Free Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima

love I encountered in life, I seemed like a baby bird keeping its truly innocent animal lusts hidden under its wing. I was being tempted, not by the desire for possession, but simply by unadorned temptation itself.
    To say the least, while at school, particularly during a boring class, I could not take my eyes off Omi's profile. What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddles, with no answers given. As for my spirit of adoration, I never even imagined it to be a thing that required some sort of answer.
    One day I had a cold and, even though it was not at all serious, stayed home from school. Upon returning to school the next day, I discovered that the day I had chosen to miss had been nothing less than the day of the first spring physical examination in our third year. Several other students had likewise missed the examination, and we all went along together to the medical office.
    In the office a gas stove was sending up such a feeble blue flame into the sunlight that one could not even be certain it was lit. There was nothing but the smell of disinfectants. Nowhere was there that pale-pink smell, like hot sugared milk, so characteristic of a room where a crowd of boys are awaiting a physical examination, their naked bodies pushing and jostling against each other. Instead there was only a handful of us, taking off our clothes in silence, shivering miserably. . . .
    There was a skinny boy who, like me, was always catching cold. He was standing on the scales, and as I looked at his pale, bony back, covered with down, I suddenly remembered my everlasting, fierce desire to see Omi's naked body. I realized how stupid I had been not to have foreseen what a perfect opportunity the physical examination of the day before would have provided for achieving that desire. Now the opportunity was already lost; there was nothing to do but go on awaiting some random chance in the future.
    I turned pale. In the pallid goose-flesh that suddenly covered me I was experiencing a form of regret like some piercing cold. I stared vacantly into the air, scratching the ugly vaccination scars on my thin arms. My name was called. The scales looked exactly like a scaffold proclaiming the hour of my execution.
    "Eighty-eight," the assistant barked to the school doctor. This assistant had formerly been an orderly in a military hospital and still retained the bearing.
    As the doctor entered the figure on my card, he was mumbling to himself :
    "Wish he'd get to ninety pounds at least."
    I had become used to undergoing this treatment at every physical examination. But today I was so relieved that Omi was not present to witness my humiliation that the doctor's words did not cause me the usual anguish. For an instant my feeling of relief amounted almost to joy. . . .
    "All right—next!"
    The assistant shoved my shoulder impatiently. But this time I did not glare back at him with the hateful and irritable look I usually gave him.
     
    Nevertheless, even though dimly, I must have foreseen the ending of my first love. In all likelihood it was the uneasiness created by this foreboding that formed the nucleus of my pleasure.There came a day in late spring that was like a tailor's sample cut from a bolt of summer, or like a dress rehearsal for the coming season. It was that day of the year that comes as Summer's representative, to inspect everyone's clothing chest and make sure all is in readiness. It was that day on which people appear in summer shirts to show they have passed muster.
    Despite the warmth of the day, I had a cold, and my bronchial tubes were irritated. One of my friends happened to be suffering with an upset stomach, and we went together to the medical office to get written excuses that would permit us merely to watch gymnastic exercises without having to participate.
    On our way back, we walked along toward the gymnasium as slowly as possible. Our