The Face of Another: A Literary Anatomy

Author: Yuval Klein

Title Image: Noa Havilio

The premise of The Face of Another is as such: A scientist named Okuyama, whose face has been disfigured in an arbitrary workplace explosion, endeavors to create a hyper-realistic mask in order to restore normalcy to his face. Okuyama narrates the book, addressing it to his wife. Mrs. Okuyama serves as the mirror which reflects his desire and orientation in the world he had long known in his faceful years. 

Self-loathing and the disdainful looks of others compel him to cover his face with bandages. When his wife spurns an erotic advance, he becomes more inclined to hide his face. It elicits a profound sense of betrayal, though the jilted advance wasn’t exactly charmant, more of an abrupt and wild grope; he overestimates the role of his facial disfigurement in the fraught nature of his marriage, while underestimating the destructiveness of his narcissism. The intricacy of their relationship is further elucidated later in the book.

The bandages ostracized him no less than the scars, even emanating a greater ominousness, that of someone who has something that must be hidden in its entirety. Having understood this, he is intent on replacing rather than hiding his face. He sifts through a number of scientific journals until happening upon the work of Doctor K, who creates prosthetic skin in his research. His ability may be an asset, decides Okuyama.

In the great film adaptation by Hiroshi Terugami–who more famously turned Abe’s Woman of the Dunes into a cinematic masterpiece–the doctor is one of the main characters, second only to Okuyama. In the movie, K conceives of Okuyama’s mask; whereas in the book, he only spurs its beginning. Also, in the movie, Okuyama’s fate is violently intertwined with that of the doctor, but K only appears once in the book.

In spite of his dwindled presence, Abe’s K serves as an important guide of conscience throughout the story. He convinces Okuyama that the face is a matter of interiority rather than merely exteriority–that the face is a roadway from oneself to others. The skin around one’s brain is vital; without a face, one would become ‘content without a container.’ Okuyama internalizes this idea. 

K posits that ‘injuries to the body, especially to the face, are not [to be] treated simply as problems of form.’ He insists that the reaction is much more visceral and should be treated as such. Cosmetic work, for example, is a treatment for mental hygiene. K has observed many wounded soldiers whose changes to their exterior left potent trauma. 

The doctor says that ‘...the expression is something like an equation by which we show our relationship with others.” Without the face, there is no roadway between oneself and others. One would become like an uninhabited, dilapidated house and [people would] perhaps pass by.’ In the Ship of Theseus, as the components of a ship are replaced, its continuity as an entity is challenged. This is, loosely, Okuyama’s predicament.

The roadway is constructed anew: His means of communication is replaced; the tools in a facial tool box become inscrutable. Okuyama is in a sort of exile. Yet, he chose this estrangement, not the mask. He wanted to live twice-fold: authentically and inauthentically. It never occurs to him to tell the people who remember him with his former face that this mask is a continuation of what is gone. People become acquainted with him as an independent entity and the bondage to the past is severed. Who he was and still considers himself to be is rendered obsolete. Instead, he becomes a composite of mask and man.

If, as K says, faces are a roadway between men, then Okuyama would be shut off from the known world. This disturbs him. He never acknowledges his subconscious sabotage of what he perceives to be “himself.” He contends that his actions were motivated by a desire to circumvent everyone’s heavy gazes while retaining a consistent persona, though he was in fact erasing the roadway. Ironically, he couldn’t comprehend that the essence of a mask is a disguise. 

He has acquired an extreme anonymity; he has been hollowed, then inhabited by chaotic levels of isolation, impunity, and disorientation. Insisting that the face isn’t essential, the notion is gradually and compellingly invalidated. At one point, he writes ‘I suppose… I’m no one. Since I have had to undergo the anguish of being someone up until now, I shall deliberately take this opportunity to withdraw from becoming someone.” He is constantly questioning whether someone or something is left over in him from the BM (before mask) years. Of course, there is, but the content is in a different container; the container is what bound the content to an immutable identity, a rigid, chronological framework. NAY, the container is content. Neigh, cries Okuyama when he decides that “one ultimately suppresses the heart by wiping out the face.” 

