The Face of Another

by Kōbō Abe

  I decided to wait on a step under the eaves of a bank building that projected slightly into the crowd. A bit higher than the crowd, I could see very well, but I was not conspicuous because many others were waiting too. I had no fear of your seeing me before I saw you. Since your class lasted until four, even if you missed one bus you would surely arrive within ten minutes.

  I had never thought that your class would be so useful. Going to such a useless thing, faithfully, year in year out, was, I thought, good proof of woman’s unpredictability. Particularly the fact that you had enthusiastically taken up the making of buttons was highly symbolic. How the devil many buttons, big and small, had you cut out, incised, painted, and polished until now? You did not make them to use but persisted in producing these generally practical objects for impractical purposes. No, I do not mean to blame you. Actually, I was never opposed to it. You were really quite addicted, and I was willing to give this innocent pursuit my full blessing.

  But, I do not have to explain minute by minute what went on. For you yourself were in the drama too. What is necessary is to expose to broad daylight the shameful face of a hidden parasite by turning my heart inside out. You arrived on the third bus and, getting off, began to walk past the bank where I was standing. I set out after you. From behind, you looked strangely fresh, strangely sleek, and I almost lost my nerve.

  I caught up with you at the traffic light on the other side of the station. In the few minutes’ time it would take to get from here to the station, I had to win you over somehow. I could not be abrupt, but there was no time to be indirect. As if I had picked it up, I casually held out one of your leather buttons which I had smuggled out of the house in advance, and flung at you the line I had prepared.

  “Isn’t this something you dropped?”

  Without concealing your surprise, you attempted to find out where it had come from, lifting your handbag and looking at the bottom, checking the clasp; and with an uncomprehending expression, you glanced quickly at me. Once I had spoken, I followed up immediately, not wanting to lose the opportunity on which I was determined.

  “Wasn’t it from your hat?”

  “My hat?”

  “Even a rabbit comes out of a hat with a pass of the hand, doesn’t it?”

  But you didn’t even smile. Far from that, you nailed my mouth shut with a glance like surgical forceps. You looked at me with an unflinching stare, of which you yourself were perhaps unconscious, as if you had forgotten yourself. If the look had gone on three seconds more I should have concluded that I had been seen through and would have beaten a quick retreat. But that could not be. My mask had already been proved successful in every situation. There was absolutely no fear that I would be suspected as long as you did not tear the mask off by force as the tattooed man did or put your lips directly to it—the difference in temperature could probably not be hidden. Moreover, I had consciously made my voice lower than usual, and even if I hadn’t, my labials, the b’s, p’s, and m’s, were quite transformed.

  Perhaps, indeed, I had been too worried; at once your gaze fell away, and your usual, far-away expression returned. But my erotic feeling seemed to slip away when I met your look, and if you had left on the spot I too should doubtless have given it up with good grace, thinking that after all it would be best for us both. At any rate, it was broad daylight, and the efficiency and expediency of the mask seemed to be fading. But you too hesitated for an instant. And the crowd, undulating around us like some greedy marine protozoan, sucked up our oozing thoughts from the edges. There was no time to explore in detail the significance of the distortion in the magnetic field that had sprung up between us as a result of your momentary hesitation, and with my sights fixed on this hesitation, I instantly delivered the second prepared line.

  MARGINAL NOTE: The expression “distortion in the magnetic field” is actually quite precise. Perhaps I had had a dim premonition of the grave significance of this instant. I could be neither proud of, nor justified in, the prophecy; but if these few lines were missing I would have had no premonition—I shudder at the very thought—that I would be sentenced to the punishment of being ridiculous, because of the crime of insensitivity. Whatever I did would merely provoke laughter, and these notes would not be the record of the mask, but those of a simple clown. Being a clown would be all right, but I did not want to be a clown unaware that he was one.

  I wonder if you remember. I casually asked, in a tone as if weary from too many inquiries, where buses on a certain line arrived and departed. I did not know whether you knew the answer or not, but choosing that stop was not a plan to kill time; it was a far-sighted, clever trap.

  First of all, that stop was the only one at which one could reach the station from an affiliated bus line, and it lay in an inconvenient and inconspicuous location.

  Next, it was located on the other side of the station, and to get to it one had to take a long, circuitous route via the overpass if one did not know the way through the underground passages. Third, the layout of the underground passages was terribly complicated, and it was difficult to explain the several exits in simple words. Finally, if you made good use of the underground passages, the distance to the platform of the bus you would take would not be much different than if you went straight through the station. And, of course, you knew the stop.

