The Box Man by Kobo Abe Page A

just how irreplaceable she is to me. Since she was the only person of the opposite sex that I had happened to meet, although that was pure chance, and since I had no one else to compare her with, one pronoun by which to distinguish the sexes would be plenty for me.
    “Right now… right away?”
    There was no particular hint of disapproval in her voice as she questioned him in return. She didn’t even appear puzzled. Her answer gave one the feeling of caressing the curve of an egg with a palm smeared with facial cream. The way things were going now she would definitely be naked. I was nonplused, but I kept my mouth shut. My lips were paralyzed and I could not get a word out.
    “It doesn’t make any difference to you, does it?” “No, but …”
    A brief, businesslike exchange.
    “It seems to me there were some matches over there, weren’t there?”
    Urged on by the fake box man, she slipped diagonally in front of me and crossed the room. Her gait was that of a small precision instrument that did not make one feel any wasted energy. She took a box of matches out of the pocket of her white tunic and flipped them with her fingertips into the fake observation window. Suddenly I smelled her fragrance. It resembled the breezes flowing in from the fields of peanuts that one smelled on the seashore. The skin round my heart rippled. Was it jealousy directed against the fake box man? When she had turned adroitly aside and returned to her original position, she suddenly began unbuttoning the buttons on her white uniform. At the second button she casually looked at me. As the look was extremely light-it was as if it could float in space for a half day like that-far from averting my gaze, I managed to return her glance without blinking (this was important: if it was she looking, no matter how much she looked I had almost no feeling of being looked at). A light was lit in the lamp of her expression. The line of her eyebrows softened faintly, and her teeth were visible between moist lips. It was an open expression. Were the doors open for me? She went on … the third button. Then the fourth. If she really tries to understand me completely, if she intends to catch me with the posture she showed to the fake box man last night, then surely I need nothing like a box. Others’ unsightliness should be invisible to those who have no unsightliness of their own to hide. If a box man is a specialized voyeur, then she is a horn victim of that voyeur ( the only worrisome thing is why the doctor, faced with this aspect of her, was made to feel lie should live in a box). Then the last button.…
    Fortunately she was not at once naked under her white uniform, and I finally regained my composure. A blouse of orange silk fitted close to her skin. There was a line of tiny buttons of the same color, like grass seeds. A short yellow ocher skirt held at the side by three black buttons about three fourths of an inch in diameter. I heard the sound of a match being struck in the box. I had assumed that the color of her skin was on the light side, but in contrast with the shade of her skirt it was rather swarthy. Yet her fingers, poised on the buttons of the skirt, were definitely light. As I looked I could no longer tell, actually, which was true. Her fingers once poised on the skirt, hesitated, changed their mind, and shifted to the grass seeds on her blouse. Ah ha, of course she should start from there. As for me, I wanted more time. I began to smell a cigarette. For example, she whom I had happened to meet the week before-she who unsuspecting as a child had wiped away all my debts like some high powered, all purpose cleaning device -if it were she alone it was possible that I might happen on her again somewhere. In any case I would apparently have the opportunity of meeting the one whom I had spied on last night, she who was so tolerant of others’ unsightliness, who was like a device for freeing me of desire that made me forget my sense of