The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [58]
Of course, the constraint remained a deep-piercing thorn. The streetcar toward town was empty, and whatever seat I took, the window glass became a dark mirror, reflecting my mask: an unknown character, sporting a beard, attired in strangely affected clothes and, though it was evening, still wearing his sunglasses. I put an ultimatum to him: he would either have to observe the truce calmly for a while or I would rip the mask off. Moreover, the character was concealing a pistol. He was extremely vigilant. As the mask smiled its sarcastic smile at me, it seemed to say:
—Well. Don’t gripe so. I’m a necessary evil.…If you expect to get something from me, you’d better be prepared to take the good with the bad.
I tried opening the window a crack. The clear, damp evening air whistled in. It did not touch my feverish cheeks but stopped exactly in front of my necessary evil, cooling only the nape of my neck and my palms. The mask, whose difference from me was distressing psychologically, adhered too closely and was disagreeable physically. It was like some botched false tooth.
But—I too, not to be outdone, tried to justify myself—if I could put up with a few obstacles (the jealousy, for example), by hook or by crook the cease-fire agreement could be preserved, and some way or other I could achieve my immediate goal, which was restoring the roadway to you. It should be impossible for me to entertain such a shameless interest in you, my wife. And furthermore, I became amazingly gentle in my feelings toward you, in inverse proportion to my sentiments toward the mask.
But was that really true? You already know the result, though I do not repeat it here—the problem does not concern the results alone—so what grounds are there to treat myself as different?
Surely one may say that an aimless erotic act is a sexual tangent to the abstract human relationship. As long as the definition of “other people” is confined to abstract relationships, those people are merely something in abstract opposition, one against others, enemies; and their sexual opposition is, in short, the impersonal erotic act. For example, as long as the abstract idea of womanhood exists, free-floating masculine eroticism is an unavoidable necessity. Such eroticism indeed is not the enemy of women, as is usually thought; rather woman herself is the enemy of its impersonality. If that is true, an erotic existence is not deliberately distorted sex, but may be considered a typical form of sex as it exists today.
Anyway, today the line of demarcation between enemy and fellow man, which in other times was easily and clearly distinguishable, has become blurred. When you get on a streetcar, you have innumerable enemies around you rather than fellow men. Some enemies come into your house disguised as letters, and some, against which there is no defense, infiltrate into your very cells in the guise of radio waves. In such circumstances, enemy encirclement becomes custom to which we are already inured, and “fellow man” is as inconspicuous as a needle in a desert. We have coined concepts of succor, such as “All men are brothers,” but where is such a vast, imaginary repository of “brothers”? Wouldn’t it be more logical to reconcile oneself to the fact that others are enemies and abandon such highflown, misplaced hopes? Wouldn’t it be safer to hurry up and produce some antibody for loneliness?
And why shouldn’t we men, surfeited with loneliness, become involved in impersonal eroticism even with our wives, not to mention other women? My