Chapter Text
P.14) “Indeed, the more carefully you examine the child’s smiling face the more you feel an indescribable, unspeakable horror creeping over you. You see that it is actually not a smiling face at all.”
What is interesting about this is that in order to look at the child, you would have to look closer. Despite this child standing out amongst a bigger family, the actual face of them is almost blurred. It suggests something inhumane or uncanny. Their face is “indescribable” yet also an “unspeakable horror”. These contrasting adjectives reinforce the idea that this story is being told from an outsider’s perspective before the reader themselves. Meaning that there is more than just one barrier separating the reader from the story itself, there is also an unknown narrator. Contrasting “smiling face” and the clarification of “not a smiling face at all” foreshadows the eventual alienation of Yozo Oba later on in the novel, it suggests that the narrator immediately assumes that the child is smiling, or else, it should be natural to assume that children should embody happiness and therefore, not expressing happiness is something that is strange and sets this particular child away from everyone else. This could arguably be the very start of Yozo’s social alienation, the concept of expecting a child to embody what society expects a child to embody.
(P.14) “It is a monkey. A grinning monkey-face.”
Monkeys are human’s primal forms; this implies that this child hasn’t “evolved” in such a way a human should. Taking into account that Yozo spends his early youth “clowning”, then the removal of that façade should reveal a “monkey”, otherwise, his true self. It should be considered that if we take this metaphor literally, a monkey’s nature of baring its teeth occurs when they feel under pressure, this makes the metaphor ironic as smiling (as society knows it) symbolises happiness and such.
(P.15) “At any rate, he is now extraordinarily handsome. But here again the face fails inexplicably to give the impression of belong to a living human being.”
In order to understand Yozo Oba’s character we need to recognise what his goal is. The narrator describes the child now as “extraordinarily handsome” which starkly contrasts his younger animal face. At a surface level, you could argue that a person changes dramatically during their teens. However, another reading of his character is that instead of showing his vulnerability, Yozo has grown into a version of himself
which blends into what society would see as normal. However, due to the emphasis on “extraordinarily” it would suggest that Yozo wanted to become more than just normal. He wanted to become perfect; so much so that no one would be able to tell who he really was under his mask. However, the narrator continues to mention that this boy did not “give the impression of belonging to a living human being” possibly suggesting that despite his appearance, it was lacking the substance a human being has. Yozo has no idea how a genuine smile looks like.