Scratch the surface, film the face: obsession with the depth and seduction of the surface in Abe Kōbō's The Face of Another

Abstract

I expose the ambiguous relationship between the seduction of the surface and the obsession with the depth in the three versions of The Face of Another—the film, the screenplay, and the novel—by looking at functions and effects of the face, not to compare these registers but to see the way they cross-reference each other in order to form themselves. I first examine references to film in the novel and show how analogous film and the face are to each other in the reconfiguration of the binary between the substance and the surface. I then discuss cinematic modifications of two significant negotiations of the man with the face of another, with the doctor and with the wife, which suggests the genre's unique position vis-à-vis Western metaphysics. Finally, I sketch gender-bending with respect to the artificial face, complicating the depth/surface dialectic that has traditionally been ascribed to the woman. The dichotomy between the surface and the substance reveals itself in this story of obsession with the face, and in the medium of film that projects images onto the surface.

Keywords:

• Japanese film
• Japanese fiction
• depth/surface dialectic
• seduction
• interpretation
• Abe K[obar]b[obar]

Acknowledgment

This article was originally written for the seminar, ‘Japanese Film and the War’, held at the University of Kentucky on 1 March 2003. I am indebted to the organizer of the seminar, Professor Doug Slaymaker, for the opportunity and encouragement to submit the paper to Japan Forum, and to the participants in and attendees at the event for valuable comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their constructive criticism.

Atsuko Sakaki is Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and Associate Member of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her publications include Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature (Hawai'i, 2005), Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard, 1999) and The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories by Kurahashi Yumiko (M.E. Sharpe, 1998). She is currently working on a project on corporeality and spatiality in modern Japanese literature, negotiating with texts by Abe Kōbō, Gotō Meisei and Kanai Mieko. She may be contacted at [email protected].

Notes

1. Claudia Benthien similarly lists German, English, Italian and French idiomatic expressions with references to skin that connote superficiality (see Benthien 2002: 17–36).

2. Benthien articulates the dual function of skin (which I consider interchangeable with the ‘face’ as I discuss here) as follows: “it [skin] serves both as a representation of the whole and as that which conceals it. On the one hand, skin… is a stand-in for “person,” “spirit,” “body,” or “life”; that is to say, it is a synecdoche for the human being. Yet at the same time, and this is what makes it so singular, skin functions as the other of the self, by representing its cover, its prison or mask, its medium of communication with the world” (Benthien 2002: 23).

3. The novel, Tanin no kao, by Abe is collected in Abe Kō bō zenshū (1999). Quotations in this text are from Abe (1966).

4. For an overall comparison between the novel and the film, see Keiko I. McDonald's ‘Stylistic experiment: Teshigahara's The Face of Another (1966),’ in McDonald (2000). In Japanese, see Brock (1997: 89). For an overview of Abe's work and a list of critical texts on him, see Bolton (2001).

5. McDonald and Brock respectively, and to varied degrees of self-consciousness, defend their choice of the comparative approach: while McDonald (2000: ix) points to the known fact (not specifically in connection with The Face of Another) that Japanese film may have exploited literary adaptations as a means to establish its aesthetic status and thus implies that a study of literary sources is called for, Brock (1997: 89) justifies her comparison between the novel and the film by highlighting the fact specific to the case that the screenplay for the film was written by the novelist himself.

6. Abe founded his own theatre production company, Abe Kōbō Sutadio (studio), in 1973, and directed the group in theatre and performing arts that he termed ‘Imēji no tenrankai’ (Exhibitions of images). His career as a playwright predates the foundation of the company: the first theatrical production of his play Seifuku (The Uniform) was in 1955. For a list of the theatrical productions of Abe's plays up to 1974, see p. 21 of the special issue of Higeki Kigeki on Abe Kōbō.

7. Kaja Silverman elaborates the history of the term ‘suture’ originating in psychoanalytic theory and then extensively in use in film theory, doing justice to a wide range of its definitions. One of the points that she makes that is relevant here is that the operation of suture is successful at the moment that the viewing subject says, “Yes, that's me,” or “That's what I see” as s/he is willing “to become absent to itself” by permitting a fictional character to “stand in” for it, or by allowing a particular point of view to define what it sees' (Silverman 1983: 205).

8. Kanai Mieko seems to share her view of film as multi-sensorial, as is obvious in the statement ‘film is indeed a corporeal experience’, which evokes many sensual effects such as ‘chilling’, ‘sour’ and ‘moist’ (1983: 11), in the appropriately entitled collection of her essays Eiga, Yawarakai hada (Cinema, the tender skin).

9. It is interesting to note that in an interview between Abe Kōbō and the director Teshigahara Hiroshi which took place in October 1965, as they were planning the film production of The Face of Another, Abe maintains that ‘the so-called literary film [bungei eiga], or film that traces the story of fiction, is not legitimate in the medium of film’, in support of ‘film absolutism’ (eiga shijō shugi) after ‘the stage of visualization of the plot of fiction’. See Abe and Teshigahara (1965: 1).

10. Translations of quotations from Abe (1986) are all mine.

11. Davies paraphrases Levinas on the subject of collectivity embodied and reminded by the face of another as follows: ‘The face of another is never simply somewhere, it is always also behind or above the space within which I might think of myself and the Other as being together, as part of a collectivity, as commensurable’ (Davies 1993: 253).

12. Maurice Blanchot writes, of the condition of ‘the relation of man face-to-face with man’, ‘there is no choice but to speak or to kill’. Rather than forming the two alternatives as mutually exclusive, Blanchot goes on to argue, ‘speech does not consist in speaking, but first of all in maintaining the movement of the either/or; it is what founds the alternative’ (1993: 62). If we accept Blanchot's argument, then the end of speech means that the movement between the alternatives has come to a halt where a murder becomes the only option. The conclusion of the film version of The Face of Another then may perhaps not be different from that of the novel; the murder of the doctor in the film is the same as the renunciation of further narration in the novel – except that one is action and the other is thought.

13. The bandaged face looks like the Paul Klee painting Fake Face, mentioned in the novel but not appearing in the film, in which ‘the features were divided horizontally by parallel lines and, depending on how the picture was viewed, could be conceived of as a bandage wrapped round and round” (Abe 1966: 14).

14. Komatsu Sakyō, a writer of science fiction, recalls an essay on the mask by Hanada Kiyoteru, an avant-garde art critic, in his own essay on The Face of Another (Komatsu 1978). To me the following passage from Hanada most effectively resonates what is happening between the man with the face of another and his wife: ‘The negotiations between the masked ones, both intent on identifying the other, are truly thrilling, bringing us to a clear awareness that masks are not to conceal our true faces but, on the contrary, in order to reveal them’ (Hanada 1954: 44).

15. Benthien (2002: 20320) discusses skin and the gaze upon it in the case of The English Patient.

16. Brock's interpretation of the paralleling of the two storylines in the film is entirely different from mine. She argues effectively that the fragmentary and occasional citation of Ai no katagawa in the film version of The Face of Another formally corresponds to the use of brackets and notes in the novel version, as they are in effect similar in productively complicating the plot (Brock 1997: 90). She further contrasts the two storylines as the one being historical (with the reference to atomic bombing) and the other fictional, suggesting that the two correspond to each other so that the man's fate may be understood in its relation to the collective memory of Nagasaki shared by the spectator of the film despite the fact that the man without a face of his own may be unfamiliar to the spectator (Brock 1997: 90–91).