The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [59]
If that is so, the plans for the mask were not my own special desire alone, but merely the expression of a contemporary, detached man’s common craving. Even though it seemed at first blush that I had again lost to the mask, in reality I had not at all.
Just a minute! The plans for the mask were not the only thing. The fate of having lost my face and of being obliged to depend on a mask was in itself not exceptional, but was rather a destiny I shared with contemporary man, wasn’t it? A trivial discovery indeed. For my despair lay in my fate, rather than in the loss of my face; it lay in the fact that I did not have the slightest thing in common with other men. I envied even a cancer victim, because he shares something with other men. If this turned out to be untrue, the hole into which I had fallen was not an abandoned well provided with an emergency escape; it was a penitentiary cell, recognized by everyone but me. My uncertainty exerted a tremendous influence on my despair. Even you could probably understand what I wanted to say. Youths whose voices are beginning to change and girls who are beginning to menstruate know that the temptations of masturbation create a lonely despair, for they are convinced that this temptation is their unique sickness. Or their humiliating feeling of desperation at a first little theft (marbles or bits of erasers or pencil leads), which like measles every one of us has experienced once, seems a crime of which they and they alone should be ashamed. If such stupidity extends beyond a given period of time it ultimately produces toxic symptoms, and these people may become either actual sexual criminals or inveterate thieves. No matter how they may try to universalize their feeling of guilt to avoid this trap, it will probably be to no avail. Rather, escaping from loneliness by realizing that everyone is equally guilty is by far the most effective way of settling things.
Perhaps because of this realization, when I later went out to drink saké, to which I was unaccustomed, I had such a feeling of closeness to others that I wanted to embrace all the strangers I saw. (I will write about this episode immediately following this passage and have decided to avoid duplication here.) Was this not because I had dimly felt among them the intimacy of kindred souls who had also lost their faces? Of course, it was not that I felt close to fellow men, but that I recognized the very lonely, abstract relationship in which everyone is an enemy. I could hardly imagine an occasion where we would frolic around together like puppies on some vague electric blanket of good intentions, like the cast of characters in a novel.
But as for me, it was a big discovery just knowing that on the other side of these concrete walls, people with the same destiny as I were prisoners. When I strained my ears, a groaning from the next cell came palpably to me. As time passed, innumerable sighs, murmurings, and sobbing cries swirled up like cumulus clouds, filling the whole jail with the sound of cursing.
—I’m not the only one … I’m not the only one … I’m not the only one.…
Even in the daytime, if luck is with them, they are allotted time for exercise and bathing, and it may be that they will find the opportunity of secretly sharing their fate by looks, and gestures, and whisperings.
—I’m not the only one … I’m not the only one … I’m not the only one.…
When you take all these voices together, the dimensions of the jail are no trifling matter. But that is to be expected. The crimes with which they are charged—the crime of having lost one’s face, the crime of shutting off the roadway to others, the crime of having lost understanding of others