During this time the attraction I had formerly felt only toward older youths had little by little been extended to include younger boys as well. This was only natural as by this time even these younger boys were the same age Omi had been when I was in love with him.
But this transference of my love to persons in a different age group was also related to a more fundamental change in the nature of my love. Just as before, I kept this new feeling hidden in my heart, but to my love for the savage there had now been added a love for the graceful and gentle. Along with my natural growth there was developing in me something like a guardian's love, something akin to boy-love.
Hirschfeld divides inverts into two categories : androphils, who are attracted only by adults; and ephebophils, who are fond of youths between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. I was coming to understand the feelings of the ephebophils. In ancient Greece a young man was called an ephebe from the age of eighteen to twenty, while receiving military training; the term is derived from the same Greek word appearing in the name of Hebe, daughter of Zeus and Hera, cupbearer to the gods on Olympus, wife of the immortal Hercules, and symbol of the springtime of life.
There was a beautiful boy, not yet seventeen, who had just entered higher school. He had a light complexion, gentle lips, and perfectly curved eyebrows. I had learned that his name was Yakumo. His features appealed to me greatly.
Without his being aware of it, he began presenting me with a series of gifts, each consisting of a full week of pleasure. The section monitors of the senior class, of whom I was one, gave commands by weekly turns at morning assembly, morning calisthenics, and afternoon drill. (This latter, as required in higher school in those days, consisted of about thirty minutes of naval gymnastics, after which we would shoulder tools and go to dig air-raid trenches or to mow grass.) My turn for giving commands came around every fourth week. Even our school, for all its fastidious ways, appeared to be succumbing to the rude fashions of the times, and with the arrival of summer we were ordered to strip to the waist both for morning exercises and for naval gymnastics in the afternoon.
The order of events was for the monitor first to give the commands for morning assembly from the platform. Then when assembly was over he would give the command "Jackets off!" After everyone had started stripping, he would come down and stand at one side of the formation. Then he would give the order for the students to bow to the gymnastics instructor, who had taken his place on the platform. At this point the monitor's job was finished, as the instructor directed the exercises, so he would run back to the last row of his section, where he too would strip to the waist and join in the exercises.
I dreaded having to give commands so much that the mere thought made me feel chill, and yet the stiff military formality of the ceremony provided me with such a rare opportunity that I somehow looked forward to the week when my turn would come: thanks to it, Yakumo's body, Yakumo's half-naked body, was placed directly before my eyes, and without the danger of his seeing my unlovely nakedness.
As a rule Yakumo stood immediately in front of the platform, in the first or second row. His hyacinthine cheeks flushed readily, and I delighted in seeing them, puffing slightly, when he would come running to assembly and take his place in line. Gasping for breath, he would always unfasten the hooks on his blouse with rough movements. Then he would jerk his shirttail violently from his trousers as though to rip it to shreds.
Even when I was determined not to look at him, from my place on the platform I found it impossible to keep my gaze off his smooth, white body when it was thus exposed to public view with such indifference. (Once my blood was frozen by a friend's innocent remark: "You always keep your eyes lowered when you're giving commands from the platform—are you really that chickenhearted?") But on these occasions I had no chance to get closer to his rosy half-nakedness.
Then in the summer all the upper classes went for a week of study and observation at a naval engineering school at M. One day while there, we were all taken to swim in the pool. Rather than admit that I could not swim, I begged off on the pretext of having an upset stomach. I had expected to remain a mere spectator. But then some captain said sunbathing was medicine for any illness, and even those of us who had claimed to be too sick to swim were made to strip to our shorts.
Suddenly I noticed Yakumo was one of our group. He was lying with his white, muscular arms folded, exposing his lightly tanned chest to the breeze, and steadily chewing his lower lip as though teasing it with his white teeth. The self-styled invalids had begun to gather in the shade of a tree beside the pool, and I had no difficulty in drawing near him. Sitting beside him, I measured his slim waist with my eye and gazed at his gently breathing abdomen. As I did so I recalled a line from Whitman :
The young men float on their backs—their
white bellies bulge to the sun . . .
But now again I said not a word. I was ashamed of my own thin chest, of my bony, pallid arms. . . .
In September, 1944, the year before the end of the war, I graduated from the school I had attended ever since childhood and entered a certain university. Given no other choice by my father, I entered the Law Department. But I was not greatly annoyed by this as I was convinced that I would soon be called into the army and would die in battle, and that my family also would mercifully be killed in the air raids, leaving not a single survivor.As was the common practice in those days, I borrowed a university uniform from an upperclassman who was going to war just when I was matriculating, promising to return it to his family when I myself should be called up. I put on the uniform and began going to classes. The air raids were becoming more frequent. I was uncommonly afraid of them, and yet at the same time I somehow looked forward to death impatiently, with a sweet expectation. As I have remarked several times, the future was a heavy burden for me. From the very beginning, life had oppressed me with a heavy sense of duty. Even though I was clearly incapable of performing this duty, life still nagged at me for my dereliction. Thus I longed for the great sense of relief that death would surely bring if only, like a wrestler, I could wrench the heavy weight of life from my shoulders. I sensuously accepted the creed of death that was popular during the war. I thought that if by any chance I should attain "glorious death in battle" (how ill it would have become me!), this would be a truly ironical end for my life, and I could laugh sarcastically at it forever from the grave. . . . And when the sirens sounded, that same me would dash for the air-raid shelters faster than anyone. . . .
