BOOK REVIEW: SECRET RENDEZVOUS (1977, 1979)

by Kobo Abe

English translation by Juliet W. Carpenter, and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1979.

Originally published in Japanese in 1977 by Shinchosha.

. . .

“This is one peculiar job I have taken on. No matter how I follow myself around, I will never see anything but my own backside, when what I want to know lies beyond: the empty space, for example, that I never knew or dreamed existed until it was invaded by that doctor’s footsteps . . . the space that ever since has grown endlessly wider, separating my wife and me . . . the ground that anyone can walk around on freely, that belongs to nobody . . . the jealousy like a bed of hard, frozen lava, leaving only the imprint of anger . . .”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

A nameless man tries to write his story according to the extensive surveillance logs collected by a secret police agency that he himself may or may not be the boss of, but he seemingly depends upon these logs more than his own memories. Hey, nowadays we all know how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be, and who is the primary eyewitness to your life? Yourself, an unreliable narrator of your own existence. So it would seem that the secret police are just trying to help us out, just some friends indeed to a friend in need of memory enhancement.

The nameless man is looking for his wife, who disappeared after taking a sinister ambulance ride. The nameless man is assisted by a man who is also a horse, or is working hard towards becoming a horse. The nameless man is not as weirded out by the horse as you might think, but it is something he gets caught on now and again. 

The nameless man investigates a suspicious hospital. He finds a labyrinth of secret passages, hidden rooms, and quirky characters ready to make his acquaintance. It’s not a million miles from a Hideo Kojima video game. There’s even a power-up item in the form of “jump shoes” which the nameless man also retails. The nameless man also has to evade goon squads, and even has a martial arts dustup to protect a woman with liquid bones. This investigation uncovers a festival of sexual perversion, human trafficking, and human experimentation. The secret police turn out to be a private enterprise outfit who get quite a lot of their business from the suspect hospital. The people running this hospital stalk and capture people to be used for parts-a chop shop of a most gruesome kind.

The nameless man’s narrative is suffused with jealousy, paranoia, misogynist entitlement, and bewilderment. He is not the most sympathetic character, and yet he himself also seems to be caught up in the chaos gears of a machine he cannot control or understand despite his desires for power via surveillance networks and unethical biotechnologies. By the end, he is abandoned by the system which he once prized. Perhaps his manufactured narrative that pitted him as a rebel against a corrupt system was his fantasy of escaping a world he knew would turn on him in the fullness of time since its hunger for human vivisection fodder could not be effectively regulated. Secret Rendezvous may have been intended to remind audiences of Imperial Japan’s germ warfare atrocities which included testing of weapons upon live human beings. The empire is gone, but big business endures, so why wouldn’t corporate capitalism, ever restless for new frontiers to consume, section and suture and dissect human beings to derive new products and services?

Secret Rendezvous may also be the chronicle of an elaborate delusion and/or masturbatory fantasia reflecting cranky, reactionary attitudes towards advances in medical science. Maybe it’s just a middle aged author’s remix of nurse porn and sensationalist headlines about artificial tissues and organ transplants and sperm donations and egg banks and the like. This is Kobo Abe, so it’s hard to tell what’s a put-on and what’s in earnest. I imagine many contemporary readers raised on formulaic lawyer thrillers, Stephen King-a-likes, Harry Potter-esques, Tolkien clones, and various YA soap operas will be displeased by such a twisty, ambiguous, button pushing narrative such as this, but that’s how it goes. Abe carved out a place for himself as a literary weirdo who wrote whatever the fuck he wanted, and I think that has value, even if Secret Rendezvous witholds narrative closure. Hell, even I sometimes find myself frustrated by Abe’s novels. I assume the frustration is part of the point.

BOOK REVIEW: INTER ICE AGE 4 (1958, 1959, 1970)

by Kobo Abe

Illustrated by Machi Abe

English translation by E. Dale Saunders. Published in 1970 by Alfred A. Knopf.

