The Face of Another

by Kōbō Abe

  I am saying that you must not make fun of my writing. For the act of writing is not simply replacing facts with arrangements of letters; it is a kind of venturesome trip. I am not like a postman on a preordained route. There is danger, and discovery, and satisfaction. I was beginning to feel there was some purpose to the writing itself, so much so that I thought I should like to go on with these notebooks for ever and ever. But I was able to curb the inclination. I should be able to avoid the ridiculous posture of an abominable monster offering gifts to an unattainable maiden. My three-day schedule stretched into four and then into five days. If I can get you to read these notes, the work of restoring the roadway will surely become ours together. Was this the song of a man being led off to prison, singing to bolster his courage? No, I was averse to over-optimism, and I had no intention of flattering myself. I realized that we were fellow casualties and anticipated an attitude of mutual sympathy. Well, let’s try bravely putting out the light. When the lights go out, that’s the end of the masquerade ball. In the dark, with neither face nor mask, I should like us to try to reestablish relations with each other. I should like to believe the new melody that comes to me from the darkness.

  WHEN I got off the streetcar, I at once dashed into a beer parlor. I was strangely grateful for the texture of the glasses, frosted with drops of water. Perhaps it was because the breathing of the skin on my face was hindered by the mask, but the mucous membranes in my throat had dried up right to the back of my nose. I downed a pint of beer in one gulp, as if I were a suction pump.

  I had drunk no alcohol for some time, and the effect was more rapid than usual.

  Of course, no color appeared on the mask. Instead the scar tissues began to feel creepy, almost to writhe. Not caring, I tossed off two, then three, glasses, as if in a race, and at length the writhing began to subside. Carried away, I followed up the beer with a bottle of saké.

  In the meantime, the irritation I had been feeling suddenly vanished, and I became strangely arrogant, defiant. Apparently even the mask was beginning to feel tipsy.—Faces, faces, faces, faces.… I rubbed my eyes, wet with tears in place of sweat, and scowled around through the noise and cigarette smoke at the innumerable faces that packed the place.—So what! Just speak up if you’ve got any complaint! You can’t?—I could see no reason why they should. As I drank my saké, my drunken babbling was proof enough of my respect and esteem for the mask. I zestfully abused my superiors and boasted what a big shot a friend of a friend of a friend was; in short, it was as if I had become someone other than my real face. Even so, this was a pretty sloppy way of getting drunk. The real face definitely could not get drunk the way the mask did. The best the real face could do was to put on a drunken face. Even dead drunk, it would be only a fraction of the mask, never like the mask itself. If I wished to wipe away name, occupation, family, even official registration, I had merely to resort to a lethal dose of poison.… But the mask was different.… It was prodigious the way it got drunk.… It could become a completely different person even without alcohol.… Like me, as a matter of fact …! Me …? No, this is the mask.… Again the mask had become presumptuous, forgetting all about our truce.… But I was no less tipsy than it.… Could I be responsible for tomorrow’s plans in such a state …? These questions were not pressing, and without realizing it, I went along with the mask’s demand for autonomy.

  The mask was growing thicker and thicker. It had grown at last into a concrete fortress that enveloped me; and I crept out into the night streets wrapped in concrete armor, feeling like a member of a heavily equipped hunting party. Through the peepholes, the streets looked like the haunts of deformed stray cats. There they loitered, their noses suspiciously in the air, looking greedy, seeking their own tattered tails and ears. I hid beneath my mask, which had neither name nor status nor age, elated at the security guaranteed me alone. If their freedom were a freedom of frosted glass, then mine was the freedom of flawlessly transparent glass. In an instant, my craving had reached the boiling point, and very soon I should not be able to help having a try at making this freedom materialize. Yes, what we call the goal of life is doubtless the consumption of freedom. People often treat the preservation of freedom as if it were the goal of human existence; but isn’t this merely an illusion, after all, that stems from a chronic lack of freedom? Since people make goals out of such things, they fall into the dilemma of talking beyond the confines of this universe; they become misers, or failing that, religious fanatics—one or the other, at least. Yet even the plans for tomorrow could not themselves be a goal. Since by seducing you I shall try to enlarge the validity of my passport, the plans must rather be thought of as a kind of means to an end. With no regret, I shall use the mask now to its fullest capacity.

