Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another is a psychological study in which the moment-to-moment eventfulness makes much of it read like melodrama. The protagonist is a scientist whose face is disfigured in a laboratory explosion. He feels cut off from the human community, alienated. When even his wife repulses him as he tries to make love to her, he resolves to create a mask so perfect as to be unrecognisable. He then realises that he can acquire a new personality to go with the new face. Is this new personality his inner self, the invisible man? Or is this only a masquerade?
The scientist conceives of the masked person as an adventurer and seducer, and he begins to act out the role. He tests the mask in many situations, then seduces his wife –with consequences astonishing to both him and the reader.
