Vita Sexualis by Ōgai Mori Read Free Book Online Page B

about myself, and I've never been able to feel sufficiently proud of myself. Furthermore, handicapped by being younger, I was always overwhelmed by the tyranny of my fellow students, no matter what I tried to do, so my behavior became one of submitting openly while secretly resisting. Clausewitz, the military strategist, once said passive resistance ought to be the tactic resorted to by weak nations. Congenitally I was a person who was to be disappointed in love, a weak creature molded by circumstance.
    When I consider the question of sexual desire, my fellow students in those days consisted of the "mashers," who were dandies and affected elegance of dress and manner, and the "queers," who were more manly and casual in their dress. The mashers belonged to that group which enjoyed looking at those strange drawings I've already mentioned. The keeper of the lending library at that time would gather up a pile of books and walk around carrying them on his back like a pannier. At the base of the pack he carried was a box with an attached drawer. It was in this drawer that those odd drawings were always kept. In addition to borrowing such pictures from the circulating library, some students owned their own collections of erotic sketchbooks. The queers never looked at these books. The one thing they could hardly wait to devour, each waiting his turn, was a handwritten manuscript about a boy named Sangoro Hirata. It was said that at private schools in Kagoshima, this story was to be the very first one read on the first day of the new year. It described the history of a love affair between Sangoro, who wore his hair in bangs, and an older man, his hair in the forelock style, shaved except for a small portion above each ear. It was about their jealousy and rivalry in love. I believe the closing chapter finds the two men, one after the other, dead on the battlefield. The manuscript also had illustrations, but they were not particularly indecent.
    The mashers were superior in number for the simple reason that the queers were made up mostly of men from Kyushu. Because there were few men from Kagoshima in the college preparatory schools at that time, Kyushu students were composed mainly of people from Saga and Kumamoto. They were joined by some students from Yamaguchi. The rest of the students were mashers who came from places as far as those extending over the whole of Chugoku and up to the Tohoku districts.
    And yet it seemed as if the queers had the real characteristics of students and that the mashers went about more or less with a guilty conscience. Although the student outfit of the skirt of duck cloth and the dark blue socks was the basic costume of the queers, the mashers imitated it. And in spite of the fact that the mashers put on the same clothing, they did not tuck up their kimono sleeves as high as the queers did. The mashers moderately perked up their shoulders. Even when they walked along with canes, these were thinner. When a masher went out to celebrate the holidays, he secretly wore a silk kimono and white socks.
    And where do you think these feet in white socks were headed? Toward those archery "shops" at Shiba and Asakusa and the houses of ill-fame in Nezu, Yoshiwara, and Shinagawa. When the mashers went out in their usual dark blue socks, they often frequented the bathhouses. Not that the queers failed to go to the public baths, but they never went upstairs. The mashers counted on taking that trip upstairs. Without fail women would be there waiting. In those days some students even promised to marry such bathhouse women. It goes without saying that these women were creatures one step lower than boardinghouse daughters.
    I was victimized by the queers, for the simple reason that in our dormitory at the time my classmate Shonosuke Hanyu and I were the youngest members. Hanyu was the son of an oculist in Tokyo. His complexion was white, his eyes bright and clear, his lips pure red, his body supple. My skin was dark, my body