by Kobo Abe
English translation by E. Dale Saunders.
Published in 1974 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Original Japanese language publication in 1973 by Shinchosha.
. . .
"It would be better for you not to forget that you are merely my scribblings. You say that I tend to cling too much to the box? As soon as I dispose of it as you advise, you too will completely disappear with the scribblings."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
In Tokyo, middle-aged men are abandoning their lives to become Box Men, which entails giving up their jobs and their families-if they had such relationships in the first place-to don modified refrigerator boxes and shoot at each other with airsoft rifles modified to shoot lead pellets. So, if you see a tall cardboard structure with a pair of legs and a rectangular opening at eye level-hey, it's a thing now, so know that you're not hallucinating.
Of course, a Box Man might be hallucinating. It's possible that one could be quite detached from reality in order to become a Box Man. And if you are indeed a Box Man yourself, and you start seeing Box Men everywhere, well, maybe you're just seeing what you want to see. Or you're just picking up the signal of other Box Men from the noise of mainstream existence because you're focused on hanging around other people who are like you.
There's also this thing where when someone sees a Box Man they may be filled with a kind of cryptic fear and loathing at the sight of such a strange being, and so they seek to attack a Box Man . . . but then the attacker finds themselves compelled to become a Box Man themselves, perhaps upon finding the remains of a modified refrigerator box abandoned by an injured Box Man. Every shell needs a snail, right?
The Box Man is a novel which starts out describing what seems to be a bizarre but semi-plausible social phenomenon. But read into it deeper and it spins out into a fractured yet recursive narrative that gives one the sensation of a novel in the process of rewriting itself. The Box Man starts with a news article about the oppressive cycle of police round-ups of homeless people in Ueno. This article comes across as an inspiration for what follows-what if disenfranchised people made their own way of life as Box Men as a fuck you to respectable society? But then the narrative seemingly collapses down into the mind of some authorial figure-Kobo Abe himself?-who burrows deeper into the labyrinth of his own imagination. This author seems obsessed with a pair of recurring figures in his ongoing narrative: a doctor whom he considers a Fake Box Man and the sexy stripping nurse who is the doctor's consort. We get variations on themes of voyeurism, guilt-ridden masturbation fantasies, and endless arguments over who gets to be a 'real' Box Man as opposed to a fraudulent Box Man. Abe once studied to be a doctor but never practiced medicine, so perhaps this is the author confronting some leftover regret about abandoning a mainstream life to become a weirdo artsy writerly type.
All of this is, according to the author-or one of the identities assumed by the author-being meticulously scribbled all over the inside surfaces of the modified refrigerator box. Occasionally, addenda are written upon different colored sheets of paper, and there are also various marginalia scribbled between and among different blocks of text.
The Box Man is a restless, frustrated text that starts out as social satire about capitalist alienation, drifts into ruminations upon sexual fantasy and sexual humiliation, and seemingly recapitulates themes of postwar identity abandonment from other Abe works such as The Woman in the Dunes. And then it changes the ground rules. It spins variations on the idea of being a Box Man. It glories and/or despairs in the absolute solipsistic power of an author endlessly re-authoring his own tale. Dreams, nightmares, and tawdry pornographic stroke-off fantasies collide. The authorial presence flies free into abstractions and visions and animal transformation fantasias only to come crashing down into peeping tom scenarios worthy of Letters to Penthouse. To don the armor of the Box Man is to enter into a state of transformation both powerful and isolating. Think of the towering anthropomorphic battlesuits from future war anime mecha franchises such as Mobile Suit Gundam, Armored Trooper VOTOMS, and Neon Genesis Evangelion, wherein humans gain power but suffer psychological trauma on the battlefield. Now think of the contemporary phenomenon of the hikikomori-people who isolate themselves by seldom leaving their rooms, sacrificing normal relationships and careers as they are disabled by extreme social anxiety. The Box Man could well be adapted into an anime titled Mobile Suit Hikikomori, in which one achieves an ambiguous freedom from the rat race by merging with a bizarre kind of armor that marks one as an outcast even as it facilitates grandiose visions and hallucinations.
