Confessions of a Mask (19 page)

I was the only one who did not have genuine lung trouble. I was pretending instead that I had a bad heart. In those days one had to have either medals or illness.

Suddenly we were brought to a halt by the sound of someone walking nearby in the grass under the cherry trees. That person also seemed to have been startled by our approach. It was a young man wearing soiled work clothes and wooden clogs. One could tell he was young only from the color of the close-cropped hair that could be seen beneath his field cap; his muddy complexion, his sparse beard, his oil-smeared hands and feet, and his grimy neck, all indicated a wretched tiredness unsuitable to his years.

Obliquely behind the boy there stood a girl, who stared at the ground and seemed to be sulking. Her hair was slicked back in a hasty, efficient fashion, and she was wearing the ubiquitous khaki blouse. The sole thing about the couple which appeared wonderfully fresh and clean and new was the pair of bloomer-like work pants the girl was wearing.

One could easily guess that they were conscript workers in the same factory and had met here for a rendezvous, playing truant from the factory and coming for a day of flower-viewing. Hearing us, they had probably been alarmed by the thought that we might be gendarmes.

They glanced at us unpleasantly as they passed by. After that we did not feel like talking much.

Before the cherry blossoms were gone the Law Department suspended lectures again and we were sent on student mobilization to a naval arsenal a few miles from S Bay. At the same time my mother, brother, and sister evacuated to my maternal grandfather's house, on a small farm in the suburbs. Our houseboy, a middle-school student who, though small in size, acted much older than his years, remained in our Tokyo house to take care of my father. On riceless days the houseboy brayed boiled soybeans in a mortar and made a gruel, which looked like vomit, for my father and himself. He also stealthily consumed our small stock of pickled vegetables when my father was not at home.

Life at the naval arsenal was easygoing. I was assigned some part-time work in the library, and the rest of the time I was on a digging detail with a group of young Formosan laborers, digging a large lateral tunnel for the evacuation of the parts-manufacturing plant. Those little devils of twelve or thirteen were the only companions I had. They gave me lessons in Formosan and in exchange I told them fairy tales. They were confident that their Formosan gods would save them from the air raids and return them one day unharmed to their native land. Their appetites reached immoral proportions. One shrewd boy among them spirited away some rice and vegetables from under the eyes of the kitchen guard, and they made it into fried rice by cooking it in a copious amount of machine oil. I declined this feast, which seemed to have the flavor of gears.

Within less than a month my correspondence with Sonoko was on the way to becoming a very special one. In my letters I behaved with unreserved boldness. One morning I returned to my desk in the arsenal after an all-clear siren had sounded and found a letter from Sonoko awaiting me. My hands shook as I read it and my body felt as though I were slightly intoxicated. There was one line in her letter which I repeated over and over under my breath:

". . . I am longing for you. . . ."

Absence had emboldened me. Distance had given me claim to "normality." I had, so to speak, accepted "normality" as a temporary employee in the corporation of my body. A person who is separated from one by time and space takes on an abstract quality. Perhaps this was the reason why the blind devotion I felt for Sonoko and my ever-present unnatural desires of the flesh had now been fused within me into a single homogenous mass and had pinned me immobile to each succeeding instant of time as a human being without any self-contradictions.

I was free. Everyday life had become a thing of unspeakable happiness. There was a rumor that the enemy would probably make a landing soon in S Bay and that the region in which the arsenal stood would be overwhelmed. And again, even more than before, I found myself deeply immersed in a desire for death. It was in death that I had discovered my real "life's aim."

One Saturday in mid-April I received permission to take the first leave I had been granted in a long time. I went first to the house in Tokyo, planning to get some books from my bookcase for reading at the arsenal and then go on at once to spend the night at my grandfather's place in the suburbs, where my mother and the others were living. But on the way, while the train was starting and stopping in obedience to the air-raid signals, I had a sudden chill. I felt violently dizzy and a hot languor spread through my body. From frequent experience I recognized the symptoms as tonsilitis. As soon as I reached the Tokyo house I had the houseboy spread the covers and went right to bed.

Before long the animated sound of a woman's voice rose from downstairs and grated against my fevered forehead. I heard someone mount the stairs and come tripping down the corridor. Opening my eyes slightly, I saw the skirt of a large-patterned kimono.

". . . What's this? What a lazy person you are!”“Oh," I said, "hello, Chako."

"What do you mean saying just 'Oh hello' when we haven't met for almost five years?"She was the daughter of a family distantly related to us. Her name of Chieko had been twisted into Chako, and this was what we all called her. She was five years my senior. The last time I had seen her had been at her wedding. But last year her husband had died at the front, and people had begun gossiping about her, saying she was becoming strangely lighthearted. Now I saw how true the gossip was, and in the face of such animation I could not offer the usual condolences. I kept a shocked silence, thinking to myself that she'd have done better to have left off the large white artificial flowers she had in her hair.

"Today I came to see Tatchan on business," she said, calling my father by the familiar form of his name Tatsuo. "I came to ask about the evacuation of our things. Because the other day Papa and Tatchan met some place and he said he could recommend a good place for us to send the things to."

"The old man said he would be a little late coming home today. But never mind—" Seeing her too-crimson lips, I became ill at ease and broke off. Perhaps it was because of my fever, but that crimson color seemed to bore into my eyes and make my head ache violently. "But you're wearing so much—In these days how can you use so much make-up without people on the street saying something?"

"Are you already old enough to be noticing a woman's make-up? Lying down like you are, you look exactly like a baby who's just been weaned from the breast.""What a nuisance you are! Go away!"

She approached me deliberately. I did not want her to see me in my night clothes and pulled the covers up to my neck. Suddenly she stretched out her hand and laid her palm against my forehead. The icy coldness of her hand against my skin was like a stab, and yet it felt good.