I heard the sound of a piano, clumsily played.
It was at the home of a friend who had decided to volunteer shortly as a special cadet. His name was Kusano, and I thought highly of him, regarding him as the only friend I had had in higher school with whom I could talk even slightly of serious matters. Indeed I still value his friendship today. I am a person who has no particular desire to have friends, but I am made miserable by something inside me that forces me to tell what follows, even though it is quite likely to destroy the sole friendship I have.
"Does whoever's playing that piano show promise? Sometimes the playing sounds a little uneven, doesn't it?"
"That's my sister. Her teacher's just gone and she's reviewing the lesson."
We ceased talking and listened intently. As Kusano's enlistment was close at hand, it was probably not just the sound of the piano in the next room that rang in his ears but rather a familiar, everyday thing, a kind of clumsy, irritating beauty, that he would soon have to leave behind. In the tonal color of those piano sounds there was a feeling of intimacy, like amateurish candy made while looking at the recipe book, and I could not resist asking:
"How old is she?"
"Seventeen," Kusano answered. "She's the sister just younger than I."
The more I listened the more I could hear that It was indeed the sound of a piano played by a seventeen- year-old girl, full of dreams and still unaware of her own beauty, whose fingertips still retained traces a childhood. I prayed that her practice would continu
e forever.
My prayer was answered. In my heart the sound of that piano still continues today, five years later. How many times have I tried to convince myself it is only a hallucination! How many times has my reason ridiculed this delusion! How many times has my weak will laughed at my capacity for self-deception? And for all that the fact remains that the sound of that piano took possession of me, and that for me it was—if the dark connotations can be omitted from the word—veritably a thing of "destiny."
I was remembering the strange impression I had received from this word destiny only a short time before. After the graduation ceremony at higher school, I had gone in an automobile with the old admiral-principal to pay a formal call of gratitude at the Palace. As we drove along, this cheerless old man, with mucous clotted in the corners of his eyes, had criticized my decision not to volunteer as a special cadet but simply await conscription as a common soldier. He had emphasized that, with my physique, I would never be able to endure the rigors of life in the ranks.
"But I've made up my mind."
"You say that because you don't realize what it means. But then the day for volunteering has already passed. So there's nothing to do about it now. It's your destiny."He used the English word, mispronouncing it in the old-fashioned way.
"Huh?" I asked.
"Destiny. It's your destiny."
He repeated himself in a monotone, using that indifferent, shy tone of voice characteristic of old men who are on their guard against being taken for fussy grandmothers.
During previous visits at Kusano's I must have seen this sister who was playing the piano. But Kusano's family was very strait-laced, not at all like the easygoing Nukada family, and whenever any of Kusano's friends came calling, the three sisters would immediately disappear from sight, leaving only their bashful smiles behind them.
As Kusano's enlistment drew nearer and nearer we visited each other with increasing frequency and were reluctant to part. The experience of hearing that piano had given me a completely wooden manner where that sister was concerned. Hearing it had been like eavesdropping on some secret of hers, and ever since I had somehow become unable to look her directly in the eye or speak to her. When she occasionally brought in the tea, I would keep my eyes lowered and see nothing but her nimble legs and feet moving lightly across the floor. I was completely carried away by the beauty of her legs, perhaps because I had not yet become accustomed to seeing city women wear the bloomer-like trousers of farm women or the slacks that had become the fashion for those perilous times. . . .
And yet it would be a mistake to leave the impression that her legs aroused any sexual excitement in me. As said before, I was completely lacking in any feeling of sexual desire for the opposite sex. This is well proved by the fact that I had never had the slightest wish to see a woman's naked body. For all that, I would begin to imagine seriously that I was in love with a girl, and the spiteful fatigue of which I have spoken would begin to clog my mind; and then next I would find delight in regarding myself as a person ruled by reason and would satisfy my vainglorious desire to appear an adult by likening my frigid and changeable emotions to those of a man who has grown weary from a surfeit of women. Such mental gyrations had become automatic with me, as though I were one of those candy machines that go to work and send a caramel sliding out the moment a coin is inserted.
I had decided I could love a girl without feeling any desire whatsoever. This was probably the most foolhardy undertaking since the beginning of human history. Without being aware of it myself, I was undertaking to be—please forgive my natural inclination toward hyperbole—a Copernicus in the theory of love. In doing so I had obviously arrived unwittingly at nothing more than a belief in the platonic concept of love.Although probably seeming to contradict what I have said earlier, I believed in this platonic concept honestly, at full face value, purely. In any case was it not purity itself rather than the concept in which I was believing? Was it not purity to which I had sworn allegiance? But more of this later.
