BOOK REVIEW: THE BOX MAN (1973, 1974)

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.

BOOK REVIEW: THE RUINED MAP (1969)

by Kobo Abe

Translated by E. Dale Saunders
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1969
Originally published in Japanese 1967

Review by William D. Tucker. 

A nameless private investigator takes on the case of a missing husband, a Mr. Nemuro. He goes to a small town somewhere in Japan, and tries to figure out where Mr. Nemuro went. It doesn't help that the man disappeared six months ago, and that it has taken so long for the wife and the wife's brother to hire a detective. The P.I. narrates his tale in the first person, and the names of the town and several pertinent organizations have been purposely redacted from his first person narrative. His investigation takes on an abstract quality. One gets the sense that this mystery and the people involved could exist in any small town or city.

The P.I. has a kind of knack for seeing things in minute detail. At times, he seems to focus obsessively on details of rooms and streets and people's attire to the point that he misses the big picture. Early on, he narrowly avoids running down a child in the street. Later, he meets with his estranged wife and he seems to have a rather distorted sense of why they had to part ways. Like in many marital conflicts, each blames the other for the separation, and the P.I. is tinged with jealousy that borders on the absurd. One moment he's specualting about her cheating on him, and the next he idly fantasises about her having a lesbian tryst with her young female employee in her dressmaking shop. Every statement, each exchange, every last change of mood and odd utterance is analyzed for hidden meanings and secret threats. The P.I. was suited for his profession, and doomed to failure in marriage.

Or maybe the P.I.'s hyperawareness is his weakness as an investigator as well. Each person he interrogates, he takes on a slightly different persona the better to draw out pertinent information. His theory is he must be a kind of blank slate, an actor, willing to take on the persona which best gets his given subject talking about what he needs to know. Brilliant . . . but there's always the risk that these ideal personas merely push his subjects to tell him what he wants to hear, and not the truth. Also, his suspicious nature may prevent him from believing the truth of statements which contain vital clues.

The Ruined Map plays with the tantalizing ambiguities inherent in human communications, especially when people are trying to hide their feelings and obscure the truth. The novel is set up like a hard-boiled mystery to give people plenty of reasons to equivocate and deceive one another about hidden motives and illicit schemes, but by the end of it I was left with the impression that Abe is suggesting that all human interactions are, on some level, profoundly uncertain. We can never really know what goes on in someone else's head. How do we know if someone is lying to us? And don't we all tell little white lies now and again? Deception, at some level, is absolutely necessary for normal human interactions to proceed apace. Radical honesty would tear us apart. But what happens if our lives are entirely made up of little white lies? Couldn't the case be made that one little white lie after another adds up to a big ol' pile of deception? That might very well be the case. And there might be absolutely nothing we can do about it.

And where does that leave the P.I. in terms of identity? If he has committed himself to being a kind of protean Everyman, altering his identity to suit whatever case and whoever he is dealing with at any given moment, then who is he? Is identity something essential and unchanging? In Abe's novel, this is not the case. Identity is something you can put on, take off, and fine tune in endless variations. At least, that's how the P.I. approaches things. That's another part of the guy's particular talent it would seem.

But what happens if you lose track of yourself? Sure, the P.I.'s a pro, that wouldn't happen . . . but what if?

The Ruined Map draws you in with a genre mystery set up, but then goes on, by gradual degrees, to take you into truly bizarre territory. I found it to be surprisingly unsettling, although it is hardly sensationalistic or gruesome in any extreme sense. But it wore on my psyche, screwing with my genre expectations, and then dragging me into a wholly unexpected fictional zone. I admired it, but it was also somewhat unpleasant, and a bit infuriating. I've read a number of other Abe novels in English, and have found most of them to be much too abstracted and absurdist for my taste, although I did enjoy The Box Man and Inter Ice Age 4. I think I was hoping, as I read it, that this book would be closer to Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, but instead it was thoroughly Kobo Abe. Well, the man's name was on the spine. I have only myself to blame.