Confessions of a Mask

by Yukio Mishima

  Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication. . . .

  Some time passed, and then, with miserable feelings, I looked around the desk I was facing. A maple tree at the window was casting a bright reflection over everything—over the ink bottle, my schoolbooks and notes, the dictionary, the picture of St. Sebastian. There were cloudy-white splashes about—on the gold-imprinted title of a textbook, on a shoulder of the ink bottle, on one corner of the dictionary. Some objects were dripping lazily, leadenly, and others gleamed dully, like the eyes of a dead fish. Fortunately, a reflex motion of my hand to protect the picture had saved the book from being soiled.

  This was my first ejaculation. It was also the beginning, clumsy and completely unpremeditated, of my "bad habit."

  (It is an interesting coincidence that Hirschfeld should place "pictures of St. Sebastian" in the first rank of those kinds of art works in which the invert takes special delight. This observation of Hirschfeld's leads easily to the conjecture that in the overwhelming majority of cases of inversion, especially of congential inversion, the inverted and the sadistic impulses are inextricably entangled with each other.)

  Tradition has it that St. Sebastian was born about the middle of the third century, became a captain in the Praetorian Guard of Rome, and ended his short life of thirty-odd years in martyrdom. He is said to have died in the year 288, during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian, a self-made man who had seen much of life, was admired for his benevolence. But Maximian, the coemperor, abhorred Christianity and condemned the Numidian youth Maximilianus to death for refusing, in the name of Christian pacifism, to perform the required military service. Marcellus the Centurion was likewise executed for this same religious constancy. This, then, is the historical background against which the martyrdom of St. Sebastian becomes understandable.

  Sebastian became a secret convert to Christianity, used his position as captain in the Praetorian Guard to console the imprisoned Christians, and converted various Romans, including the mayor; when these activities became known, he was sentenced to death. He was shot with countless arrows and left for dead. But a pious widow, who came to bury him, discovered that his body was still warm, and nursed him back to life. Immediately, however, he defied the emperor, reviling the emperor's gods. This time he was beaten to death with clubs.

  The broad outlines of this legend may well be true; certainly many such martyrdoms are known to have taken place. As for the suspicion that no human being could have been restored to life after receiving so many arrow wounds, may this not be a later embellishment, a familiar use of the resurrection theme in response to mankind's demand for miracles?

  Desiring that my own rapture before the legend, before the picture, be understood more clearly as the fierce, sensual thing it was, I insert the following unfinished piece, which I wrote several years later :

  St. Sebastian—A Prose Poem

  Out of a schoolroom window once I spied a tree of middling height, swaying in the wind. As I looked, my heart began to thunder. It was a tree of startling beauty. Upon the lawn it erected an upright triangle tinged with roundness; the heavy feeling of its verdure was supported on its many branches, thrusting upward and outward with the balanced symmetry of a candelabrum; and beneath the greenery there showed a sturdy trunk, like an ebony pedestal. There it stood, that tree, perfect, exquisitely wrought, but not losing any of Nature's grace and artlessness, keeping serene silence as though it itself were its own creator. And yet at the same time it assuredly was a created thing. Maybe a musical composition. A piece of chamber music by a German master. Music giving such religious, tranquil pleasure that it could only be called sacred, filled with the solemnity and longing found in the patterns of stately wall tapestries. . . .

  And so the affinity between the shape of the tree and the sounds of music had some meaning for me. Little wonder then that when I was attacked by the two of them together, all the stronger in alliance, my indescribable, mysterious emotion should have been akin, not to lyricism, but to that sinsister intoxication found in the conjunction of religion and music.

  Suddenly I asked in my heart: "Was this not the very tree—the tree to which the young saint was bound with his hands behind him, over the trunk of which his sacred blood trickled like driblets after a rain? that Roman tree on which he writhed, ablaze in a final agony of death, with the harsh scraping of his young flesh against the bark as his final evidence of all earthly pleasure and pain?"

