The Face of Another

by Kōbō Abe

  The thought confused me. After all, wouldn’t the meaning of the mask be completely negated, no matter how skillfully it was constructed, if I wore one identical to myself?

  Fortunately I remembered a friend of mine from high-school days who was specializing in paleontology. It might well be that reconstructing animals from fossils that he dug up formed a part of his work. I consulted the directory and learned that, as luck would have it, he had remained at the university. I intended to discuss the matter by telephone, but as it was some time since our graduation, he was eager to see me and suggested we meet, refusing to take no for an answer. Perhaps in resistance to my shyness over the bandages on my face, I was unable to turn him down, and I accepted. However, I was immediately tormented by regrets. How meaningless to persist in this scheme out of foolish pride. The bandage alone would be enough to excite considerable curiosity, and since the bandaged man was beginning to delve into details of modeling techniques and facial anatomy, which were not his professional specialty, I would seem like some sneak thief in disguise. To avoid such discomfiture, I should have refused categorically from the very first. What’s more, I hated the streets. In all the diffident, casual glances there were hidden needles bearing a corrosive poison, though those who had never been targets could not be expected to understand. The streets quite exhausted me. I felt like an oily dustcloth, spotted with shame, yet there was nothing to do but go to the appointed place, however reluctantly.

  The café we had agreed upon was on a street corner at the university which I knew well. I took a taxi and was able to get as far as the door of the place almost unnoticed. However, my friend’s confusion, greater than my own, was such that I pitied him. Damn it.… I regained my ill-tempered self-possession. No, “self-possession” is misleading. Anyway I’d like you, however inadequately, to imagine my wretchedness at making people around me uncomfortable just by my existence, like some stray mongrel. It was the desperate feeling of loneliness one sees in the eyes of a decrepit old cur on the verge of death. It was an emptiness like the sound of track construction deep in the night when the pinging sings down the rails. Feeling that any expression I carried behind my bandage and my sunglasses would not get out had made me perverse.

  “I suppose you’re surprised,” I said in a neutral voice. “I was covered with liquid air. I’m apparently predisposed to keloids. Hmm … rather bad … the whole face is a regular web of scar tissue. You probably don’t exactly fancy the bandage, but it’s still better than letting people see what’s underneath.”

  With a perplexed expression, my companion muttered something, but I could hardly catch what he said. The reunion—how stridently had he insisted just thirty minutes ago that as soon as we met we should go where we could get something to drink—was sticking in my throat like a fishbone. But the point was not to say disagreeable things, so I immediately changed the subject and broached the business at hand. Needless to say, he lost no time in grabbing at this life preserver.

  His explanation boiled down to this. A faithful reproduction of an original biological form is not possible by modeling upon the bone, no matter how experienced the modeler may be; what can be correctly judged from the anatomical structure of the bones is at best merely the placing of the tendons. Thus, for example, if you tried to reconstruct a whale, which has especially developed subcutaneous tissue and fatty layers, on the basis of the skeleton alone, you would get a monster not in the slightest like a whale—something between a dog and a seal.

  “Well. I suppose one’s right in assuming that there would be considerable error possible in modeling the face too, wouldn’t there?”

  “If the trick were possible, there wouldn’t be such things as unidentifiable skeletons. You don’t have to go so far as a whale; a human face is a delicate thing, isn’t it? It’s not easily imitated even by montage photography. Yet, if it were absolutely impossible to get away from the bony structure, plastic surgery couldn’t exist to start with.”

  Whereupon, he took a quick glance at my bandages, mumbled embarrassedly, and then fell silent. I didn’t have to ask what worried him. No, let him think what he wanted. What was disagreeable was his quite inexcusable blushing without making any attempt to hide his discomfort.

  EXCURSUS: I wonder what this shyness of mine is, fundamentally. Perhaps, at this point, I should bring up the incident of the wig burning once again. The present situation is just the opposite; by having my wig discovered I have discountenanced my companion, which worries me even more. Is that the hidden key to solve the riddle of my face?

  Yet he was a bungling fellow. Although I tried my best to muddle through with inoffensive, ordinary conversation, he couldn’t help stumbling and blushing. I had extracted from him most of what was directly pertinent to my plans; I should have left him then with the uncomfortable memory of our meeting. Those things which evoked shame in me could easily become the source of gossip. But I was tempted to let rumors fly, like keyhole whisperings. His feeling of embarrassment was beginning to infect me too. I started in on justifications that were better left unsaid.

  “I can just about imagine what you’re thinking. You get ideas when you relate my questions to this bandage, don’t you? But that would be a big mistake. It’s too late for me at my age to begin worrying over an injured face.”

  “You’re the one who’s mistaken. What in heaven’s name am I supposed to imagine?”

  “If I’m wrong, let it go. But even you unconsciously judge people by their faces, don’t you? I think it’s rather natural for you to be concerned about me. But if you really think about it, does an identity card fully identify the man it represents? My experience has made me do a lot of thinking. Don’t we actually cling too much to our identity cards? Because of them we produce freaks that devote themselves to forgery and alteration.”

