Faces of War: Japan’s Onibaba (1964) and The Face of Another (1966)
Within two years of each other, two Japanese films put a mask over a face the war had burned. Kaneto Shindō pulled a Noh demon over a widow in Onibaba, and Hiroshi Teshigahara fitted a flawless synthetic face onto a scarred engineer in The Face of Another. One mask is the oldest thing in the country’s theatre and the other is built in a laboratory, and both cover the same wound, the newest in its history. Each film asks whether the face underneath is a monster, a stranger, or the only truth a person has left.
Kaneto Shindō, Onibaba (1964), and Hiroshi Teshigahara, The Face of Another (1966)
In 1952 Nobuko Otowa walked through the ashes of Hiroshima, playing a teacher who returns to the city seven years after the bomb and moves among the survivors and the family graves, in Kaneto Shindō’s Children of Hiroshima (Genbaku no ko, “children of the atom bomb”), the first Japanese film allowed to face the attack once the American occupation lifted its ban on the subject. Shindō had been born in 1912 in the Saeki District of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the burn stayed in his work. Twelve years after that film he gave Otowa a demon mask and set her in a marsh, and the face he ruins under it belongs to the same catastrophe she had walked through on screen.
Onibaba takes its name from a figure in Japanese folklore, the demon hag, an old woman who haunts the wilderness and hunts lost travelers for their flesh. Shindō sets the story near Kyoto in the mid-fourteenth century, at the start of the Nanboku-chō period, the civil war between two rival imperial courts that opened after the Battle of Minatogawa in 1336, and shoots it in a field of susuki grass, the tall silver-plumed reeds of the Japanese autumn, at Inba Swamp in Chiba Prefecture. Two women, unnamed in the script and on screen, stay alive by ambushing soldiers who stumble in from the fighting, killing them, taking the armor and blades, and rolling the bodies into a black pit hidden in the grass, then trading the loot to a merchant named Ushi for a little millet.
The war that drives all this stays off screen. The older woman’s son Kishi was drafted alongside the neighbor Hachi, and Hachi returns alone to say Kishi died stealing food from farmers after the two of them deserted. What reaches the marsh is the wreckage, the fleeing soldiers, the widowed house, and a hunger sharp enough to turn two ordinary women into the creatures the legend warns about, so the onibaba comes with a cause, and the cause is history. A second hunger runs beside the first, since the younger woman slips through the reeds at night to Hachi’s hut while the older woman watches and turns jealous and then afraid, needing her partner close to keep trapping soldiers.
The mask enters the film as a tool before it becomes anything else. A lost samurai appears in a hannya mask, the horned, bronze-fanged face Noh theatre gives a woman consumed by jealousy, claiming he wears it to keep a beautiful face safe from the scars of war, and the older woman leads him to the pit, takes the mask from his ruined face, and wears it at night to frighten the younger away from Hachi. Shindō drew the object from a Shin Buddhist parable, the niku-zuki-no men, the mask with flesh attached, in which a mother playing a demon to scare a young woman from a forbidden love finds the mask fused to her skin, tearing the flesh away when she pulls it off. Rain fuses it here too, and when the younger woman breaks it loose with a mallet, the face beneath is pitted and raw, a ruin Shindō said belongs to the people who lived through the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He leaves open whether the mask cursed her or whether the damage is plainly human, and that openness is the point, since it keeps you unsure whether a monster was made or only named.
Teshigahara reached the same wound from the other end of time. In 1966 he made The Face of Another (Tanin no kao) from a screenplay Kōbō Abe adapted from his own 1964 novel, with a score by Tōru Takemitsu, and set it in the glass and steel of the modern city instead of a medieval marsh. An engineer named Okuyama, played by Tatsuya Nakadai, has lost his face to burns in an industrial explosion, and he moves through the early scenes in bandages, rejected by his wife and closed off from the people around him. A psychiatrist offers him a way out, a lifelike mask modeled on another man’s face and fitted to him like surgery, a graft in all but name that he can wear as his own.
The mask does exactly what the psychiatrist warned it would. Okuyama wears it into his own home and seduces his wife as a stranger, and the new face works its way into his character until the surface is most of what is left of him. When his wife tells him she knew all along, the recognition breaks him, and the film moves him toward a street where everyone he passes wears a mask, and then toward the killing of the psychiatrist who built his. His ruin sends him to hide inside a borrowed face, and the borrowed face hollows him out.
Teshigahara stages this loss as a modern and clinical thing. The psychiatrist’s office is a room of glass panels printed with surgical diagrams and Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, and severed ears drift through the scenery, so the body arrives already dismantled, mapped and labeled like parts on a table. In that setting the mask becomes one more component, and the psychiatrist imagines it going into mass production, a city of removable faces where a person can do anything and walk away from it. The street where Okuyama passes among masked strangers is the film’s fear laid bare, that the modern face is already a disguise, and that a country skilled at building new ones has let identity quietly dissolve.
A second story runs through the film, following a young woman whose face is scarred down one cheek and neck, who works in a psychiatric ward full of war veterans and lives with her brother. The film lets you read her scars as the mark of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, through her fear of another war and a question she asks her brother about the sea they knew there as children. She carries her ruin in the open, her face bare where the two men hide theirs, and after a night with her brother she dresses in white, walks into the sea, and lets it take her. Her disfigurement is the bomb without cover, set beside Okuyama’s the way the burned face sits beside the borrowed one.
Set side by side, the two films make one shape from opposite materials. Shindō reaches back for the oldest mask the culture owns, the Noh hannya, and Teshigahara builds the newest, a clinical prosthetic fitted in a laboratory, and both lay it over a face the war has burned. Both press the same question, whether the mask is a disguise worn over the truth or the only self a ruined person has left, and their characters answer it in opposite directions. Okuyama flees into his mask and it hollows him until he kills, while the older woman in the marsh tears hers off. Onibaba ends on her leap, as the younger woman clears the pit and she jumps after her screaming that she is a human being, and the picture cuts with her still in the air above the hole she has filled with bodies since the war began. Between the man who keeps the mask and the woman who claws it away, both films come to rest in the same place, where the burned face is the true one and the mask is the lie a frightened country lays over what it has done.
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An earlier Doomnation feature followed this same fear back to The Hands of Orlac, where a pianist wakes with an executed murderer’s hands grafted to his arms and holds them away from his body, waiting for them to act without him. Orlac and Okuyama flinch in the same direction, each certain that a part taken from someone else carries a will that will unmake him, and The Face of Another falls on the road that runs from Maurice Renard imagining the graft in 1920 to the first real face transplant in 2005. The woman in the marsh chooses the other way, reaching up to tear the face off and keep the ruin over the disguise, because identity is not housed in the flesh and has to be chosen, each time, from whatever the war has left.
