The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [3]
But there is light, actually, and darkness is at most a stay of execution with a definite time limit. When I opened the window, a rain-drenched wind blew in, like black vapor. Without thinking, I inhaled it; I took off my sunglasses and wiped away the tears, whereupon the tops of telephone poles and the wires to the shops set back along the main street and the line of the eaves caught the light from the passing cars and shone dimly like traces of chalk left on a blackboard.
There was a sound of footsteps approaching along the hallway. With a gesture that had become habit, I readjusted my glasses. It was a man delivering the bedding I had ordered. I stuck the money under the door and asked him to leave the bedding in the hallway.
Somehow it seemed that everything was ready for the start. When I took off my coat and opened the closet, I found a mirror attached to the back of the door. I took off my glasses again, removed my mask, and, looking in the mirror, began to undo the bandages. The three layers of cloth were swollen with sweat and felt twice as heavy as when I had put them on in the morning.
As I removed the bandages, a leech-like mass crept out across my face … the keloid scars, swollen and distended, red and black intertwining.… How repulsive! Since this was daily routine, I should be used to it soon.…
I was vexed even more by my unwarranted surprise. When I thought about my feeling, it seemed baseless, irrational. Why did one have to put up a hue and cry about anything so trifling as the skin on one’s face, which, after all, was only a small part of the human capsule? Such prejudice and set ideas, of course, are not especially strange. For example, belief in magic … racial prejudice … groundless fear of snakes (or the morbid terror of cockroaches that I mentioned in my letter)….
While such a situation would be understandable in a pimply adolescent who lives in visions, it was ridiculous for me, the section head of a respectable laboratory, moored securely to this world by an anchor-like weight, to be afflicted by psychological hives. I realized there was no particular reason for my abhorrence of the leech-like scars, but I was unable to stop my suffering, although fed up with the whole thing.
Of course, I intended to try. Rather than run aimlessly away, it would be best, I suppose, to face the situation squarely and get used to it once and for all. If I made nothing of it, then surely no one else would either. With this thought in mind, and of my own accord, I had made my face the subject of conversation at the Institute. I had compared myself, for example, to the masked monsters of television, deliberately exaggerated. I had stressed the advantages of seeing-without-being-seen—since my expression was inscrutable to others—and appeared amused by the whole thing. To accustom others to my face was the best short cut to getting used to it myself.
The stratagem seemed to work. I was then able to get along at the laboratory with no sense of constraint. There is more to those popular masked monsters, too, than appears; I began to understand why they turn up over and over again in comic books and on television. My mask itself—were it not for the scars underneath, spreading like webs—was comfortable enough. If covering our bodies with clothes represents a cultural step forward, there is no guarantee that in the future masks will not be taken equally for granted. Even now they are often used in important ceremonies and festivals. I do not quite know how to put it, but I wonder if a mask, being universal, enhances our relations with others more than does the naked face.
Sometimes