by Kōbō Abe
I stood swaying in blank amazement. When I saw my shadow teetering with me, I realized that it was not my imagination but that I actually was swaying. I had made a terrible blunder. I had taken the wrong bus someplace. How far back would I have to go to change for one in the right direction, for God’s sake? As I stood wavering, I tried to retrace the route of my memories with the help of a stained, illegible map.
The jealousy-filled night when I decided to write these notes. The afternoon of the seduction when I first spoke to you. The time I thought I was becoming a lecher. The faintly smiling dawn when I had at last completed the mask. The evening with its promise of rain when I began making the mask. And then the long period of bandages and scar webs that had led to all this. Still not enough? Though I had come this far, if I had taken the wrong route, I should have to find another point of departure in yet another direction. I wonder whether I was really stagnant water within, despite the outside container, as you imply.
There is no reason for me to accept this assertion of yours. I absolutely cannot agree with the opinion that someone who plants the seeds of death is a selfish person thinking only of himself. The expression “selfish person” is an extremely happy and interesting one, I think, but however you consider it you lend it too much significance when you think of it as anything more than a result. Thinking only of oneself is forever a result, never a cause. Because—I wrote this in my notes—what contemporary society needs is essentially abstract human relationships, so that even faceless people like me can earn their wages with no interference. Naturally, human relations are concrete. One’s fellow man is increasingly treated as useless and at best continues a piecemeal existence in books and in solitary islands of family groups. No matter how much television dramas go on singing the cloying praises of the family, it is the outside world, full of enemies and lechers, that passes on a man’s worth, pays his wages, and guarantees him the right to live. The smell of poison and death clings to any stranger, and people have become allergic to outsiders without realizing it. Loneliness is terrible, of course, but being betrayed by the mask of one’s fellow man is much worse. We are awkward at espousing the illusions of our fellow men, but we do not want to be so stupid as to drop out of step. Our habitual, daily routines appear merely as common, everyday battles. People strive to protect themselves against the encroachments of others, dropping a Venetian blind over their faces and fastening it tight. And if things go well they dream up impossible desires—just as my mask tried to do—wanting to escape from themselves, to be invisible beings. No stranger is so tractable that one can know him just by wanting to. Was it not rather you who were seriously afflicted with this obliviousness to strangers, you who were possessed with the idea that you could make the conquest of a stranger by thinking only of yourself?
Of course, it serves no purpose to cling to such trivial thoughts at this point. The essential thing is the truth, not arguments or complaints. There are two indications that your sniping at me was fatal. One is the cruel revelation that while you had seen through the real character of the mask, you had nonetheless gone on pretending to be deceived. The other is the merciless chastisement of claiming that I tediously talked on and on about alibis, anonymity, pure goals, and the destroying of taboos. In actual fact I did not perform a single real act but simply went round in circles writing these notes.
My mask, which I had expected to be a shield of steel, was broken more easily than glass. I cannot refute you on that. As you said, I had come to feel that the mask was closer to being a new face for me than a mask. If I still intended to persist in believing that my real face was an incomplete copy of the mask, then I had gone to a lot of trouble to make a fake mask.
Perhaps this was so. Abruptly I recalled the primitive mask I had seen some days before in the newspaper. Certainly that must be a real mask. Perhaps one could only call something which completely got away from the real face a mask. The popping, bug-like eyes, the great mouth filled with fangs, the nose set with shiny buttons.… Down the sides of the nose a number of tendrils had swirled out over the whole face, and the entire circumference was stuck with long bird feathers, like a quiver for arrows. The more I had looked at it, the more weirdly strange, the more unreal it had appeared. As I had stared at it, wanting to put it on myself, I had gradually begun to grasp its meaning. It was the expression of a poignant aspiration to go beyond man, an effort to consort with the gods. What a horrible imagination! It was a violent compression of will in an attempt to combat a natural taboo. Perhaps I should have made a mask like that. If I had, from the very beginning I should have been able to dispense with my feeling of deceiving others.
Not at all. Since I had spoken rashly, I had been subjected to your sarcasm when you spoke of complicated scissors and knives of incomprehensible uses. If it was all right to be a monster, weren’t my scar webs enough without the mask? Gods change, and so do men. Man has gone through periods of covering up his face, like the ladies in The Tale of Genji or veiled Arabian women, and at last we have arrived at the period of the real face. Of course, I do not claim that this is progress. It may be thought of as man’s victory over the gods; but at the same time it may be a sign of his allegiance to them. We never know what tomorrow will bring. Surprisingly, it is not altogether impossible that the future may see a period of rejecting the face again. But the present age belongs to man rather than to the gods. There was a reason why my mask was identical with my real face.
No, that’s enough. Enough of reasoning. If I searched, I could certainly find as many pretexts as I wanted. But no matter how many objections I marshalled, I should not be able to reverse the two facts that you pointed out to me. I should have gradually come round to the second one: that my mask had complained without ultimately doing anything. Enough of this coat of shame. It would be all right if it were only a question of clowns and fiascos, but since the experience had turned out to be worthless I was too wretched and embarrassed even to justify it. It would be meaningless to call it desperation. I had had a perfect alibi, unrestricted freedom, yet I had gained nothing. In addition, I had been ridiculous to destroy my own alibi by writing up such a detailed report. I was like some wretched creature in ideal sexual prime, but without a penis.
