonoko in this way. And Sonoko also seemed to have been overcome with the same feeling.

We waited a long time, but as Sonoko's mother and grandmother did not come, we finally took one of the elevated trains and went on ahead to U Station.

In the bustle at the station we were hailed by a Mr. Ohba who was going to visit his son in the same regiment Kusano was in. This middle-aged banker, who disdained the khaki civilian uniform then in official favor and clung stubbornly to Homburg hat and sack coat, was accompanied by a daughter whom both Sonoko and I knew slightly. Why did I rejoice in the fact that this girl was far from beautiful when compared with Sonoko? What was this feeling? In spite of Sonoko's naive frolicking, taking place there before my eyes—she was grasping crossed hands with the Ohba girl and making a great show of intimacy—I realized that Sonoko was endowed with the bright magnanimity that is the prerogative of beauty and that this made her appear to be an adult several years older than she actually was.

When we boarded the train it was empty. As though by chance Sonoko and I took seats at a window, facing each other.Counting the maid who had accompanied them, there were three persons in Mr. Ohba's party. And our party, which had finally been completed, consisted of six. As the two groups made a total of nine, we were one too many to occupy two sets of seats across the aisle from each other.

I had made this quick calculation without even being aware of it. Could Sonoko have been doing the same? At any rate, when we sat down with a plump opposite each other we exchanged mischievous smiles.

In view of the unwieldly number of our combined party, the others tacitly consented when Sonoko and I formed this separate little island for ourselves. As a matter of etiquette Sonoko's grandmother and mother had to sit facing the Ohba father and daughter. Sonoko's younger sister immediately chose a window seat across the aisle, from which she could both see her mother's face and look out the window. The third sister followed her, and their seat became a playground, with the Ohba maid in charge of the two pert girls. Sonoko and I were isolated from all the others by the back of a time-worn seat.

The talkative Mr. Ohba took control of the conversation even before the train left the station. His low-voiced, womanish garrulity left his hearers nothing to do but to agree with him. Even the young-spirited grandmother, who was the talkative representative of the Kusano family, was struck speechless with wonder.Both she and the mother could say nothing but "Yes, yes," and were fully occupied with the task of laughing at important point after important point in Mr. Ohba's monologue. As for the Ohba girl, not a single word passed her lips.

Presently the train began to move. When we were clear of the station the sunlight streamed through the dirty glass of the windows; it fell upon the battered window sill beside which Sonoko and I sat, and spilled over into our laps. Both of us were silent, listening to Mr. Ohba's prattle from the next seat. Now and then a smile flitted across Sonoko's lips; her amusement gradually infected me. Whenever our glances met, Sonoko would assume a sparkling, mischievous, carefree look of listening to the adjacent voice and would avoid my eyes.

". . . And when I die I intend to do so dressed exactly like this. Dying in civilian uniform and leggings, that would be no sort of death, would it? And I won't let my daughter wear slacks either. Isn't it my duty as a father to see that she dies dressed like a woman?"

"Yes, yes."

"By the way, please let me know when you want to evacuate your things from the city. It must be difficult in a household without a man's help. Whatever it is, please let me know."

"You're too kind."

"We've been able to buy a warehouse at T Spa and are sending the belongings of all our bank clerks there. I can assure you your things would be safe there. Anything you want to send is all right, your piano or anything."

"You're too kind."

"By the way, it's lucky the commander of your son's unit seems to be a good man. I hear my son's commander takes a rake-off from the food brought during visitor's day. Why, it's just the sort of thing you'd expect of those people across the sea. They say the commander always has stomach cramps after visitor's day."

"My, my. . . ."

A smile was again pushing at Sonoko's lips, and she seemed restless. Finally she took a library edition out of the bag she carried. I was a little disappointed, but showed an interest in the title of the book.

"What's that you're reading?" I asked.

She showed me the back of the open book, smiling as she held it up like a fan before her face. The title read
Tale of the Water-Spirit
and was followed, in parentheses, by the original German title,
Undine.