A businessman with a disfigured face obtains a lifelike mask from his doctor, but the mask starts altering his personality.

A businessman facially scarred in a laboratory explosion receives treatment from a psychiatrist, and obtains an amazingly life-like mask from the doctor. Soon after being fitted for the mask, he attempts to seduce his wife and succeeds. But his wife claims she was aware all along who he was and believed that both were just masquerading together as men and women do in different ways. Strangely enough, his personality seemingly begins to change after he puts on the mask as if the mask has influenced his personality. His new identity does not enable him to reintegrate into society after all. A subplot is inserted in fragments. A good-natured young woman, the right side of whose face is disfigured, has been hurt by others' inquisitive eyes and insults, and has been shunned by men. She asks her older brother, the only man who understands her pain and solitude, to make love to her, hiding from him the intent of killing herself afterwards.—Prion

Mr. Okuyama, a business executive, is involved in a workplace industrial accident, which leaves his face severely burned. Rather than show his scarred face to the world, he would rather keep his entire head bandaged whenever he is in public. Although he takes some responsibility for what happened to him, he is very bitter, not so much about his face, but at the people he feels have abandoned him, including his wife. He asks his psychiatrist, Dr. Hori, to help him kill himself. Dr. Hori believes he has a more palatable alternative, albeit one that may not be ethical: Dr. Hori will create a life-like mask for him to wear, one that only a trained eye could tell is not a real face, it which would allow him to assume another identity completely. While Mr. Okuyama just wants to have some semblance of normalcy in agreeing, Dr. Hori, who is treating this process like a scientific psychological experiment, has the caveat that he wants Mr. Okuyama to report back his every action and encounter as he truly does believe that the mask will take on an identity of its own. As Okuyama goes through the growing pains of being comfortable not only wearing the mask but all that goes along with being someone else (despite his assertions that he will always be who he is), he divulges his true intention with the mask which has specifically to do with reclaiming his wife. That mission ends up having unintended consequences. A parallel, separate story is interwoven with Okuyama's, it concerning a young woman with a burn scar on the right side of her face, the scar which she generally hides by her hairstyle, and the true emotions she is dealing with regarding her disfigurement.—Huggo

This follow-up to Abe and Teshigahara's Sunna no Onna (1965) is even more surrealistic, thanks to the intrusion of science fiction elements. Tatsuya Nakadai (X) is horribly burned it a laboratory accident and seeks the help of Dr. K___, who designs a new face for him out of a realistic mask. Is the mask controlling him, or did he create the personality of the mask? He randomly remembers scenes from a film he saw in which Bibari Maeda was a horribly scarred woman (Hiroshima), shunned by most people, who commits incest with her brother and throws herself into the sea.—Scott Hutchins <[email protected]>