Anxiety of reading, ethics of writing: A Couple's letters in Kobo Abe's the face of another

This paper aims to analyze the ethical problem between the protagonist, the husband, and his wife in Kobo Abe' s Novel The Face of Another, focusing on the fact that the means by which communication is carried out between the couple, as the form in this novel, are three pieces of handwritten notebooks from the husband and a letter from his wife. The handwritten notebooks and the letter describe the process of the construction and failure of the ethics generated between the couple. What has been frequently discussed in previous research is how we evaluate the wife' s letter, because we may think that the content written in his wife' s letter breaks down the story. However, rather than re-starting from such contradictions and failures, this paper will try to approach this novel from the viewpoint of the reader' s wife, not from the writer' s husband. As a result, in terms of gender relations, ethics of writing, the possibility of pursuing the dialogue instead of the monologue, will be clarified, such as presented by the wife and a girl appeared in a movie introduced in the novel.