An Affair or Something More??

Masks, by Fumiko Enchi, is about how women behave in a patriarchal society. Mieko is an old woman who had Akio and Harumé. Akio, who married Yasuko, died in a skiing accident and now Yasuko is in love with Ibuki, but planning on marrying Mikamé. Though this sounds very backward, Mieko has a huge role in everyone’s love lives. Yasuko feels that Mieko is really controlling her, even though Mieko is not Yasuko’s biological mother. Towards the end of the book, we find out Mieko’s plot, to get Harumé pregnant so that she will be able to have Akio’s bloodline continued in another generation because Harumé and Akio were twins and weren’t their father’s kids. Mieko had had an affair with another man while she was married and had the children of another man.

            Yasuko, who has an affair with Ibuki nearer the end of the novel, has a role in what Mieko was plotting. Yasuko would switch places with Harumé, while Ibuki was sleeping. This way, the two woman managed to get Harumé pregnant. What stuck out to me the most would be that how did Ibuki not know that he was not with Yasuko. Mikamé, while talking with Ibuki about the ordeal, said that the woman slipped something into his drink so that he was not aware of what he was doing. Though he may have been drunk, he still would have known that he was not with the one that he thought he was with. And this happened more than one time as well.

            Yasuko tries to brush it off by telling him that he sounded like a poem “from the Tales of Ise: ‘Did you come, I wonder, or was it I who went? I scarcely know – was it dream or reality, did I sleep or wake?” (111-112) The fact that this happened more than one time makes a person think. Though the two women wanted to continue on Akio’s bloodline and the Toganō bloodline, they were willing to risk Harumé’s safety and health in order to get what they wanted. And Ibuki seemed oblivious to what they were doing or trying to do to both Harumé and himself.

            These women, though they seemed harmless, where trying to further themselves, hurting not only Harume but Ibuki and his small family too. They did not think of what the consequences would be when they did this and at the end of this book, Mieko seems as if frozen in one place because of all that she has lost in her lifetime. She lost her son and also, now, her daughter because of what happened with Harume and Ibuki. A lot of the things that happen throughout the book happen because of Mieko and her greed and ability to have things turn out exactly the way that she wants them to.