Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima Read Free Book Online

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