Confessions of a Mask

tormenting myself.... This is a trite device, often adopted by persons who, cut off from all other means of escape, retreat into the safe haven of regarding themselves as objects of tragedy. . . .

then, this image of a lukewarm man that Sonoko was now seeing, this thing that appeared to be my character, aroused my disgust, made my entire existence seem worthless, and tore my self-confidence into shreds. I was made to distrust both my will and my character, or at least, so far as my will was concerned, I could not believe it was anything but a fake. On the other hand, this way of thinking that placed such emphasis upon the will was in itself an exaggeration amounting almost to fantasy. Even a normal person cannot govern his behavior by will alone. No matter how normal I might have been, there certainly might have been a reason somewhere for doubting whether Sonoko and I were perfectly matched at every point for a happy married life, some reason that would have justified even that normal me in answering "H'm, perhaps so." But I had deliberately acquired the habit of closing my eyes even to such obvious assumptions, just as though I did not want to miss a single opportunity for torment

hand in the matter. In short, I knew clearly that it was not my fault.

But for this very reason I had formed the habit of treating those parts of my character that were in any way my responsibility to exhortations so wholesome and sensible as to be comical. As a part of my system of self-discipline, dating from childhood, I constantly told myself it would be better to die than become a lukewarm person, an unmanly person, a person who does not clearly know his likes and dislikes, a person who wants only to be loved without knowing how to love. This exhortation of course had a possible applicability to the parts of my character for which I was to blame, but so far as the other parts were concerned, the parts for which I was not to blame, it was an impossible requirement from the beginning. Thus, in the present case even the strength of a Samson would not have been sufficient to make me adopt a manly and unequivocal attitude toward Sonoko

every turn this sort of curious contradiction cropped up between my intellectual views and my emotions. I knew that what made me adopt such lukewarm attitudes—like that "H'm, perhaps so"—was not some fault in my character that I could change, but was the work of something that had existed even before I had had any

normality" as a temporary employee in the corporation of my body. A person who is separated from one by time and space takes on an abstract quality. Perhaps this was the reason why the blind devotion I felt for Sonoko and my ever-present unnatural desires of the flesh had now been fused within me into a single homogenous mass and had pinned me immobile to each succeeding instant of time as a human being without any self-contradictions.

Absence had emboldened me. Distance had given me claim to "normality." I had, so to speak, accepted

a familiar use of the resurrection theme in response to mankind's demand for miracles

Until then I had mistakenly thought I was only poetically attracted to such things, thus confusing the nature of my sensual desires with a system of esthetics.

isolation would appear to the eyes of love, and at the same time was I learning, from the reverse side of the lesson, my own incapacity for accepting love? . . .

What was it I understood at that moment, or was on the verge of understanding? Did the motif of later years—that of "remorse as prelude to sin"—show here the first hint of its beginning? Or was the moment teaching me how grotesque my isola