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By Root 525 0

so that even faceless people like me can earn their wages with no interference. Naturally, human relations are concrete. One’s fellow man is increasingly treated as useless and at best continues a piecemeal existence in books and in solitary islands of family groups. No matter how much television dramas go on singing the cloying praises of the family, it is the outside world, full of enemies and lechers, that passes on a man’s worth, pays his wages, and guarantees him the right to live. The smell of poison and death clings to any stranger, and people have become allergic to outsiders without realizing it. Loneliness is terrible, of course, but being betrayed by the mask of one’s fellow man is much worse. We are awkward at espousing the illusions of our fellow men, but we do not want to be so stupid as to drop out of step. Our habitual, daily routines appear merely as common, everyday battles. People strive to protect themselves against the encroachments of others, dropping a Venetian blind over their faces and fastening it tight. And if things go well they dream up impossible desires—just as my mask tried to do—wanting to escape from themselves, to be invisible beings. No stranger is so tractable that one can know him just by wanting to. Was it not rather you who were seriously afflicted with this obliviousness to strangers, you who were possessed with the idea that you could make the conquest of a stranger by thinking only of yourself?

Of course, it serves no purpose to cling to such trivial thoughts at this point. The essential thing is the truth, not arguments or complaints. There are two indications that your sniping at me was fatal. One is the cruel revelation that while you had seen through the real character of the mask, you had nonetheless gone on pretending to be deceived. The other is the merciless chastisement of claiming that I tediously talked on and on about alibis, anonymity, pure goals, and the destroying of taboos. In actual fact I did not perform a single real act but simply went round in circles writing these notes.

My mask, which I had expected to be a shield of steel, was broken more easily than glass. I cannot refute you on that. As you said, I had come to feel that the mask was closer to being a new face for me than a mask. If I still intended to persist in believing that my real face was an incomplete copy of the mask, then I had gone to a lot of trouble to make a fake mask.

Perhaps this was so. Abruptly I recalled the primitive mask I had seen some days before in the newspaper. Certainly that must be a real mask. Perhaps one could only call something which completely got away from the real face a mask. The popping, bug-like eyes, the great mouth filled with fangs, the nose set with shiny buttons.… Down the sides of the nose a number of tendrils had swirled out over the whole face, and the entire circumference was stuck with long bird feathers, like a quiver for arrows. The more I had looked at it, the more weirdly strange, the more unreal it had appeared. As I had stared at it, wanting to put it on myself, I had gradually begun to grasp its meaning. It was the expression of a poignant aspiration to go beyond man, an effort to consort with the gods. What a horrible imagination! It was a violent compression of will in an attempt to combat a natural taboo. Perhaps I should have made a mask like that. If I had, from the very beginning I should have been able to dispense with my feeling of deceiving others.

Not at all. Since I had spoken rashly, I had been subjected to your sarcasm when you spoke of complicated scissors and knives of incomprehensible uses. If it was all right to be a monster, weren’t my scar webs enough without the mask? Gods change, and so do men. Man has gone through periods of covering up his face, like the ladies in The Tale of Genji or veiled Arabian women, and at last we have arrived at the period of the real face. Of course, I do not claim that this is progress. It may be thought of as man’s victory over the gods; but at the same time it may be a sign of his allegiance to them.