At times, he thinks that the mask is a means to an end; at times, he is the means and it is the end. Masked and unmasked, the two personas are perfectly designed to exist as autonomous entities. That is, until they coalesce. His actions become reflective of this duality. When he begins to feel, think, and express himself with the mask, there is naturally a rearrangement of identity.

His landlord’s infantile daughter is able to discern where and when Okuyama begins and ends. That is to say, she recognizes the bandaged man and the discreetly masked man as one. At first, he is hysterical and incredulous, but he rapidly acclimates to the new reality. He is now a composite of mask and man. When he is in a toy store, buying the landlord’s daughter a yoyo, he is offered a handgun by the clerk. In disbelief and revulsion, he gapes as his face shows an incongruous approval. In the face of passive restraint, the masked face prevailed in dictating his response. He ends up buying the gun on account of his mask, which has become just as real as his scarred foundation. Okuyama has begun to think and feel with the mask.

His state of existence doesn’t fit neatly in neither the category of life nor death. As he observes, he is not quite “buried alive,” but he has mostly been erased. Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas claims that societies delineate the pure and the dangerous. That is, there are categories and places for things, and all that is aligned with them is considered pure, the rest are anomalous or ambiguous objects of danger. Taboos and standards are set in place by every civilization, so that a collective can look at the world through the same sacred moral and religious prism of morality. Any transgressions of the moral, social and intellectual categories are deemed to be inimical to an established order. She posits a variety of social mechanisms to deal with ambiguous and anomalous phenomena, all of which are supported through descriptions of obscure and antiquated tribes as well as modern civilization. “Dirt is matter out of place,” she says. 

Like the ship of Theseus, when the components of an entity begin to be replaced, its categorization becomes convoluted. We use language to compartmentalize and concretize things. Consequently, there arise shortcomings of language. The ability to describe. the anomalous and ambiguous eludes us, and so we put mechanisms in place the sort them. For example, an object up to multiple interpretations can simply be aligned with one and not the other. For example, arbitrary racial hierarchies have done this. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the court ruled that any American who has any "one drop" of African-American ancestry is to be labeled Black by law. Sometimes historical racial hierarchies may create new categories (e.g. Casta system in the Americas, Nazi Germany). In any case, people are motivated to destroy or modify the existence of that which transgresses categories. There are many more examples, a few of which Douglas mentions, of how such sorting mechanisms guide the rigid contours of culture.

The bandage, like the mask, falls in the realm of the “dangerous.” It impersonalizes Okuyama, making him ambiguous; an anonymous man cannot be categorized. He says that strangers, too, are perceived as dangerous–that ‘the line of demarcation between enemy and fellow man, which in other times was clear and easily distinguishable, has become blurred.’ The dread of strangers can be understood as a distress at being unable to compartmentalize them as objects to be sorted. I use “object” because this sorting process objectifies people, as well as ideas and objects. In psychology, the Mere Exposure Effect refers to the tendency for people to gravitate towards something that is familiar–towards anything that can be understood using available heuristics.

Okuyama is intent on cleansing himself of the disturbance to the perceived sacred homogeneity, this abnormality. The desire is reflected in many moments. For example, at one point, he considers making everyone’s face, especially that of his wife, disfigured. He is essentially flipping the stratification of world order and then imposing norms that are tailored to his dimensions. That is, if the shoe doesn’t fit, burn all of the shoes in the world, then everyone would be barefoot. The other one, which he ended up pursuing, is fundamentally changing himself. If the shoe doesn’t fit, tailor it. Okuyama often equates his predicament to those of the masses. At one point, he decides that all people are faceless prisoners in a cosmic penal colony. In doing so, Abe is equating modern alienation to that of Okuyama, but perhaps more interestingly, the protagonist is adjusting the framework through which he understands the world around him in order to reconcile the difficulty of categorizing and ident(ity)-ifying himself within the pre existing schemas. These are all mechanisms of dealing with anomaly, normalizing alienation in order to placate it.

