The Face of Another (1964)

Japan

Novel

Original Title: 他人の顔

Author: Abe Kōbō

Translator: E. Dale Saunders (1966)

Combining exhaustive scientific speculation, unflinching human insight, and troubling, philosophising enquiry, Abe’s excellent seventh novel – a tale of a scientist, horribly facially disfigured in a lab accident, who strives to create a mask to allow himself to rejoin society and, perhaps, seduce his wife, who has been distant with him since his injury – is a thoroughly absorbing and unsettling socio-psychological examination of identity and the implications of its removal. Iain.Stott