  In the traditional annals of martyrdom it is said that, during the time following his enthronement when Diocletian was dreaming of power as limitless as the unobstructed soaring of a bird, there was a young captain of the Praetorian Guard who was seized and charged with the crime of serving a forbidden god. He was a young captain endowed both with a lithe body reminding one of the famous Oriental slave beloved by the Emperor Hadrian and with the eyes of a conspirator, as emotionless as the sea. He was charmingly arrogant. On his helmet he wore a white lily, presented to him each morning by maidens of the town. Drooping downward gracefully along the flow of his manly hair as he rested from fierce tourneying, the lily looked exactly like the nape of a swan's neck.

  There was none who knew his place of birth, nor whence he came. But all who saw him felt this youth, with the physique of a slave and the features of a prince, to be a wayfarer who would soon be gone. To them it seemed that this Endymion was a nomad, leading his flocks; that this was the very person chosen to find a pasture darker green than other pastures.

  Again, there were maidens who cherished the firm belief that he had come from the sea. Because within his breast could be heard the roaring of the sea. Because in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it. Because his sighs were sultry like the tidal breezes of full summer, fragrant with a smell of seaweed cast up upon the shore.

  This was Sebastian, young captain in the Praetorian Guard. And was not such beauty as his a thing destined for death? Did not the robust women of Rome, their senses nurtured on the taste of good wine that shook the bones and on the savor of meat dripping red with blood, quickly scent his ill-starred fate, as yet unknown to him, and love him for that reason? His blood was coursing with an even fiercer pace than usual within his white flesh, watching for an opening from which to spurt forth when that flesh would soon be torn asunder. How could the women have failed to hear the tempestuous desires of such blood as this?

  His was not a fate to be pitied. In no way was it a pitiable fate. Rather was it proud and tragic, a fate that might even be called shining.

  When one considers well, it seems likely that many a time, even in the midst of a sweet kiss, a foretaste of the agony of death must have furrowed his brow with a fleeting shadow of pain.

  Also he must have foreseen, if dimly, that it was nothing less than martyrdom which lay in wait for him along the way; that this brand which Fate had set upon him was precisely the token of his apartness from all the ordinary men of earth.

  Now, on that particular morning, Sebastian kicked off his covers and sprang from bed at break of day, pressed with martial duties. There was a dream he had dreamt at dawn—ill-omened magpies flocking in his breast, covering his mouth with flapping wings—and not yet had it vanished from his pillow. But the crude bed in which he lay himself down each night was shedding a fragrance of seaweed cast up upon the shore; surely then such perfume as this would lure him on for many a night to come to dreams of sea and wide horizons.

  As he stood at the window and donned his creaking armor, he looked across the way at a temple surrounded by a grove, and in the skies above it he saw the sinking of the clustered stars called Mazzaroth. He looked at that magnificent pagan temple, and in the subtle arching of his eyebrows there came a look of deep contempt, akin almost to suffering and well becoming his beauty. Invoking the name of the only God, he softly chanted some awesome verses of the
Holy Scriptures. And thereupon, as though the faintness of his chant were multiplied a thousandfold and echoed with majestic resonance, he heard a mighty moaning that came, there was no doubt, from that accursed temple, from those rows of columns partitioning the starry heavens. It was a sound like that of some strange cumulation crumbling into bits, resounding against the star-encrusted dome of sky.He smiled and lowered his eyes to a point beneath his window. There was a group of maidens ascending secretly to his chambers for morning prayers, as was their custom in the darkness before each dawn. And in her hand each maiden bore a lily that still was sleeping closed. . . .

