The Face of Another

About this book

The Japanese novelist Kobo Abe has often been compared to Kafka and this 1966 novel suggests an elegantly chilling postscript to The Metamorphosis. Abe's narrator is a scientist who has been hideously deformed in a laboratory accident, a man who has lost his face in a society where "losing face" is a synonym for humiliation. Alienated from his fellows, sexually rejected by his wife, the injured man painstakingly sets out to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. Yet once he achieves his goal, he realizes that he has not fashioned a disguise, but an alternate self -- a self that is capable of anything. The Face of Another is an intellectual horror story of the highest order.

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