His description of the monster overtly illustrates Mary Douglas’ philosophy (I should mention that The Face of Another was written a few years prior to Purity and Danger). Apparently, Foucalt once gave a lecture on the concept of “monstrosity” through the lens of Purity and Danger. I learned that only after having made the connection and I haven’t looked into his description. The premise of the monster is that it is a dangerously undefinable entity that transgresses natural laws. Okuyama laments that he has become a “monster” by virtue of the fact that those around him think he is abnormal. If only darkness weren’t so fleeting. Then, there would be a general consensus that “a loaf of bread is a loaf bread whether triangular or round.” 

He considers light to be the bane of his existence, the only obstacle to a blissful and inconspicuous equanimity that he never had in the first place. One of the more theatrical scenes is a quarrel with a tattooed man. Naturally, the scene begins with ruminations on the nature of tattoos as opposed to masks. The mask is a means of hiding and its essence is hinged upon the ability to remove it. This is why when Okuyama fails to remove it, he decides that it is as real as his face; he uses the analogy of imaginary numbers which when multiplied by two, become real. Conversely, tattoos appeal to people with two wholly antithetical ethos: 1. People will stare and make a spectacle of your body, and 2. The tattoo ink is permanent, seeped into your skin indefinitely. The fight started because Okuyama was probing too conspicuously at the tattooed man’s skin. It ends with the mask being torn off to the astonishment of the aggressor and bystanders alike. Okuyama simply walks away.

His descriptions of racism are also Douglasian. He is fixated with racial prejudice towards Koreans in Japan and Blacks in the United States. His first observation is obvious, the question of why something so arbitrary as pigment and/or ethnic difference pervades into discourse and political institutions. Though more interestingly, he examines how the prejudice towards his appearance is different. It would be reductive to say that it is because of less appealing physical attributes; it explains physical attraction, but not prejudice. The difference between the discrimination that a Korean endures (or ‘endured’; I don’t know the nuances of Japanese-Korean relations) to that of Okuyama is that whereas the Koreans are discriminated against as a group, Okuyama is discriminated against as a monstrous aberration. Xenophobic othering is done to a collective, whereas Okuyama endures all of it alone.

  Perhaps the climax of the book is a masochistic plan to seduce his wife with the mask. I say ‘masochistic’ because every potential outcome of his scheme is a form of self-flagellation. Prior to the accident, his relationship with his wife was fraught and the mask then further alienated them from one another. His wife sees his ploy as a mature attempt at revitalizating their relationship, but Okuyama doesn’t understand that she is cognizant of his delusion until after the scene had already gone awry. 

A disguised husband approaches his wife. The wife is not entirely receptive nor hostile. She accepts him without validating any of his schemas; she does not act like a licentious adulterer, nor an honest and indignant partner, nor is she impassive; she is quite simply, inscrutable. Okuyama is confused, crying inwardly, ‘What in god’s name are you?’ He wonders whether he is embarking on an erotic adventure with his wife or witnessing a betrayal. The latter interpretation seems more likely to him, though it turned out to be wrong. 

He considered tearing off the mask, but understood that this would scare her, and in doing so, leaving himself to the misery of abandonment. So instead, he has his wife read The Face of Another, a chronicle of his nascent persona. His wife reads and responds to the letters, then leaves without his knowing. She had apparently gone along with the seduction, wearing her own mask of makeup and oblivion, but the scheme felt increasingly like being observed and operated on for no reason. He dehumanized and objectified her, using her and everyone else as mirrors through which to project himself. She was observed only as a means of gauging the extent of his alienation. 

Having lost his wife to narcissism, he briefly mentions his shock upon learning that she had known everything. Then, he describes a movie that he wrote, a nightmare that again channels the ideas of Purity and Danger. It is about a woman with a very beautiful profile on one side of her face while her other side is morbidly scarred from the bombing of Hiroshima. In the film adaptation, her story is interwoven seamlessly with that of Okuyama. There, she plays a much more central role in the narrative. He describes a scene in which she is approached by a group of hoodlums, who proceed to harass her. Upon seeing her scar, they stand beside her in disbelief, disarmed much like the aggressive tattooed man. One day, in a capricious outburst, she pours sulphuric acid on the beautiful side of her face. Previously, she and others were unsettled by her appearance because it contained what they perceive to be both beauty and ugliness. It was difficult for her to occupy this liminal space because, again, people are uncomfortable with that which falls in between categories; they find it to be antagonistic to their sense of world order. It ends with her having an incestuous affair with her brother and then walking serenely into an abysmal sea, vanishing suddenly. Mary Douglas mentioned incest; it is a deeply rooted taboo in most cultures because it is highly corrosive to the social order. Siblings, by definition, cannot be lovers, otherwise our most basic blanket of security would be torn to shreds and the hard-fought social mechanism of cleanliness would be undermined. This is precisely why it is such a troubling idea. Depriving an anomalous object of existence is one of the mechanisms she describes. Her vanishing act is precisely that.

