by Kōbō Abe
I could not say that I had reaped no harvest at all. My efforts did seem to have put me in a better position than before, but such an experience could not be wiped away, leaving no mark at all. At least I had made a big catch simply by realizing that my real face was merely an incomplete mask. I was perhaps being too optimistic, but this knowledge gave me great strength. Even if I were to be enclosed forever in this unmelting column of ice, I would discover sufficient human life in it to get along without ever again going through the useless struggle I had been locked in until now. However, I had better think things through carefully again after I have returned with your surrender in hand. At this point, there is nothing to do but wait.…
I collapsed limply on the matting of the living room, like some marionette whose strings have been cut, trying not to resist the flow of time. A rectangular piece of whitish sky, cut out between the window frame and the eaves of the house next door, seemed quite like the extension of a jail wall. Without taking my eyes from it, I persuaded myself that this was so. I was not the only one who had been shut in; considering the whole world a jail was quite in keeping with my feelings at the time. Even more, I imagined that everyone was frantically trying to escape from the world. The real face becoming useless, like a vestigial tail, was an unexpected fetter, and apparently one from which not a single person had succeeded in escaping. But … I was different. I alone—it had lasted but a moment—had experienced life beyond the wall. Unable to stand the overconcentrated air there, I had come running back; still, I had had the experience. As long as I could not deny existence beyond the wall, my real face, which was merely an incomplete copy of the mask, could never overwhelm me. Since you have heard my confession, you can surely have no objection to these points at least, but.…
But the concrete wall that cut off the sky gradually lost its luminosity, and as it dissolved into the darkness, I was overcome with an uncontrollable irritation at my efforts to defy the passage of time. For God’s sake, how far have you got in your reading? I should have some idea if I knew the average number of pages you read per hour, but.… Suppose you did a page a minute: that would make sixty. Then since four hours and twenty minutes have gone by, you should be reaching the end pretty soon. Of course, you would be distracted and bored at times. You will probably just have to grit your teeth and put up with it, as if you were seasick. But no matter what the delays, you can’t need more than another hour. I suddenly jumped up and then remembered that there was no reason to, except that I did not feel like sleeping. I turned on the light and put the kettle on the gas burner. On my way back from the kitchen, I unexpectedly caught your odor—the smell of your cosmetics, coming from the dressing table at the entrance to the bedroom.
I was overcome by a paroxysm of nausea, as if I had had the inside of my throat painted with iodine. It was apparently an immediate reaction of the scar webs that had been laid bare. But at this point, was I qualified, I wondered, to look down on another’s cosmetic equipment, I who had already once taken the main role in a masked play? I must be more generous. Once and for all, I should have to graduate immediately from this childish state in which I clung to make-up and wigs. Then I decided to concentrate all my attention on the psychology of make-up, seeking a cure for my deep abhorrence of cosmetics. Make-up—making a face—is indeed a denial of the real face, but a gallant effort to get a little closer to others by transforming the expression. But when a woman’s make-up obtains the desired effect, is she jealous of it? Women do not particularly seem to be. It is a very curious thing. Why do deeply jealous women not show the slightest reaction to others who have imitated their faces? Is it a lack of imagination, or a spirit of self-sacrifice? Or is it that they have an excess of self and imagination, and that the distinction between self and others has ceased to exist? All this was pretty wide of the mark and apparently quite incapable of curing my abhorrence of make-up. (Of course, it is different now. I’ll continue in the light of my present feeling. The fact that women get along without being jealous of their own make-up is perhaps the result of instinctively perceiving the drop in value of their own face. It is because they instinctively realize that the virtues of their real faces are merely left-overs from a period when hereditary property was one’s security; and unfortunately they are without property. Isn’t this attitude far more realistic, far more consonant with reason, than that of men who cling to the authority of the real face? Of course, women condemn make-up for children. I wonder if they do not have some misgiving about it. If they do, the responsibility probably lies in the conservatism of secondary education rather than in women’s lack of confidence. If one were to press the effectiveness of secondary education to its logical conclusion, naturally men too would accept cosmetics freely. No, let’s stop.… At this point, no matter how many different possibilities I claim, they can after all be only a prisoner’s lament. In a nutshell, the mask was probably just not competent to cure my latent phobia for make-up.)
