The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [42]
Someone’s footsteps, which apparently had been audible for quite some time, gradually grew louder as they approached. They came steadily closer; they were my pulse. The open door was urging me on.
Well, let’s go out! Let’s go into a new world, someone else’s world, through someone else’s face.
MY heart was throbbing. It was palpitating with the anxiety and anticipation of a child who for the first time is permitted to ride on a train alone. Thanks to the mask, everything would change completely. It was not only me; the world itself would appear in completely new garb. I was exhilarated by the bubble of my anticipation, and the shame that had so distressed me seemed to have vanished.
EXCURSUS: I expect I should confess: I had taken quite a few sleeping pills that day. No, not only that day. I had begun to do so regularly for some time previously. Yet it was not in order to deaden my anxiety, as one might imagine. I was trying to maintain a more rational state and offset my futile irritation. As I have often repeated, my mask was more than anything else a challenge to the prejudice surrounding the face. I must be continually alert to the mask, as one is to handling complicated machinery.
And one more thing: when I took certain types of sleeping pills and tranquilizers simultaneously in the right amounts, for several seconds after the effect of the medicine was apparent I was strangely possessed by a pure, clear stillness, as if I were peering into myself with a telescopic lens. Of course, as I had no assurance that it was not some ecstatic narcosis, I omitted writing about it; but now I have come to feel that a deeper meaning than I had imagined was concealed in the experience of those several seconds. Something, for example, that would bring me closer to the essence of human relations that are composed of the transitory elements we call the face.
As the drugs began to take effect, I experienced first the feeling of stumbling over rocks. For an instant my body floated in air and I was seized with a slight giddiness. Then a fragrance like crushed grass tickled my nose, and my mind wandered out into a distant countryside. No, the expression is perhaps not exact. Suddenly the flow of time seemed to disappear, and I lost my bearings, drifting away outside the current. It was not only that I drifted away; all the things that had flowed along with me, creating the relationship we had had until now, crumbled to pieces. With a feeling of release as I was freed from the flow, I became supremely optimistic, taking a generous view of everything; I repeated my singularly rash judgment that my own face was identical to yours in that it resembled a Buddhist saint’s. The period during which I was quite indifferent to the thing we call face lingered on for seven or eight minutes.
Perhaps then in an eddy of that current, not only was I indifferent to the scar webs, but also I had gone beyond the face itself and arrived at the other side of the problem. I may have glimpsed, if only for a moment, a freedom which was unimaginable when I relied on human relationships seen through the window of the face. Perhaps I had stumbled unexpectedly on the terrible truth that anyone closing the window of the soul with a mask of flesh was merely shutting away scar webs inside. Having lost my face, perhaps I could make contact with another world of real things, which were not pictures painted in windows. This pellucid feeling of release could not ultimately be false—it could not be a temporary trick of the drugs.
But—distressingly enough—my mask might restrict the freedom of facelessness. And wasn’t this the cause, surprisingly, of my shame about the mask? Yet the mask already screened my face. And the drugs, close to twice the usual amount, were beginning to make me forget the freedom of having no face.
I remonstrated with myself. After all, wasn’t the ugly duckling in the fairytale ultimately granted the right to be transformed into a