Confessions of a Mask (16 page)

We could hear someone getting up from the seat behind us. It was Sonoko's mother. I thought she was trying to escape Mr. Ohba's chatter by going to quiet her youngest daughter, who was leaping and jumping on the seat opposite. But as it turned out, she also had a further purpose. She came bringing the noisy girl and her pert older sister to our seat, saying:"Come now, please let these noisy children join you."

Sonoko's mother was beautiful and graceful. At times the smile that accompanied her gentle way of speaking seemed almost pathetic. As she spoke this time, her smile again impressed me as being rather sad and uneasy. Leaving the two children sitting with us, the mother returned to her seat, while Sonoko and I again snatched a glance at each other. I took a notebook out of my breast pocket and, tearing out a sheet, wrote on it with a pencil :

"Your mother is being careful!"

"What's this?" said Sonoko, cocking her head coyly as I handed her the note. Her hair smelled like a child's. When she had finished reading the words on the piece of paper she blushed to the nape of her neck and cast her eyes down.

"Isn't that right?" I said.

"Oh, I—"

Our eyes met again and we understood each other. I could feel that my cheeks also were bursting into flame.

"Sister, what's that?" The smallest sister reached out her hand.

In a flash Sonoko hid the piece of paper. The other sister was old enough to seem to understand the meaning behind our actions. She became quite angry and pouted. One could tell this from the exaggerated way she began scolding her small sister.Rather than dampening our spirits, this incident only made it all the easier for Sonoko and me to talk. She spoke about her school, some novels she had been reading, and about her brother. For my part, I soon carried the conversation to general matters, taking the first step in the art of seduction. As we kept talking together so familiarly, ignoring the two sisters, they soon returned to their original seats. They were obviously not very efficient spies, but the mother, again giving her troubled smile, immediately made them come back and sit with us.

By the time we had all gotten settled at an inn in M City, near Kusano's unit, it was already time for bed. One room had been allotted to Mr. Ohba and me.

When we were alone together Mr. Ohba began talking freely, without any attempt to disguise his opposition to further continuation of the war. Such antiwar views were already being whispered whenever people got together, even in the spring of 1945, and I was sick of hearing them. Mr. Ohba babbled on intolerably in his low voice, saying that the big ceramics company in which he had investments was already preparing for peace; that, under the pretext of repairing war damage, they were planning large-scale production of ceramic wares for household use; and that it seemed we were making peace offers through the Soviet Union.

As for me, there was something I much more wanted to think about by myself. Finally the light was turned off and Mr. Ohba's face, which had looked strangely swollen without his glasses, disappeared into the shadows. His innocent sighs slowly pervaded all the bedding two or three times and then his deep breathing showed he was asleep. Feeling the fresh cover, which had been wrapped about the pillow, scratching against my flushed cheeks, I became lost in thought.

Added to the gloomy irritation that always threatened me when I was alone, the grief that had so shaken the foundations of my existence this morning when I had seen Sonoko was now revived still more poignantly within my heart. It proclaimed that every word I had spoken and every act I had performed that day had been false: having discovered that it was less painful to decide a thing was false in its entirety than to torture myself with doubts as to which part might be true and which false, I had already become gradually familiar with this way of deliberately unmasking my falseness to myself. And even as I lay thinking, my tenacious uneasiness concerning what I called the basic condition of being a human being, concerning what I called the positive human psychology, did nothing but lead me around in endless circles of introspection.

How would I feel if I were another boy? How would I feel if I were a normal person? These questions obsessed me. They tortured me, instantly and utterly destroying even the one splinter of happiness I had thought I possessed for sure.My "act" has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. It's no longer an act. My knowledge that I am masquerading as a normal person has even corroded whatever of normality I originally possessed, ending by making me tell myself over and over again that it too was nothing but a pretense at normality. To say it another way, I'm becoming the sort of person who can't believe in anything except the counterfeit. But if this is true, then my feeling of wanting to regard Sonoko's attraction for me as sheer counterfeit might be nothing but a mask to hide my true desire of believing myself genuinely in love with her. So maybe I am becoming the sort of person who is incapable of acting contrary to his true nature, and maybe I do really love her. . . .

With such thoughts as these weaving circles inside my head I was finally almost on the point of going to sleep when suddenly, borne on the night air, there came that wailing sound which was always ominous but still somehow fascinating.

"Isn't that the alarm?" the banker said immediately. I was startled by the lightness of his sleep.

"I wonder," I answered vaguely.

The sirens continued sounding faintly for a long time.

As the hours for visiting the regiment began early in the morning, we all arose at six o'clock.

Sonoko was in the washroom when I went in. After exchanging good mornings with her, I said:"The sirens blew last night, didn't they?"

"No," she replied with a straight face.

When we returned to our adjoining rooms, where th
_e
connecting door had been thrown open, her answer to my question provided her sisters with good material for teasing her :

"Sister was the only one who didn't hear the sirens. My, how funny!" the smaller sister said, following the other's lead.

"Me, I woke up right away, and heard Sister's loud snoring."

"That's right. I heard her too. She was snoring so loud that I could hardly hear the sirens."

"That's what you say, but you can't prove it." Because I was present, Sonoko was blushing deeply and putting up a bold front. "If you tell such lies, you'll be sorry later."

I had only one sister. Ever since childhood I had longed for a lively family with many sisters. To my ears this half-joking, noisy quarrel among the sisters sounded as a most splendid and genuine reflection of worldly happiness. It also reawakened my anguish.

