Kobo Abe, The Face of Another *** 1/2

The Face of Another is the first (alphabetically and in reading order) of the Japanese literature I bought from the impressive foreign-language section at Maruzen in Kyoto. I know Kobo Abe from the film adaptation of The Woman in the Dunes.

In The Face of Another, a scientist has his face deformed in a laboratory accident and sets out to design an undetectable mask to cover his scars. As he does so, he ponders the relationship between a person's face and his or her self: society interacts with you through your face, and your personality determines which expressions shape your face, so a different face means a different personality.

From the plot description, I expected a horror novel with the scientist gradually finding himself acting differently when wearing his mask. However, it is more philosophical than that. The scientist understands the potential consequences from the beginning, and he considers the relationship between one's face and one's self from every angle. The book also spends a considerable amount of time describing the difficulties of designing the mask. Abe uses evocative descriptions and analogies to keep the abstract philosophizing grounded.