Mkultra's Reviews > The Face of Another

Huge disappointment.

I came across Kobo Abe by way of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s screen adaptation of ‘The Woman in the Dunes,’ as well as ‘Pitfall,’ both of which I regard as masterpieces of Japanese cinema, on par with the films of Kurosawa and the other Japanese greats. This was my first Kobo Abe novel.

The premise is very compelling. Not so the execution. I found the prose so impenetrably dull and repetitive that my trying to stay focused to follow the narrator’s train of thought was quite excruciating. Poignant insights or thought-provoking ideas are either few and far between, or else well disguised, locked within closed loops of quasi-philosophical non sequiturs—ostensibly the protagonist’s jotted-down musings on such themes as identity, alienation, and sexual desire—which make up the bulk of the novel.

Maybe there is profound insight and meaning to be had from some of those passages. Then again, maybe not. Actually, it doesn’t matter. For me, a piece of well-wrought fiction conveys its meaning on many levels, and can be appreciated without being ‘understood’ (whatever that means). With a prose that is clunky, circuitous, riddled with inane similes (e.g. ‘a wretched feeling, like wearing wet socks’) and makes use of the phrase ‘in heaven’s name’ on every other page, ‘The Face of Another’ is just poor craftsmanship. Simple as that.

I fail to see why anyone would want to wade through this heap of literary refuse in search of a few (perhaps) well-hidden nuggets of philosophical insight.