  “I agree … completely … alteration is the right word … quite … they say that women who wear heavy make-up are frequently hysterical, but.…”

  “Incidentally, what would it be like if a man’s face were as expressionless as an egg, with no eyes, or nose, or mouth?”

  “Hmm. You couldn’t distinguish among people, I suppose.”

  “Between thieves and policemen … assailants and victims.…”

  “And my wife and my neighbor’s wife.…”—as if wanting help. He put a match to his cigarette and gave a short, soft laugh. “That’s interesting. Interesting, but there’s still something of a problem. For heaven’s sake, would human life be easier or not?”

  And I too laughed with him; perhaps I should have stopped at this point. But my thoughts had already taken on an uncontrollable momentum, circling constantly around my face. They could only go on circling, aware of the danger, until the centrifugal force broke them free.

  “Life wouldn’t be easier or not easier. Aren’t both generalizations logically impossible? Since there’s no correlation, there can be no comparison.”

  “When there is no correlation, that’s retrogression.”

  “Well, then. Are you trying to say that the difference in skin color has yielded a profit for history? I absolutely can’t accept such a meaning for correlation.”

  “Good heavens! Were you discussing the race problem? But isn’t that something of an overblown interpretation?”

  “If it were possible, I should like to blow it up as much as I could. To every single face in the world. Only, with a mug like mine the more I talk about it the more it becomes a prisoner’s lament.”

  “If you allow me to talk only about the race problem … but that’s too unreasonable … putting all responsibility on the face is.…”

  “But I’m asking you, every time I daydream about people on other planets I wonder why in heaven I always start with speculating on what they look like.”

  “We’re getting off the track again,” he said, vigorously stubbing out his cigarette after scarcely three puffs. “It would suffice, I should imagine, if you simply explained it as being due to curiosity.”


  I sensed keenly the sudden change of his tone, but just as abruptly as the plate stops spinning in a game of spin-the-plate, my façade fell away.

  “Just take a little look at that picture,” I said, still not having learned from experience and pointing to what was apparently a reproduction of a European Renaissance portrait. “What do you think of that?”

  “Well, if I answer casually, you look as though you would snap me up, but … well, it’s stupid, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is. Putting a halo back of the face like that is a false, deceptive idea. Because of it, the face is instilled with lies.”

  There was a strange smile on my companion’s face. It was a remote smile, as if he were looking at something far away, but his constraint had disappeared.

  “It won’t work. No matter how you exaggerate I can’t feel anything without first understanding. Is it because there aren’t any common words between us? I specialize in extinct plants and animals, but in art, I lean toward the modern.”

  No, IT WAS useless to complain. Better get used to such looks right now. To expect better results was only pampering myself. I had been able to get hold of necessary information, and my first plan was to try to overcome my basic humiliation.

  I began to hate the paleontologist when I realized that the catch I had brought back from my visit was in reality merely inedible bait. Rather, it was apparently foodstuff, but unfortunately I didn’t know anything about the art of cooking.

  Miserably, I recognized that the large margin of error in modeling, even when one began with the same bone structure, forced the plan for the mask another step further. I could choose any face I wanted, but I did have to pick one—anyone. But wouldn’t any face at all be to my satisfaction? I should have to decide after sifting through numberless possibilities. What in heaven’s name was the scale of measurement for faces?

  If you didn’t intend special meaning to a face, then any would do. When you went to the trouble of making it, you didn’t choose a cardiac’s puffiness. Yet it probably wouldn’t do at all to take a movie star as the model. This freedom, at first comforting, was in fact a terribly bothersome problem.

  I don’t mean to insist unduly on an ideal face. Besides, such a thing probably doesn’t exist. However, since I was going to make a selection, I had to have some standard or other. Even an inappropriate facial guide, however awkward, would somehow be all right—I hadn’t the faintest notion whether to be subjective or objective—but when all was said and done I dragged out the decision for close to half a year.

  MARGINAL NOTE: It would be a mistake to settle this whole thing with vague standards. Rather I should doubtless take into consideration my inner impulse to reject standards. Choosing a standard, in other words, is to commit oneself to others. However, at the same time, men have the opposite desire of trying to distinguish themselves from others. Perhaps the two could be related thus:

  A = the factor of commitment to others; B = the factor of resistance to others; n = age; f = one’s degree of viscosity [its decrease is the hardening of the self and at the same time the forming of the self; generally it stands in inverse proportion to age, but in a locus curve one can observe a number of individual differences among people according to sex, personality, work, etc.].

  In short, with age the degree of my viscosity was decreasing very much, and I felt strong opposition to changing faces at this late date. I must doubtless admit that the paleontologist’s view that heavily made-up women are prone to hysteria is an extremely astute theory. Psychoanalytically speaking, hysteria is an infantile phenomenon.

  In the meantime, of course, I was not idle. I had a mountain of largely technical work, such as tests of material for the flat epidermis, and my engrossment provided me with a fine excuse to postpone the showdown.

