The Face of Another (2 page)

THE BLACK
       NOTEBOOK

B
Y THE WAY
, the order of the notebooks is by color: black, white, and grey. There is no relationship, of course, between colors and content. I chose haphazardly, merely to distinguish among notebooks.

F
IRST
of all, I wonder if I should start with the hideaway. It makes little difference where I do start. But it’s easy to begin talking about that day. It was then, about two weeks ago, that I was to leave the city for a week on business. It was the first trip I had planned since leaving the hospital; perhaps it was also a day that greatly impressed you. Ostensibly, the purpose of the trip was to inspect progress in constructing a printing-ink factory in Osaka. But this was a pretext. Actually on that day, I shut myself up in my room at the S— Apartments, putting the finishing touches to my plans. Here is a sample from the diary entry for that day:

But at the S— Apartments I did not use another name, nor did I try to conceal my identity. Perhaps this appears indiscreet, but I had my own scheme. Having gone this far with the deception about my face, there was nothing to be done about it. Actually, some little girl about primary-school age, playing in front of the entryway, had taken one look at me—I must have appeared like something out of a nightmare—and begun sobbing. Of course, the superintendent was stupidly affable, doubtless because it was his business.…

No, the affability wasn’t confined to the superintendent.… Unfortunately, almost everybody I met gave me, ungrudging, only affability. As long as things did not go any further, everyone put up a fine show. And that was to be expected. If they did not want to look me square in the face, at least they had to be affable, I suppose. Anyway thanks to that, I was able to avoid unnecessary inquisitiveness. Shut off by a wall of affability, I was always completely alone.

Perhaps because the S— Apartments had been so recently constructed almost half the eighteen units were still empty. Although I did not request it, the superintendent showed me to the farthest room on the second floor, next to an emergency stairway. That’s the long and short of it. Of course, his picking out that particular unit for me was incontestably valuable. The bathroom was ordinary, not first-class;
a desk was provided along with two chairs; and there was a terrace-like bay window which the other rooms did not have. Furthermore, a parking lot with four or five places was located at the bottom of the emergency stairway, and from there one could get out directly by a side driveway. This was quite useful too. I had to be prepared from the start, so I immediately paid a three-months’ deposit. At the same time, I told the superintendent to buy bedding from a near-by shop and have it delivered. The man was increasingly less able to conceal his delight and kept on prattling endlessly about the sunniness of the place and the excellence of the ventilation. When those subjects of conversation were exhausted, he would go on jabbering about himself. But when he held out the key to me, it slipped from his grasp—luckily—and fell to the floor, making a sharp clatter. With an abashed expression, he hastily tore the seal from the gas-inlet valve and departed. Thank God! If false veneer always came off so easily, what a relief it would be.

I
T HAD
already become so dark I could not count the fingers on the hand I held before my face. The room, unused to human habitation, was cold and unaffable. But this was better than an affable man. I had grown terribly familiar with darkness since the event in question. How wonderful it would be, frankly, if everybody in the world
would suddenly lose his sight or forget the existence of light. Immediately, there would be agreement about
form
. Everybody would accept the fact that a loaf of bread is a loaf of bread whether triangular or round. The girl a little while ago would have kept her eyes shut and listened to my voice. If she had, perhaps we could have become friendly and I could have taken her to the playground and we could have eaten ice cream together. Just because there was light, she heedlessly thought that a triangular loaf of bread was not bread but a triangle. This thing called light is itself transparent, but it apparently changes into something nontransparent.

But there is light, actually, and darkness is at most a stay of execution with a definite time limit. When I opened the window, a rain-drenched wind blew in, like black vapor. Without thinking, I inhaled it; I took off my sunglasses and wiped away the tears, whereupon the tops of telephone poles and the wires to the shops set back along the main street and the line of the eaves caught the light from the passing cars and shone dimly like traces of chalk left on a blackboard.

There was a sound of footsteps approaching along the hallway. With a gesture that had become habit, I readjusted my glasses. It was a man delivering the bedding I had ordered. I stuck the money under the door and asked him to leave the bedding in the hallway.

