Free Vita Sexualis by Ōgai Mori Page B

helped since I've been assigned here." My reply was certainly blunt.
    "I guess you feel I'm the same type Henmi is, don't you? I'm not."
    Without replying, I began to put my section of the room in order. Ever since my childhood, I had had a great aversion to having any of my things scattered about. From the moment I had entered this school, I had precisely and systematically classified my school notebooks and my other concerns. By that time in this period of my life, I already had a great many notebooks, exactly twice the number other students had. The reason I had so many was that I used two notebooks for each subject. Furthermore, I always carried these sets of notebooks to class, and while listening, I would sort out the important facts and the points for future reference and write these down in ink in whichever notebook was appropriate, the opened notebooks piled one over the other. There was no need to make a clean copy of my notes the way the other students did after returning to the dorm. In my room I had only to look up some scientific terms used during the lecture and some Greek and Latin etymologies and annotate these in red ink along the margins of my notebook. That was just about the extent of the work I did outside the classroom.Whenever I heard anyone saying it was difficult and troublesome to memorize these technical terms, I couldn't help feeling amused. I almost felt like asking them why they tried to memorize these words mechanically without looking up their etymologies.
    I always arranged my notebooks and reference books in the same order on the shelf. As a precaution against overturning my bottles of red and black ink, I lined these up with my pens in an empty cake box I set on the far corner of my desk. On the front of my desk I spread a huge sheet of blotting paper. To the left I piled two notebooks with thick bindings. One was my diary in which before going to bed I kept a precise record of each day's events. The other notebook was for memos that had nothing to do with school subjects. For its title I had pretentiously written in pen as seal letters the two scholarly and academic Chinese characters kan and ju y which can supposedly awaken memory. Under my desk I concealed about ten volumes of Teijozakki with their essays on the samurai. In those days the most elegant and refined miscellaneous essays available in the circulating libraries were in books of this sort, and when one had completed, as I had, all the novels of Bakin and Kyoden, the only thing to do was turn to such essays. Whenever I happened to find anything worthwhile in them, I would make a note of it in my kanju notebook.
    Koga, a broad grin on his face, was watching what I was doing, but when he saw me trying to conceal the Teijozakki volumes under my desk, he said, "What sort of books are those?"
    "Teijozakki"
    "What's in them?"
    "On these pages in this volume they're writing about ceremonial costumes."
    "What's your purpose in reading that kind of stuff?"
    "It's not for any particular purpose."
    "Then it's all useless, isn't it?"
    "If that's the case, then my, or anyone's, entering this school and pursuing an education is useless, don't you think? You probably didn't enter only to become a government official or a teacher, did you?"
    "You mean that when you graduate, you don't want to become a government official or teacher?"
    "Well, I may. But I'm not studying just to become one.
    "You mean, then, you're studying in order to learn, that is, you're studying for the sake of study?"
    "Well. Yes, I guess that's right."
    "Well, you're an interesting kid."
    Suddenly I felt angry. To talk to someone for the first time and to conclude by saying I was an interesting "kid" was too insulting. I glared at him with those same reversed triangular eyes of mine. Koga was still calmly grinning at me. I felt somewhat disarmed, so I couldn't really hate this innocent strapping fellow.
    Toward evening that same day Koga suggested we go for a walk. Even