Original Japanese language version serialized in Sekai magazine in 1958 and 1959. Novel published in 1959 by Hayakawa Publishing.

Publication information sourced from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, the Wikipedia article for Inter Ice Age 4, and the 1970 Alfred A. Knopf edition of the novel.

. . .

“This dog, can it catch fish?”

. . .

“The most fearful of monsters is the well-known friend slightly altered.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

One discovery leads to another.

A mystery is interwoven into other mysteries.

The more data you collect the more nuanced your overall picture of life becomes, until, inevitably, there’s no more mystery to it . . . right?

Hmmm.

Or is it more like you ask questions that just lead to more questions with no end in sight?

You’re asking me?!

Katsumi is a government computer engineer who works with a powerful forecasting machine in a near future Japan. This adorably retro predictive engine utilizes punch cards, presumably by the truckload, although the ability to reduce human nature to patterns of holes on paper could be a sly commentary on the vaulting ambitions of those who dream of totally reductionist quantification schemes . . . and/or the arrogance of novelists presuming to capture a convincing portrait of existence via language marks on pages. Science and literature make for quirky, dysfunctional comrades in Inter Ice Age 4. 

The Russians and the Americans also have predictive engines. Japan-a nation that’s already been nuked at Hiroshima and Nagasaki-is sandwiched between the atom bomb armed factions. Protracted Cold War Nuclear Jitters has everyone wondering about what’s around the corner. Is Communism the future? Capitalism? Can technology solve the problems created by technology? What about other horizonal crises? Resource depletion? Petroleum shocks? Carbon pollution? Global warming? Rising water lines? Can a future predicting machine be sustained by hard, unyielding quantitative facts and logic alone, or does it also require soft, squishy qualia? Also, if a machine tells us what’s going to happen next . . . is that the machine ordering us around or an infallible prognostication? What’s the difference? How do we know we’re not feeding prejudicial parameters into the system? Is it possible to counteract unconscious bias? Do the experts running these miraculous machines care about anything other than locking down their own domain of hyper-analytic power so governments and corporations have to come calling politely with hat in hand? Could this all be a pseudoscientific scam?

Meanwhile, parallel to the computer shit there’s a bunch of bio-shenanigans going down. Human and animal fetuses are being secretly harvested/kidnapped to be used as fodder for sinister genetic experiments. Two murders have seemingly been committed to keep the lid on this next level Frankenfuckery. 

Katsumi stumbles across the fetusnappings while running an experiment with the forecasting machine. At first, Katsumi dismisses the bio-shenanigans as delusional ravings but then his pregnant wife is coerced into what at first seems a forced abortion by mysterious people who managed to impersonate him. Katsumi receives threatening phone calls from someone able to perfectly impersonate his voice. In a world where everything can be totally quantified it may end up being a purely procedural endeavor to output copies of human beings. 

Narratively, Katsumi functions as a detective who grapples with mysteries outside and inside himself. His interactions with the forecasting machine resonate with our contemporary dilemmas of generative AI and its attendant hype and hallucinations. Katsumi begins as the technician maintaining the machine intelligence, but ends up facing his own obsolescence within its oracular insights.

Of course, Katsumi could be cracking up under work stress. Inter Ice Age 4 has a peculiar narrative hiccup wherein we find out sorta late about Katsumi’s personal life outside his job. Katsumi-who narrates much of the tale-describes his marriage and home life almost as though he were recounting a hypnotically repressed alter ego. I choose to interpret this as a satirical commentary on the notoriously grinding demands of Japanese work culture, but it may also be a consequence of an already complex narrative being imperfectly translated into English.

The forecasting machine develops some wild talents. It’s artificially intelligent. It can talk in convincingly human tones. If used in conjunction with specialized probes it can scan brains-even dead ones-to formulate semi-self-aware simulations of people that can communicate. That’s right: a computer as a medium in both the technical sense and the spooky sense. Technology even encroaches upon the realms of the occult in the world of Inter Ice Age 4, as it would seem supernatural/spiritual phenomena also submit to radical quantification. 