For distraction I turned on the television set. As luck would have it, it was just the time for the foreign news, and a report was in progress on the Negro riots in America. Having talked about the wretched black people in torn shirts who were being marched away by white police officers, the announcer continued matter-of-factly:
—The racial disturbances in New York are a cause for concern at the beginning of this long, black summer. They have materialized just as predicted by competent sources. Harlem streets are overflowing with more than five hundred helmeted police, Negro and white. One is reminded of the summer of 1943. In some churches, opposition meetings are being held along with Sunday services. The contempt and mistrust that exist between police and colored citizens.…
The words gave me an intolerable feeling of pain and depression, as if a sharp fishbone had thrust itself between my teeth. Of course, I had almost nothing in common with the Negroes, except for being an object of prejudice. The Negroes were comrades bound in the same cause, but I was quite alone. Even though the Negro question might be a grave social problem, my own case could never go beyond the limits of the personal. However, what gave me such a stifling feeling as I watched the riot scenes stemmed from an association of ideas whereby I saw thousands of men and women, like me without faces, gathering together. Could we, the faceless, arise resolutely against prejudice like the Negroes? It would be impossible. Disgusted with each other’s ugliness, we would probably begin to battle among ourselves. If we did not do that, the only thing for one like us would be to start running full speed until he disappeared from sight. No, if all this were true, I could still have borne it. However, I was apparently quite fascinated with the riots. On the slightest pretext, groups of us monsters might make unprovoked attacks on the faces of honest citizens. Out of malice? Or would it be some ploy to profit by increasing our ranks with every ordinary face we smashed? Both were definitely strong motives, but I seemed to be stimulated by a desire to be buried as a soldier in the riot’s storm. Surely the soldier enjoys an anonymous existence. Even without a face he would have no difficulty in accomplishing his mission, and he would be provided with an excellent raison d’être. Faceless battalions would be ideal groups of soldiers. Unflinchingly rushing on to destruction for the sake of destruction, they would make splendid fighting units.
This was perhaps quite true, but I was still as alone as before. I with an air pistol concealed in my pocket, I who had not even attempted to shoot down a bird. Disgusted, I switched off the television set and looked at my watch; the appointed hour had already gone by.
Naturally, I was upset. I listened for sounds outside, checking my watch every few minutes. I had an unbearable feeling like flood waters beginning to rise. There! Footsteps! But when the neighbor’s dog began to bark, I realized that it was someone else. But now? No, surely. The sounds were too heavy for you. For some time I listened to the noises of autos stopping and the opening and closing of doors, but unfortunately they came from the direction of the lane in back. I grew more and more distressed. What in
God’s name was holding you up? Had you met mishap? A traffic accident? A rapist’s attack? If you had, at least you could have telephoned … even you who liked rape.… No, I must not say that. Even jokingly there are things you say and things you don’t. Our experience had a thin, supersensitive skin that could never be touched by such expressions.
How would it be, since I was so worried, if I went to meet you? Let’s not jump the gun. If I left now, we would miss each other on the road. Even if you had finished reading, it might well be taking you more time than I had calculated to collect your thoughts and decide how best to answer me. Then there was also the business of burying the mask, which I entrusted to you. Even though you left the notebooks as evidence, you may have decided to smash the button and cut the mask into bits in order to do away with every last vestige of this nightmare, and this may have taken more time than I anticipated. Whichever it was, from now on it was only a question of time. Perhaps you were already on the way home. In three more minutes you would be at the door, ringing your usual two short buzzes. Yes, only two more minutes … one more.…
It didn’t work. Let’s begin again from the beginning Five minutes more … four … three … two … one … As I kept repeating these sequences, nine o’clock came round, then ten, and before I knew it it was almost eleven. Like a steel pipe that has split open under strain, my senses vibrated with the commotion in the distant streets, moaning and answering back in timid whispers. What other possibilities could there be, in heaven’s name? Where else could you go besides returning here? But there was no answer. Naturally. There could be no answer. As long as you were careful and did not misread the notes.…
Then suddenly I let out a curse. Hastily wrapping the bandages around my face, I locked up and hurried out. What was I fiddling around for anyway? I should have made up my mind much sooner! Perhaps it was already too late! Late? How could it be too late? I did not know myself what I meant by that, but my premonitions, darker than the inside of a monster’s throat, spewed out ominous vapor.
The premonitions were absolutely correct. It was a little before midnight when I arrived at the apartment. The light in the room was out and there was no sign of anyone. Cursing the self-complacency with which I had gone on mindlessly waiting until it was so late, I mounted the emergency stairs and opened the door, a bitter taste in my mouth. My heart was pounding like a hammer. After making sure there was no sound in the room, I carefully turned on the light and looked around. You were not there. Your corpse was not there either. The room looked exactly as I had left it. The three notebooks lay on the table, and even the sheet of paper I had put there, with instructions for you to open to the first page of the first notebook, lay untouched under the ink bottle I had weighted it down with. Then you had not been in the room after all. The mystery was growing. Although the burden of my responsibility was lighter, the fact remained that it would be even more of a disaster if you had gone off without reading at all than if you had disappeared after having read. I looked in the closet. Neither the button nor the mask showed the slightest sign of having been touched.
But … just a minute. That smell.… Yes! The smell, faintly colored with the odor of mold and dust, was unmistakably yours. Then you had been here. Yet the fact that the note I had left was in the same place as before seemed to indicate that you had ignored the notebooks.… What in the deuce did it mean when you had taken the pains to come this far?
As I carelessly perused the note, I gave a start. The paper was just like what I had used, but the writing was different. It was a letter addressed to me, written in your hand on the back of my own note. You had apparently disappeared after having read the notebooks. The worst had apparently come to pass, just as I had feared.
