The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [53]
Since it was approaching the time the early-closing stores let their employees out, the streetcar was fairly crowded. I shifted my body a little, and the buttocks of a young woman in a green coat brushed my thigh. When I turned my body, trying to conceal the revolver, the contact with her became much more intimate. Then, since she did not particularly try to draw away, I too decided to stand as I was. The contact increased, following the movement of the streetcar, and our two bodies drew no further apart. As the girl’s buttocks stiffened and relaxed, she resolutely feigned sleep. While I was musing lightheartedly what would happen if I were to press the muzzle of the revolver in my pocket against her buttocks, the car came to my stop. I glanced at her as I was about to get off, and from the style of her hair I could see she was not young; with a disagreeably serious expression she earnestly continued to scan a sign beyond the station platform. No, there could be no further significance to the incident. All I wanted to say was that I suppose that things would not have gone at all as they had if I had not had my mask on.
EXCURSUS: No, the explanation in this section lacks candor. If candor is lacking, so is honesty. Was this because of my constraint toward you? I wonder. If that were true, I should not have mentioned it at all from the very beginning. If I were just indicating the efficiency of the mask, there was no need to waste ten or twenty lines on such a fake erotic confession. Consequently, I said honesty was lacking. Thanks to having engaged in this makeshift subterfuge, I was not only unable to tell the truth, but I might well have the bitter experience of your misunderstanding me.
I am not particularly interested in trading on honesty. Since it is inevitable that I should touch on the matter, I shall mention it and simply bring the real motive out into the open, concealing nothing. From the standpoint of general morality, it was a quite ordinary shameful act, at best to be repented; but seen from the standpoint of an act by the mask, I consider that it provides an extremely important key to my subsequent actions. To put it bluntly, I had begun to have an erection at the time. Perhaps I cannot go so far as to call this illicit intercourse, but it must at least be considered an act of mental masturbation. I wondered if I would be betraying you. No, I don’t want to use the word “betrayal” so cheaply. If I were to say such a thing, then I had been betraying you ever since the webs had begun to form on my face. Furthermore, since I feared that my cutting a ridiculous figure would make you lose the desire to read this, I deliberately refrained from mentioning it, but at least seventy percent of my thinking continued to be possessed by frantic sexual fantasies. They did not appear in my actions, but I was indeed a potential sexual criminal.
It is often said that sex and death have an intimate relationship, but it was about that time that I became aware of the real meaning of the statement. Until then I had shallowly interpreted the ultimate moment of the sexual act to be so much a self-effacement as to suggest death, but having lost my face and finding myself buried alive, I was made to comprehend for the first time the very real meaning of the words. Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces