General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Face of Another (他人の顔)

The Face of Another (他人の顔, Tanin no kao) is a 1966 Japanese black-and-white psychological drama directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, based on the 1964 novel of the same title by Kōbō Abe, who also wrote the screenplay¹^•². It follows a businessman whose face is destroyed in an industrial accident and who obtains a lifelike mask from a psychiatrist, then uses his new face to seduce his own wife as a stranger³. The film was the third of four adaptations of Abe's fiction that Teshigahara made in the 1960s, after Pitfall (1962) and Woman in the Dunes (1964)²^•⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Hiroshi Teshigahara; original work and screenplay by Kōbō Abe¹
Release	Japan, 1966; distributed by Toho; theatrical release date listed as July 16, 1966⁵
Format	Black and white, Japanese language, listed at 121 minutes by eiga.com and 122 minutes by WOWOW (Criterion lists 124 minutes)⁵^•²^•¹
Principal cast	Tatsuya Nakadai (Okuyama), Machiko Kyō (his wife), Mikijirō Hira (the psychiatrist), Kyōko Kishida⁶
Key crew	Cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa; music by Tōru Takemitsu⁷
Critical standing	86% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 7 reviews; 90% audience score⁸
Home video	Criterion Collection release, spine #395, with a restored high-definition transfer¹

Spoilers

Plot

Okuyama, a wealthy chemist and company executive, is badly burned across his face in an explosion at a newly built factory³^•⁵. Until a prosthesis can be made, his head is entirely wrapped in bandages, with openings only for his eyes, nose, and mouth³. Believing that he has lost his relationships with his wife, his business partner, and his secretary along with his face, he grows suspicious and withdrawn⁵.

The psychiatrist he consults takes an experimental interest in his case and agrees to build a mask molded on a stranger's face, on condition that Okuyama report all his subsequent actions⁵^•¹. Once fitted with the artificial face, Okuyama rents a separate apartment, passes himself off as a complete stranger, and sets out to seduce his own wife, whom he suspects of infidelity³. The affair that follows ends with a revelation for Okuyama and drives him to cut ties with the psychiatrist who has been monitoring him³. In one late scene he walks the midnight streets declaring himself "a pure stranger who is nobody" and impulsively assaults a woman⁵.

A second story runs alongside the main plot: a young woman whose right cheek bears a keloid scar, disfigured in the atomic bombing, who is shunned as an outcast and enters an incestuous relationship with her brother, with tragic consequences for both³. She is played by Bibari (Beverly) Maeda, and Okuyama recalls her as a character in a film he once saw³^•⁵.

The Abe–Teshigahara collaboration

The film continues the working method of Teshigahara's earlier features: Abe supplied both the source novel and the screenplay, Hiroshi Segawa photographed, and Tōru Takemitsu composed the score⁵^•⁷. The four collaborations, Pitfall (1962), Woman in the Dunes (1964), The Face of Another (1966), and The Man Without a Map (1968), placed Japan at the center of international discussion of identity and alienation in modern urban society⁴^•⁹.

Takemitsu's electronic music is matched to the film's imagery of glass, mirrors, and cold reflective surfaces, a visual scheme built around lost or artificial identity⁹. A Viennese waltz and a German song performed in a Munich-style beer hall serve in the film as signifiers of European culture and of war anxiety¹⁰.

Adaptation from the novel

Abe's novel is set in Tokyo in 1964, and its final pages take the form of a document about a film, a device the film itself turns back on its audience by staging the scarred girl's story as a movie Okuyama remembers¹¹^•⁵. The critic James Quandt, a frequent contributor to Artforum, notes that the film drops two visually potent sequences from the book, a struggle with a tattooed man in a public bath and an exhibition of Noh masks, while expanding the girl's story from a short coda into a boldly interpolated counterpoint; he judges Teshigahara's film more involving than Abe's original¹⁰.

Scholarship on the film has focused on the scarred woman. A 2011 study by Yoshiyuki Tomoda of Ritsumeikan University treats her as a figure for the female hibakusha (survivor of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan), examining how her existence became a point of contention in the passage from novel to film and reading the work as a cultural response to the atomic bombings¹².

Reception and legacy

The film was a success in Japan but was largely dismissed by Western critics on release, in a period when the modernist style it shared with filmmakers such as Antonioni, Bergman, and Resnais was falling out of fashion¹⁰. Even in Japan it was unfavorably compared with Teshigahara's previous success, Woman in the Dunes³. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that as fiction it was "too fanciful to be seriously compelling and too glib to be especially thought-provoking"³. Later assessments have been warmer: Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader called the theme brilliantly and imaginatively explored, and Dennis Schwartz gave it a B+, noting that it asks probing questions about identity⁸.

The film is frequently paired with other masked-identity works. Turner Classic Movies compares it to John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966) and Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960)³. It was released on home video in the Criterion Collection as spine #395 with a restored high-definition transfer and a video essay by James Quandt¹. Its subject has acquired renewed topicality through real face-transplant surgery and public debate over face coverings; the film already incorporates, from Abe's novel, a remark about Arab women's veils in the wife's reflection on the power of concealing the face¹⁰.

Themes

The film treats the face as the entrance through which others recognize a person and the channel connecting an individual to society, and it asks what remains of identity when that channel is severed or replaced¹³. The psychiatrist argues for anonymity as the ultimate personal freedom, and Okuyama's experiment shows both the liberation and the danger of a new persona: freed from the constraints of his former self, he tests the limits of morality until the mask erodes the boundary between authenticity and performance¹⁴^•⁶. The Japanese Film Festival Australia's synopsis summarizes the film's suggestion that masks do not always hide the self; in some cases they may expose it⁶.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026