Free The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes Page B

armpit.
    Mishima described his “first love” at the GakushÅ«in. It was an older boy, Ōmi; as
Confessions of a Mask
has it, “he surpassed us all in physique, and in the contours of his face could be seen signs of some privileged youthfulness excelling ours by far. He had an innate and lofty manner of gratuitous scorn.” Ōmi, according to a school rumor, had “a big thing”; Mishima duly reflected on this report: “It was like fertilizer poured over the poisonous weed of an idea deeply planted in me.” Mishima, who was fourteen, looked forward impatiently to summer: “Surely, I thought, summer will bring with it an opportunity to see his naked body. Also, I cherished deeply within me a still more shamefaced desire. This was to see that ‘big thing’ of his.” He could not be the only admirer of Ōmi’s person; the older boy filled his school uniform, a “pretentious” copy of a naval officer’s uniform, “with a sensation of solid weight and a sort of sexuality.” And “surely I was not the only one who looked with envious and loving eyes at the muscles of his shoulders and chest . . . Because of him I began to love strength, an impression of overflowing blood, ignorance, rough gestures, careless speech, and the savage melancholy inherent in flesh not tainted in any way with intellect.” He worshipped all “those possessors of sheer animal flesh unspoiled by intellect—young toughs, sailors, soldiers, fishermen”—but he was doomed to “watching them from afar with impassioned indifference.”
    One encounter with Ōmi led to Mishima’s discovery of a fetish: white gloves. It was the custom at the GakushÅ«in to wear white gloves on ceremonial days. “Just to pull on a pair of white gloves, with mother-of-pearl buttons shining gloomily at the wrists and three meditative rows of stitching on the backs, was enough to evoke the symbols of all ceremonial days . . . the cloudless skies under which such days always seem to make brilliant sounds in midcourse and then collapse.” In the grounds of the GakushÅ«in stood a swinging log and the boys often had fights for possession of the log. One day Ōmi stood on the log waiting for someone to challenge him; he seemed “like a murderer at bay” to Mishima, rocking back and forth and wearing his white gloves. Mishima was drawn toward the log: “Two contrary forces were pulling atme, contending for supremacy. One was the instinct of self-preservation. The second force—which was bent, even more profoundly, more intensely, upon the complete disintegration of my inner balance—was a compulsion toward suicide, that subtle and secret impulse.” He darted forward and attacked and the two boys struggled, white-gloved hands interlocked, and crashed to the ground together; during that brief struggle they exchanged a single look and Mishima felt that Ōmi had surely understood that he loved him. The two boys sat close together in the school ceremony that followed and time after time Mishima looked across at Ōmi, his eyes resting on the stains on his gloves; both boys had dirtied their white gloves on the ground. Mishima, however, after a short time, looked forward to the ending of this Platonic affair; he even felt an intense pleasure deriving from the foreknowledge that his love would be short-lived.
    The end came in the late spring (of 1939). There was a gymnastics class outside, from which Mishima was excused because of ill health—he had had a touch of tuberculosis and had a continual cough. The boy went out to watch the class, in which Ōmi, a favorite of the gym instructor, was the star. He was called upon to show the class how to swing on a horizontal bar. The day was warm and Ōmi wore only a light undershirt. Mishima reflected that his strong arms were “certainly worthy of being tattooed with