The Face of Another : A Novel

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.