Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima Page B

self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty, that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration, and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork.
    My uneasiness was the same as that of which Stephan Zweig speaks when he says that "what we call evil is the instability inherent in all mankind which drives man outside and beyond himself toward an unfathomable something, exactly as though Nature had bequeathed to our souls an ineradicable portion of instability from her store of ancient chaos." This legacy of unrest produces strain and "attempts to resolve itself back into super-human and super-sensory elements." So then, it was this same instability that drove me on, while the other boys, having no need for self-awareness, could dispense with introspection.
    Bus conductresses possessed not the slightest sexual attraction for me, and yet I saw that my words, spoken deliberately both because of the analogy and the other considerations I have mentioned, had not only actually shocked my friends and made them blush with embarrassment, but had also played upon their adolescent susceptibility to suggestive ideas and produced an obscure sexual excitement in them. At this sight, a spiteful feeling of superiority naturally arose in me.
    But my feelings did not stop there. Now it was my own turn to be deceived. I sobered up from my feeling of superiority, but distortedly, one-sidedly. The process was like this:
    One part of my feeling of superiority became conceit, became the intoxication of considering myself a step ahead of mankind. Then, when this intoxicated part became sober more swiftly than the rest, I committed the rash error of judging everything with my sobered consciousness, not taking into consideration the fact that part of me was still drunk. Therefore the intoxicating thought of "I am ahead of others" was amended to the diffidence of "No, I too am a human being like the rest." Because of the miscalculation, this in turn was amplified into "And also I am a human being like them in every respect." The part of me that was not yet sober made such an amplification possible and supported it. And at last I arrived at the conceited conclusion that "Everyone is like me." The way of thinking that I have called a steppingstone to aberration came powerfully into play in reaching this conclusion. . . .
    Thus I had succeeded in hypnotizing myself. And from that time on, ninety percent of my life came to be governed by this autohypnosis, this irrational, idiotic, counterfeit hypnosis, which even I definitely knew to be counterfeit. It may well be wondered if there has ever been a person more given to credulity.
    Will the reader understand? There was a very simple reason why I had been able to use even the slightest of sensual words when speaking of bus conductresses. And this was the very point I had failed to perceive. . . . It was truly a simple reason—nothing more than that, where women were concerned, I was devoid of that shyness which other boys possess innately.
     
    In order to escape the charge that I am simply crediting the person I was in those days with powers of judgment I did not possess until today, let me cite here a passage from something I wrote at the age of fifteen:
    . . . Ryotaro lost no time in making himself a part of this new circle of friends. He believed confidently that he could conquer his reasonless melancholy and ennui by being—or pretending to be—even a little cheerful. Credulity, the acme of belief, had