["The Face of Another"] is an intricately contrived fantasy, somewhat wanting in dramatic confrontation of characters, but replete with symbolic devices having to do with the fate of modern man.

The story, told in a series of letters and journal entries, is of a man who, as a result of a laboratory accident, has lost his face behind keloid scars, and who sets about making himself a new one. The process of imagining and producing the new face is an ordeal, the process of trying to put it to use a still greater one. The hero's motives in wishing to have "the face of another" are complex and contradictory, but central to them is a longing to re-establish communication with humanity, of which the loss of a face has deprived him. What he finds is only a companionship of loneliness. (pp. 4-5)

One of the most striking things about the book is that so little in it is overtly Japanese. The setting is urban, but the city could be anywhere from Buenos Aires to Leningrad…. [On] the whole, the characters are so anonymous and unattached and the setting as generalized as in Kafka—who of all Western writers would seem to have influenced Mr. Abé most.

Yet beneath it all there are Japanese strains. The journal form has been a favorite of Japanese prose writers for a millennium or so. On a somewhat deeper level, the imagery and the emotion, although they rarely have specific reference to things Japanese, are very much of Japan. The general mood of the book is not really one of despair (as its subject would seem to demand), but rather one of melancholy. Melancholy is much more congenial to the Japanese. (p. 5)