Table of Contents

Preface

　I have seen three photographs of that man.

　The first is what might be called his childhood — a photograph taken when he appears to have been around ten years old. The child is standing surrounded by many women (presumably his older and younger sisters, and his cousins) at the edge of a garden pond, wearing a hakama with coarse stripes, his head tilted about thirty degrees to the left, with an ugly smile on his face. Ugly? And yet, dull people — those with no interest in beauty or ugliness — might look at it with an expression of mild indifference and say, "What a darling little boy," an offhand compliment that would not sound entirely hollow, for there is indeed a shadow of what might be called a conventional "cuteness" in the child's smile. But anyone with even a little training in aesthetics would, at a single glance, mutter with obvious distaste:

"What a disagreeable child."

　And might toss the photograph away with a gesture like brushing off a caterpillar.

　Indeed, the more one looks at that child's smile, the more one feels something indefinably unpleasant and eerie about it. It is not a smile at all. This child is not smiling in the least. As proof: the child is standing with both fists clenched tight. A person cannot smile while clenching their fists. It is a monkey. A monkey's grin. Nothing more than ugly wrinkles piled onto a face. It was a truly strange photograph — the expression so uncanny as to make one want to say "little wrinkled boy" — and somehow filthy, oddly nauseating. I had never seen a child with such a bizarre expression.

　The face in the second photograph had changed to a startling degree. It is the figure of a student. Whether it is a photograph from his high school days or university days I cannot say, but in any case, it is a young man of frightening beauty. And yet, strangely, this one too gave no impression of a living human being. He is wearing a student uniform, a white handkerchief peeking from the breast pocket, seated in a rattan chair with legs crossed, and again, smiling. This time the smile is not the wrinkled grin of a monkey, but a rather skillful one — and yet it differs somewhere from a human smile. There is no sense of what one might call the weight of blood, or the astringency of life, no feeling of fullness whatsoever — not like a bird, but like a feather, as light as a sheet of white paper — and yet, smiling. In short, from first to last, everything about him feels artificial. To call it affected is not enough. To call it shallow is not enough. To call it coy is not enough. To call it vain is certainly not enough. And yet, looking carefully, one begins to feel in this beautiful student too something ghastly, something like a ghost story. I had never seen such a strangely beautiful young man.

　The third photograph is the strangest of all. One cannot tell his age at all. His hair appears to be partly white. He is crouching in the corner of a filthy room (the walls of the room have crumbled in three places, clearly visible in the photograph), holding both hands over a small charcoal brazier, and this time he is not smiling. There is no expression at all. He might as well be sitting there with his hands over the brazier, dying naturally — a truly ominous, ill-omened photograph. The strangeness does not end there. Since the face was photographed rather large, I was able to examine its structure closely: the forehead was ordinary, the wrinkles on the forehead ordinary, the eyebrows ordinary, the eyes ordinary, the nose and mouth and jaw — ah, this face not only lacked expression, it lacked even impression. It had no distinguishing features whatsoever. For instance, I look at this photograph and close my eyes. Already I have forgotten the face. I can recall the walls of the room and the small brazier, but the impression of the face of that room's occupant vanishes like mist, impossible to recover no matter what I do. It is a face that cannot become a painting. It is a face that cannot even become a cartoon. When I open my eyes again, there is no joy of recognition — no "Ah, so that was the face, I remember now." To put it in the extreme: even opening my eyes and looking at the photograph again, I still cannot recall it. And it only makes me more uncomfortable, more irritated, making me want to look away.

　What is called a "death mask" surely has at least some expression or impression — if one were to attach a draft horse's head to a human body, perhaps the result would be something like this — in any case, something about it, impossible to say exactly what, makes the viewer shudder and feel a vague unease. I had never seen such a strangely unsettling face in my life.