The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [52]
I could make no answer. There could be none. For it was the mask itself that had set forth the ideas conceived in my head. (I wonder if you laughed just now? No, it would be too selfish of me to expect that. It was a bad joke. If I could get you to realize that there was a partial truth in the explanation, I should be quite satisfied, but.…)
I who had been defeated—or who pretended to have been defeated—decided to let the mask have its way without further opposition. Whereupon the mask set up surprisingly (considering that it was nobody) sensible and bold plans which were in no way inferior to the incident of the pistol I spoke of before. Anyway, when I had finished lunch, I would try going as far as our house and check the looks of things. No, I do not refer to the looks of the house, but to my own. How far could I endure the seducer’s ordeal, which had at last been set for the morrow? At least I should try getting a look at the house. I entertained my own inner hopes, but since I was unable to express them, I readily agreed.
EXCURSUS: I do not mean to praise myself, but I was too kind. It was like arguing the Ptolemaic theory while believing in the Copernican. No, the crime of being too kind should never be thought of as slight. Just thinking of what happened before this was apparently enough to make the worms of shame come wriggling out of all the pores of my body. If I am ashamed to reread this, how much more ashamed I am to imagine you reading it. Even I knew full well that the Copernican theory was the correct one. Surely I have made too much of my loneliness. I thought my loneliness greater than all mankind’s combined. As a sign of repentance, in the next notebook at least, I should like to delete any suggestion of tragedy.
THE GREY
NOTEBOOK
ALTHOUGH a bare five days had passed since I had last taken the suburban streetcar I habitually rode, the experience was as fresh as if five years had gone by. Though it was a ride I knew well, one where I could go with my eyes closed, it was a completely new one for the mask. If it had the feeling it remembered something, that was because this ride was a vision in the womb before the mask was born.
Yes, actually it was that way. Indeed, the very clouds along the way, which I could glimpse from the window of the streetcar, were things I remembered as if they were white-bearded relics of a bygone age. The inside of the mask seemed bathed in soda water and tiny bubbles fizzed around on the surface.… I wiped my forehead, which was not even damp, with the back of my hand in a reflex movement, then heaved a sigh of relief as I looked around, for no one had noticed the blunder. I seemed to be permitted a normal relationship with people at a natural, proper distance. Suddenly laughter welled up within me. The feeling of exhilaration, as if I were entering enemy territory, changed imperceptibly into the mellowness of homecoming; the feeling of guilt, as if I were committing some crime, was transformed into the nostalgia of reunion. It was an individual matter. Quite like an invalid who at last is able to leave off dieting, I adjusted myself to the movement of the car, and greedily began to send out tendrils, like a creeping vine, toward your white forehead, toward the faint pink scar a burn had left on the underside of your wrist, toward the lines of your ankles resembling the underside of a snail’s shell.
Was it too sudden? I wondered. Even so, there was nothing to be done for it. Though you may say that these are the incoherent