The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [26]
Screwing up my courage, I decided to go outside. Yet I couldn’t positively say that seeking this refuge had been completely futile. I had come to feel more defiant than before; in other words, I had to this extent reconciled myself to the world.
AT LENGTH the morning drew to an end. The street in front of the station took on its usual holiday animation, and an almost unbroken stream of people swarmed by. Swallowed up in the current, I continued to walk for about an hour, battling the stares that pestered me like flies. Walking is sometimes considered to have a spiritual effect. For example, military marching is done in formation, columns of two or four, each soldier supplying two legs to maintain that formation. Although the men despair at having lost face and heart, they seem to get an innocent sense of peace in the rhythm of marching. Actually, during long marches it is not at all uncommon for men to experience erections.
Forever chasing the flies away was not going to be much help. Rather, I would have flit covetously among the crowd with the many-faceted eyes of a bluebottle. I would have to find some person who looked as if he might sell me the surface of his face. Sex: male.… Possessor of a smooth skin, as much as possible without characteristic markings.… Since it will be flexible, size or looks are unimportant.… Age: thirty to forty.… A forty-year-old man who would agree to such a requirement for money might possibly have rather pocked and unacceptable skin. Actually I was looking for someone around thirty, I suppose.
I tried to pull myself together, but the effort flickered like a light bulb beginning to burn out: it was difficult to keep up the resolve. Furthermore, although the people walking along the streets were strangers to each other, they formed a tight chain, like some organic composition, and I could not squeeze in. Could sharing ordinary, normal faces forge such a strong bond among them? Moreover, even the things they wore matched. The mass-produced patterns of today called fashion. Is that a negation of the uniform, for heaven’s sake, or simply a new kind of uniform? From the standpoint of continuous change, it probably is the negation of the uniform, I suppose; but considering that this negation is brought about collectively, it may indeed be considered very much a uniform. Perhaps it’s the spirit of today. And because I am against this spirit, I am a heretic. Although my researches bolstered the part of this fashion made with synthetic fibers, not even that would permit me to associate with the crowd; perhaps they thought that a man without a face would be without a heart, too. It was as much as I could do just to keep walking.
If I were stupid enough to try addressing someone among them, even my remote contact with those around me would be sundered at once as easily as a piece of shoji paper. I would be drawn into the midst of the unrelenting crowd and pressed to answer questions about the grotesqueness of my mask. A half-dozen times I crossed and recrossed the street in front of the station, constantly being warned. No, I was not imagining things. In spite of the congestion, pockets of space opened around me, like quarantined areas; not once had I rubbed shoulders with anyone.
It was like being in prison, I thought. A prison’s oppressive, constraining walls, its iron bars, all become burnished and pellucid mirrors reflecting the inmate. The torment of imprisonment lies in not being able to escape from oneself at any time. I too was wretchedly floundering around, tightly closed into the bag of myself. My impatience became irritation, irritation became a dark anger;