No, I should not use such words as “the worst” so glibly. The contents of your letter far exceeded any of my expectations and took me completely by surprise. No matter how much I had been afraid, perplexed, worried, distressed, and upset, such feelings meant nothing now. With a dash of the pen, as in a puzzle where a flea is transformed into an elephant, the outcome had been changed into something different from what I had planned. The mask’s determination, its thoughts, its struggle with my real face, and the petition to you that I had tried to get across through the notes—all had been made ino an absurd burlesque. It was a terrible thing. Who could imagine that one could be so ridiculed, so humiliated by oneself?
MY WIFE’S LETTER
IT WAS NOT the mask that died among the boots, but you. The girl with the yoyo was not the only one to know about your masked play. From the very first instant, when, elated with pride, you talked about the distortion of the magnetic field, I too saw through you completely. Please don’t insult me any more by asking how I did it. Of course, I was flustered, confused, and frightened to death. Under any circumstances, it was an unimaginably drastic way of acting, so different from your ordinary self. It was hallucinatory, seeing you so full of self-confidence. Even you knew very well that I had seen through you. You knew and yet demanded that we go on with the play in silence. I considered it a dreadful thing at first, but I soon changed my mind, thinking that perhaps you were acting out of sympathy for me. Then, though the things you did seemed a little embarrassing, they began to present the appearance of a delicate and suave invitation to a dance. And as I watched you become amazingly serious and go on pretending to be deceived, my heart began to fill with a feeling of gratitude, and so I followed after you meekly.
But you went from one misunderstanding to the next, didn’t you? You write that I rejected you, but that’s not true. Didn’t you reject yourself all by yourself? I felt that I could understand your wanting to. In view of the accident and all, I had more than half resigned myself to sharing your suffering. For that very reason, your mask seemed quite good to me. In a happy frame of mind, I reflected that love strips the mask from each of us, and we must endeavor for those we love to put the mask on so that it can be taken off again. For if there is no mask to start with, there is no pleasure in removing it, is there? Do you understand what I mean?
I think you do. After all, don’t even you have your doubts? Is what you think to be the mask in reality your real face, or is what you think to be your real face really a mask? Yes, you do understand. Anyone who is seduced is seduced realizing this.
But the mask did not return. At first you were apparently trying to get your own self back by means of the mask, but before you knew it you had come to think of it only as your magician’s cloak for escaping from yourself. So it was not a mask, but somewhat the same as another real face, wasn’t it? You finally revealed your true colors. It was not the mask, but you yourself. It is meaningful to put a mask on, precisely because one makes others realize it is a mask. Even with cosmetics, which you abominate so, we never try to conceal the fact that it is make-up. After all, it was not that the mask was bad, but that you were too unaware of how to treat it. Even though you put the mask on, you could not do a thing while you were wearing it. Good or bad, you could not do a thing. All you could manage was to wander through the streets and write long, never-ending confessions, like a snake with its tail in its mouth. It was all the same to you whether you burned your face or didn’t, whether you put on a mask or didn’t. You were incapable of calling the mask back. Since the mask will not come back, there is no reason for me to return either.
Nevertheless, these notes were a terrible confession. I felt as if I had been forced onto an operating table, although I was not sick, and hacked up indiscriminately with a hundred different knives and scissors, even the uses of which were incomprehensible. With this in mind, please read through what you have written once again. Surely even you will be able to hear my cries of pain. If I had the time, I should like to explain the significance of those cries one by one. But it would be dreadful if I were so careless as to let you return while I was still here. It really would be dreadful. While you spoke of the face as being some kind of roadway between fellow human beings, you were like a snail that thin
ks only of its own doorway. You were showing off. Even though you had forced me into a compound where I had already been, you set up a fuss as if I had scaled a prison wall, as if I had absconded with money. And so, when you began to focus on my face you were flustered and confused, and without a word you at once nailed up the door of the mask. Indeed, as you said, perhaps death filled the world. I wonder if scattering the seeds of death is not the deed of men who think only of themselves, as you do.
You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors. My insides have almost burst with your ridicule. I shall never be able to get over it, never.
(And then came about two and a half lines of erasures, obliterated to the point of illegibility.)
WHAT a surprise attack. To imagine that you perceived that my mask was a mask and nevertheless went on pretending to be deceived. A swarm of shame, centipede-legged, streamed out, choosing the parts of me most subject to goose flesh—my armpits, my back, my sides. Indeed, my nerves, feeling the humiliation, seemed to be at the very surface of my skin. I became flacid as a drowned man with the hives of my shame. It was stupid of me, however normal it may have been, to say that I had not wanted to be a clown and unaware of it; but these very lines have become those of a clown. To imagine that you had seen through everything! It was as if I were putting on a play in which I was the only actor, thinking I was invisible, believing in a fake spell. I was completely oblivious to the fact that I had been seen by a spectator. My swarming shame plowed my skin. Sea urchin spines sprouted in the turned-up furrows. Soon I should be obliged to join the ranks of spiny creatures.…