Somehow it seemed that everything was ready for the start. When I took off my coat and opened the closet, I found a mirror attached to the back of the door. I took off my glasses again, removed my mask, and, looking in the mirror, began to undo the bandages. The three layers of cloth were swollen with sweat and felt twice as heavy as when I had put them on in the morning.

As I removed the bandages, a leech-like mass crept out across my face … the keloid scars, swollen and distended, red
and black intertwining.… How repulsive! Since this was daily routine, I should be used to it soon.…

I was vexed even more by my unwarranted surprise. When I thought about my feeling, it seemed baseless, irrational. Why did one have to put up a hue and cry about anything so trifling as the skin on one’s face, which, after all, was only a small part of the human capsule? Such prejudice and set ideas, of course, are not especially strange. For example, belief in magic … racial prejudice … groundless fear of snakes (or the morbid terror of cockroaches that I mentioned in my letter)….

While such a situation would be understandable in a pimply adolescent who lives in visions, it was ridiculous for me, the section head of a respectable laboratory, moored securely to this world by an anchor-like weight, to be afflicted by psychological hives. I realized there was no particular reason for my abhorrence of the leech-like scars, but I was unable to stop my suffering, although fed up with the whole thing.

Of course, I intended to try. Rather than run aimlessly away, it would be best, I suppose, to face the situation squarely and get used to it once and for all. If I made nothing of it, then surely no one else would either. With this thought in mind, and of my own accord, I had made my face the subject of conversation at the Institute. I had compared myself, for example, to the masked monsters of television, deliberately exaggerated. I had stressed the advantages of seeing-without-being-seen—since my expression was inscrutable to others—and appeared amused by the whole thing. To accustom others to my face was the best short cut to getting used to it myself.

The stratagem seemed to work. I was then able to get along at the laboratory with no sense of constraint. There is more to those popular masked monsters, too, than appears; I began to understand why they turn up over and over again in comic books and on television. My mask itself—were it not for the
scars underneath, spreading like webs—was comfortable enough. If covering our bodies with clothes represents a cultural step forward, there is no guarantee that in the future masks will not be taken equally for granted. Even now they are often used in important ceremonies and festivals. I do not quite know how to put it, but I wonder if a mask, being universal, enhances our relations with others more than does the naked face.

Sometimes I believed I was on the way to recovery. But I did not yet truly realize the repulsiveness of my face. Meanwhile, the leech-like corrosion continued its steady progress under the bandage. Despite the doctor’s assurance that chilblains caused by liquid air were not as deep as fire burns and that accordingly recovery should be rapid, the leech scars overcame one line of defense after another in spite of every possible countermeasure: X-ray treatments, cortisone shots, and antibiotics taken internally. The scar army called out its reinforcements, one after the other, to occupy new areas of my face.

For example, one day—it was the noon break, and I had just returned from a liaison meeting between my colleagues and another department—a young assistant, a girl, graduated just this year, approached me with a mischievous expression, turning over the pages of some book.

“Look, Doctor. This is a fascinating picture.” Under her slim, teasing finger lay a line drawing by Klee entitled
False Face
.

The features were divided horizontally by parallel lines and, depending on how the picture was viewed, could be conceived of as a bandage wrapped round and round. Slight, narrow apertures revealed only the eyes and the mouth, and the expression was expressionless to the point of cruelty. Suddenly I was overcome by an indescribable feeling of humiliation. Of course, the girl hadn’t intended malice. What had given
her the idea was basically the result of my own conscious provocation. Easy does it! If I were to get angry at this point, all my efforts would fail. Although I admonished myself thus, I was so upset that the picture appeared to be my very own face seen through the girl’s eyes. A false face, seen but unable to look back. It was intolerable to think that I appeared to the girl like this.

Suddenly, I ripped the book in two. And with it my heart. From the tear my insides came running out like a rotten egg. I became an empty, cast-off skin. Piling the torn pages together, I regretfully handed them back to the girl. But it was too late. The thermostat of the isothermic tank, which in normal circumstances was inaudible, made a tremendous noise like the bending of a zinc plate. The girl’s knees knocked together with such force under her skirt that they might well have fused.