I haven’t seen the beautiful travel magazine editor since then, so I have no idea what happened with her name. I hope it didn’t cause her any real hardship. She was blameless, after all. Nothing about it was her fault. I do feel bad about it, but I still can’t bring myself to tell her about the Shinagawa monkey.
CARNAVAL
Of all the women I’ve known until now, she was the ugliest. But this might not be a fair way of putting it. I’ve known lots of women whose looks were uglier. I think I’m on safe ground, though, in saying that among the women I’ve been close with in my life—those who have put down roots in the soil of my memory—she was indeed the ugliest. I could use a euphemism, of course, and say least beautiful in place of ugly, which should be easier for readers, especially women readers, to accept. But I’ve decided to go with the more straightforward (and somewhat brutal) term instead here, for this captures more the essence of who she really was.
I’m going to call her F*. There are a couple of reasons it wouldn’t be appropriate to reveal her real name. Incidentally, her real name has nothing to do with either F or with *.
Perhaps F* might read this story somewhere. She often told me she was only interested in works by living women writers, but it’s not impossible that she might run across these words. And if she did, she’d surely recognize herself here. Even if that happened, I seriously doubt that my saying “Of all the women I’ve known until now, she was the ugliest” would bother her much. For all I know, she might even find it amusing. She was more aware than anyone that her looks were far from appealing, or ugly, as I put it, and even enjoyed using this to her advantage.
I don’t imagine there are many cases like this. First of all, there aren’t that many ugly women who realize they’re ugly, and those who do go on to take some pleasure in their ugliness are certainly a minuscule fraction. In that sense, I think she was unique. And it was that very uniqueness that drew people to her. Like a magnet attracts all sorts of metal to itself—some useful, some worthless.
—
Talking about ugliness also means talking about beauty.
I know a few beautiful women, the kind that anyone would find lovely and charming. But to me those beautiful women, the majority of them at least, never seem able to truly, unconditionally, derive pleasure in being gorgeous. Kind of strange, I think. Women who are born beautiful are always the center of men’s attention. Other women are jealous of them and they get coddled no end. People give them expensive presents, and they have their pick of men. So why don’t they seem happier? Why do they sometimes even seem depressed?
What I’ve observed is that most of the beautiful women I know are dissatisfied, and irritated by tiny, inconsequential flaws—the kind inevitably found somewhere in any person’s physical makeup. They obsess over these little details. Their big toes are too big, or their nails are weirdly off center, or their nipples aren’t the same size. One gorgeous woman I know is convinced that her earlobes are too long, and always wears her hair long to hide them. I couldn’t care less about the length of someone’s earlobes (she showed me hers once and they struck me as perfectly normal). Maybe, though, all this stuff about earlobes was just a substitute, a way of expressing something else.
Compared to these women, isn’t a woman who is not beautiful—who is even considered to be ugly—and yet enjoys that fact, a far happier person? No matter how beautiful a woman might be, she always has imperfections, and likewise no matter how ugly a woman might be, there’s always a part of her that is beautiful. And they seem to freely revel in that part of themselves, unlike beautiful women. It’s not a substitute for anything, or a metaphor.
This might sound like a banal opinion, but the world can turn upside down, depending on the way we look at it. The way a ray of sunshine falls on something can change shadow to light, or light to shadow. A positive becomes a negative, a negative a positive. I don’t know if this is an essential part of the way the world works, or simply an optical illusion. But it’s in that way that F* was a sort of trickster with light.
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A friend of mine first introduced me to her. I was just past fifty then, and she was about ten years younger. But for her, age didn’t matter. Her looks surpassed any other personal factors. Age, height, the shape and size of one’s breasts, let alone the shape of big toenails or the length of one’s earlobes, all took a back seat to her spectacular lack of beauty.
I was at a concert in Suntory Hall when I ran across a male friend of mine having a glass of wine with F* during intermission. One of Mahler’s symphonies was on the program that evening (I forget which one). The first half of the program featured Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. My friend introduced me to F* and the three of us had some wine and talked about Prokofiev’s music. All of us had come alone to the concert and