  EXCURSUS: Of course, this was merely alcoholic sophism. The instant I revealed my love to you, I did not intend to beg you to accept such irrefutable logic for impudently justifying the illicit intercourse, nor did I myself intend to. Precisely because I did not, I was preparing my farewell address to the mask. But what worried me slightly was that I could not help but want to use exactly the same logic even in a sober state.

  “The goal does not lie in the results of research, the very process of research is itself the goal.” Yes … words that any researcher would utter as a matter of course. While at first blush they seemed unrelated to my case, I could not help but feel that I was after all saying the same thing as they. The process of research, in short, was merely the expenditure of freedom upon matter. The results of research, on the contrary, by being calculated in terms of value, encourage the preservation of freedom. The point of the words was to warn against the tendency to overemphasize only results and to confuse means and ends. I thought this was a much more enlightened logic, but on reflection what I had put forth was quite like the alcoholic babblings of the mask. I was not at all satisfied with the explanation. Was it not simply that, although I had intended to control the mask, I had actually found it to be unmanageable? Or was freedom like some powerful medicine which, though beneficial in small quantities, produces ill effects as soon as one exceeds the given dosage? I should like to hear what you think. Surely, if I must follow the mask’s dictates, then not only the hypothesis of the mask as a prison, which I went to some pains to describe, but the whole body of these notes could be the product of misunderstanding. I could by no means believe that you would support such arguments to justify illicit relations.

  WELL now, how shall I deal with this excessive freedom?

  If someone were to view my covetous behavior with dispassion, he would frown upon it. However, the mask had originally been no one, and thus it experienced no pain at all, for it made no difference to it how it was thought of. It had no need to be ashamed, nor to justify itself, and this feeling of release was very comforting. The release from the sense of shame, especially, bathed me in a music that rose bubbling round my ears.

  MARGINAL NOTE: True, I must make special mention of this music. Ornamental neon lights, blanched night skies, girls’ legs that expanded and contracted with their stockings, forgotten alleys, corpses of dead cats in trash cans, tobacco ashes, and then … and then—I cannot name them all—every one of these scenes made its own particular music, its own particular noise. And for the sake of this music alone, I wanted to believe in the reality of the time I was anticipating.…

  EXCURSUS: It goes without saying that the above “marginal note” took place before the immediately preceding excursus, and was written down immediately after the text. From my present feeling, it is difficult to recall just where such music was. But I do not have the confidence to strike the passage out.

  Though the mask’s alibi was flawless, and the freedom it promised inexhaustible, I wondered if it were not ignoble to be satisfied with the freedom of behaving covetously; I was disoriented, like a penniless man who has suddenly acquired a great sum of money. I knew this already. The saké brought a tipsy feeling of release, knotting into lumps of craving throughout my body,
and I became like an old tumorous tree. In addition, the freedom placed right under my nose now, compared to the “freedom” I had been enjoying, restricted by age, position, and profession, was exactly like raw meat dripping blood as opposed to the mere word “meat.” Just looking and saying nothing could do me no good. Far from being satisfied, my mask opened the roadway wide, like the mouth of a frogfish gloatingly awaiting the arrival of the bait.

  But unfortunately, I did not know if hunting down the game would be worth the expenditure of freedom. Was I too accustomed to conserving freedom? If my craving for freedom were inadequate, even though it left my body cancer-ridden, humorously enough I could augment my craving only by the exercise of logic.

