The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [27]
I stepped off the elevator, into an exhibition area behind which lay the restaurant. The words of a huge sign suddenly leapt out at me: EXHIBITION OF NOH MASKS. I stood for an instant rooted to the spot and then began to back away in confusion. This must have been a coincidence. I immediately thought that if I were to back out now I would be much teased for it, and so, though there was a roundabout way to the restaurant, I walked straight into the exhibition area.
I felt as tense as a coiled spring as I headed for the restaurant. Perhaps I wanted to take a preliminary look around before the challenge. Even so, a masked man looking at Noh masks was an unusual combination. If necessary, I was prepared to jump through a hoop of fire.
But unfortunately so few people were going into the exhibition that my enthusiasm was dampened. As a result, I decided lukewarmly to make a round of the exhibit as if I were interested. I anticipated nothing special. There was a big difference between a Noh mask and the mask I sought. I needed something to clear the obstruction of the scars and restore the roadway to other people, while the Noh mask rather seemed bent on rejecting life. The moldy smell that filled the exhibition room, for example, a sort of atmosphere of decadence, was good proof of that.
Of course, it wasn’t that I was incapable of understanding that there was a kind of refined beauty in the Noh mask. What we call beauty is perhaps the strength of our feeling of resistance to destructibility. Difficulty of reproduction is the yardstick of the degree of beauty. Thus thin plate glass, if it could not be mass produced, would surely be considered the most beautiful thing in the world today. Even so, the mystery is that man has to seek such rare refinement. The demand for a mask, practically speaking, stems from a desire on the part of those who are not satisfied with, who want something more than, a mere living actor’s expression. If this were true, what would be the need of deliberately stifling expression?
Suddenly I halted in front of a woman’s mask. It was displayed against the surface of a pleated partition connecting two walls. Hung on a background of black cloth, in a wooden frame painted white like a railing, it suddenly raised its face as if answering my gaze. Quite as if it had been waiting for me, a smile seemed to break out over the whole face, and.…
No, of course it was an illusion. It was not the mask that was moving, but the lights which illuminated it. A number of miniature light bulbs, imbedded in a line on the back of the wooden frame, switched on and off in a regular, progressive movement, producing a unique effect. It was a clever device. But even after I realized that it was a device, my initial surprise lingered on. I abandoned once and for all the simple preconception that there was no expression in Noh masks.
Not only was the design of this mask very elaborate, but its effect too, compared to the others, was striking.
Its difference was irritating; I don’t know why. I made another round of the exhibition hall, and when I came again to where the mask hung, everything suddenly came into focus, and the enigma was resolved. This wasn’t a face. What professed to be a face was in fact nothing more than a simple skull to which a thin membrane had been applied. Some masks representing old people were indeed more clearly skeletal, but actually the woman’s mask, though it seemed fleshy, on closer inspection revealed the basic skull. The seams of the bones in the brow, forehead, cheeks,