Masks by Fumiko Enchi

    It’s rare these days to feel myself so unmoored by a book. At almost no point could I predict where Fumoki Enchi’s Masks was going, and the book felt surprisingly fresh despite originally being published in 1958. I will do my best to explain the premise, but it’s going to be a challenge.

Let’s start with the central characters:

1. Ibuki: A professor-type who is married to Sadako, with whom he has a child.

2. Mikame: Ibuki’s friend and a bachelor professor-type who’s a bit of a philanderer.

3. Mieko: A poet of some renown whose son Akio married Yasuko.

4. Yasuko: A widow who has continued to live with her mother-in-law follow Akio’s death.

5. Harume: A beautiful resident of Mikeo’s household.

    The first four of the characters above have varying interest in spiritualism, and when Ibuki and Mikame run into each other at the coffee shop at the start of the novel, they immediately recollect a seance they had attended with Yasuko. The seance is presented as suspect, but the fear of the medium speaking French and describing a situation echoing Akio’s death incites fear in Yasuko and she grabs Ibuki’s hand. There’s a strange erotic power in the moment that leaves its witnesses in an ambiguous situation.

    From there, the novel progresses along such strange lines. The four central characters visit a mask maker, whose daughter provides them with a kind of gallery tour with the masks haunting the characters in various ways. Following that, some last minute changes of plans force Ibuki and Yasuko onto a train ride together alone. The thing is, it may not have been pure chance. Rumours of a strange closeness between Yasuko and her mother-in-law pervade the text and while she rides the train with Ibuki, there’s an extraordinarily tense and engaging scene. Yasuko explains to Ibuki how she feels Mieko is manipulating her life, ominously pulling all kinds of strings and possessing her as if a spirit. The conversation makes me think of Hitchcock films at their best (is Strangers on a Train too on the nose?), or other modern noirs (à la The Invisible Guest). The tension and intrigue in the conversation is exquisite because it remains unclear whether Yasuko is paranoid or whether there are actually some terrible forces at work. Though both Yasuko and Ibuki are interested in one another, Yasuko suspects that Mieko is trying to manipulate her into partnering with Ibuki for obscure and shadowy reasons. In an act of defiance, she announces that she will get Mikame to marry her—though even that move may have been predetermined by her mother-in-law.

    While the train arrives at the station, the book goes off the rails.

    The novel shifts several times. In one section, the narrator presents a lengthy essay Mieko wrote in her younger years in which she analyzes a character from The Tale of Genji. Admittedly, I’m not familiar with the source material so I’m not able to comment on the incisiveness of the essay or its credibility in-context; its relevance is expounded upon later. Then, despite agreeing to marry Mikame and engaging in courtship, Yasuko maintains a secret affair with Ibuki. The rest of the novel involves private detectives, secret twins, unwanted pregnancies, secret movies, and mysterious plots against characters. The perpetual changes to the plot made this book unpredictable and thoroughly enjoyable.

    Overall, the book was profoundly compelling. I was engrossed in the strange dynamics influencing the characters and felt compelled to pause and reflect as if I were sleuthing my way through a mystery novel. Some of the moments are just magnificent in their quiet tension, especially since the possibility of supernatural forces continually looms in the background. In some ways the atmosphere is similar to a book like The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, where the haunting is always uncertain; the haunting may simply be a side-effect of characters’ psychologies. 

    One scene I’ve already alluded to—the conversation on the train—sets up the central premise of the book so beautifully. To add to the effect, there’s a parallel later on in the novel that is equally tense and enthralling. At one point, Sadako confronts Mikame about the relationship between her husband and Yasuko and the uncertain nature of the book exacerbates the tension wonderfully.

    There’s another scene near the halfway mark of the novel that has a hypnotic quality akin to a Twin Peaks monologue. For context, Yasuko’s husband died in an avalanche and his body couldn’t be found until the spring thaw. Yasuko recounts to her mother-in-law a dream that she had, and given the fact that even small phenomena are charged with meaning, it’s clear that this dream is an omen of something horrible. Enchi is a master of the craft of developing that quiet tension. Yasuko describes the dream as follows:

“This time was by far the worst. Do you remember, right after the accident, how I went up with the search party? They gave each of us a long steel rod to poke down in the snow and hunt for buried objects with. It was frightening—I kept thinking, ‘What if Akio is down in the snow and I stab him with this by mistake?’---but every time I thrust down, when I pulled up the rod again, there in the snow would be a tiny deep hole of a blue that was so pure, so clear, so beautiful, it took my breath away. My arms have never forgotten the feeling of thrusting down…but tonight in my dream I did stab Akio with that rod. I stabbed his dead face straight in the eye” (63).

