The Tale of Kaho

1. “Kaho”

The first story introduces Kaho as a woman whose life is shaped by a painful, almost philosophical awareness of faces, beauty, ugliness and the way other people judge the female body. It opens during a dinner date. The man sitting opposite her tells her, after dessert, that he has dated many women but that she is honestly the most “ugly” or unattractive sort of woman he has ever encountered. He says it almost calmly, even politely, which makes the insult stranger and more disturbing. Kaho is stunned not only because the comment is cruel, but because she cannot understand why anyone would need to say such a thing aloud. If a blind date goes badly, one simply does not call again. To insult someone directly seems unnecessary, almost experimental.

The man is older, well dressed, handsome in a conventional way, and socially polished. Kaho notices all this while also noticing that he is not really “her type.” His insult forces her to think about beauty as social power. She has never believed herself beautiful, and since childhood she has felt detached from her own face. Her mother was beautiful and knew it, or at least received the world’s confirmation of it. Kaho, by contrast, grew up without that kind of confirmation. She was not the girl boys surrounded, praised or pursued. At school and later at university, she became used to observing the mechanics of attractiveness from the outside.

The story gradually turns from the date into an anatomy of Kaho’s self-consciousness. She is interested in people’s faces almost like an illustrator, a collector or a scientist. She notices the exact texture of a face: clean, ordinary, handsome, mediocre, forgettable, artificial. Yet she cannot quite stabilize her own face in her mind. She looks in mirrors but does not receive from them a clear answer. Her face is hers and not hers, visible to others but somehow unavailable to herself.