# 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](https://www.edgepedia.org/kobo-abe), who also wrote the screenplay[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/828-the-face-of-another) • [2](https://www.wowow.co.jp/detail/203691). 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 stranger[3](https://www.tcm.com/articles/150490/the-face-of-another). 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](https://www.wowow.co.jp/detail/203691) • [4](https://analepsis.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/japanesecinema.pdf).
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director / writer | Hiroshi Teshigahara; original work and screenplay by Kōbō Abe[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/828-the-face-of-another) |
| Release | Japan, 1966; distributed by Toho; theatrical release date listed as July 16, 1966[5](https://eiga.com/movie/37707/) |
| Format | Black and white, Japanese language, listed at 121 minutes by eiga.com and 122 minutes by WOWOW (Criterion lists 124 minutes)[5](https://eiga.com/movie/37707/) • [2](https://www.wowow.co.jp/detail/203691) • [1](https://www.criterion.com/films/828-the-face-of-another) |
| Principal cast | Tatsuya Nakadai (Okuyama), Machiko Kyō (his wife), Mikijirō Hira (the psychiatrist), Kyōko Kishida[6](https://jffau.jpf.go.jp/film/the-face-of-another/) |
| Key crew | Cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa; music by Tōru Takemitsu[7](https://img-lib.musabi.ac.jp/search/index.php/document/detail-work/326) |
| Critical standing | 86% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 7 reviews; 90% audience score[8](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/face_of_another) |
| Home video | Criterion Collection release, spine #395, with a restored high-definition transfer[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/828-the-face-of-another) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
Okuyama, a wealthy chemist and company executive, is badly burned across his face in an explosion at a newly built factory[3](https://www.tcm.com/articles/150490/the-face-of-another) • [5](https://eiga.com/movie/37707/). Until a prosthesis can be made, his head is entirely wrapped in bandages, with openings only for his eyes, nose, and mouth[3](https://www.tcm.com/articles/150490/the-face-of-another). Believing that he has lost his relationships with his wife, his business partner, and his secretary along with his face, he grows suspicious and withdrawn[5](https://eiga.com/movie/37707/).
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 actions[5](https://eiga.com/movie/37707/) • [1](https://www.criterion.com/films/828-the-face-of-another). 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 infidelity[3](https://www.tcm.com/articles/150490/the-face-of-another). The affair that follows ends with a revelation for Okuyama and drives him to cut ties with the psychiatrist who has been monitoring him[3](https://www.tcm.com/articles/150490/the-face-of-another). In one late scene he walks the midnight streets declaring himself "a pure stranger who is nobody" and impulsively assaults a woman[5](https://eiga.com/movie/37707/).
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 both[3](https://www.tcm.com/articles/150490/the-face-of-another). She is played by Bibari (Beverly) Maeda, and Okuyama recalls her as a character in a film he once saw[3](https://www.tcm.com/articles/150490/the-face-of-another) • [5](https://eiga.com/movie/37707/).
## 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 score[5](https://eiga.com/movie/37707/) • [7](https://img-lib.musabi.ac.jp/search/index.php/document/detail-work/326). 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 society[4](https://analepsis.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/japanesecinema.pdf) • [9](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/607).
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 identity[9](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/607). 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 anxiety[10](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/592-the-face-of-another-double-vision).
## 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 remembers[11](https://tufs.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/3177/files/ifa014011.pdf) • [5](https://eiga.com/movie/37707/). 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 original[10](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/592-the-face-of-another-double-vision).
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 bombings[12](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/nihonbungaku/60/11/60_38/_article/-char/ja/).
## 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 fashion[10](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/592-the-face-of-another-double-vision). Even in Japan it was unfavorably compared with Teshigahara's previous success, *Woman in the Dunes*[3](https://www.tcm.com/articles/150490/the-face-of-another). 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](https://www.tcm.com/articles/150490/the-face-of-another). 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 identity[8](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/face_of_another).
The film is frequently paired with other masked-identity works. [Turner Classic Movies](https://www.edgepedia.org/turner-classic-movies) compares it to [John Frankenheimer](https://www.edgepedia.org/john-frankenheimer)'s *Seconds* (1966) and [Georges Franju](https://www.edgepedia.org/georges-franju)'s *Eyes Without a Face* (1960)[3](https://www.tcm.com/articles/150490/the-face-of-another). 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 Quandt[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/828-the-face-of-another). 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 face[10](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/592-the-face-of-another-double-vision).
## 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 replaced[13](https://bungakushi.com/japan/work/tanin-no-kao/). 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 performance[14](https://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s2319tesh.html) • [6](https://jffau.jpf.go.jp/film/the-face-of-another/). 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 it[6](https://jffau.jpf.go.jp/film/the-face-of-another/).
## References
1. [The Face of Another (1966), The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/films/828-the-face-of-another)
2. [他人の顔, WOWOWオンライン](https://www.wowow.co.jp/detail/203691)
3. [The Face of Another, Turner Classic Movies (Jeff Stafford, 2006)](https://www.tcm.com/articles/150490/the-face-of-another)
4. [Teshigahara Hiroshi, Japanese cinema survey (analepsis.org)](https://analepsis.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/japanesecinema.pdf)
5. [他人の顔：作品情報・キャスト・あらすじ, 映画.com](https://eiga.com/movie/37707/)
6. [The Face of Another (他人の顔), The Japanese Film Festival Australia](https://jffau.jpf.go.jp/film/the-face-of-another/)
7. [他人の顔, 武蔵野美術大学 美術館・図書館 映像作品データベース](https://img-lib.musabi.ac.jp/search/index.php/document/detail-work/326)
8. [The Face of Another, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/face_of_another)
9. [The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu, The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/607)
10. [The Face of Another: Double Vision, by James Quandt, The Criterion Collection (2007)](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/592-the-face-of-another-double-vision)
11. [安部公房の『他人の顔』における戦争の記憶と人種問題, 東京外国語大学機関リポジトリ](https://tufs.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/3177/files/ifa014011.pdf)
12. [映像のなかの原爆乙女―安部公房／勅使河原宏映画『他人の顔』論, 友田義行, 『日本文学』60巻11号 (2011)](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/nihonbungaku/60/11/60_38/_article/-char/ja/)
13. [他人の顔｜文学史ナビ](https://bungakushi.com/japan/work/tanin-no-kao/)
14. [DVD Savant Review: Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, DVD Talk](https://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s2319tesh.html)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Science fiction and fantasy films (individual works) › Science fiction and fantasy films before 1970*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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