  The flat epidermis took up an unimaginable amount of time. Quantitatively, it formed the most important part of the skin; but, more than that, the success or failure of producing the feeling of mobile skin was at stake. I profited by my colleagues’ distance from me in the laboratory and quite openly made use of the equipment and materials, but even so it took more than three full months. I considered it a comical contradiction that, while my plans for the mask advanced, I had taken no decision concerning the form of the face, but that did not worry me very much. Yet I could not forever take shelter from the rain under another’s eaves. This period passed. Then, the work began to make progress, and I was gradually cornered.

  For the ceratin layer of the skin surface, I made a simple, very suitable discovery in the family of acrylic resins. And for the subcutaneous tissue, it would apparently be enough to spray something of the same quality as the skin itself into a sponge and let it harden. The fatty layer was easy: I would simply saturate a sponge with liquid silicon and make it airtight by enclosing it in a membrane. Thus, by the second week in the new year I had completed my preparations as far as the materials were concerned.

  With things as they now stood, I could no longer make excuses. If I did not come to some decision about what sort of face to make, I could not advance a step further. But no matter how much I thought about it, my head, like a museum storeroom, was in utter confusion with a thousand sample faces. Yet, if I kept shrinking from making a choice, I would never come to any decision. I borrowed a warehouse storage list, deciding there was no other course open to me except to gather my courage and check the faces off one by one. However, on the first page of the list appeared some unexpectedly obliging instructions, “rules for classification,” which I read with pounding heart:

  The standard of value for faces is definitely objective. If one is involved in personal feelings, one makes the error of being taken in by imitations.

  There is no such thing as a standard of value for faces. There are only pleasure and displeasure, and the standard of selection is continually cultivated through refinement of taste.

  It was as I had anticipated. When one is advised that something is black and white at the same time, it would be better to have no advice at all. Moreover, as I read along, comparing each face, I had the feeling that every one could be equally justified, and thus the degree of complication deepened. At last I was sick at the thought of so many faces, and I still wonder why I didn’t decide to put a stop to my plans at that time.

  AGAIN about portraits. The paleontologist had made light of my ideas, but I could not help clinging to them. I think that the concept of portraiture, be what it may artistically, embodies a philosophy worthy of deeper inquiry.

  For example, in order for a portrait to be a universal representation you have to accept as a premise the universality of the human expression. That is, it is necessary for the majority of people to be in general agreement that certain identical traits are to be seen behind a given expression. What supports this belief, of course, is doubtless the empirical understanding that face and heart stand in a fixed relation to each other. Of course, there is no proof that experience is always reality. Yet it is likewise impossible to conclude that experience is always a pack of lies. Rather, isn’t it more correct to assume that the more earthy the experience the greater the degree of truth it contains? Within these limits, I think it is impossible to deny completely that there is some good in an objective standard of values.

  On the other hand, we cannot disregard the fact that the same portrait changes its personality with the centuries. Our vision shifts from the classical harmony of heart and face to the representation of character devoid of harmony, completely collapsing into Picasso’s eight-sided faces and Klee’s False Face.

  Which in God’s name should one believe, then? If I may express my own personal preference, of course, it would be the latter standpoint. I think that applying objective standards to the face is, at all events, too naïve; this isn’t a dog show. When I was young, even I used to associate a given face with the ideal personality I wanted to be.

  MARGINAL NOTE: That is, this demonstrated a high degree of inclination toward others, stemming from my
high degree of viscosity.

  Naturally, a romantic, unordinary face comes into focus through a blurred lens. However, it would never do to be forever addicted to such dreams. Indeed, hard cash is worth more than any kind of promissory note. There was nothing to do but pay what I could with the face I actually had. Don’t men shun cosmetics because they believe in taking responsibility for their own faces? (Of course, with women—that is, women’s make-up—it seems to me they use it because their cash has reached rock bottom, hasn’t it?)

  I COULD not come to any decision at all—I felt queasy, as if I was about to catch a cold—but nevertheless I continued to make progress in technical areas, where my concern was only with the surface of the face.

  After the materials came the casting of the back of the mask. No matter how permissive my colleagues were I could not do that in the laboratory, and I decided to take my equipment home with me and set up a workshop in my study. (Ah! You seemed to think that my enthusiasm for work was in compensation for my face, and, moved to tears, you tried to help me. Indeed, it was compensation, but it was not the kind of enthusiasm you thought it was. I closed the door of the study and went so far as to turn the key; I shut out even your affection when you tried to bring me my evening snack.)

  The work in which I immersed myself on the other side of the closed door was this.

  First, I prepared a basin large enough to contain my whole face and poured into it potassium alginate, plaster of Paris, sodium phosphate, and silicon. Then, with all my facial muscles completely relaxed, I quickly thrust my face into the mixture. Within three to five minutes the solution changed into calcium alginate in a plastic state. Since I could not be expected to hold my breath all this time, I had inserted in my mouth a slender rubber tube that led out of the basin. However, just imagine having to immobilize your expression for a time exposure. That is difficult enough. With repeated failures—a twitching under the eyes or an itchy nose—I was at it four days before I got anything satisfactory.