Free Vita Sexualis by Ōgai Mori Page A

mother was a woman. For some reason or other I became terrified. I might have even turned pale.
    "I'll come some other time."
    "Oh dear! You can stay here a little longer, can't you?"
    Suddenly overcome with confusion and bowing three or four times, I broke into a run. Between the thick growth of plants in the garden of our lord's mansion was a ditch into which water from a small pond ran after passing over a small dam. On the sandy soil at the edge of this ditch where horsetails were growing, tall trees among the thick growth of vegetation were casting lingering shadows slightly to the west. Having run as far as this spot, I threw myself down on the sand and lay on my back.
    Directly above me clusters of trumpet flowers were blooming as if aflame. The cries of the locusts were vigorous, energetic. There were no other sounds. It was the hour when the great god Pan still sleeps. I pictured to myself a multitude of images.
    Afterwards, even when I talked things over with Eiichi, I never mentioned anything to him about his mother.
    * * *

When I was fifteen . . .
    After the final exams at the close of the past year there had been such a great weeding out of students that each class had some members who left school. The majority of these sacrificial candidates were mashers. Even little Hanyu was eliminated along with the others.
    Henmi also dropped out of school. But only recently had he suddenly turned into a masher, lengthening his kimono sleeves and his hakama skirt and plastering his hair with perfumed pomade, that hair of his which had formerly pointed to the heavens like the leaves of a palm tree.
    In those days I became acquainted with two friends, Koga and Kojima.
    Koga was a big fellow with prominent cheekbones on his square ruddy face. Due to the fact that he had taken special interest in a handsome beautiful boy named Adachi, in addition to the way he himself dressed, Koga certainly seemed to be one of the shining lights of the queers. From about the fall of the preceding year he had been trying to get to know me. I couldn't help but keep a firm grip on the handle of that dagger of mine.
    However, after the great shakeup in our school, a change occurred in the allotment of dormitory rooms, and I found Koga and I were roommates. Waniguchi said to me, a look of mockery on his face, "Well, go on over to Koga's place and he'll make you one of his pets," and he laughed.
    He spoke in that same imitation of my father's voice. And yet this was the man who had never offered to give me the slightest bit of protection. Instead of being troubled by this fact, I considered myself fortunate. Though from first to last I had been made uncomfortable by his cynical words and actions, he was at least an independent spirit. I remember the concluding lines a poet in his class had presented to him:
Quiet evening,
Calm brooding over the bamboo
Beyond your window
As you read
Kanpi.
    Many were afraid of Waniguchi, were in fact in awe of him. I realized that had been a form of protection he offered me indirectly.
    I was about to lose this indirect protection. And I was about to move into the room of the notoriously dangerous Mr. Koga. I was instinctively terrified.
    I moved into that room as if I were entering a lion's den. Once Hanyu had said to me, "Your eyes are triangles with the base line standing up," and I suppose those same reversed triangular eyes of mine were now even more angular. Sitting cross-legged on an old woolen blanket which had discolored into a dirty grey and which he had spread over a broken desk without even a solitary book or anything on it, Koga was staring at me. His perfectly round eyes, too small for his large face, were overflowing with joy.
    "Even though you've been so afraid of me that you've been running away all over the place, you've finally come to me, haven't you?" And he laughed.
    He broke into a broad grin. His was a strange face, both clownish and dignified. It didn't seem the face of a bad guy.
    "Can't be