For his second novel Kobo Abe attempted to deal with larger issues of identity and personality on a national scale, by focussing on one nameless man. In Woman of the Dunes (1962), his first novel, Abe’s prose had a simple elegance, but with The Face of Another (1964) the basic form is much diluted, and complicated by multiple questions. The protagonist of Woman of the Dunes was simply trying to escape; the protagonist of this work is trying to find himself and lose himself, and trying to find a way to live in a society that seems to have rejected him. Abe’s novel eventually brings in a host of other concerns – taking in Noh theatre, the Hibakusha, and racism, and all thoughts connected with them. All of this has the cumulative effect of making The Face of Another a less successful novel than Woman of the Dunes, but one still filled with interesting undertones.The narrator, who tells his story through a series of notebooks (black, white and grey), records how following an accident at the laboratory where he worked is left with keloid scars covering his face. This disfigurement (and the first resonance with the Hibakusha (those people who survived the atomic bomb blasts in Japan and were permanently disfigured)) causes the narrator to feel an outcast in society, and estranged from his wife to whom he feels he can no longer make love. The first Frankenstein allegories becomes clear as the narrator begins to furnish a mask, one so detailed and perfect that it will fit him like skin, and be indistinguishable as a fake. He dedicates himself to this with zeal, perfecting the technique and seeking out the perfect model.With the mask complete, the protagonist is faced with further questions of identity and personality – can one live as a man without a face? Can one live with another man’s face? The mask begins to exert power upon him, and he finds his personality changing, becoming more forceful and assertive for the mask has given him anonymity, despite having a face.“The mask was growing thicker and thicker. It had grown at last into a concrete fortress that enveloped me; and I crept out into the night streets wrapped in concrete armour… I hid beneath my mask, which had neither name nor status nor age.” (P.152)Abe never takes his novel into the horror territory it could quite easily stroll – he is much cannier than that. At times imagination is allowed to run riot – as Abe the novelist and the narrator ponder upon what might happen if everyone were allowed a mask (actors copyrighting their faces for instance), and what crimes one might theoretically get away with. The main concern is of a sexual one, though, as the narrator seduces his own wife wearing the mask, bringing up questions of fidelity and play within a relationship.As with Woman of the Dunes, the film director Hiroshi Teshigahara turned Abe’s novel into a film (Tanin No Kao (1966)), and though the film is less successful than the novel (or indeed their previous collaboration), cinema is something of an issue within the novel and Abe has clearly been influenced by his collaboration with Teshigahara. In the novel the protagonist watches a film – leading to further discussions upon the nature of masks, for all actors are wearing one though they still have the same face – and it is later revealed that the woman in the film is Hibakusha, the right side of her face covered in keloid scars. The man she loves kisses her finally, and the protagonist asks his wife (and us) what the significance would be if he kissed her on the left or right cheek. Also, we are to consider how much the mask that he is wearing becomes a cinema screen, how much it might remove him from his actions, whether there is any responsibility left there.From Kaori Nagai’s introduction we learn one further fact. The title Tanin No Kao is a play on words: “By choosing the word which can mean at once the other and the stranger as his keyword, Abe turns our most familiar landscape – the face of our most intimate other – into a baffling maze.” (p.vii) The other can be familiar – the other is his wife – but it is also a stranger. Abe’s novel does not appear baffling, but it certainly becomes a moral maze, filled with ambiguity and doubt.Our final scene of the protagonist is of him watching and waiting, wondering whether he should commit a crime. It becomes the final perfect metaphor for everything that has come before, and the final unifying choice: he will be committing the crime, whatever face he wears, and the implications of that will rest in him, not on the face, though he shall find freedom.“I wonder if I shall become a swan with an act like this. Can I make people feel guilty for me? It is useless to think. What is amply clear, at least, is that I shall be lonely and isolated, that I shall only become a lecher. There will be no reward outside of being freed from the crime of being ridiculous. Perhaps that’s the difference between movies and actuality.” (P.237)Abe’s novel, though not entirely successful, and some of the concepts and thoughts contained within now seem dated or outmoded - we live now in a world where a face transplant has occurred – and it does seem very much of its decade. As one of Abe’s stories of metamorphism – a familiar motif in his work – it is not his best, but one worth wallowing in for a few hours. For like all the best pulp it asks questions of us, and what more can we ask from such fiction?
