The Face of Another by Kōbō Abe Read Free Book Online

lies.”
    There was a strange smile on my companion’s face. It was a remote smile, as if he were looking at something far away, but his constraint had disappeared.
    “It won’t work. No matter how you exaggerate I can’t feel anything without first understanding. Is it because there aren’t any common words between us? I specialize in extinct plants and animals, but in art, I lean toward the modern.”

    No, IT WAS useless to complain. Better get used to such looks right now. To expect better results was only pampering myself. I had been able to get hold of necessary information, and my first plan was to try to overcome my basic humiliation.
    I began to hate the paleontologist when I realized that the catch I had brought back from my visit was in reality merely inedible bait. Rather, it was apparently foodstuff, but unfortunately I didn’t know anything about the art of cooking.
    Miserably, I recognized that the large margin of error inmodeling, even when one began with the same bone structure, forced the plan for the mask another step further. I could choose any face I wanted, but I did have to pick one—anyone. But wouldn’t any face at all be to my satisfaction? I should have to decide after sifting through numberless possibilities. What in heaven’s name was the scale of measurement for faces?
    If you didn’t intend special meaning to a face, then any would do. When you went to the trouble of making it, you didn’t choose a cardiac’s puffiness. Yet it probably wouldn’t do at all to take a movie star as the model. This freedom, at first comforting, was in fact a terribly bothersome problem.
    I don’t mean to insist unduly on an ideal face. Besides, such a thing probably doesn’t exist. However, since I was going to make a selection, I had to have some standard or other. Even an inappropriate facial guide, however awkward, would somehow be all right—I hadn’t the faintest notion whether to be subjective or objective—but when all was said and done I dragged out the decision for close to half a year.
    M ARGINAL NOTE:
It would be a mistake to settle this whole thing with vague standards. Rather I should doubtless take into consideration my inner impulse to reject standards. Choosing a standard, in other words, is to commit oneself to others. However, at the same time, men have the opposite desire of trying to distinguish themselves from others. Perhaps the two could be related thus:

    A
=
the factor of commitment to others; B = the factor of resistance to others; n = age; f = one’s degree of viscosity [its decrease is the hardening of the self and at the same time the forming of the self; generally it stands in inverse proportion to age, but in a locus curve one can observe a number of individualdifferences among people according to sex, personality, work, etc.]
.
    In short, with age the degree of my viscosity was decreasing very much, and I felt strong opposition to changing faces at this late date. I must doubtless admit that the paleontologist’s view that heavily made-up women are prone to hysteria is an extremely astute theory. Psychoanalytically speaking, hysteria is an infantile phenomenon
.
    In the meantime, of course, I was not idle. I had a mountain of largely technical work, such as tests of material for the flat epidermis, and my engrossment provided me with a fine excuse to postpone the showdown.
    The flat epidermis took up an unimaginable amount of time. Quantitatively, it formed the most important part of the skin; but, more than that, the success or failure of producing the feeling of mobile skin was at stake. I profited by my colleagues’ distance from me in the laboratory and quite openly made use of the equipment and materials, but even so it took more than three full months. I considered it a comical contradiction that, while my plans for the mask advanced, I had taken no decision concerning the form of the face, but that did not worry me very much. Yet I could not forever take