  I wasn’t boasting about fine craving. In any case, my alibi was guaranteed, and I did not mind a bit how disgusting or even immoral it might be. Rather, since I had a feeling of release from my real face, it was tempting to break the law, to disdain good sense. However, what came in answer to my demand—perhaps unconsciously induced by the air pistol in my pocket—were grossly unattractive acts that smacked of gangsterism: blackmail, extortion, robbery. Of course, if I could bring even these off successfully, it would be a great exploit for me. If their real character were to be exposed, the strangeness of this combination would be first-class news copy. If I were really inclined to try, I would not hold back. I might make those with real faces—pseudo-masks—who feign ignorance, understand the actual form of abstract human relations, and at least I could express my pent-up revenge on the scars.

  I was not being hypocritical, but why was I not inclined to this type of immorality? The reason was extremely simple: for one thing, there was no particular need for a real mask; even a bandage disguise would serve the purpose. And another thing: even if I were to try extortion or blackmail, getting money to redeem my freedom was the only goal. Two hundred dollars left from my business travel expenses were still warming the inside of my pocket. I could certainly manage tonight and all day tomorrow. As for the means of getting more money, I might as well let that go until it became a problem.

  But what in heaven’s name was a pure goal, uninvolved with the question of means? Interestingly enough, almost all the illegal actions that occurred to me were concerned with money, that is, the illegal transfer of ownership. To give one example, gambling, which is said to be a relatively pure concentration of passion, is termed by psychology an escapist craving. This act attempts to replace a continuous, chronic anxiety with a momentary channeling of that tension—if this is really true, it would surely make no difference at all whether it were escapist or whether it were an expenditure of freedom—however, if one eliminated the give and take of money, gambling would become quite insipid. One gambling experience leads to another, the chain is potentially endless, and the fact that it ultimately becomes habit seems to prove that it is merely the swing of the pendulum between means and ends. Fraud, embezzlement, robbery, counterfeiting—all are inconceivable without the means by which they are committed. Even fellows who appear to disregard the law and behave according to their personal dictates actually belong to a freedomless world surprisingly imbued with wants. Isn’t pure purpose simply an illusion?

  For example, carrying off whatever materials I wanted from the storeroom at the Institute by intimidating the guard, or stealing the expense sheets and progress charts of experiments by breaking into the locked files of the administration department—these were practical objectives, typical of me. They were amusing daydreams, good for adolescent television serials, not motivated by greed but by my dissatisfaction with a company that provided only provisional independence under the name of an Institute; but the fact remained that they were means to an end, and furthermore, the role I wanted my mask to play above all would perhaps not be realized. Maybe there would be grounds for further consideration after I had let the mask have its way and I had settled down to this life.

  MARGINAL NOTE: Needless to say, as long as no obstacle arose, I intended to go on indefinitely living this double life of the mask and the real face.

  Of course, among the various crimes, there was only one that suggested an exceptional possibility. That was arson. In arson many elements are simply means for preserving freedom: receiving the insurance as beneficiary, or destroying evidence after theft, or scheming by a fireman thirsting for fame. And is not almost all calculated arson based on grudge after all, an attempt to recover freedom which has been frozen or snatched away? But I realize that there are also cases of pure incendiarism, which themselves have no value other than the direct satisfaction of a craving—pure incendiarism, where the billowing flames lick at the walls, twist the pillars, pierce the ceiling, and suddenly shoot up to the clouds, oblivious to the milling crowd of curiosity seekers; where the dramatic destruction, the reduction to ashes, of a bit of history, which until then had been in undeniable existence, was food that satisfied a spiritual hunger. It seemed by no means a normal craving. An arsonist is an eccentric by definition. But since the mask was a mask and not bound by a “right” way of doing things, if the expenditure of freedom itself were guaranteed, there was no need to bring normality or abnormality into the question.