"You've got fever. Did you take your temperature?”

“Exactly 103 degrees."

"What you need is an ice bag."

"There's not any ice."

"I'll see to it."

Chieko flounced gaily out of the room, her kimono sleeves flapping against each other, and went downstairs. Soon she returned and sat down in a quiet pose.

"I sent that boy for it."

"Thanks."

I was looking at the ceiling. She picked up the book at my bedside and her cool silken sleeve brushed my cheek.

Suddenly I wanted those cool sleeves. I started to ask her to put them on my forehead, but then I stopped. The room began to become twilit.

"What a slow servant," she said.

A person with fever perceives the passage of time with morbid exactness and I knew it was still too soon for Chieko to be emphasizing that he was slow. A few minutes later she spoke again:

"How slow! What can the boy be doing?"

"He's not slow I tell you," I shouted nervously.

"Oh, you poor thing, you're upset. Please close your eyes. Please don't try to outstare the ceiling with such an awful look."

I closed my eyes, and the heat of my eyelids became intense agony. Suddenly I felt something touch my forehead, and with it came a faint breath against my skin. I turned my head and gave a meaningless sigh. At that instant my unusually fevered breath became mingled with hers. My lips were covered by something heavy and greasy. Our teeth crashed together noisily. I was afraid to open my eyes and look. Then she grasped my cheeks firmly between her two cold hands.

After a moment Chieko pulled away and I partially raised myself. There we were glaring at each other in the gloom. It was common knowledge that Chieko's sisters were loose women. Now I realized clearly that she must have the same blood in her veins. But there was an inexplicable and singular feeling of affinity between the passion that was blazing in her and the fever of my illness. I sat up straight and said:

"Once more!"

In this way we continued our endless kisses until the houseboy returned. She kept saying:

"Only kissing, only kissing. . . ."

I did not know whether or not I had experienced any sexual desire during those kisses. However that may be, since what is called a first experience is a kind of sexual feeling in itself, it would probably be useless to draw a distinction in this case. It was no use to try to single out from the drunken emotions of that moment the usual sexual element of the kiss. The important thing was that I had become a "man who knows kisses." And all the time that we were embracing each other I had thought of nothing but Sonoko, exactly like a boy who is served some delicious sweet away from home and immediately wishes he could give some to his younger sister. From then on all my daydreams were focused on the idea of kissing Sonoko. This was my initial and also my most serious miscalculation.

At any rate, as I continued thinking of Sonoko, this first experience gradually became ugly in my eyes.

When Chieko called me on the telephone the next day I lied and told her I was returning immediately to the arsenal. I did not even keep our promised rendezvous.

I blinded myself to the reality of the fact that I felt unnaturally cold toward her simply because I had derived no pleasure from those kisses, and assured myself instead that they seemed ugly only because I was in love with Sonoko. This was the first time I used my love for Sonoko as a justification for my true feelings.

Sonoko and I exchanged photographs like any boy and girl in their first love affair. She wrote saying she had put mine in a locket and hung it over her breast. But the photograph she sent me was so large that it would only barely have fitted into a brief case. As I could not get it in my pocket, I carried it wrapped in a carrying-cloth. Fearing the factory might burn down with the picture in it, I took it with me whenever I went home.

One night I was on the train returning to the arsenal when the sirens suddenly sounded and the lights were put out. In a few minutes there came the signal to take shelter. I searched in the luggage-rack with groping hands, but the large bundle that I had put there had been stolen, and with it went the carrying-cloth containing Sonoko's picture. Being inherently given to superstition, from that moment I became obsessed with the idea that I must go to see Sonoko quickly.

That air raid of the night of May the twenty-fourth, as destructive as the midnight raid of March the ninth had been, brought me to a final decision. Perhaps my relationship with Sonoko required the miasmal air exhaled by this accumulation of calamities; perhaps that relationship was a sort of chemical compound that could be produced only through the agency of sulphuric acid.

We left the train and took shelter in the many caves that had been dug along a line where the foothills opened onto the plain, and from our shelter we watched the sky over Tokyo turn crimson. From time to time something would explode, throwing a reflection against the sky, and suddenly between the clouds we could see an eerie blue sky, as though it were midday. It was a sliver of blue sky appearing for an instant in the dead of night.The futile searchlights seemed more like beacons welcoming the enemy planes. They would catch the glittering wings of an enemy plane exactly in the middle of two beams that had crossed momentarily and would then beckon the plane courteously, handing it on from one baton of light to the next, each time nearer Tokyo. Nor was the antiaircraft fire very heavy in those days. The B-29's reached the skies over Tokyo in comfort.

From where we were it was unlikely that anyone could actually distinguish friend from foe in the air battles that were taking place above Tokyo. And yet a chorus of cheers would rise from the crowd of watchers whenever they spotted, against the crimson backdrop, the shadow of a plane that had been hit and was falling.

The young workmen were particularly vociferous. The sound of hand-clapping and cheering rang out from the mouths of the scattered tunnels as though in a theater. So far as the spectacle seen from this distance was concerned, it seemed to make no essential difference whether the falling plane was ours or the enemy's. Such is the nature of war. . . .

Instead of going on to the arsenal, as soon as it was light I started home. I had to walk half the length of one of the suburban railway lines, which had been put out of commission, stepping along the still-smouldering ties and crossing the bridges by means of the narrow, half-burned crosswalks. As I got closer home I discovered that nothing had escaped the fire in that whole section of town except our immediate neighborhood, and that our house was untouched. My mother, brother, and sister happened to have been staying there that night, and I found them surprisingly cheerful in spite of the night's fire. They were celebrating their escape by eating some bean jelly, which they had dug up from the place where it had been stored.