There’s a big twist, of course. Everything’s connected. Inter Ice Age 4 seems to suggest that humans operating under high tech nation states will have extreme difficulties adjusting to global crises that demand massive changes in how we all live. This is due mostly to rigid hierarchies and overspecialization. Each of us has our job, our role. We go to work secure in the knowledge that we have our chosen/imposed thing that we do. But if a big enough crisis threatens to overturn this order, how do we get everyone on board to make necessary changes to prevent disaster? Inter Ice Age 4 assumes that the powers that be would act coercively-that, in fact, a new power base would secretly emerge from within the established order to make otherwise impossible decisions for all of us. The reality disrupting crisis is just too severe to realistically expect squabbling atomized individuals to make effective democratic decisions. Even totalitarian Communism is too rigid, too stratified by the dictates of its cumbersome party elites to react in time. Inter Ice Age 4 is a provocation, in this sense, asking us to look beyond our current limits and roles to consider what lies beyond our specializations, our professionalisms, our nationalisms, our bigotries.

Inter Ice Age 4 also takes perverse joy in describing an aquatic mad science facility and what all it is doing to those human and animal fetuses. These passages are grotesquely comical in the way one expects from the cynically deranged Kobo Abe-a writer famously disillusioned with Japanese Imperialism, Soviet Communism, all forms of nationalism, and capitalism. I’m sure these passages describe impossible things . . . and yet there's so much detail that it’s weirdly convincing. Inter Ice Age 4 functions well as a pitch black science fictional comedy of errors. It even has a happy ending. Sorta.

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.

MOVIE REVIEW: THE FACE OF ANOTHER (1966)

Directed and Produced by Hiroshi Teshigahara
Screenplay by Kobo Abe, based on his original novel
Music by Toru Takemitsu
Sound by Junosuke Okuyama
Cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa
Lighting by Mitsuo Kume
Art Direction by Arata Isozaki and Masao Yamazaki
Set Decoration by Kenichiro Yamamoto
Edited by Yoshi Sughihara
Still Photography by Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Sculptures by Tomio Miki
Titles Designed by Kiyoshi Awazu

Starring
Tatsuya Nakadai as Mr. Okuyama
Machiko Kyo as Mrs. Okuyama
Mikijiro Hira as Psychiatrist
Kyoko Kishida as Nurse
Miki Irie as Radiation Scarred Girl
Bibari Maeda as Beer Hall Singer

---

"Is it my true self that's getting drunk, or the mask?"

---

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Mr. Okuyama lost his face in an explosion in a factory. This is one of those things that wasn't supposed to happen. It's not like he worked there on the regular, y'know-he was an at-a-distance supervisor. Mr. Okuyama spent most of his days in cushy, modish 1960s offices, smoking cigarettes, perhaps complaining about how much time and money his wife spends on her gem-polishing classes, occasionally flirting with the beautiful young female secretary, and, oh yeah, doing some actual work, now and again? I assume he met with buyers, and took down orders, and then the drudges on the factory floor executed the dictates from home office. But, there comes a time when management must venture out among the worker drones and BOOM! Mr. Okuyama loses his face. 

Mr. Okuyama is first seen in an X-ray camera view-he's nothing more than an eerie talking skull. He numbly describes how and why he ended up in the factory on that fateful day. He's full of irrational guilt-the explosion came about because of a technical error, a fuck-up-and yet Mr. Okuyama invokes his "technical background" as though that should've been a mystical ward against harm. He put in the years. He paid his dues. Nothing bad was ever supposed to happen to him, certainly not on the job. Certainly nothing so . . . random . . . so . . . unplanned . . .

Mr. Okuyama is speaking, as it turns out, not to We the Audience, but to a Psychiatrist who specializes in replacing lost and/or mangled body parts and skin tissues with artificial replicas. This Psychiatrist has seemingly taken on the task of bridging the perceived gap between mind and body, which is pretty damn progressive, I think, moving beyond the internal fantasias of Freud and Jung, and engaging with people as they are-as bodies in time and space. 

