Two masks appear in Japanese films made two years apart. In Kaneto Shindō’s Onibaba (1964), an older woman steals a demon mask from a samurai and uses it to police another woman’s desire. In Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966), a psychiatrist manufactures a lifelike face for a man disfigured in an industrial accident. One mask comes from a medieval story world and Noh iconography; the other comes from postwar medicine and modern design. Both make the face a site where fear, shame, desire, and social identity become visible.
War connects the films, but not in identical ways. Shindō’s connection to Hiroshima is explicit and documented. Teshigahara’s is more indirect: The Face of Another contains a parallel story widely read as that of a Nagasaki survivor, but the argument that this secondary narrative determines the meaning of the entire film belongs to critics rather than to a verified statement of directorial intention. Keeping those levels separate makes the comparison stronger.
Shindō after Hiroshima
Shindō was born in Hiroshima Prefecture in 1912 and repeatedly returned to the atomic bombings in his work. Soon after the US occupation ended in April 1952, the Japan Teachers Union approached him to make a film based on Arata Osada’s collection of testimonies from children who had experienced the bombing. The result was Children of Hiroshima (Genbaku no ko, 1952), one of the first Japanese features to confront the atomic bombing directly after occupation censorship had prevented open cinematic treatment of the subject. Nobuko Otowa plays a teacher returning to Hiroshima and encountering survivors, graves, illness, and the rebuilt city.
That history matters for Onibaba, but it should not be used as a shortcut that turns every image in the later film into Hiroshima. Shindō gives us one unusually secure bridge. In a later interview included with Criterion’s edition of Onibaba, he connected the disfiguring effect of the mask to people scarred by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is an artist statement. The broader reading of the film as a trauma text can build from it, but it remains interpretation.
Onibaba is set in war-torn fourteenth-century Japan during the Nanboku-chō conflicts. An older woman and her daughter-in-law survive in a field of tall susuki grass by killing exhausted soldiers, stripping their weapons and armor, and throwing the bodies into a deep pit. Hachi, a neighbor who went to war with the older woman’s son, returns alone. His arrival turns survival into a struggle over sex, dependence, and jealousy as the younger woman begins visiting him at night.
The hannya mask
The mask carried by the lost samurai is a hannya, one of the most recognizable masks in Noh theatre. Hannya masks represent women transformed into demons by consuming emotions such as jealousy, rage, or grief. That makes Shindō’s use of it deliberately unstable from the moment it appears. The mask is first worn by a man, a samurai who claims it hides a beautiful face damaged by war. After the older woman kills him and removes it, she discovers that his face is already diseased or scarred beneath it. She then takes a mask associated with female jealousy and uses it to become the demon her own jealousy requires.
The plot also reworks a Buddhist fable known in versions as the bride-scaring mask or the “mask with flesh attached.” In the traditional story, a woman wears a demon mask to frighten a younger woman away from religious devotion and is punished when the mask sticks to her face. Shindō moves the prohibition from religion to sexuality. The older woman wears the mask to prevent her daughter-in-law from reaching Hachi. Rain makes the mask adhere to her skin; when it is finally broken off, her face is left raw and pitted.
Here the Hiroshima connection can be stated without invention. Shindō said the damage caused by the mask symbolized the disfigurement of atomic-bomb victims. The image therefore carries at least two histories at once: the older theatrical language of the hannya and a twentieth-century history of burned and scarred bodies. Neither cancels the other. The mask does not become “the atomic bomb” in a one-to-one allegory. It lets an older moral object acquire a postwar physical reference.
A face manufactured in 1966
The Face of Another (Tanin no kao) comes from a different collaboration. Hiroshi Teshigahara directed from a screenplay by Kōbō Abe, who adapted his own novel, with music by Tōru Takemitsu and cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa. Tatsuya Nakadai plays Okuyama, a man whose face has been severely burned in an industrial accident. He moves through the first part of the film in bandages until a psychiatrist offers him an experimental prosthetic mask modeled on another man’s face.
The psychiatrist imagines the mask as a social experiment as much as a medical one. If a face can be exchanged, he wonders, what happens to accountability, desire, and inhibition? Okuyama uses the new appearance to create another identity and approaches his own wife as a stranger. The film never needs the mask to possess him magically. Its more disturbing possibility is that anonymity licenses impulses already present in him.
The film’s modern spaces make that experiment visible. Glass partitions carry anatomical diagrams; sculpted ears appear as detached objects; rooms shift between clinic, laboratory, and display case. Criterion credits Masao Yamazaki with the art direction, while the film’s design repeatedly reduces the body to parts that can be measured, reproduced, or exchanged. Okuyama’s mask belongs to that world. It is another manufactured component, frightening because it fits perfectly.
The scarred woman and Nagasaki
Running beside Okuyama’s story is a second narrative about a young woman whose face and neck are scarred. She works around psychiatric patients, including war veterans, lives with her brother, fears another war, and recalls the sea at Nagasaki. The film does not stop to identify her in documentary terms. Critics, however, have strong reasons to read her as a Nagasaki survivor. James Quandt’s Criterion essay calls her the “Nagasaki victim” and treats her story as the film’s most important counterpoint to Okuyama’s.
That distinction matters editorially. It is fair to say the film invites the Nagasaki reading. It is not fair to turn the reading into a quotation from Teshigahara that we do not have. His biography supplies relevant context: he grew up during Japanese militarism, witnessed the postwar consequences of the atomic bombings, and made earlier documentary work connected to Hiroshima. Context can explain why critics place the secondary story within nuclear memory, but it cannot substitute for a statement of intention.
The scarred woman also changes the argument of the film because she does not receive Okuyama’s technological escape. Her face remains visible. She experiences other people’s looks directly rather than testing a second identity behind a perfect surface. In Abe’s novel, her story is presented more clearly as a film watched by the protagonist; Teshigahara intercuts it with Okuyama’s life so insistently that the boundary becomes harder to see. The two narratives therefore operate as a designed contrast even if their exact relationship remains open.
Two masks, two kinds of responsibility
Putting Onibaba and The Face of Another together does not require claiming that Shindō and Teshigahara were making the same allegory. Shindō gives us an explicit atomic-bomb reference attached to the disfiguring mask. Teshigahara gives us a scarred parallel narrative that critics identify with Nagasaki, placed beside a protagonist who can conceal his damaged face completely. The comparison begins there.
The hannya mask exaggerates an emotion until a human face becomes demonic. Okuyama’s prosthetic does the opposite: it removes every visible irregularity and makes him socially ordinary. One advertises monstrosity; the other erases difference. Yet both create distance between appearance and responsibility. The older woman uses a demon face to control somebody else. Okuyama uses an acceptable face to test how far he can separate action from identity.
War remains in the comparison, but unevenly. In Onibaba, civil war makes hunger and predation ordinary, while Shindō later supplies a twentieth-century reference for the mask’s damaged flesh. In The Face of Another, Okuyama’s own injury comes from industry rather than war, while the Nagasaki-coded woman carries the historical wound in the parallel story. The films do not place the same wound under two masks. They distribute damaged bodies differently and ask what society does when a face can no longer perform normality.
That is where they meet most precisely. Both films refuse the idea that a face is merely a surface. A face determines how other people read a body, how desire is permitted or refused, and how a person recognizes an action as his or her own. Shindō makes that problem archaic and physical; Teshigahara makes it clinical and reproducible. Between them sits postwar Japan, but the historical connection has to be built from the evidence each film actually provides.
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An earlier Doomnation feature examines another body-transformation film in What the Flesh Remembers: The Hands of Orlac.