Confessions of a Mask

Confessions of a Mask By Yukio Mishima Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it never has and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Within beauty both shores meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I'm not a cultivated man, brother, but I've thought a lot about this. Truly there are mysteries without end! Too many riddles weigh man down on earth. We guess them as we can, and come out of the water dry. Beauty! I cannot bear the thought that a man of noble heart and lofty mind sets out with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What's still more awful is that the man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and in the bottom of his heart he may still be on fire, sincerely on fire, with longing for the beautiful ideal, just as in the days of his youthful innocence. Yes, man's heart is wide, too wide indeed. I'd have it narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! But what the intellect regards as shameful often appears splendidly beautiful to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, most men find their beauty in Sodom. Did you know this secret? The dreadful thing is that beauty is not only terrifying but also mysterious. God and the Devil are fighting there, and their battlefield is the heart of man. But a man's heart wants to speak only of its own ache. Listen, now I'll tell you what it says. Dostoevski, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV CHAPTER ONE For many years I claimed I could remember things seen at the time of my own birth. Whenever I said so, the grownups would laugh at first, but then, wondering if they were not being tricked, they would look distastefully at the pallid face of that unchildlike child. Sometimes I happened to say so in the presence of callers who were not close friends of the family; then my grandmother, fearing I would be taken for an idiot, would interrupt in a sharp voice and tell me to go somewhere else and play. While they were still smiling from their laughter, the grownups would usually set about trying to confute me with some sort of scientific explanation. Trying to devise explanations that a child's mind could grasp, they would always start babbling with no little dramatic zeal, saying that a baby's eyes are not yet open at birth, or that even if his eyes are completely open, a newborn baby could not possibly see things clearly enough to remember them. "Isn't that right?" they would say, shaking the small shoulder of the still- unconvinced child. But just then they would seem to be struck by the idea that they were on the point of being taken in by the child's tricks: Even if we think he's a child, we mustn't let our guard down. The little rascal is surely trying to trick us into telling him about "that," and then what is to keep him from asking, with still more childlike innocence: "Where did I come from? How was I born?" And in the end they would look me over again, silently, with a thin smile frozen on their lips, showing that for some reason, which I could never understand, their feelings had been deeply hurt. But their fears were groundless. I had not the slightest desire to ask about "that." Even if I had wanted to ask, I was so fearful of hurting adult feelings that the thought of using trickery would never have occurred to me. No matter how they explained, no matter how they laughed me away, I could not but believe I remembered my own birth. Perhaps the basis for my memory was something I had heard from someone who had been present at the time, or perhaps it was only my own willful imagination. However that may have been, there was one thing I was convinced I had seen clearly, with my own eyes. That was the brim of the basin in which I received my first bath. It was a brand-new basin, its wooden surface planed to a fresh and silken smoothness; and when I looked from inside, a ray of light was striking one spot on its brim. The wood gleamed only in that one spot and seemed to be made of gold. Tongue-tips of water lapped up waveringly as though they would lick the spot, but never quite reached it. And, whether because of a reflection or because the ray of light streamed on into the basin as well, the water beneath that spot on the brim gleamed softly, and tiny shining waves seemed to be forever bumping their heads together there. The strongest disproof of this memory was the fact that I had been born, not in the daytime, but at nine in the evening: There could have been no streaming sunlight. Even though teased with a "So then, it must have been an electric light," without any great difficulty I could still walk into the absurdity of believing that no matter if it had been midnight, a ray of sunlight had surely been striking at least that one spot on the basin. In this way the brim of that basin and its flickering light lingered on in my memory as something I had surely seen at the time of my first bath. I was born two years after the Great Earthquake. Ten years earlier, as a result of a scandal that occurred while he was serving as a colonial governor, my grandfather had taken the blame for a subordinate's misdeeds and resigned his post. (I am not speaking euphemistically: until now I have never seen such a totality of foolish trust in human beings as that my grandfather possessed.) Thereafter my family had begun sliding down an incline with a speed so happy-go-lucky that I could almost say they hummed merrily as they went— huge debts, foreclosure, sale of the family estate, and then, as financial difficulties multiplied, a morbid vanity blazing higher and higher like some evil impulse. As a result I was born in not too good a section of Tokyo, in an old rented house. It was a pretentious house on a corner, with a rather jumbled appearance and a dingy, charred feeling. It had an imposing iron gate, an entry garden, and a Western-style reception room as large as the interior of a suburban church. There were two stories on the upper slope and three on the lower, numerous gloomy rooms, and six housemaids. In this house, which creaked like an old chest of drawers, ten persons were getting up and lying down morning and evening—my grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, and the servants. At the root of the family troubles was my grandfather's passion for enterprises and my grandmother's illness and extravagant ways. My grandfather, tempted by the schemes that dubious cronies came bringing, often went traveling to distant places, dreaming dreams of gold. My grandmother came of an old family; she hated and scorned my grandfather. Hers was a narrow-minded, indomitable, and rather wildly poetic spirit. A chronic case of cranial neuralgia was indirectly but steadily gnawing away her nerves and at the same time adding an unavailing sharpness to her intellect. Who knows but what those fits of depression she continued having until her death were a memento of vices in which my grandfather had indulged in his prime? Into this house my father had brought my mother, a frail and beautiful bride. On the morning of January 4, 1925, my mother was attacked by labor pains. At nine that evening she gave birth to a small baby weighing five pounds and six ounces. On the evening of the seventh day the infant was clothed in undergarments of flannel and cream-colored silk and a kimono of silk crepe with a splashed pattern. In the presence of the assembled household my grandfather drew my name on a strip of ceremonial paper and placed it on an offertory stand in the tokonoma. My hair was blondish for a long time, but they kept putting olive oil on it until it finally turned black. My parents lived on the second floor of the house. On the pretext that it was hazardous to raise a child on an upper floor, my grandmother snatched me from my mother's arms on my forty-ninth day. My bed was placed in my grandmother's sickroom, perpetually closed and stifling with odors of sickness and old age, and I was raised there beside her sickbed. When about one year old I fell from the third step of the stairway and injured my forehead. My grandmother had gone to the theater, and my father's cousins and my mother were noisily enjoying the respite. My mother had had occasion to take something up to the second floor. Following her, I had become entangled in the trailing skirt of her kimono and had fallen. My grandmother was summoned by telephone from the Kabuki Theater. When she arrived, my grandfather went out to meet her. She stood in the entryway without taking her shoes off, leaning on the cane that she carried in her right hand, and stared fixedly at my grandfather. When she spoke, it was in a strangely calm tone of voice, as though carving out each word: "Is he dead?" "No" Then, taking off her shoes and stepping up from the entryway, she walked down the corridor with steps as confident as those of a priestess.

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