Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima Page A

expanse of glare.
    The snow scene was in a way like a fresh castle ruin: this legerdemain was being bathed in that same boundless light and splendor which exists solely in the ruins of ancient castles. And there in one corner of the ruin, in the snow of the almost five-meter-wide track, enormous Roman letters had been drawn. Nearest to me was a large circle, an O . Next came an M. And beyond it a third letter was still in the process of being written, a tall and thick I .
    It was Omi. The footprints I had followed led to the O , from the O to the M, and arrived finally at the figure of Omi himself, just then dragging his overshoes over the snow to finish his I, looking downward from above his white muffler, both hands thrust in his overcoat pockets. His shadow stretched defiantly across the snow, running parallel with the shadows of the zelkova trees in the field.
    My cheeks were on fire. I made a snowball in my gloved hands and threw it at him. It fell short.
    Just then he finished writing the I and, probably by chance, looked in my direction.
    "Hey!" I shouted.
    Although I feared that Omi's only reaction would be one of displeasure, I was impelled by an indescribable passion, and no sooner had I shouted out than I found myself running down the steep slope toward him. As I ran, a most undreamed-of sound came reverberating toward me—a friendly shout from him, filled with his power:
    "Hey, don't step on the letters!"
    He certainly seemed to be a different person this morning. As a rule, even when he went home he never did his homework, but left his schoolbooks in his locker and came to school in the mornings with both hands thrust in his overcoat pockets, barely in time to shed his coat dexterously and fall in at the tail end of class formation. What a change today! Not only must he have been whiling away the time by himself since early morning, but now he welcomed me with his inimitable smile, both friendly and rough at the same time—welcomed me, whom he had always treated as a snot-nosed child, beneath contempt. How I had been longing for that smile, the flash of those youthful white teeth!But when I got close enough to see his smiling face distinctly, my heart lost its passion of the moment before, when I had shouted "Hey!" Now, suddenly, I became paralyzed with timidity. I was pulled up short by the flashing realization that at heart Omi was a lonely person. His smile was probably assumed in order to hide the weak spot in his armor, which my understanding had chanced upon, but this fact did not hurt me so much as it hurt the image I had been constructing of him.
    The instant I had seen that enormous omi drawn in the snow, I had understood, perhaps half-unconsciously, all the nooks and corners of his loneliness—understood also the real motive, probably not clearly understood even by himself, that brought him to school this early in the morning. . . . If my idol had now mentally bent his knee to me, offering some such excuse as "I came early for the snow fight," I would certainly have lost from within me something even more important than the pride he would have lost. Feeling it was up to me to speak, I nervously tried to think of something to say.
    "The snowfight's out for today, isn't it?" I finally said. "I thought it was going to snow more though."
    "H'm." He assumed an expression of indifference. The strong outline of his jaw hardened again in his cheeks, and a sort of pitying disdain toward me revived. He was obviously making an effort to regard me as a child, and his eyes again began to gleam insolently. In one part of his mind he must have been grateful to me for not making a single inquiry about his letters in the snow, and I was fascinated by the painful efforts he was making to overcome this feeling of gratitude.
    "Humph! I hate wearing children's gloves," he said.
    "But even grownups wear wool gloves like these.”“Poor thing, I bet you don't even know how leather gloves feel. Here—"
    Abruptly he thrust