The sole subject of conversation during breakfast was last night's air-raid warning, which was the first since early March. Since there had been only the warning signal and the signal of an actual attack had not sounded after all, everyone calmed down and concluded that nothing much could have happened. As for me, it made no difference either way. I told myself that even if my house had burned to the ground while I was away, even if my mother, father, brother, and sister had all been killed, that would be quite all right with me.

At the time this did not seem a particularly cold-blooded thought. In those days our powers of imagination had been made the poorer by the fact that the most fantastic event which we could imagine might actually happen any moment as a matter of course. It was far easier to imagine the annihilation of one's entire family than to picture things that now belonged to a distant, impossible past, say an array of bottles of imported liquors in a Ginza shopwindow, or the sight of neon signs flickering in the night sky over the Ginza. As a result our imagination confined itself to easier paths. Imagination like this, which follows the path of least resistance, has no connection with coldness of heart, no matter how cruel it may appear. It is nothing but a product of a lazy, tepid mind.

In contrast to the tragic role in which I had cast myself during the night, when we left the inn the next morning I instantly wanted to play the lighthearted cavalier and carry Sonoko's bag. This too was with the deliberate intention of producing an effect within sight of everyone. If I insist on carrying her bag for her, I told myself, she is sure to protest, simply out of her natural feeling of reserve toward me; but her mother and grandmother will think we must already be on affectionate terms and will interpret her hesitation as fear of what they might be thinking; and as a result she herself will be tricked in turn into a clear awareness of a feeling
_o
f sufficient intimacy with me to make her fear her mother and grandmother.

My little ruse was successful. She remained by my side, as though the entrusting of her bag to my hands had given her a reasonable excuse for doing so. Even though the Ohba girl was a friend of the same age, Sonoko took no notice of her and talked only with me. I glanced at Sonoko from time to time with a strange feeling. Her voice, so sweet and pure that it made me feel somehow sad, was blown to pieces by the dust-laden wind of early spring, which came blowing directly in our faces.

I raised and lowered my shoulder, testing the weight of her bag. Its weight scarcely justified the feeling that was growing deeply within my heart, a feeling like the guilty conscience of a fugitive from justice.

As we reached the outskirts of town Sonoko's grandmother began complaining of the distance. The banker retraced his steps to the station, where he must have used some clever trick in order to rent the two cars—so scarce in those days—with which he presently returned.

"Hey! it's been a long time."

I shook Kusano's hand and was as startled as if I had grasped the shell of a spiny lobster."Your hand—what's the matter with it?"

Kusano laughed. "You're surprised, aren't you?"

His body had already acquired that somehow dispirited pitifulness which is the special characteristic of a
_n
ew recruit. He stretched his hands out for me to see, holding them side by side. They were badly chapped, with hardened dirt and oil ground into their cracks and scratches and chilblains until they did indeed resemble the shell of a lobster. They were also damp and cold.

His hands frightened me in the same way that reality did. I felt an instinctive terror of those hands. What I actually feared was something within me that these relentless hands had revealed, something for which they accused and condemned me. It was a fear that I could hide nothing from them, that all deception would be unavailing before them. Instantly Sonoko took on a new meaning for me—she was my sole armor, the sole coat of mail for my frail conscience in its struggle against these hands. Right or wrong, by fair means or foul, I told myself, you simply
must
love her. This feeling became, as it were, a moral obligation for me, lying even heavier in the bottom of my heart than did my sense of sin.

Knowing nothing of all this, Kusano said innocently : "You don't need a washrag for a bath when you've got hands like these to rub with."

A tiny sigh escaped from his mother's lips. In my position I could not help feeling like a shameless, uninvited guest. Sonoko happened to glance up at me. I hung my head. Absurd as it was, I had a feeling as though I must ask her forgiveness for something.

"Let's go outside," said Kusano, pushing roughly at the backs of his grandmother and mother in his embarrassment.

Each family group was seated in a circle on the dead turf of the bleak barracks courtyard, treating its cadet to a feast. I regret to say that no matter how I looked I could find no beauty in the scene.

Soon we too had formed a circle of our own, with Kusano sitting cross-legged in the middle of it. He was cramming some Western-style candies into his mouth and could only roll his eyes when he wanted to call my attention to the sky in the direction of Tokyo. From the hilly region where we were I could look across sear fields to the basin in which M City lay extended. And beyond it I could look between a gap formed by the meeting of two low mountain ranges to what Kusano said was the sky over Tokyo. The chilly clouds of early spring were spreading their shadows over that distant region.

"Last night the sky was bright red there. It was something awful. There's no telling whether your house is still standing or not. There's never been an air raid before that made all the sky there turn so red. . . ."

No one spoke. Kusano went on chattering importantly, complaining that unless his grandmother and mother evacuated the family to the country as soon as possible he'd never be able to get a full night's sleep.

"I agree with you," the grandmother said spiritedly. "We'll evacuate right away. I promise you." From her obi she extracted a small notebook and a silver pencil no larger than a toothpick and began writing something painstakingly.

On the return journey the train was filled with gloom. Even Mr. Ohba, whom we had met by appointment at the station, seemed a different person and held his tongue. Everyone had the air of having been taken prisoner by the feeling commonly called "love of one's own flesh and blood"; it was as though the emotions one normally keeps hidden within had been turned inside out and were smarting painfully with rawness. They had met their sons, brothers, grandsons, with a showing of naked hearts—it was all they had to show —and now, on top of this, they probably realized it had all been nothing but a futile outpouring of blood before each other. As for me, I was still pursued by the vision of those pitiful hands. It was almost dusk, almost time for lights to be turned on, when our train reached the station on the outskirts of Tokyo where we were to transfer to the elevated.