The Face of Another by Kōbō Abe Read Free Book Online Page B

face comes into focus through a blurred lens. However, it would never do to be forever addicted to such dreams. Indeed, hard cash is worth more than any kind of promissory note. There was nothing to do but pay what I could with the face I actually had. Don’t men shun cosmetics because they believe in taking responsibility for their own faces? (Of course, with women—that is, women’s make-up—it seems to me they use it because their cash has reached rock bottom, hasn’t it?)

    I COULD not come to any decision at all—I felt queasy, as if I was about to catch a cold—but nevertheless I continued to make progress in technical areas, where my concern was only with the surface of the face.
    After the materials came the casting of the back of the mask. No matter how permissive my colleagues were I could not do that in the laboratory, and I decided to take my equipment home with me and set up a workshop in my study. (Ah!You seemed to think that my enthusiasm for work was in compensation for my face, and, moved to tears, you tried to help me. Indeed, it was compensation, but it was not the kind of enthusiasm you thought it was. I closed the door of the study and went so far as to turn the key; I shut out even your affection when you tried to bring me my evening snack.)
    The work in which I immersed myself on the other side of the closed door was this.
    First, I prepared a basin large enough to contain my whole face and poured into it potassium alginate, plaster of Paris, sodium phosphate, and silicon. Then, with all my facial muscles completely relaxed, I quickly thrust my face into the mixture. Within three to five minutes the solution changed into calcium alginate in a plastic state. Since I could not be expected to hold my breath all this time, I had inserted in my mouth a slender rubber tube that led out of the basin. However, just imagine having to immobilize your expression for a time exposure. That is difficult enough. With repeated failures—a twitching under the eyes or an itchy nose—I was at it four days before I got anything satisfactory.
    When I had finished, I began work on vacuum plating the inner side with nickel. Since obviously I couldn’t do that at home, I surreptitiously took the die to the laboratory and, keeping it out of sight, completed the plating there.
    At length, I came to the finishing touches. One evening, after making certain you had gone to bed, I placed an iron crucible filled with an alloy of lead and antimony over a propane flame. The melted antimony took on the color of cocoa mixed with too much milk. When I poured it carefully into the hollow of the mold plated with potassium alginate, drops of white steam gently eddied up. A transparent blue smoke first spurt forcefully from the hole of the rubber breathing tube, then rose from all around the circumference of the mask. Perhaps the potassium alginate was scorching.There was a terrible stench; I opened the window, and the chill January wind suddenly snapped at my nostrils with its claws. I turned the mold upside down and shook it, separating the hardened antimony cast, and extinguished the still-smoking potassium alginate base by submerging it in water. Silvery white scar webs, gleaming dully, flickered back at my own flesh-colored ones.
    Somehow I could not believe that this was my face. It was different … too different.… These could not possibly be the webs so familiar to me that I could scream, the ones I always saw in my mirror. Of course, since the left and right of the antimony cast were the reverse of my face reflected in a mirror, some feeling of difference was unavoidable. Yet, I had already experienced this much variation with photographs without acutely sensing a difference.
    Was it a question of color then? According to Henri Boulan’s
Le Visage
, which I had found in the library, a surprisingly intimate relationship apparently exists between facial color and expression. For example, a plaster-of-Paris death mask of a