Yes, perhaps I should write about the movie. I think it was around the first of February. I did not name the movie in my notes, but rather than being unrelated to what I was writing about, it was much too pertinent. I had the feeling it would be ludicrous to mention it when I was making the mask, and I deliberately avoided it. However, as things have come to this pass, there is no purpose in being superstitious. Or perhaps the situation has changed; anyway, my impressions of it have completely altered. Surely it was not simply cruelty. The film was eccentric and did not create much of a sensation, but I think you will recall the title, One Side of Love.
A SLENDER, neat-looking, modestly dressed girl was gliding along in a quiet, stark setting. She had a transparent, sprite-like profile. As the picture showed her walking from right to left, she revealed only the left side of herself to us. She walked along almost rubbing against the concrete building in the background with her right shoulder, which we could not see. She seemed dazzled by the world, and this fitted her grief-stricken profile, strengthening even more the impression of her loveliness.
At the curb, on the same side of the street, three young men who looked like delinquents lolled against a railing, each with one foot propped against it, awaiting the arrival of a victim. Seeing the girl, one of them whistled at her. The girl showed no reaction, as if she lacked sense-organs to receive external stimuli. Another of the boys, provoked, left his place and approached her. With an experienced gesture he grasped the girl’s left arm from behind and tried to pull her back, muttering something obscene. The girl, as if resigned, stopped walking and slowly turned and looked in the direction of the young man. The right side of her face, which she revealed for the first time, was pitifully disfigured with keloid ridges and distortions, and was compl
etely transformed. (No full explanation was given, but the name “Hiroshima” was constantly repeated in the following dialogue.) Startled, the young man stood in dumb amazement, while the girl, turning once more her beautiful, fairy-like profile, walked on as if nothing had happened.
She went down several streets, and every time she came to a crossing or other place that did not offer adequate cover on her right side, it was an obvious ordeal—I was about ready to jump out of my seat in sympathy for her—and finally, after several blocks, she came to a barracks-like structure surrounded with barbed wire. The building was strange. It was as if we had suddenly been taken back twenty years; soldiers in wartime uniform were roaming around the courtyard. Some, with empty expressions as if they had returned from the grave, were giving orders or complying with them; still others would repeatedly advance three steps, then freeze, and salute; among them the most impressive was an old soldier, who compulsively kept repeating the Imperial Military Rescript. Singly the words were distorted and the meaning lost, but the general idea and the tone were clearly there.
It was a mental institution for old soldiers. The patients continued to live faithfully in the past, in an eddy of time that had stopped twenty years before, unaware that the war had been lost. The girl’s bearing as she walked through this depressing setting was amazingly lighthearted and insouciant. She and the men exchanged no words, but evident between them was a feeling of sympathy, as among fellow men who have been deprived of time. At length the girl, while being thanked by one of the orderlies, began to do the washing in a corner inside the building. This was an act of charity that the girl had chosen to perform once a week. When she looked up, she could see, between some buildings, a sun-drenched lot where children were innocently playing baseball.
Then the scene changed to a view of the girl’s life at home. Her house was a small, suburban dwelling where the family made pressed tin toys, a prosaic, bleak place. But when the right and left sides of the girl’s face appeared alternately in this simple setting, a delicate change came about and the cheap foot presses lined up in the workroom began to moan disconsolately. As this daily life was shown in conscientious, over-long detail, everything expressed an unutterable sense of grief for the future of this girl that would never come, and for the half of her face whose beauty would never be rewarded. On the other hand, we could understand how sympathy could be unbearable to her. And so we were not particularly surprised when in a fit of despair one day she was seized with the desire to apply sulphuric acid to the good side of her face and make it as ugly as the other. Of course, if she had done so, it would not have made sense. But she could think of no other way, and no one had the right to blame her.
Then, again on a different day, the girl suddenly turned to her brother and said: “It doesn’t look as if there’ll be war for a long time, does it?”
Yet, in the girl’s tone there was not the slightest note of wishing others ill. She apparently intended to suggest nothing like revenge on those who were unblemished. She seemed to nurture only the naïve hope that, if there were war, standards of value would be instantly reversed and people’s interest would concentrate far more on the stomach than the face, on life itself rather than outer appearances. The brother apparently understood her feeling very well, and matching her tone, said quite casually: “No, not for some time, I suppose. But as far as tomorrow is concerned, even the weather report isn’t very reliable, you know.”
“Yes, I suppose so. If you could know what was going to happen tomorrow so easily, there wouldn’t be much use for fortunetellers, would there?”
“True enough. Even with wars, you usually realize they’ve begun only after they’ve started.”
“That’s right, isn’t it? Accidents, too. If you knew you were going to have one before it happened, you wouldn’t have it.”
It was pathetic and unbearable to hear them talking about war as if they were waiting for a letter from someone.