  But since I myself had no intention of becoming an arsonist, there was no point in further discussion. As I threaded my way through the alleys between the main streets, which were filled with flashy billboards crowded together edge to edge, I tried imagining a scene where flames would spurt out suddenly from the crevices in the walls and from under the eaves, but it had no appeal at all. I wasn’t especially frightened, I think. If you were to try putting on the mask just once, you too would surely understand; trying to suppress such acts of violence was meaningless and fatuous. For example, even the most fainthearted child can enjoy a horror movie calmly if he covers his face and looks through his fingers. Further, a heavily made-up woman is more easily seduced than one who wears no make-up. This is not restricted to sexual seduction; it is demonstrable, statistically, in cases of habitual shoplifters. People get excited about upholding discipline, or custom, or rules, but in the final analysis such things, depressingly, are merely houses on sand supported by a thin layer of skin, the real face.

  Indeed, I was not frightened. From now on it would serve no purpose to hold back out of shame. Basically, the mask itself was the crystallization of shame. It may not be prohibited by law, but is there another act more reprehensible than disguising oneself with a mask unrecognizable as such? In short, even though I could imagine what the psychology of an arsonist might be, I myself was simply not one. However, I too became uneasy when I found that the single, apparently pure goal I had at last hit upon was unfortunately not what I had ordered. Since I could decide on no other suitable plan, there was nothing to be done about it. Even so, the plan would be better than doing nothing. But I could not possibly think of all those cravings, those throbbing tumors, as classifiable under “means.” It was too pitiful to have become so accustomed to frugality in freedom. Anyway, I shall suppress incendiarism for the time being.…

  Just a minute. I realize I have made an important omission either deliberately or by accident in what I have written until now. If it were a question of illegal acts, there was another type of criminal I should have mentioned above: the bandit who attacks suddenly. If one accords a pure motive for arsonists, then there should be no question about doing the same for bandits. None at all. On the outside he is not so ostentatious as the arsonist, but in his heart he is no better than a murderer. Even so, could I have forgotten such a representative example? No, I had forgotten it precisely because it was representative. Didn’t the bandit escape me because he had more destructive motives than the arsonist, in whom I was not interested anyway?

  The extroverted, unpacific type. My mask, which passed itself off as a hunter, drew back on hearing the words “destructive motives,” and in so doing could not help but show its origins. It may appear that I am repeating, but not because I am a coward. While cowardice is something to be denied, I do no
t particularly need to deny it. Looking into myself I could find not the slightest interest in either banditry or arson. The thousand volts of electricity that stimulated the mask was completely different from destruction; it was something that coiled closely round the mask and had a character I might well call the direct opposite of destructive.

  Of course, it would be too much to say that I had absolutely no destructive motives in me. In daydreams, I was more than once carried away by impulses such as wanting to tear your skin from your face to make you experience the same agony as I, to release into the air poison gasses that would paralyze the optic nerves and blind the whole world. Indeed, I remember having often used similar harsh language in these notes, but before the mask was made. After it was completed I had the feeling, though still I made similar protests, that a delicate transformation had taken place. Perhaps it had. Precisely because it had, the mask wanted to expend its freedom on something quite different than destruction. It was not a negative something, such as letting the mask help dispose of criminal evidence by destroying it. Oh, come on. What do I really want to say? Do I want such classical harmonies as love, or friendship, or mutual understanding? Or do I want to suck on the suitably sweet, sticky cotton candy they sell in street stalls at fairs, that makes one go all soft inside?

  Irritated, like a child that cannot have what it wants, I entered a coffee house and with water and ice cream alternately bathed the tumor of craving that rose in my throat hard as a fist. I wanted to do something, but what would be best I did not know. Would I end up by doing nothing at all or by forcing myself to do something I didn’t want to? I regretted having started nothing. It was a wretched feeling, like wearing wet socks. Under the mask my face felt as if it were in a steam bath, and I seemed to be bleeding at the nose. Apparently the time had come for serious action. As I well realized, I had become my own analyst, and was earnestly organizing my own cravings, sifting them out, to discern the real forms pent up in this tumor.