The world of The Face of Another is the world of Japan in the 1960s , observed through Abe's highly tuned microscope; a world layered in paranoia, in which fast growing technology when not regulated, might create a terrifying nightmarish forecast of the future. Abe explores the foreign - the unknown within man, moving his protagonist in deceptive scenarios, observing his relationship with others, peeling away his external perceptions, to expose the layers within. A scientist's facial vulgarization caused by a lab explosion alienates and victimizes him, spurring him to create a lifelike mask capable of human expression. In the guise of this foolproof mask, he hopes to interact with the world again without the humiliation of his scars and, more personally, to seduce his wife whom he believes has been avoiding him.Man's soul is in his skin...I have come to observe with the greatest care the appearance of soldiers who have been wounded. And, ultimately, I have come to one conclusion. And it's a distressing one: serious exterior injuries, especially to the face, leave definite mental trauma. Abe's precise descriptions of the fantastic creation, constructed with the realism of a technologically sophisticated lab experiment, the structure of a suspense thriller with a science fiction theme, make for very intriguing mad-scientist material. His artfulness detail the typical Japanese obsession with faces, selfhood and social roles of the time, and perhaps, more psychologically, an experiment of the theory that man validates his ego only through others. In the novel, the narrator because of his injury, experiences isolation, loneliness, a loss of self; a monstrous outcast, questioning and uncertain of the value of his life. I can hardly believe that the face is so important to a man's existence. A man's worth should be gauged by the content of his work; possibly the convolutions of the surface of the brain have something to do with it, but his face certainly does not. If the loss of a face can cause conspicuous change in the scale of evaluation, it may well be owing to a fundamental emptiness of content. In his altered self, no longer hidden behind the old visage, his true nature surfaces. When the play-acting scheme with his wife backfires, he becomes blindly jealous of this 'other' self, and is driven by maniacal rage as the twisted revelation unfolds.Abe's novel brings classic sci-fi thriller components into an intricate rumination on the self, ego, otherness and the accepted ideal of what is normal. Consequentially and conceptually, what is normal or alien becomes directly under scrutiny. Abe ingeniously masks some condemning messages by inventing a scientist who suffers deforming scars distinctly similar to those of Hiroshima victims. Secondly, Abe compares the scientist's fate with Japanese-Koreans who, despite indiscernible features to their Japanese co-habitants, persistently suffered prejudice.The Face of Another is a story of metamorphosis from normal to monstrous, a Jekyll and Hyde story, an ill state that is directly in opposition to an idyll one. Abe suggests that within the seemingly normal external self solemnly lurks the internal alien. Is what you think to be the mask in reality your real face, or is what you think to be your real face really a mask? Read in August, 2014*photos are scenes from the 1966 movie adaptation directed by Hiroshi Teshigara.
What do You think about The Face Of Another (2003)?
