Confessions of a Mask

After the war, Kochan enters a haze. He summarizes many emotionally heavy events: He returns his university uniform to the soldier he had borrowed it from, his sister dies, and Sonoko gets engaged and married. While he continues to attend school, he does so mindlessly, with “the feeling of being neither alive nor dead” (220). Eventually, he realizes that he is not numb but in immense pain. Between social distractions, he studies for the civil service examinations, but he becomes deeply depressed and loses motivation to do anything. Unable to satisfy or even engage in his desires, he becomes tense and extremely anxious. He tries to live rigidly and exhausts himself doing so, even though he is doing little.

Noting that his real desires are too complex and deeply buried to require him to be prudish, Kochan tries once again to conjure up sexual attraction towards women. He stares at pornographic images and forces himself to imagine women sexually. Nothing has any effect. His only friend from university shares many physical and emotional similarities with him but is self-confident. This friend guesses that Kochan is a virgin and invites him to visit a brothel with him.