by Kōbō Abe
I was unable to make up my mind immediately whether, frankly, to mock or to fear this creature aged zero. However, the creature in dark glasses reflected from the mirror of the station washroom, was wild and defiant, perhaps abetted by an association of ideas with the object concealed in its pocket.
WELL, what to do? Rather than standing around, arms folded, not knowing what to do, I was overflowing and alert with curiosity. At any rate, I was walking alone with my mask, and I had no particular plan other than just to let it walk by itself. The first problem was to get used to the feel of things. Knowing that inadequate preparation of the mask could, make me shrink away from my project, I had intended to nurse it along with the greatest of caution. But since the occurrence at the toy shop, the tables were turned. Far from leading, I could only follow in dumb amazement after this searching spirit like a prisoner just liberated.
Well, what to do? Well, what to do? As I lightly stroked the jaw of the mask with my fingers, perhaps reacting to my old bandage disguise, I ostentatiously struck a number of poses, like a hunter testing decoys—eagerly expecting, licking of lips, watching, coveting, defying, verifying, desiring, showing confidence, aiming, searching—rolling, as it were, some of each into one compound expression, incessantly sniffing around like a badly behaved dog who has made off with something from under the shepherd’s nose. This was a sign that the mask was beginning to gain some self-confidence from others’ reactions; and I, in part, could not deny that I had a feeling of satisfaction in acting this way.
Yet, at the same time, I was terribly anxious. No matter how different I might be from my real face, I was still myself. Since I was not under the influence of hypnotism or drugs, whatever the acts of the mask—even the concealing of an air pistol in my pocket—it was the real I who would have to assume the ultimate responsibility. The personality of the mask was certainly not something that, rabbit-like, popped out of a magician’s hat; it must really be a part of me that had come into being without my being aware of it, because the gatekeeper, my real face, had been so severely forbidden access. And while I theoretically understood this to be so, nevertheless, it was as if I were suffering from amnesia; I could not conjure up the whole of the personality. Imagine my irritation at not being able to provide a content consonant with this abstract self. Once I distractedly tried to put on the brakes.
—The failure of that thirty-second experiment: was it because the testing technique was bad or was there something wrong with the hypothesis itself?
I want to recall my viewpoint concerning an important problem in the laboratory just now. I had obtained precisely the experimental results I had anticipated for certain types of high-molecular matter, verifying an hypothesis that a functional relationship apparently existed between the variation in the rate of elasticity under pressure and under temperature. This idea seemed to have been completely upset by the latest, thirty-second experiment, and I found myself in a serious quandary.
The mask, however, merely frowned, apparently but slightly distressed. While I thought it natural, I felt that my self-esteem had been injured, and I became rather defiant.
MARGINAL NOTE: Originally the mask was nothing more than a means for recovering myself. I mused that it seemed like having the house taken over when one has let but one room; self-respect had little to do with the matter.
—Well. What in heaven’s name do you want? If I felt like it, I could stop you right now.
However, the mask coolly and nonchalantly took no notice.
—You understand, I suppose … I’m no one. Since I have had to undergo the anguish of being someone up till now, I shall deliberately take this opportunity to withdraw again from becoming someone. Even you don’t really think you would like to make someone of me, do you? As a matter of fact it would be impossible even if you did, so shouldn’t we let things go as they are? Ah, I told you so, take this crowd … and it’s not even a holiday. A crowd isn’t formed after people gather; people gather after the crowd forms. It’s true … students wearing their hair like hoodlums, modest housewives made up like actresses who won their reputation by their indecency, porcine girls wearing the latest fashions designed for bony mannequins. Lost in the crowd, it’s all right to pretend for a moment to be no one. Or do you intend to insist that only you and I are different?
I could make no answer. There could be none. For it was the mask itself that had set forth the ideas conceived in my head. (I wonder if you laughed just now? No, it would be too selfish of me to expect that. It was a bad joke. If I could get you to realize that there was a partial truth in the explanation, I should be quite satisfied, but.…)
I who had been defeated—or who pretended to have been defeated—decided to let the mask have its way without further opposition. Whereupon the mask set up surprisingly (considering that it was nobody) sensible and bold plans which were in no way inferior to the incident of the pistol I spoke of before. Anyway, when I had finished lunch, I would try going as far as our house and check the looks of things. No, I do not refer to the looks of the house, but to my own. How far could I endure the seducer’s ordeal, which had at last been set for the morrow? At least I should try getting a look at the house. I entertained my own inner hopes, but since I was unable to express them, I readily agreed.
EXCURSUS: I do not mean to praise myself, but I was too kind. It was like arguing the Ptolemaic theory while believing in the Copernican. No, the crime of being too kind should never be thought of as slight. Just thinking of what happened before this was apparently enough to make the worms of shame come wriggling out of all the pores of my body. If I am ashamed to reread this, how much more ashamed I am to imagine you reading it. Even I knew full well that the Copernican theory was the correct one. Surely I have made too much of my loneliness. I thought my loneliness greater than all mankind’s combined. As a sign of repentance, in the next notebook at least, I should like to delete any suggestion of tragedy.