  It was well into the winter of my second year in middle school. By then we had become accustomed to long trousers and to calling each other by unadorned surnames. (In lower school we had never been permitted to leave our knees bare below our short pants, not even at the height of summer, and thus our joy at first putting on long trousers had been doubled by the knowledge that never again would we have to garter our thighs painfully. In lower school we had also had to use the formal form of address when calling each other by name.) We had become accustomed as well to the splendid custom of making fun of the teachers, to standing treat by turns at the school teashop, to jungle games in which we went galloping about the school woods, and to dormitory life. I took part in all these diversions except dormitory life. My ever-cautious parents had used the plea of my poor health to obtain for me an exception to the rule requiring every student to live in the dormitory for a year or two during his middle-school course. And once again their main reason was nothing more than to keep me from learning "bad things."

  The number of day students was small. In the final term of our second year a newcomer joined our little group. This was Omi. He had been expelled from the dormitory because of some outrageous behavior. Until then I had paid no particular attention to him, but when his expulsion placed this unmistakable brand of what is called "delinquency" upon him, I suddenly found it difficult to keep my eyes off him.

  One day a good-natured, fat friend came running up to me, giggling and showing his dimples. By these familiar signs I knew he had come into possession of some secret information.

  "But do I have something to tell you!" he said.

  I left the side of the radiator and went out into the corridor with my good-natured friend. We leaned on a window overlooking the wind-swept archery court. That window was our usual spot for telling secrets.

  "Well, Omi—" my friend began. Then he stopped, blushing as though he was too embarrassed to continue. (Once, in about the fifth year of lower school, when we had all been talking about "that," this boy had flatly contradicted us with a capital remark: "It's all a complete lie—I absolutely know people do no such thing." Another time, upon hearing that a friend's father had palsy, he warned me that palsy was contagious and that I had better not get too near that friend.)

  "Hey! what gives with Omi?" Though I was still using the polite, feminine forms of speech at home, when at school I had begun speaking crudely like the other boys.

  "This is the truth. That guy Omi—well, they say he's already had lots of girls, that's what!"

  It was easy to believe. Omi must have been several years older than the rest of us, having failed to be promoted two or three times. He surpassed us all in physique, and in the contours of his face could be seen signs of some privileged youthfulness excelling ours by far. He had an innate and lofty manner of gratuitous scorn. There was not one single thing that he found undeserving of contempt. For us there was no changing the fact that an honor student was an honor student, a teacher a teacher; that policemen or university students or office workers were precisely policemen, university students, and office workers. In the same way Omi was simply Omi, and it was impossible to escape his contemptuous eyes and scornful laughter.

  "Really?" I said. And for some unknown reason I thought instantly of Omi's deft hands cleaning the rifles we used for military training. I remembered his smart appearance as a squad leader, the special favorite only of the drillmaster and the gymnastics instructor.

  "That's why—that's the reason why—" My friend gave the lewd snicker that only middle-school boys can understand. "Well, they say his you-know-what is awful big. Next time there's a game of Dirty just you feel and see. That'll prove it."

  "Dirty" was a traditional sport at our school, always widespread among the boys during their first and second years, and as is the case with any craze for a pastime, it was more like a morbid disease than an amusement. We played it in broad daylight, in full public view. Some boy—call him A—would be standing around not keeping his wits about him. Noticing this, another boy—B—would dart up from the side and make a well-aimed grab. If his grab was successful, B would then retreat victoriously to a distance and begin hooting:

  "Oh, it's big! Oh, what a big one A has!"

  Whatever the impetus behind the game may have been, its sole objective seemed to be the sight of the comical figure cut by the victim as he dropped his schoolbooks, or anything else he might be carrying, and used both hands to protect the spot under attack. Actually, the boys discovered in the sport their own shame, brought into the open by their laughter; and then, from a secure foothold of still louder laughter, they had the satisfaction of ridiculing their common shame, as personified in this victim's blushing cheeks.

  As though by prearrangement, the victim would shout :"Oh, that B—he's dirty!"

  Then the bystanders would chime in with a chorus of assent:

  "Oh, that B—he's dirty!"

  Omi was in his element in this game. His attacks almost always ended swiftly in success, so much so as to give cause for wondering if the boys did not secretly look forward to being attacked by Omi. And, in return, his victims were constantly seeking revenge. But none of their attempts on him were ever successful. He always walked around with one hand in his pocket, and the moment he was ambushed he would instantly fashion twofold armor out of the hand in his pocket and his free hand.

