by Kōbō Abe
However, neither my mask nor I actually knew what you were thinking. You had put up no resistance to my transparent tactics of inviting you first to coffee and then to dinner—you were so completely without resistance that I wondered if you had not expected things to happen as they did—then you accepted, and the mask was completely optimistic that things were going as planned. But your resolute attitude, as if you had poured mortar into the nooks and crannies of your conscience, at once cast the mask into the bedevilment of suspicion again. Of course, it was not only your abruptness. If you were curt in accepting my invitation, that would be proof that you were more than aware of the sexual barrier and I could easily handle you, but you were tender and showed a delicate consideration for me. You were straightforward and natural, not the slightest bit bashful. In short, you were quite yourself, not a bit different from your usual self.
On the other hand, this lack of change perturbed the mask. Where in God’s name were you concealing the excitement of anticipation, the inner flashings, dazzling glances, the breathing, of someone awaiting seduction?
The waiter cleared the table with obvious incivility. Ripples formed on the surface of the water in our glasses doubtless from the tremor of a subway train. The mask was flustered and chattered meaninglessly, trying to insert here and there sexually suggestive words, but you showed not even the reaction of refusal, not to mention consent. As I surreptitiously watched the mask’s confusion, I inwardly offered sarcastic congratulations, but unfortunately I was unable to convince myself of your unfaithfulness.
However, after this had been going on about twenty minutes—I wonder if you remember—the mask, coming out of his paralysis, stretched out his foot and accidentally touched your ankle with the tip of his shoe. An almost imperceptible expression of agitation passed over your face. Your gaze was fixed in the void. A shadow formed on your forehead and your lips trembled. But like the generosity of a morning sky gradually suffused with light, you quite calmly ignored his blunder. Inside, the mask was filled with laughter. The laughter, without outlet, became as if charged with electricity. The mask had apparently succeeded in bringing down its prey. I needn’t have worried so much. As I concentrated on the sensation of you which was transmitted by the tip of my toe, even the mask shut its mouth and recovered its pleasure in silent conversation.
Actually, it was really quite dangerous to attempt small talk. On the subject of garden plants, for example, our two conversations were in strange agreement; the subject of childless couples accidentally came up; without my being aware of it, technical chemical terms cropped up among my figures of speech; if I relaxed my attention there would be enough evidence to give the mask away. It would seem that man befouls his daily life with his own excretions far more than a dog does.
But for me your conduct was a brutal shock. Your self-possession while being seduced was a part of you I should never have imagined, although I could see that the mask was fascinated. It was a severe shock. Moreover, the foot that was touching your ankle was definitely my foot. But if I did not concentrate with all my strength I had no more than an indirect impression of things, as if they were out-of-focus, faraway, imaginary events. If my face were different from me, then so was my body. I had foreseen this, but when confronted with the fact, the thought was nonetheless painful. If I felt this way about your ankle, how would I be able to keep my senses when I touched your whole body? Could I resist the impulse to rip off my mask on the spot? Could this surrealist triangle of ours, which was already straining us to the limit, maintain itself against even greater pressure?
How hard I strove to endure the penance in the cheap hotel room. Without taking off my mask, without strangling you, I had to go on witnessing your being violated. I was as if bound hand and foot, with my head stuck in a bag with openings only for the eyes. I felt like shrieking. It was too easy! It was much too easy! Five hours had not yet gone by since I had met you. How easy it was! If only you had shown at least a modicum of resistance. Well, how long should you have resisted to satisfy me? Six hours? Seven? Eight? I was being stupid and ridiculous. Your licentiousness would be the same, if you held back for five, fifty, or five hundred hours.
Well, why didn’t I have the courage to put an end to this festering triangle? Because of a desire for revenge? Perhaps. But I think there was a different motive. Had it been simply desire for revenge, would it not have been more effective to tear the mask from my face on the spot? But I was afraid. Of course, the behavior of the mask, which was demolishing my calm everyday life, was cruel, but returning to the faceless, enclosed days was even more terrifying. Fear strengthened fear, and like a bird that has lost its feet and is unable to alight upon the ground, I would have to keep endlessly hovering. But that was not the end of it. If I really could not endure the situation, the mask, alive as it was, might well kill you. Your fornication would be difficult to deny, which gave me an alibi.
But I did not kill you. Why? I wonder. Because I did not want to lose you? No, precisely not wanting to lose you was reason enough for killing you. It would be senseless to seek rationality in jealousy. Just look at yourself. You who had rejected me so positively, who had rebelled against my face, now lay broken beneath the mask! It was too bad that the lights had been turned off, for I could not satisfy myself with my own eyes—your chin where maturity and immaturity existed strangely together, the grey wart in your armpit, the scar from your appendectomy, the tuft of frizzled hair mixed with something white, the chestnut-colored lips between your spread legs—all of them were about to be possessed, violated. I should like to see every last detail with my own eyes in the full light of day. You had seen and rejected the scar webs, seen and accepted the mask; surely you have no objection to being seen yourself. But light did not suit my purposes either. I would not have been able to take off my glasses, and I carried all kinds of physical marks, like the scar on my hip I had got when we went skiing together long ago—and perhaps some I didn’t know about but you did. I concentrated on capturing you in every way other than sight: legs, arms, palms, fingers, tongue, nose, ears. I did not miss a single signal that was emitted from your body: your breathing, sighing, the working of your joints, the flexing of your muscles, the secretions of your skin, the vibrations of your vocal cords, the groaning of your viscera.