The dream offers such a viscerally gruesome image that retains some nice symbolic significance in the grand scheme of the novel. These moments really elevate the tone away from the academic register of some of its earliest chapters and into a more haunting domain.

    But if the book is unsettling for its central conversations, it is made more so by the fact that there’s no clear character for readers to grasp onto. The main character seemed to fluctuate and I was continually unclear if I ought to spend my energy predominantly on Ibuki or Yasuko or Mieko or Mikame or someone else; the narration cycled between them charitably, which is a great touch. Normally when we think of third person omniscient narrators we have the belief that we’re getting the most transparent account, but somehow that did not feel true here; because the novel orbits these characters in nearly equal measure, you never really get your footing. It’s an interesting technique that I usually only see achieved with unreliable narrators giving first-person accounts.

    To be clear, the above is not a complaint. Instead, I think it enhances the text and provides for opportunities which would not be available otherwise. Moreover, the unified vision of the book seems to be achieved more thoroughly by separating its characters. Early in the text, Mikame and Ibuki discuss the relationship between Mieko and Yasuko and Mikame compares them to a painting. They debate who is more spirit and who is more shaman between Yasuki and Mieko. Ibuko compares them to a painting:

“In T’ang and Sung paintings of beautiful women or in a Moronobu print of a courtesan, the main figure is always twice the size of her attendants. It’s the same with Buddhist triads: the sheer size of the main image makes the smaller bodhisattvas on either side that much more approachable. Perspective has nothing to do with it, so at first the imbalance is disturbing, but then it has a way of drawing you in …. Anyway, to me Mieko is the large-sized courtesan, and Yasuko is the little-girl attendant at her side” (13).

This passing description comes up a few more times in the text and towards the end of the novel I realized just how actively Enchi achieves this effect in literary form with the characters in Masks. They are always competing for dominance and their relationships are always presented in relief to one another. When I put that approach together with the early description of the painting, the book just clicked and its cohesion was exemplary.

    I am trying to avoid spoilers as best I can, so you’ll have to take it on trust that Enchi ‘turns the screw’ more and more as the story progresses. The stakes continue to increase, the tension continues to grow, and the mystery behind character motives only increases your sense of dread for them.

    Beyond the compelling story and characters of the book, Enchi’s literary style is well-achieved. From the literary essay section, it’s clear that Enchi is able to operate in different modes. While most of the novel reads as matter-of-fact, there are passages that  are aflame with poetry. In one of the closing pages of the novel, the scene’s imagery encapsulates the mood so serenely, balancing beauty with pinches of dread:

“One day, when a mottled layer of ashen clouds was deepening in the sky, and the air shone with a fine, soft drizzle, he got off the bus at Arashiyama and proceeded on foot.

Beside a narrow bamboo-lined path he spotted a stone marker engraved ‘Site of the Shrine in the Fields’ and halted, hands in the pockets of his Burberry raincoat. The sight of the desolate torii gate and shrine—exactly as described in the essay—aroused in him no strong desire to gain a closer view. [...] Muttering the temple name over to himself, he followed a stone pathway into the compound. Standing amid the fresh greenery inside were several tall chestnut trees, whose cream-colored corollas scattered a shower of powdery blossoms into the breeze, sprinkling Ibuki’s hair and shoulders with their petals. Their spacious grounds were hushed and deserted. Over the high bell tower drooped sprays of golden flowers—broom, perhaps—with the unstudied grace of a discarded kimono” (135).

I love the way the passage balances the light and the dark: “powdery blossoms” and “petals” and yet the grounds are “hushed and deserted.” There is no unqualified joy in the moment, and given the plot context it’s a perfect alignment of different elements. I suppose it would be classed as pathetic fallacy, though I think it goes beyond that.

    I will not spoil the ending of the book, so you’ll have to trust me that it’s great. Even until the very last pages I wasn’t sure where the book was going but nothing ever felt out of place or out of align with the logic of the Masks universe. The book begins on a mystery and ends on a mystery, which allows you to reevaluate other moments throughout the text. I repeat that the book remains fresh. 

    As I come up to the third page of this review, I feel that I have not yet said enough about Masks. There are many layers to it and many that are difficult to articulate. All I can say is that this book is one of the best spontaneous purchases I’ve made from an overstocked book store based on cover alone.

    Happy reading, everyone!