If you are into dynamic, leaning on plot books, this one is a late-bloomer. Being nowhere near an atmospheric piece either, the endless musing passages grimly inserted throughout, make it unbearably tedious halfway. After reaching the protagonist's wife's response, Kobo Abe's sense of humour seemed to be by far the sharpest and it almost won me over. Ultimately, the movie recalling part however sensibly thought out, only gave the impression of a wrenched attempt to reclaim the linearity of the book. The author seems to be aware of this, for this piece could have no better ending line: "Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens"
—kuhu13
3. 5 stars (review has spoilers)I battled with myself on how to rate this. A large part of me felt I should give 4 stars because it is really very good. But it was very scenitific in places and the scientists musings were quite in depth to the point that I don't think I grasped everything he was trying to say, which hindered the enjoyment for me a bit. It also meant that although it was good to read a book that made me think things through, I didn't find it easy to read when I was tired. Therefore I plumped for 3.5.That being said it is a very good book with very good ideas behind it. As the blurb says it looks at the face as a means of identity and how a person without one relates to the world and others around them. The scientist starts off by repulsing people with his bandages and then starts researching into the creation of a mask. Through these events he gathers opinion, along with his own feelings and experiences around the importance of a face with regards to society. Then once he has made the mask he tries it out. But finds that it gives him a freedom that non-masked people do not have and he starts to don an alternate self that considers breaking the law. He believes he is being controlled by the mask. Is he, or has the freedom unleashed impulses that were within him all the time? The book looks at the need for human connection and intimacy as he tries to build a "roadway" again between himself and his wife who he feels has distanced herself from him. He seduces her while wearing the mask. Yet when she accepts his advances he ends up putting himself into a prison of jealousy and hated as he watches his wife cheat on him . . . with himself. Although a bit heavy on the scientific side (I don't think I grasped what he meant by all his musings) I really liked this. It keeps you in suspense and is full of some interesting ideas. Its not an easy book to read however, I described it to my brother as "wading through treacle" now I have finished I feel a little weary, so am looking forward to reading some easier, more lighthearted books now :) But it is definitely worth it if you can dedicate the time to studying it properly. I'm looking forward to reading some of his other books in the future.
—Sharon
I experienced this story first several years ago via the film adaptation by the great Hiroshi Teshigahara.So, one of the things that interests me is the tandem experience of book and film; the film really explores the idea -- a man's face is destroyed in an accident and he creates (or, in the film, has created) a mask so lifelike almost nobody realizes it's a mask at all, only to find that instead of restoring him fully to his life and his humanity, it has made him more of a monster than he was when his face was a hideous mass of scars and ruined tissue -- from the exterior. The plot wanders quite a bit from that of the novel, but that's immaterial for my purposes; what interests me now is how book and film complement each other; the film cannot, except in voice-overs, really explore the inner man of the scientist except indirectly (hence the introduction of a sub-plot lifted mostly from a film our protagonist watches early on in the book, of a girl, her face half destroyed in the Hiroshima bombing, who does charitable work for WWII veterans despite her disfigurement, but who is ultimately too isolated by it to continue); for all its startling imagery (get a load of that doctor's office, wholly invented for the film), it does not begin to come close to what makes the book such a disturbing read.The book is written in an extended epistolary/diary form; the first person narrator is the scientist (nameless in the book) who has lost his face, writing an extended confessional to his wife. And herein lies the creepiness, for while he believes he has fashioned the mask (in secret, all on his own, in the book) to "restore the roadway" between him and his wife, he has gotten so carried away with the sudden duality of existence it affords him that he has actually come to think of The Mask as another person, a person who quickly becomes his Mr. Hyde, all id and transgressions, all an exploration of what he can get away with when no one knows it's him. Inevitably -- and I give nothing away here that isn't given away in the very opening paragraphs of the book -- he and it decide to see about seducing his own wife; the roadway he sought to restore to her is left forgotten; he takes the long way round and comes back at her as a stranger, and then rages with jealousy when Mask Him succeeds.Throughout this confession, he reveals that the roadway was washed out long ago; he has created a wife-emulator in his head who is much stupider than she really is, less perceptive and with no self-determination, and unwaveringly regards his real wife as that lesser being. She is trapped in his imagination, confined to the smallest possible space, surrounded on all sides by him and his limited, limiting understanding of her -- and the further we get into the novel, the more oppressive is his tendency to project onto her most, if not all, of his negative feelings about himself. It's a classic trope, but I've never seen it so elegantly, horrifyingly done as here. The build-up to the actual meeting between Mask Him and his wife treats the seduction as a fait accompli ratchets the depressing creepiness up to eleven; all the time we spend alone (except for the Mask) in the nameless man's skull dials it up to twelve.I can't recommend this one highly enough, shattering though it is.
—Kate Sherrod