I could not get used to being a man condemned to death. As all the juices were being wrung from my body and I was drying up, I had to continue to put up with this immorality, this struggle. In my anguish, the thought of death lost its usual solemnity, and homicide seemed no more than a slight barbarism. What in God’s name were you thinking? What made me decide to be so patient—perhaps it was rather strange—was the dignity you maintained even while you were being violated. No, dignity seems a curious term for it. It was not at all a question of rape, nor was it a one-sided lawbreaking by the mask. Since you did not once make any pretense of refusing me, I must consider rather that we were partners in crime. It is comical when a partner in crime maintains dignity with his accomplice—it might be more precise to say a very assured partner in crime. Yet no matter how desperately the mask struggled, it was not ultimately able to be a fornicator, to say nothing of a rapist. You were literally inviolable. This did not change the fact that you were immoral and unfaithful. It also did not change the fact that you had stirred up my fierce jealousy, like boiling tar in a cauldron, like smoke from chimneys just after rain, like the water of hot springs seething up together with mud. The unexpected event that, by your attitude of inviolability, you did not in the ultimate sense submit to the mask, completely amazed and overwhelmed me.
It would seem that I had not yet fully grasped the significance of your assurance in the act of fornication with a stranger. There was apparently no lust involved. If there were, you would have been more obviously flirtatious. But, quite as if you were performing some ceremony, you never lost your seriousness from beginning to end. I do not really understand. What was happening inside you? I did not have a clue. Moreover, m
y sense of defeat, firmly rooted at that time, has unfortunately remained as an indelible blot to the very end—at least until this moment I write this. This insidious disease of self-persecution was worse than my fits of jealousy. Although I had deliberately put on the mask, opened up the roadway to you, and beckoned you in, you had passed me by and hastened along somewhere else. And I was left alone with my loneliness, quite the same as before I had donned the mask.
Ah, I do not understand you. I could not think that just because there was temptation you would respond, paying no attention to who the partner was, like a shameless streetwalker. But there was no proof against this. Had I been unaware of the natural-born harlot in you? If you were a real harlot, you would satisfy your violator, neither spurring him on when he was inadequate nor making him feel mistreated. What in God’s name were you? Although the mask had frantically tried to break down the barrier, you had slipped through it without touching. Like the wind … or a spirit.
I do not understand you. Putting you to any further tests would be nothing more than my own destruction.
THE following morning—well, it was already close to noon—we hardly spoke to each other until we left the hotel. Between spells of wakefulness, worried lest my mask might have come off, and snatches of sleep, when I dreamed repeatedly that I was rushing to leave for somewhere but had lost my ticket, fatigue pierced my forehead like a stake. However, thanks to the mask, signs of fatigue or shame showed on my face no more than on yours. But, also thanks to the mask, I could neither wash my face nor shave. My swollen features were agonizingly painful. Compressed by the unyielding mask, the ends of my beard, which had begun to grow, were obstructed and had begun to push back in. I wanted as quickly as I possibly could to get away from you and return to my hideaway.
As I lit my last cigarette, my real face, which had constantly been forced into bad roles, had begun speaking, touching on your guilty conscience, and I started involuntarily as you hesitatingly offered me a blue-green button. It was not the one I had picked up for you; it was one it had taken you half a month to do. At the time I was simply angry at your zealousness, but when I considered it again, I felt I understood you. Silver edged lines, as if scratched into a thick lacquered base with a nail, flickered in a lovely tangled skein. It was as if your voiceless cries were shut up within it. I thought the button was like a lonely cat raised by a doting old woman. Perhaps it was naïveté. But when I considered that it was a real challenge to “him,” who had not even once glanced at your button, I realized this was a bold, determined act. I had intended to blame you but on the contrary was blamed myself; perhaps I was gradually getting used to my own defeatism. Who the deuce ever thought up the stupid proposition that women were anything to get carried away about? I wonder.
