This chapter extends the analysis of the modernist face to Abe’s 1964 novel, which it considers as a text of global modernism. The novel is framed by the conventions of science fiction: the protagonist, a Japanese scientist, has an accident that destroys his face. Studying physiognomic manuals which draw on both Western and Japanese traditions of physiognomy, he builds a new face, which takes the form of an all-powerful mask. This mask acquires a life of its own, prompting philosophical speculation on facial alienation and the ethics of the face. The chapter traces a dialogue between Abe’s novel and Kōjin Karatani’s Origins of Japanese Literature (1980) on the “invention” of the face in Japanese literature. For both novelist and theorist, literature offers an infrastructure for the global travels of the face as a system of signification.

With the publication of various translations of French surrealist essays and poems in Japanese avant-garde publications of the 1930s, small groups of writers and individual artists began to make surrealism their own. However, due to the multifarious misunderstandings and often inaccurate adaptations of these texts resulting from their translation into Japanese, the term chō-genjitsushugi (surrealism) expanded to incorporate culturally and regionally specific concerns and concepts. Novelist Kōbō Abe surveyed post-war Japan from a very particular vantage point, having spent years of his life witnessing war and conflict in Manchuria before settling in Tokyo’s metropolis. This chapter examines Abe’s engagement with French surrealism, his frequently black (surrealist) humour, and the quest for the marvellous that manifests across his oeuvre. Writing against the grain of Japanese modernist literary convention, Abe’s surrealism revels in the convulsive beauty of metamorphoses via animal, mineral, and plastic forms. Through the figures of the box, the mask, the dendrocalcalia, or the cocoon of thread, the reader is aligned with narrators who disrupt and critique the order of things, disturbing the surface so as to reveal a sham society that seems hellbent on dehumanizing its citizens.