If at times I seemed not to believe in platonic love, this too could be blamed on my brain, so apt to prefer the concept of carnal love, which was lacking in my heart, and on that fatigue produced by my artificiality, so apt to accompany any satisfaction of my craze to appear to be an adult. In short, blame it on my unrest.
The last year of the war came and I reached the age of twenty. Early in the year all the students at my university were sent to work at the N airplane factory, near the city of M. Eighty percent of the students became factory hands, while the frail students, who formed the remaining twenty percent, were given some sort of clerical jobs. I fell into the latter category. And yet at the time of my physical examination the year before, I had received the classification of 2(b). Having thus been declared eligible for military service, I had the constant worry that my summons would come tomorrow, if not today.
The airplane factory, located in a desolate area seething with dust, was so huge that it took thirty minutes simply to walk across it from one end to the other, and it hummed with the labor of several thousand workers. I was one of them, bearing the designation of Temporary Employee 953, with Identification No. 4409.
This great factory operated upon a mysterious system of production costs: taking no account of the economic dictum that capital investment should produce a return, it was dedicated to a monstrous nothingness. No wonder then that each morning the workers had to recite a mystic oath. I have never seen such a strange factory. In it all the techniques of modern science and management, together with the exact and rational thinking of many superior brains, were dedicated to a single end—Death. Producing the Zero-model combat plane used by the suicide squadrons, this great factory resembled a secret cult that operated thunderously—groaning, shrieking, roaring. I did not see how such a colossal organization could exist without some religious grandiloquence. And it did in fact possess religious grandeur, even to the way the priestly directors fattened their own stomachs.
From time to time the sirens of the air-raid signals would announce the hour for this perverted religion to celebrate its black mass.
Then the office would begin to stir. There was no radio in the room, so we had no way of knowing what was happening. Someone, speaking in a broad country accent, would say: "Wonder what's up?" About this time a young girl from the reception desk in the superintendent's office would come with some such report as: "Several formations of enemy planes sighted." Before long the strident voices of loud-speakers would order the girl students and the grade-school children to take shelter. Persons in charge of rescue work would walk about distributing red tags bearing the legend "Bleeding stopped: hour minute ." In case someone was wounded, one of these tags was to be filled in and hung about his neck, showing the time at which a tourniquet had been applied. About ten minutes after the sirens had sounded the loud-speakers would announce: "All employees take shelter."
Grasping files of important papers in their arms, the office workers would hurry to deposit them in the underground vault where essential records were stored. Then they would rush outdoors and join the swarm of laborers running across the square, all wearing air-raid helmets or padded hoods. The crowd would be streaming toward the main gate.
Outside the gate there was a desolate, bare, yellow field. Some seven or eight hundred meters beyond it, numerous shelters had been excavated in a pine grove on a gentle slope. Heading for these shelters, two separate streams of the silent, impatient, blind mob would rush through the dust—rushing toward what at any rate was not Death, no matter if it was only a small cave of easily collapsible red earth, at any rate it was not Death.I went home on my occasional off days, and there one night at eleven o'clock I received my draft notice. It was a telegram ordering me to report to a certain unit on February the fifteenth.
At my father's suggestion, I had taken my physical examination, not at Tokyo, but at the headquarters of the regiment located near the place where my family maintained its legal residence, in H Prefecture of th
e Osaka-Kyoto region. My father's theory was that my weak physique would attract more attention in a rural area than in the city, where such weakness was no rarity, and that as a result I would probably not be drafted. As a matter of fact, I had provided the examining officials with cause for an outbreak of laughter when I could not lift—not even as far as my chest—the bale of rice that the farm boys were easily lifting above their heads ten times. And still, in the end I had been classified 2(b).
So now I was summoned—to join a rough rural unit. My mother wept sorrowfully, and even my father seemed no little dejected. As for me, hero though I fancied myself, the sight of the summons aroused no enthusiasm in me; but on the other hand, there was my hope of dying an easy death. All in all, I had the feeling that everything was as it should be.
A cold that I had caught at the factory became much worse as I was going on an interisland steamer to join my unit. By the time I reached the home of close family friends in the village of our legal residence—we had not owned a single bit of land there since my grandfather's bankruptcy—I had such a violent fever that I was unable to stand up. Thanks, however, to the careful nursing I received in that house and especially to the efficacy of the vast quantity of febrifuge I took, I was finally able to make my way through the barracks gate, amidst a spirited send-off given me by the family friends.
My fever, which had only been checked by the medicines, now returned. During the physical examination that preceded final enlistment I had to stand around waiting stark naked, like a wild beast, and I sneezed constantly. The stripling of an army doctor who examined me mistook the wheezing of my bronchial tubes for a chest rattle, and then my haphazard answers concerning my medical history further confirmed him in his error. Hence I was given a blood test, the results of which, influenced by the high fever of my cold, led to a mistaken diagnosis of incipient tuberculosis. I was ordered home the same day as unfit for service.