Outside, everything was shimmering in a light like plated chromium. The only reality was the odor of your perspiration that lingered in my nostrils. Back in my room, after hasty attention to my face, I threw myself onto the bed and did not awake until dawn had begun to break. I calculate that I had slept close to seventeen hours. My face was burning as if someone had been working on it with a file. I opened the window and, as I watched the sky, which was beginning to turn a clear blue, I held compresses of moistened towels to my face. At length the heavens became the very color of the button I had received from you, the color of the sea against which is outlined the vanishing stern of a ship. I felt unduly melancholy, and squeezing the flesh of my arms and my breast until it hurt, I involuntarily groaned in pain. What barren purity! Nothing could continue to exist in such a blue. I wished that yesterday and the day before could be eradicated. Actually, I suppose my plans had had some degree of success, but who in heaven’s name was going to reap the harvest? And what harvest? If anybody, you would reap, you, a shameless harlot, who had cut through the mask like some great, solid shadow. But what existed here and now was only the blue of the sky and the pain of my face.… The mask, that should be the victor, lay stupidly on the table, like an obscene picture that has drained all one’s desire; I wondered if I should start using it for target practice with my air pistol. And after that, what if I were to hack it utterly to pieces?
However, as I stood musing, the blue faded away, and the streets began to show their daytime face. My sentimental grumbling too fell away like an old scab, and whether I wished it or not, I was again brought back to the inescapable reality of the scar webs. Even though, with the mask, I could not at this point dream dreams like the flashings of holiday fireworks, to give it up and bury myself alive in a windowless cell would be even more unthinkable. After yesterday, I was still vacillating, but I had ascertained the precise center of gravity of this three-cornered relationship, and it was altogether possible to acquire command of the mask by adroitly keeping my equilibrium. No matter how violent my passing emotions, there was definitely a point to plans that one had spent time refining.
I hurried through dinner and dashed out of my hideaway. Since I had to return to the role of my real self who was coming back from a week’s business trip, today I should have to put on the bandages, which I had not worn for some time. As I was leaving, I was startled at my reflection in the window-pane. I was terrifying! I had come to have a new and better opinion on the feeling of release that the mask provided. If I were to return straight home just as I was—it was a stimulating thought to me—I should produce a considerable effect on you in whom the sensations of last night were most surely still alive. It would definitely be worth trying. Providing I could stand it. Unfortunately I did not have the confidence. The sensations of the preceding night were still alive in me too. Perhaps I should have accused you, gone into a frenzy, and exposed everything in a fit of anger. No matter how agonizing, I wanted to leave this three-cornered relationship alone for the time being. I would meet you as “myself” after composing myself and accustoming myself to the ordinary world for a while.
But was the world really ordinary? I wonder. The gate to the Institute was still closed. When I entered through the side door, the guard, who was admiring a flowerpot as he brushed his teeth, was startled into speechlessness for an instant. I restrained him from dashing to the entryway and simply asked for the key. The smell of chemicals was familiar as an old coat. But the deserted Institute building—was it the odor? the sound of my footsteps?—was like some ghostly precinct inhabited only by tree spirits. To restore my relation with the present, I turned my attendance tab up and hastily changed into my white work smock. The report of the experiment-in-progress that had been assigned to the Group C assistants was written on the blackboard. The results were excellent. I was interested in them but in nothing more. In this building people showed a spirit of competition, were driven by desire for fame, were prey to jealousies, maneuvered to get the start on others by secretly sending for foreign publications, were disturbed by private matters, and became frantic about experiments and budgets, yet I felt this was a life worth living. I had the feeling, however, that it was not actually I who was devoting myself so assiduously to this work, but someone else who resembled me, and that this me was merely another tree spirit. I had not bargained for that at all. For a given technique there are the laws of that technique, and they cannot be influenced by anyone. Or if one did not maintain human relationships on all kinds of levels—like water fleas with other water fleas, jellyfish with other jellyfish, parasites with other parasites, pigs with other pigs, chimpanzees with other chimpanzees, field mice with other field mice—then would not chemistry and physics be meaningless too? Of course not! Human relationships are merely trivial appendages of human endeavor. If they are not, the only thing left to do is to give up this makeshift masked play and commit suicide.
A scar on a section of skin, bothersome to no one, could have no effect on my work. This work, no matter what anyone said, was mine. Whether I were a transparent man, a noseless man, a hippopotamus-faced man, so long as I could think, so long as I could manipulate my instruments, I should always fix my compass on this work.
> Suddenly I thought of you. They say that women fix their compasses on love. I doubt the veracity of this, but women apparently can be happy with love alone. Well, then, I wonder if you are happy now. Suddenly I called to you aloud and longed to hear your voice answering me. I took the receiver off the hook and dialed the number but hung up on the second ring. In my heart I was not ready yet. I was still afraid.
After a while, the office workers gradually began to come in, greeting me one by one with surprised, sympathetic words. The building—and I too—at length took on its human aspect. I had been too anxious. Being here was not particularly good, but it was not especially disagreeable. If I could make my work at the Institute a roadway to others, supplementing my deficiencies with my mask, and get used to the double life, then by putting them together I could become a complete man. No, a mask was no substitute for a real face. It gave to a real face the unreal privilege of free passage through the barriers of sexual taboos, and so, far from becoming a complete man, I would doubtless lead the fragmented lives of several different men. Anyway, I would get used to a double life. I would adopt the habit, quite nonchalantly, of changing my clothes to suit different times and places. Just the way a single groove in a record can produce a number of different sounds at the same time.