THE GREY
NOTEBOOK
ALTHOUGH a bare five days had passed since I had last taken the suburban streetcar I habitually rode, the experience was as fresh as if five years had gone by. Though it was a ride I knew well, one where I could go with my eyes closed, it was a completely new one for the mask. If it had the feeling it remembered something, that was because this ride was a vision in the womb before the mask was born.
Yes, actually it was that way. Indeed, the very clouds along the way, which I could glimpse from the window of the streetcar, were things I remembered as if they were white-bearded relics of a bygone age. The inside of the mask seemed bathed in soda water and tiny bubbles fizzed around on the surface.… I wiped my forehead, which was not even damp, with the back of my hand in a reflex movement, then heaved a sigh of relief as I looked around, for no one had noticed the blunder. I seemed to be permitted a normal relationship with people at a natural, proper distance. Suddenly laughter welled up within me. The feeling of exhilaration, as if I were entering enemy territory, changed imperceptibly into the mellowness of homecoming; the feeling of guilt, as if I were committing some crime, was transformed into the nostalgia of reunion. It was an individual matter. Quite like an invalid who at last is able to leave off dieting, I adjusted myself to the movement of the car, and greedily began to send out tendrils, like a creeping vine, toward your white forehead, toward the faint pink scar a burn had left on the underside of your wrist, toward the lines of your ankles resembling the underside of a snail’s shell.
Was it too sudden? I wondered. Even so, there was nothing to be done for it. Though you may say that these are the incoherent mutterings, the intoxicated babblings of the mask, there is no basis for denying them. Surely, this is the first time I have written about you in such a way in these notes. Yet it is not because I set you aside in a holiday savings club until the date of maturity came; rather it is because I considered that I did not have the qualifications. A faceless monster talking about your body is as funny as a frog discussing a canary’s song. Hurting myself
was hurting you, I expect. But then … did that mean the spell was broken by the mask? I wondered. That, of course, was a much bigger, thornier problem. Yet in the future I would be obliged to come to a showdown, no matter how unpleasant it might be for me.
Since it was approaching the time the early-closing stores let their employees out, the streetcar was fairly crowded. I shifted my body a little, and the buttocks of a young woman in a green coat brushed my thigh. When I turned my body, trying to conceal the revolver, the contact with her became much more intimate. Then, since she did not particularly try to draw away, I too decided to stand as I was. The contact increased, following the movement of the streetcar, and our two bodies drew no further apart. As the girl’s buttocks stiffened and relaxed, she resolutely feigned sleep. While I was musing lightheartedly what would happen if I were to press the muzzle of the revolver in my pocket against her buttocks, the car came to my stop. I glanced at her as I was about to get off, and from the style of her hair I could see she was not young; with a disagreeably serious expression she earnestly continued to scan a sign beyond the station platform. No, there could be no further significance to the incident. All I wanted to say was that I suppose that things would not have gone at all as they had if I had not had my mask on.
EXCURSUS: No, the explanation in this section lacks candor. If candor is lacking, so is honesty. Was this because of my constraint toward you? I wonder. If that were true, I should not have mentioned it at all from the very beginning. If I were just indicating the efficiency of the mask, there was no need to waste ten or twenty lines on such a fake erotic confession. Consequently, I said honesty was lacking. Thanks to having engaged in this makeshift subterfuge, I was not only unable to tell the truth, but I might well have the bitter experience of your misunderstanding me.
I am not particularly interested in trading on honesty. Since it is inevitable that I should touch on the matter, I shall mention it and simply bring the real motive out into the open, concealing nothing. From the standpoint of general morality, it was a quite ordinary shameful act, at best to be repented; but seen from the standpoint of an act by the mask, I consider that it provides an extremely important key to my subsequent actions. To put it bluntly, I had begun to have an erection at the time. Perhaps I cannot go so far as to call this illicit intercourse, but it must at least be considered an act of mental masturbation. I wondered if I would be betraying you. No, I don’t want to use the word “betrayal” so cheaply. If I were to say such a thing, then I had been betraying you ever since the webs had begun to form on my face. Furthermore, since I feared that my cutting a ridiculous figure would make you lose the desire to read this, I deliberately refrained from mentioning it, but at least seventy percent of my thinking continued to be possessed by frantic sexual fantasies. They did not appear in my actions, but I was indeed a potential sexual criminal.
It is often said that sex and death have an intimate relationship, but it was about that time that I became aware of the real meaning of the statement. Until then I had shallowly interpreted the ultimate moment of the sexual act to be so much a self-effacement as to suggest death, but having lost my face and finding myself buried alive, I was made to comprehend for the first time the very real meaning of the words. Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces its seeds just before it withers, sex is simply a struggle with death on the human level. Thus, an erotic impulse without a definite object can be said to be the hope of man on the verge of death for human recovery. The proof of this is that eroticism flourishes among soldiers. An increase in the number of erotics among townspeople is an indication that in the cities, and in the nation itself, there will be a greater number of deaths. When men can forget death, sex for the first time will change into love that has an object and will be able to insure stable human reproduction.