  I was understandably tense as I awaited your answer. My whole body was stiff and awkward with my efforts to conceal my underlying motive. If I had not put on the mask, though you consented, I would not have had the confidence to walk along with you. More than that, I was even doubtful that I could manage to dissimulate my agitated breathing. I continued to wait with a feeling of being enclosed in a thin glass jar—in a jar of glass thinner than paper, that would fly to pieces at a mere sneeze. I cannot deny that I was also irritated, but it was true too that your answer was slow in coming. Was it something you had to hesitate about? I clung to the fact that you were hesitating. Such a situation was one that required a prompt decision either way. The more you hesitated the more unnatural and false our position would be. If you did not want to, you should say a simple “no”; but by hesitating you implied that your consent was already half given. You would soon have no excuse for refusing, because you had already half consented. Perhaps I should put in another good word to make the decision easier. Just then, a young man in a hurry pushed his way roughly between us. I became aware that the two of us had become a conspicuous obstacle, an eddy in the streaming crowd. Desperately regaining your balance, you gave me a suspicious glance. Then you looked at me as if you were flipping indifferently through the pages of a calendar. Displeased with your expression, I closed the distance between us, thinking to hasten the decision a little, and just as I began to speak, you finally answered.

  But when I heard your response, while I applauded in my heart that things had gone well, I wondered why I had the painful feeling that I had been betrayed. It was all right since it was I, but what if it had been some complete stranger? Once you had hesitated, you acquiesced. There was a significance that you should have had to hesitate in acquiescing. In short, it suggested something like a sexual barrier. You realized what it would mean to consent to walk side by side with me for seven or eight minutes over a distance of several hundred yards, and I naturally could assume that this was more than simple kindness. This was too much to do in return for a button I had picked up for you. To put it bluntly, by your acquiescence you had consciously aroused my erotic feelings. And since you consciously provoked them, you too must have some feeling.…

  No, things were going all right. How could I dare object now, since I had originally planned just such a situation. If, by chance, you had turned me down, all the pains I had taken would have come to nothing. I could set another day, but even though I had been lucky the first time, a second time would simply make you more cautious, and I would be unable to avoid letting you know my real intentions. Yes, things were all right this way. I was made to realize fully last night that getting
you back through the mask and getting all the others back through you was not the insipid thing one might imagine from the impression the words alone make; when all was said and done, getting you back was breaking down the barriers of sex and bursting through my own vileness. Since I was trying to get over the barrier and since my companion was disposed to consent, there was no point in making a fuss. You could not be so impudent as to haul out the old alibi of not having realized what was going on. If I wanted to break the fence myself, but didn’t want to let my companion do so, that would be simple rape. But it would be amazing if the roadway between us were restored by such one-sided lechery. With such an act, the mask would have to disappear from the world, without leaving a trace that it had been alive. Moreover, if all I wanted was to rape, my real, scar-webbed face would have sufficed.

  This was theoretically true, perhaps. But, having you with me at last, going down the stairs toward the underground passage chock-full of strangers, I felt stifled with unutterable anguish, bewilderment, and confusion, carried away by the overwhelming feeling of your presence. Isn’t it generally rare to imagine by a sense of touch? I did not conceive of you as a glass doll or as abstract word symbols, but had a tactile sense of your presence as I got within touching distance of you. The side of my body next to you was as sensitive as if it had been overexposed to the sun, and each one of my pores panted for breath like dogs sweltering in the heat. And when I realized that you, a refined woman, were prepared to accept a stranger, I felt intolerably sad. I was being cuckolded by my own self, and at the same time I was a good-for-nothing who had been dismissed without reason. If that were the case, my shameful fantasies yesterday in which I had ignored my companion were far sounder. Wasn’t even rape more wholesome than this? I began to feel enmity and seething hatred for this hunter-type face, wearing its sunglasses and its strange affected clothes and sporting a beard, making me realize again that the features of the mask were those of a stranger. At the same time I felt that you were a completely different person because you did not at once reject the face; and you gave me a feeling of oppressiveness, as if I were seeing poison smeared on jewels.

  But the mask was different. The mask absorbed my anguish and seemed to have a capacity of turning it into nourishment, making the leaves and branches of my desires thick and luxuriant, like some jungle plant. Simply not having been rejected by you was to say that I had already got you, and I sank the fangs of my imagination into the nape of your neck, which rose smoothly from the collarless, buff-colored blouse. Since for me you were you, but for the mask you were simply a pleasing woman, there was no point in censuring its impoliteness. Yes, a vertiginous abyss lay between the mask and me. There was a difference between us, but it was only a few inches of facial surface, and for the rest we were the same. Think of the groove of a record. From such a simple device as that one can reproduce scores of tones. It is all the less surprising that man’s heart should strike two opposing notes at the same time.

  Of course, I should not have been surprised. Actually, you yourself were split into several parts. Just as I had a double existence, you did too. If I was another person wearing a stranger’s mask, you were another person wearing the mask of yourself. Another wearing the mask of himself … a gruesome combination.… Although I intended to lay plans to bring about a second meeting, the results, to the contrary, would probably be a second good-bye. Perhaps I had made a slight miscalculation.

  If I had suspected things would be like this, how much better to have pulled out at once. No, how much better, rather, simply to have got you to tell me the location of the stop as I had asked and let the rest of my plans go. Why in heaven’s name was I shamelessly following around after the mask? Actually my confidence was not up to my explanation; my betrayed love had been drawn into a corner and changed to hate, my desire to reestablish the roadway had been frustrated and turned into a desire for revenge. Since I had come this far and had made quite sure of your infidelity, even though it had not been my motive to do so, the result was that my actions had fallen into step with the mask’s. But just a minute. I have the feeling that, toward the beginning of these notes, I used the word “revenge” quite often. Yes, I did indeed. At that time, the main pretext for making the mask was to try to seek revenge on the arrogance of faces by deceiving you. But then it shifted to reestablishing relations with others, and the significance of seducing you changed to something mental, contemplative; furthermore, something physical was added, and there occurred an emotional explosion in the form of jealousy. Through this jealousy I was seized by a spasm of love as if I were parched with thirst, I was blocked by the barrier of sexual taboos, I became passionate, and then at last I again seemed to become a captive of my desire for revenge.