“If covering our bodies with clothes represents a cultural step forward, there is no guarantee that in the future masks will not be taken equally for granted.” He describes a world in which faces could be replaced like clothes. This speculative meandering is one of the more thought-provoking and sweeping passages of the novel. It had a lot to say about the directionality of sixty years ago, and even more so, it depicts a reality comparable to ours.

Newsflash: Hyper-realistic masks have pervaded every sphere of the market.  They are forbidden in places of employment and police stations. Famous people insist on copyrighting their faces; it is very prescient, strikingly close to many of the problems that are now only in their infancy. For example, the ability to “deep fake” videos and audio recordings. Society is taking insufficient measures against it, just as Okuyama said it would. Moreover, to know whether one’s face is real, people would have to pinch and draw blood. Still, most of the time, people would not be privy to the identity of those around them. We see this with the internet, which affords people a carnival of anonymity that is a form of Okuyama’s speculative future. There are measures that can be taken to separate fake media from the real, but a significant population can be deceived. Conspiracies are being propagated throughout social media, weaponized by ominous entities (organizations, people, and otherwise) in order to distort reality. This fundamentally changes the world, and such technology is only at its infancy. There is also  resistance to artificial intelligence by actors and artists who want to copyright their work, face, voice, etc. Abe predicted that famous people would copyright their faces–that they would be at the center of these changes. He predicted catfishing; through the internet, people can metaphorically mask themselves just as in the passage, through the purchase of hyper-realistic masks, people can literally mask themselves in order to deceive a romantic interest. He also mentions that this commodity, though painful and unsettling at times, would give immense pleasure. Hence, masks would be kept. 

He describes changes in the cultural, political, and social stratospheres. In show business, detective stories would become unpopular while family dramas with multiple personalities would take over, though eventually their plots would become increasingly convoluted such that the audience’s patience would wear off; beauty parlors and cosmetics–huge industries in Japan–would go bankrupt; writers would raise a ruckus about the destruction of “man” by the mask; dermatologists and beauticians would channel their skills into researching the negative effects of masks on the skin. Moreover, any resistance to these changes would be silenced by the sheer monopolistic force of the distributors; crime would be virulent and in tandem, anxiety; people would plagiarize faces in order to implicate others in crime and propaganda in order to advance personal and political causes; the concept of personality will have vanished, which would in turn erode our most fundamental educational virtues; people will have become indignant and such that the call for mask prohibition would become widespread, but like with guns in the U.S., people would be scared of the excesses and unlawful possession of this lethal ubiquity–hoarding masks would be so banal that legal repercussions would not be able to be more severe than minor, i.e. negligible.

In the film, this chaotic reality is also explored compellingly with a scene in which the doctor approaches a crowd of people and realizes that all of their features appear to be smudged. Seeing these puppet-like and eerily nondescript faces, he gauges the vastness of repercussions at the helm of this invention. The idea that people could acquire the ability to act with impunity and anonymity is troubling. If the face, a roadway to others, were to become obsolete, people would have to navigate relationships differently. Good science-fiction books like Face of Another show the ability of technology to alter human nature. Abe largely describes communication and the way modernization can be an alienating force. The ways in which people communicate are constantly changing in a way that rapidly approaches a faceless world. The body and more specifically, the face, have become less essential in how we communicate. Many of my most meaningful connections are maintained largely through WhatsApp; in a world of social media, we are faceless and voiceless, and many meaningful relationships are largely incorporeal. With that in mind, The Face of Another is a compelling character study and a uniquely prescient work.