ego as container

The ego as container is the intermediate model of selfhood in Creta Kano’s account: after a life shaped by pain and then numbness, she experiences herself as newly formed but largely empty, able to receive and transmit other people’s egos before attempting to develop an identity of her own. The metaphor gives a name to both the provisional structure that lets her live and the limitation she eventually tries to leave behind.

From bodily disruption to a new self

Creta’s account begins with a period in which her bodily sensations and movements no longer seem connected to her will or sense of self. After several days of isolation and disorientation, the turmoil subsides. She describes the person who emerges as her third self, distinct from the earlier self living in chronic pain and the interim self marked by pain-free numbness. The transition does not settle the question of who she truly is; it gives her a tentative sense that she may be moving in a better direction.

She attributes the transformation to an encounter with Noboru Wataya, while acknowledging that she cannot explain why it happened or why he was involved. In her account, a profound physical change leaves her in a “whole new container.” The language emphasizes a new capacity or form rather than a complete, already defined identity: she has escaped the suffocating numbness, but still has to discover what this changed self can contain and how it can function.

That change is not presented as uncomplicated recovery. Creta retains a strong sense of defilement associated with the encounter, and regards the transformation as simultaneously real and beneficial in its effects and bound to something wrong. The container therefore holds a contradiction: it is the form through which she escapes one condition, yet its origin remains inseparable from an experience she cannot simply erase.

Learning to constitute an identity

Creta describes her new self as nearly empty, as if what had been inside her had spilled away. Rather than treating identity as something already complete and waiting to be recovered, she says that she must assemble it through experience: learning what this self feels like and how it functions, and building the things that constitute “I” one by one. The vessel is not a finished person but a fragile capacity for becoming one.

Her daily life after the transformation reflects that incompleteness. Although still officially a university student, she has no intention of returning. She spends long stretches alone in parks, goes to the library when it rains, sits in movie theaters, or rides around the city on the Yamanote Circle Line. She has no book that explains her experience and cannot reach her sister Malta, who is secluded on Malta. Yet she says she is lonely without being unhappy: she now has a self to cling to, even though it remains under construction.

Malta Kano’s use of the container

Malta gives Creta her new name, Creta Kano, and guides her in learning to control her changed self and distinguish flesh from spirit. She also uses Creta as a spiritual medium. Creta does not describe this arrangement simply as exploitation: Malta believes that allowing the minds or egos of different people to pass through Creta will help her gain a firmer grasp of her own self, and Creta understands the practice as a vicarious experience of what having an ego feels like.

The arrangement makes the container metaphor both practical and relational. Creta receives other egos, but Malta’s purpose, as Creta understands it, is to help her build a self rather than replace her with the people who pass through her. Malta becomes a companion, guide, and protector. Under her direction, Creta gradually learns to live with greater peace, though she still regards her true self as beyond her grasp.

From vessel to selfhood

Looking back on her twenty-six years, Creta concludes that she had existed as “a prostitute of the flesh” and “a prostitute of the mind”: first, her life had been organized around pain, and later, she had served as a medium through which other egos passed. The description extends the container image toward a reckoning with how little she believes had belonged to her as her own will. Even after the third self appeared, she says, she had only acquired the minimum necessary container for a self.

Her stated aim is now to stop being either a container or a medium of passage and to establish herself on the face of the earth. That intention marks a change in the metaphor’s value. The container was essential as an interim structure: it made experience and the gradual construction of identity possible. But it cannot be the end of her development, because holding other selves is not the same as becoming her own.

Creta’s plans to leave Japan for Crete belong to this effort to make a life beyond the role of medium. She has read about the island, studied Greek, and saved enough money to live there for a substantial period. She has not told Malta of the plan, though she believes her sister would support it. Her proposed departure does not resolve the question of her identity; it gives concrete form to the attempt to inhabit the world as a person in her own right.