  But there was something dissatisfying in this last desire for revenge, and I was worried. I had confirmed your unfaithfulness, true, but what sort of revenge should I take? Should I trust the evidence in your face and ask for your repentance, or should I press you for a divorce? Not at all; by doing anything like that, I should lose you. If a relationship with you were no more than my observing your unfaithfulness through the mask, that would be all right; I would go on watching my whole life long. And wouldn’t I have ample vengeance by the very continuation of such perversion? For you would have to put up forever with a division of yourself that matched this split in me. Neither love nor hate … neither mask nor real Face.… Perhaps I had found a temporary equilibrium in such depressing circumstances.

  HOWEVER, it was the triumphant mask’s turn now to begin to lose its composure in the presence of my anxieties. As, some ten minutes later, I stirred my spoon around in my coffee in the restaurant at the end of the underground passage, the word of consent you casually uttered frightened away the self-confidence of the mask and seemed to drive it into two facing mirrors, talking with itself.

  “My husband is away on business just now.…”

  Well, what did you mean? You said nothing more, nor did the mask ask. Of course, if one put a common-sense interpretation on it, one could take it that you were justifying your answer to my invitation: that you need not return home to prepare supper and that it would make no difference if you ate out. But there was something courageous in the somber frigidity of your tone, as if you were standing firm, and your attitude seemed to have the effect of snapping a finger at the nose of the mask with its air of self-conceit. I wonder how we had ever been able to converse at all before this. Yes, the mask—surely it had read the line somewhere before—complimented you on the shape of your fingers and then asked about the cut on your right thumb that you had got making buttons. And after noting that your hand did not attempt to escape its gaze, it broached the subject of human relations, like some algebraic equation that does not include such divers items as name, occupation, and address. It was immediately after that, I think, that I began to explore your feelings. The mask did not try to question with whom of us the initiative for the seduction lay and manipulated you according to its own wishes, eagerly watchful. Having been outdistanced, I was simply dumb with amazement, like a child who has suddenly been pushed aside by its companion.

  MARGINAL NOTE: Oh yes, I remember at that time being overcome with panic lest my real self be discovered behind the mask.

  Surely, there was no proof at all that the mask had committed the seduction and that you were the one who had been seduced. Regardless of the wiles of the mask, which had gone about the matter with surprising adeptness, you had wanted to be seduced, hadn’t you? Nevertheless, there was no possibility of doing things over at this point, and in order to spur itself on, the mask acted the seducer even more boldly.

  However, that was beside the point, for the fact was that you were seduced. There is a saying that if you overcome one arm then you are revenged only one arm’s worth; if you overcome both arms then you are revenged two arm’s worth. All during the time we were in the restaurant the mask tried its utmost not to bring up again the subject of your husband. Thus, it felt it could
even bring up the subject of the scar webs with composure, and though it might convince itself that the story concerned some one else, it was still a horrible thing. It was an annoying situation, because when you showed no disposition at all to mention your husband, I became blindly angry. Indeed, it was ignoring him—that is, me. Perhaps it was bitter contempt for him. I was very distressed, for I could not say positively whether it would have been better to get you to discuss him or not. Your bringing “him” up, however disagreeable, would have functioned as a check to the mask. I could only hope, as the seducer, that you would go on being the accomplice you were.

  I was worried by the curious way you had of smiling with only your lower lip … I was worried by your staring through me, beyond me into the distance … I was reproachful at your refusing the beer I had offered … yet I was opposed to your drinking too much … it was as if boiling water had been poured over me as I lay soaking in ice. While my left eye looked longingly at you, as at some spoils of war, at your fingers that were crumbling bread—at your soft, sleek fingers, except for the cut from your button work—what I saw with my right eye made me writhe in pain. I was a cuckold present at his wife’s adultery. This was a triangular relationship with one actor playing two parts. If one were to make a drawing of “me,” “the mask, that is, the other me,” and “you,” it would be a non-Euclidean triangular relationship, existing on a single straight line.

  When we finished dinner, time suddenly began to jell around us. Perhaps it was the weight of the ceiling. The disproportionately massive concrete pillars standing in the middle suggested great heaviness. In addition, the underground restaurant was windowless. These was no place for the sun and its twenty-four-hour cycle to stray in here. There was only a timeless, artificial illumination. Time measured in units of tens of thousands of years flowed along right outside the wall in subterranean water courses and through the layers of earth, slicing vertically straight down. But your “husband,” who was urging our time on, would never return as long as we waited like this. Oh time, suspend your flight, be a vessel containing only us. And we shall cross the street together as we are and reach our new home.