The Face of Another

Abe's narrator, an engineer left with a mass of keloid scarring after a liquid-oxygen accident in his own lab, writes three notebooks addressed to "you," his wife, and treats the writing itself as evidence in a case he's building against her. Rather than accept the reconstructive surgery his disfigurement would normally call for, he spends months perfecting a mask indistinguishable from living skin, then rents a separate apartment under a false name and sets himself a single experiment: seduce his own wife as a stranger, and use whatever happens as proof that a face, not a self, is what a marriage actually rests on. The premise reads at first like science fiction's usual trick of making a metaphor literal, but Abe keeps the mask's mechanics, the wax mold, the matched skin tone, the daily maintenance of pores and stubble, so exact that the philosophy never gets to hide behind vagueness; every claim the narrator makes about identity has to survive contact with an actual manufactured object.

A second, unrelated plot keeps intruding on the main one: a film the narrator watches obsessively about a young woman disfigured on one side of her face by the Nagasaki bombing, whose own fiancé recoils once he sees the scarring beneath her makeup. Abe never explains why he interleaves this footage with the mask experiment, and that's the point. The narrator reads his private, accidental wound as continuous with a national, historical one, and the two never actually line up: her scarring came from a weapon that disfigured an entire city at once and asked nothing of the people it marked, while his came from his own laboratory and asks him, specifically, whether he can still be loved once he engineers a way around it. Abe lets that gap between the two woundings stand unresolved, a quiet rebuke to how easily the narrator borrows the graver history to dignify his own self-pity.

The three notebooks are less a diary than a lab report kept by a jealous man: the narrator footnotes his own reasoning with a private theory of the face as social membrane rather than biological given, and keeps circling a claim he never quite proves, that the mask hasn't changed who he is so much as revealed who he secretly always was. Abe trained as a physician before he became a novelist, and the prose carries that training's clinical patience, recording the narrator's escalating manipulation of his own wife in the same flat register he uses for the mask's cheek pigment. He never once notices that his methodology has stopped being a study of identity and become an alibi for stalking his own marriage.