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Authors: Yukio Mishima
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could not keep from lowering my eyes. And just at that instant I was caught by a swoop of his right hand. In a reflex action to keep from falling, I clutched at the air with my right hand and, by some chance, managed to fasten onto the fingertips of his right hand. I grasped a vivid sensation of his fingers fitting closely inside the white gloves.
For an instant he and I looked each other in the eye.It was truly only an instant. The clownish look had vanished, and, instead, his face was suffused with a strangely candid expression. An immaculate, fierce something, neither hostility nor hatred, was vibrating there like a bowstring. Or perhaps this was only my imagination. Perhaps it was nothing but the stark, empty look of the instant in which, pulled by the fingertips, he felt himself losing his balance. However that may have been, I knew intuitively and certainly that Omi had seen the way I looked at him in that instant, had felt the pulsating force that flowed like lightning between our fingertips, and had guessed my secret—that I was in love with him, with no one in the world but him.
At almost the same moment the two of us fell tumbling off the log.
I was helped to my feet. It was Omi who helped me. He pulled me up roughly by the arm and, saying not a word, brushed the dirt off my uniform. His elbows and gloves were stained with a mixture of dirt and glittering frost.
He took my arm and began walking away with me. I looked up into his face as though reproving him for this show of intimacy.
At my school we had all been classmates since lower-school days, and there was nothing unusual about putting arms about each other's shoulders. As a matter of fact, at that moment the whistle for class formation sounded and everyone hurried off in just that intimate way. The fact that Omi had tumbled to the ground with me was for them nothing but the conclusion of a game they had already gradually become bored with watching, and even the fact that Omi and I walked away together with linked arms could hardly have been a sight worthy of particular notice.
For all that, it was a supreme delight I felt as I walked leaning on his arm. Perhaps because of my frail constitution, I usually felt a premonition of evil mixed in with every joy; but on this occasion I felt nothing but the fierce, intense sensation of his arm: it seemed to be transmitted from his arm to mine and, once having gained entry, to spread out until it flooded my entire body. I felt that I should like to walk thus with him to the end of the earth.
But we arrived at the place for class formation, where, too soon, he let go of my arm and took his place in line.
Thereafter he did not look around in my direction. During the ceremony that followed, he sat four seats away from me. Time and time again I looked from the stains on my own white gloves to those on Omi's. . . .
My blind adoration of Omi was devoid of any element of conscious criticism, and still less did I have anything like a moral viewpoint where he was concerned. Whenever I tried to capture the amorphous mass of my adoration within the confines of analysis, it would already have disappeared. If there be such a thing as love that has neither duration nor progress, this was precisely my emotion. The eyes through which I saw Omi were always those of a "first glance" or, if I may say so, of the "primeval glance." It was purely an unconscious attitude on my part, a ceaseless effort to protect my fourteen-year-old purity from the process of erosion.
Could this have been love? Grant it to be one form of love, for even though at first glance it seemed to retain its pristine form forever, simply repeating that form over and over again, it too had its own unique sort of debasement and decay. And it was a debasement more evil than that of any normal kind of love. Indeed, of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
Nevertheless, in my unrequited love for Omi, in this the first
For an instant he and I looked each other in the eye.It was truly only an instant. The clownish look had vanished, and, instead, his face was suffused with a strangely candid expression. An immaculate, fierce something, neither hostility nor hatred, was vibrating there like a bowstring. Or perhaps this was only my imagination. Perhaps it was nothing but the stark, empty look of the instant in which, pulled by the fingertips, he felt himself losing his balance. However that may have been, I knew intuitively and certainly that Omi had seen the way I looked at him in that instant, had felt the pulsating force that flowed like lightning between our fingertips, and had guessed my secret—that I was in love with him, with no one in the world but him.
At almost the same moment the two of us fell tumbling off the log.
I was helped to my feet. It was Omi who helped me. He pulled me up roughly by the arm and, saying not a word, brushed the dirt off my uniform. His elbows and gloves were stained with a mixture of dirt and glittering frost.
He took my arm and began walking away with me. I looked up into his face as though reproving him for this show of intimacy.
At my school we had all been classmates since lower-school days, and there was nothing unusual about putting arms about each other's shoulders. As a matter of fact, at that moment the whistle for class formation sounded and everyone hurried off in just that intimate way. The fact that Omi had tumbled to the ground with me was for them nothing but the conclusion of a game they had already gradually become bored with watching, and even the fact that Omi and I walked away together with linked arms could hardly have been a sight worthy of particular notice.
For all that, it was a supreme delight I felt as I walked leaning on his arm. Perhaps because of my frail constitution, I usually felt a premonition of evil mixed in with every joy; but on this occasion I felt nothing but the fierce, intense sensation of his arm: it seemed to be transmitted from his arm to mine and, once having gained entry, to spread out until it flooded my entire body. I felt that I should like to walk thus with him to the end of the earth.
But we arrived at the place for class formation, where, too soon, he let go of my arm and took his place in line.
Thereafter he did not look around in my direction. During the ceremony that followed, he sat four seats away from me. Time and time again I looked from the stains on my own white gloves to those on Omi's. . . .
My blind adoration of Omi was devoid of any element of conscious criticism, and still less did I have anything like a moral viewpoint where he was concerned. Whenever I tried to capture the amorphous mass of my adoration within the confines of analysis, it would already have disappeared. If there be such a thing as love that has neither duration nor progress, this was precisely my emotion. The eyes through which I saw Omi were always those of a "first glance" or, if I may say so, of the "primeval glance." It was purely an unconscious attitude on my part, a ceaseless effort to protect my fourteen-year-old purity from the process of erosion.
Could this have been love? Grant it to be one form of love, for even though at first glance it seemed to retain its pristine form forever, simply repeating that form over and over again, it too had its own unique sort of debasement and decay. And it was a debasement more evil than that of any normal kind of love. Indeed, of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
Nevertheless, in my unrequited love for Omi, in this the first
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