I have seen three snapshots of him.
The first was taken in what might be called his tender years, around the age of ten. He was standing at the edge of a garden pond, surrounded by girls (his sisters and cousins, I’d imagine), his head tilted slightly to the left, wearing a kimono, broad-striped hakama trousers and an ugly smile. Ugly? Granted, his smile contained just enough of what passes for “cuteness” that if dullards (by which I mean those blind to beauty and ugliness) chirped, “What a cute little boy!” even that generic compliment wouldn’t sound completely empty; yet anyone who had acquired a slightly discriminating eye might well take one look, mutter “Horrible child!” and fling the photo aside in disgust, the way you would a caterpillar.
The more I looked at that smile, the more it struck me as weird and unpleasant. To begin with, it wasn’t a smile, not at all. You could tell because he was standing with his fists clenched. Humans aren’t designed to smile and clench their fists at the same time. He was a monkey, smiling a
monkey smile. His face had ugly wrinkles. The phrase “wizened little boy” comes to mind; that’s how odd, how repulsive and sickening the look on his face was. Never in my life had I seen a child with an expression so baffling. In the second snapshot he looked quite different, astonishingly so. He was dressed as a student, though whether in high school or college I couldn’t say. In any case, he was extraordinarily handsome. And yet, once again, he did not give the impression of a live human being. He had on a school uniform with a white handkerchief poking out of the breast pocket, and he was sitting in a rattan chair with his legs crossed, smiling. This time the smile displayed some cleverness. It wasn’t a wrinkly monkey grimace, but it was still somehow off, not quite human. There was no trace of what you might call the heaviness of blood, the sting of life. Completely lacking in substance, his expression was as light as feathery down. He was a blank sheet of paper, smiling. In short, he was altogether fake. “Affected” doesn’t come close, and neither does “insincere” or “foppish” or of course “stylish.” The more I studied the image of that handsome student, the more I felt there was something vaguely uncanny about it, as if he belonged in a ghost story.
Never in my life had I seen a handsome young man whose looks were so baffling.
The third photo was the most disturbing of all. It was impossible to say how old he was. His hair had gone rather gray. He was sitting in a corner of a badly rundown room (the photo showed plain as day that the walls were crumbling in three places), holding his hands over a small charcoal brazier, but this time he wasn’t smiling. His face was expressionless. It was as if while sitting there in the act of warming his hands, he had died a natural death. The photo had an utterly repugnant and sinister aura. But that’s not all that made it disturbing. The photo was in medium close-up, so I was able to study how his face was put together. The forehead was ordinary, as were the lines in the forehead, the eyebrows, and the eyes, likewise the nose, mouth and chin. His face not only lacked expression—it made no impression whatever. There was nothing distinctive about it. All I had to do was close my eyes after looking at his face, and instantly it faded from
memory. The walls and the little charcoal brazier I could remember, but the face of the owner of the room simply vanished, irretrievably gone. It wasn’t a face you could paint a likeness of or draw in a manga. I opened my eyes. No rush of pleasure, no Oh, that’s right! Now I remember! To put it in stark terms, even after opening my eyes and looking at the photograph again, I still couldn’t remember his face. I only felt unpleasant and irritated and wanted to look away.
The shadow of death itself surely has more expression, makes more of an impression, than did that face. If you stuck a nag’s head on a human body, would the result be any less monstrous? Somehow, the face in that photo had a chilling, horrifying effect on me. I repeat—never in my life had I seen a man’s face that was so utterly baffling.