But in the town there was nothing that announced a resurgence of stomachs or of life. The camera traveled the streets for the benefit of the girl, but all it could catch was distorted gluttony and prodigal wastage of life. A deep sea of exhaust gases … numberless construction sites … groaning bins for garbage disposal … clanging fire engines … the frantic eyes of crowds at amusement places and bargain counters … a police box ringing and ringing … and the continuous bawling of television commercials.…
At length, the girl felt that she could not stand waiting any longer. Then she who had seldom asked for anything earnestly began to coax her brother to take her somewhere, somewhere far away—just once in her life. The brother realized immediately that the stress fell on life rather than on once. Since there was no way of helping and since he did not feel he could let her be more lonely than she was, he resigned himself to agreeing; the only way of expressing his love for her was to share her unhappiness.
Thus, several weeks later, the brother and sister went to the seashore. In a room of a country inn facing the darkening sea, the girl, hiding the injured right side of her face in the shadows and wanting to show even her brother only her beautiful side, looked happier than she ever had before, as she tied a ribbon in her hair. When the sister said that the sea was expressionless, the brother answered that that was not true at all, that it was the best of talkers. But this was their only difference of opinion, and as each vibrated to the other like a lover, the slightest word became doubly meaningful. The girl tried to pretend she was smoking a cigarette. At last their excitement gave way to a comfortable feeling of fatigue, and each of them lay down on their beds that stood side by side. In the meantime, from the window they had left open to see the moon, they watched the golden globe fall into the sea, spreading out along the horizon between sky and water; the girl spoke, but her brother no longer answered.
The girl watched the ridge of the moon gradually arch like a golden whale; for some time she waited for something to happen, but then at once reflected that this was a trip for the purpose of ending her waiting. Placing her hand on her brother’s shoulder, she shook him to awaken him, whispering: “Won’t you kiss me?”
The brother was too upset to go on pretending to be asleep. Looking through half-closed eyes at his sister’s transparent, porcelain-like profile, he could neither scold her, nor, of course, could he consent. But the girl was not discouraged. “You can never tell … there might be a war tomorrow,” she continued, whispering entreatingly, supplicatingly, as she brought her lips closer and closer to her brother’s, her breath coming in gasps.
Thus the desperate destruction of a taboo began with a mad, incomplete fusion between the two discordant hammers of anger and desire. Love and hate … serenity and murderous intent … fusion and rejection … caressing and beating … tossed between conflicting passions, a high-speed plunge from which there was no return. But if this is shameful, who today can avoid being implicated?
Day was gradually breaking in the semicircle of sky, when the girl, listening for the breathing of her sleeping brother, softly arose and began to put on her clothes. Beside her brother’s pillow she placed two envelopes she had previously prepared and quietly left the room. The moment the door closed the brother, who was supposed to be sleeping, opened his eyes wide. A senseless groan came from his half-open lips and a line of tears ran down his cheeks. Leaving the bed, he went to the window and looked out, gritting his teeth savagely. At last he saw the girl, like a white bird, running with little steps toward the black, heaving sea. Again and again the white bird was thrown back by the waves until at last it rode upon them, appearing and disappearing as it swam toward the open sea.
His knees had begun to ache unbearably on the hard floor when a single line of red lights appeared in the distance. His eyes were distracted by them for an instant, and when he looked again, the white spot of his sister had completely vanished, never to be seen again.
IT seems to be proverbial that the story of the ugly duckling ends with the swan’s song. This is typic
al opportunism. How would you feel if you were the swan? No matter what song others sang for the girl, she did die, she was unmistakably defeated. I don’t want to be like the swan. I don’t want that. If I die, there is no one to think of me as a swan, and furthermore I have a chance of winning. Well, when I first saw the movie I turned my face away in anger, but it is different now. I cannot escape a new sense of envy for the girl.
Anyway, she did act. She tried splendidly to break down an especially difficult sexual taboo, and even death, since she chose it herself, was far better than doing nothing. Thus she made even utterly unrelated strangers feel sorry for her and realize that they too were accomplices in her death.
All right, I too would give just one more chance to my mask, which fortunately had continued in existence. I would rescue all my past efforts from the void by breaking the present situation with some act—anything. Fortunately, my change of clothes and the air pistol were as I had left them. I unwrapped the bandages and put on the mask. There was an instantaneous change in my psychological make-up. For example, I did not even feel the forty years of my face. Looking into the mirror, I felt a certain nostalgia, as if I were meeting an old friend. The unique intoxication and self-confidence of the mask which I had quite forgotten began to be recharged with a hum. Let’s not jump to hasty conclusions. The mask might not be absolutely right, but it was not completely wrong. In any situation the right solution isn’t the only one.
Eagerly, as if protected by armor, I went out into the night streets. As I had expected, there was no one abroad at such an hour, and the sky lowered over the roof tops like a sick dog. A humid wind pierced my throat, and the feel of rain was in the air. I opened the directory in a nearby telephone booth, thinking of looking up two or three places where you might have taken refuge. Your parents’ house, a schoolmate’s, a cousin’s.
