Naturally, when I met F* my first thought was that this was one singularly ugly woman. She was so friendly and straightforward, though, that I was embarrassed by my initial reaction. I’m not sure how to put it exactly, but as we chatted, I grew accustomed to her looks. They no longer seemed to matter. She was a pleasant person, and a good talker, able to converse widely. Add to this a quick mind, and good taste in music. When the buzzer sounded ending the intermission, and then when we said goodbye, I thought if only she were good-looking, or at least if her looks were a little better, she’d be a very appealing woman.
But later on, I learned the hard way how shallow and superficial my thinking had been. It was precisely because of her unusual looks that she was able to effectively engage her powerful personality—her power to draw people in, you might put it. What I mean is, it was precisely the gap between her physical appearance and her refinement that created her own special brand of dynamism. And she was fully aware of that power, and was able to use it as needed.
It’s next to impossible for me to describe exactly what it was about her looks that was so unappealing. No matter how I try to describe her, I’ll never be able to convey to the reader the idiosyncrasies of her appearance. One thing I can say for sure, though, is this: you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint any functional imperfections. So it wasn’t like—this part’s weird, or fix this part and she’d look a bit better. Yet combine them all and you wound up with an organically comprehensive ugliness. (It’s an odd comparison, but the process reminds me of the birth of Venus.) And it’s impossible for words or logic to explain that composite. Even supposing I could, it wouldn’t mean much anyway. What we have there is a choice between two alternatives, and only two—we either wholly accept it, unconditionally, as something that is what it is, or we completely reject it. Like a take-no-prisoners type of war.
In the opening of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and I think the same applies to women’s faces in terms of beauty or ugliness. I believe (and please take this for what it is, just my personal view) that beautiful woman can be summed up by simply being “beautiful.” Each one of them is carrying around a single beautiful, golden-haired monkey on her back. There might be a slight difference in the luster and shade of their fur, but the brilliance they share makes them all seem one and the same.
In contrast, ugly women each carry around their own individual version of a shaggy monkey. There are small, but significant, differences in their monkeys—how worn their fur is, where their fur has thinned out, how dirty they are. There’s no brilliance at all, so unlike the golden-haired monkeys, our eyes are not dazzled by them.
The monkey that F* carried around on her back had a variety of expressions, and its fur—though never sparkling or shining—was a composite of several colors simultaneously. One’s impression of that monkey changed drastically depending on the angle you viewed it from, as well as by the weather, the wind, direction, the time of day. To put it another way, the ugliness of her features was the result of a unique force that compressed unattractive elements of all shapes and sizes and assembled them together in one place. And her monkey had quietly settled down, very comfortably, and unhesitantly, on her back, as if every possible cause and effect had embraced at the very center of the world.
I was aware of all this, to some extent, the second time I met F*, though certainly still unable to articulate it. I knew it would take some time to understand her ugliness, and doing so would require intuition, philosophy, morality, and a bit of real-life experience. And that spending time with her would, at a certain point, lead to a sort of feeling of pride. It was pride at the fact that we’d somehow managed to grab hold of the requisite intuition, philosophy, morality, and life experience.
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The second time I saw her was also at a concert hall, a smaller venue than Suntory Hall. It was a concert by a French female violinist. As I recall, she played sonatas by Franck and Debussy. She was an amazing musician, and these pieces were part of her favorite repertoire, but on that particular day she wasn’t at her best. The two pieces by Kreisler she played for an encore, though, were quite charming.
I was outside the concert hall, waiting for a taxi, when she called to me from behind. F* was with a woman friend then, a small, slim, beautiful friend. F* herself was rather tall, just a bit shorter than I am.
“I know a nice place just down the street,” she said. “Would you care to go have a glass of wine or something?”
Sounds good, I told her. The night was still young, and I was feeling some lingering frustration over the concert. I felt like having a glass or two of wine and talking with someone about fine music.
The three of us settled down in a small bistro in a nearby side street, ordered wine and some snacks, but her lovely friend soon got up to take a phone call. A family member had called telling her that her cat was sick. So then it was just F* and me. But I wasn’t especially disappointed, since by this time I was starting to be interested in F*. She had excellent taste in clothes and wore an obviously high-end blue silk dress. The jewelry she