  Those words of my friend were like fertilizer poured over the poisonous weed of an idea deeply planted in me. Until then I had joined in the games of Dirty with feelings as completely naive as those of the other boys. But my friend's words seemed to bring my "bad habit" —that solitary life which I had been unconsciously keeping strictly segregated—into an inseparable relationship with this game, with this my communal life. That such a connection had been established in my mind was made certain by the fact that suddenly, whether I would or no, his words "feel and see" had become charged with a special significance for me, a significance that none of my innocent friends would ever have understood.From that time on I no longer participated in games of Dirty. I was fearful of the moment when I might have to attack Omi, and even more of the moment when Omi might attack me. I was always on the lookout, and when there were indications that the game might break out—like a riot or rebellion, it could arise from the most casual event—I would get out of the way and keep my eyes glued on Omi from a safe distance. . . .

  As a matter of fact, Omi's influence had already begun to seduce us even before we were aware of it. For example, there were the socks. By those days the corrosion of an educational system that aimed at producing soldiers had already reached even our school; General Enoki's deathbed precept—"Be Simple and Manly" —had been reheated and served up ; and such things as gaudy mufflers or socks were taboo. In fact, any muffler at all was frowned upon, and the rule was that shirts be white and socks black, or at least of a solid color. It was Omi alone who never failed to wear a white-silk muffler and bold-patterned socks.

  This first defier of the taboo possessed an uncanny skill for clothing his wickedness in the fair name of revolt. Through his own experience he had discovered what a weakness boys have for the charms of revolt. In front of the drillmaster—this country bumpkin of a noncommissioned officer was a bosom friend of Omi's or, rather, it seemed, his henchman—he would deliberately take his time in wrapping his muffler about his neck and ostentatiously
turning back the lapels of his gold-buttoned overcoat in the Napoleonic manner.

  As is ever the case, however, the revolt of the blind masses did not go beyond a niggardly imitation. Hoping to escape the dangers entailed and taste only the joys of revolt, we pirated nothing from Omi's daring example except his socks. And, in this instance, I too was one of the crowd.

  Arriving at school in the morning, we would chatter boisterously in the classroom before lessons began, not sitting in the seats, but on the tops of the desks. Anyone who came wearing gaudy socks with a novel pattern would make a great show of plucking up the creases of his trousers as he sat down on a desk. At once he would be rewarded with keen-eyed cries of admiration:

  "Oh! flashy socks!"

  Our vocabulary did not contain any tribute of praise surpassing the word flashy. Omi never put in an appearance until the last moment, just before class formation ; but the instant we said flashy, a mental picture of his haughty glance would rise before us all, speaker and hearer alike.

  One morning just after a snowfall I went to school very early. The evening before, a friend had telephoned saying there was going to be a snowfight the next morning. Being by nature given to wakefulness the night before any greatly anticipated event, I had no sooner opened my eyes too early the next morning than I set out for school, heedless of the time.

  The snow scarcely reached my shoetops. And later, as I looked down at the city from a window of the elevated train, the snow scene, not yet having caught the rays of the rising sun, looked more gloomy than beautiful. The snow seemed like a dirty bandage hiding the open wounds of the city, hiding those irregular gashes of haphazard streets and tortuous alleys, courtyards and occasional plots of bare ground, that form the only beauty to be found in the panorama of our cities.

  When the train, still almost empty, was nearing the station for my school, I saw the sun rise beyond the factory district. The scene suddenly became one of joy and light. Now the columns of ominously towering smokestacks and the somber rise and fall of the monotonous slate-colored roofs cowered behind the noisy laughter of the brightly shining snow mask. It is just such a snow-covered landscape that often becomes the tragic setting for riot or revolution. And even the faces of the passers-by, suspiciously wan in the reflection of the snow, reminded me somehow of conspirators.