The action of the mask in the streetcar, both for me and for the woman, was terribly lonely; but from my standpoint, I felt that I was in a situation of erotic love, as it were, or rather, in a transition from eroticism to love. The mask had not yet achieved life completely; perhaps it had halfway begun to live. In this condition, far from betraying you, it did not yet have even the capability of such betrayal. According to my schedule, the mask’s ability to come completely alive was possible only after it had successfully met you.
To conclude what I have been saying, perhaps things would turn out this way. Thanks to the mask, I had somehow been able to avoid the extreme criminal sexual impulse; but that did not change the fact that I was semi-erotic, and these erotic elements did not bring me to you. Rather I was convinced that they were a stimulus to shake me free of you. Thus in some way I had to make you fall in love with the mask.
As I stood urinating in the public toilet of the station, I was thinking that nothing could be better for the mask, in growing up, than having all kinds of experiences. I decided to avoid the commercial streets and go through the back lanes. It would be unfortunate to happen upon you in front of the fishmonger’s. I still did not have the confidence to withstand surprise, and furthermore I wanted everything to go as planned, especially the meeting between the mask and you. Even though everything was going well, I was distracted. For no reason at all, my feet became entangled and I almost stumbled on the flat ground. Breathing through my mouth like a dog in order to cool the air which had begun to heat up inside the mask, I panted and panted as if reciting some magic formula.—Listen. This is my first time here. Everything I see, everything I hear is new. From now on, the buildings I see, the people I meet—I shall be seeing all for the first time. Even if I have memories that fit what I see now they are merely mistakes, or strange coincidences, or fantasies. Oh, yes … broken manhole covers too … and half-painted Police Alert signals … and street corners with their year-round pools of waste water that overflowed the gutters … and elm trees jutting out into the streets … and … and.…
One by one I endeavored to eject colors and forms from my memory as if spitting out sand from my mouth, but something always remained—you. I earnestly admonished the mask: You’re a complete stranger … tomorrow’s meeting will be the very first confrontation with her … you haven’t yet seen her, nor heard her … well, you had better forget such impressions at once. But the appearance of things around me was crystal-clear in my memory. The further away I got, the more clearly, the more distinctly your face floated before me, and I was at a loss to know what to do.
I—and the mask too, of course—passed the front of our house time after time; with your image as an axis, I kept circling tirelessly around the unequal-sided tetragon that defined the yard, like a moth drawn to the light.
Moreover, there was no fear of being challenged. The groups of neighborhood women, their shopping baskets on their arms, ignored in their haste the unknown man walking down the street; and the children insatiably played away the few moments that remained before dinner. As I approached the house for the fifth or sixth time, the street lamps came on and suddenly the sun began to set. I slowed down as much as I dared without raising suspicion. From a window I could not see, a faint light fell softly on the garden, telling me that you were there. It was the living-room light. I wondered if you were preparing dinner all by yourself.
Abruptly, I began to feel jealous of the living room light. It was nothing so precise as thinking there was some guest taking my place; I was apparently jealous of the very light burning when evening came, of the living room the same as it had always been. I should be reading the evening paper by that light as I waited for dinner, and apparently I felt it somehow unfair and unacceptable that I should have to loiter outside the window, my face concealed by a mask. The living room light, whose calm brightness remained unchanged even though I was not there … just as you did.…
Then I suddenly realized the shabbiness and the unreliability of the mask, which until now had given such satisfactory results, on which I had placed so much hope. My big scene, in which I had imagined putting on the mask and becoming
someone else, was after all merely a scene; and with the coming of evening, a switch had been turned and the living-room light lit. The mask was a poor weak thing before such everyday certainties. When it saw you smile it would dissolve like unseasonable snow.
In order to get over this feeling of defeat, I decided to let my mask dream as it would for a while. The dreams would be somewhat crude, like the mask, but I could not complain if it was filled with fancies, or delusions—these were its daily fare. In the meantime, pretending to ignore what was going on in the mask, I again began to circle around the house with the air of being there on business.
But these musings, far from emboldening the mask, had the effect of demonstrating the treacherous impassability of the deep channel that separated me from it.
The instant the chains were loosened, the mask would boldly march toward the house. That would place me in the position of a pimp. The gate off its hinges … the mud-clogged gravel path … the diseased entry door from which the paint had begun to peel … the half-rotted rain barrel, beginning to collapse in a corner of the entryway.… None of your business, this is somebody else’s house! I would strain my ears for your presence as I rang the doorbell and step back, controlling my breathing. At length, the sound of footsteps would draw near, the porch light would go on and then the sound of your voice would ask who was there.…
No. No matter in how much detail I tell such a story, it is all quite hopeless. There is no need to tell it, and furthermore, it would be impossible. It might turn into something funny, if by hook or by crook I could apply logical syntax to the wild fancies; but they were like scribblings on a blackboard, all mixed up, disregarding time or sequence, writing and erasing, erasing and writing—their order was like graffiti on the wall of a public toilet. I should like to extract two or three fragments, restricting myself to what is necessary to make you understand the impact these thoughts had on me.