But, alas, this is a movie, which means our Psychiatrist must be some kind of a Frankenstein, and therefore obsessed with bizarre and taboo projects that go beyond the norms and ethics of medicine. I mean, if this was just a straightforward saga of healing and making one whole and resilient, would we watch? Would we care? I probably wouldn't, if you must know, and what does that say about me?

William gasps, and takes up a cat o' nine tails-the old naval whip-to flagellate himself for his perversity. 

Our Psychiatrist sees in Mr. Okuyama a suitable test subject for a new way of life. Mr. Okuyama is obviously traumatized by his experiences and therefore justifiably angry and hurt and lost. But our Psychiatrist also detects a discontent that goes back well before the accident and begins to finesse the faceless man towards a radical form of therapy. 

Of course, our Psychiatrist offers pro forma hand-wringing about "ethics" and "potential dangers," but this is all calculated to push the macho, hard-driving Okuyama into taking a plunge. Once Okuyama agrees, our Psychiatrist blithely drops all reservations and gets to work. 

Our Psychiatrist constructs a new face for Mr. Okuyama out of an advanced form of rubbery plastic that can function as a skin analog. This New Face shall enable Mr. Okuyama to become a New Man and thereby lead a New Life. 

Which is terrific, right! Especially for the 1960s. 

If this were a comic book or a TV show-as opposed to an adaptation of a rigorously deranged Kobo Abe novel-this new putty face technology would allow Mr. Okuyama to become a master of disguise and fight gangsters and solve crimes and shit.

But because this is indeed an adaptation of a rigorously deranged Kobo Abe novel . . . that's not how it goes down. 

What our Psychiatrist is after is satisfaction for his own curiosity: what if you give someone a face that they can put on and take off like a hat, a coat, a scarf, a pair of pants, what happens when we can do that? Hmm? What happens when you enable someone to put on identity like you put on your clothes in the morning or take 'em off in the evening? 

How does that play out?

Well . . . it depends on the quality of the removable face . . . and it depends on the nature of the test subject doesn't it? If the face is convincing enough . . . and if the person wearing it commits to that New Face . . .

. . . well . . .

Of course, Mr. Okuyama is a Frankenstein's Creature to some degree. But not absolutely. Yes, our Psychiatrist pushes him down a strange path, but our defaced industrialist is a bit of a self-aware monster, as it turns out. The tense domestic conversations between Mr. and Mrs. Okuyama consist of terror and philosophy like something out of Edward Albee directed by Roger Corman. It becomes clear that Mr. Okuyama has a grotesque and toxic sense of entitlement over his wife's mind and body, and proceeds to use the New Face to assume a New Self and thereby seduce her as though they are strangers all over again. 

But maybe they were strangers all along. Yes, this is one of those movies that sees husband-and-wife shit as a form of social theater, and I tend to agree, but I imagine it won't sit too well with the "family values" crowd, but whatever does with those folks, y'know?

Mr. Okuyama uses his New Face to set up a double life. He approaches people who have met him before and dares them to see through his mask. There is a dizziness which comes with this freedom. And a giddiness which our Psychiatrist shares, as these two men hang out in a German beer hall-I guess this is to Japan what phony "Irish" pubs are to America-and plotting a brave new world where we will all become as strangers to one another and fly free of social gravity, and mold our fates as we mold our New Faces of Putty-

Honestly, this should all be a lot of fun, right? But I think our Psychiatrist picked the wrong test subject, and, also, I think, if you really pay attention,  our Psychiatrist is also an insincere asshole who gets off on screwing with his subject, but doesn't want to be on the hook when it all goes bad. We come to find out that our Psychiatrist-who is charming as fuck it must be said-is leading his own double life by cheating on his wife with his loyal nurse assistant. It's one of those infidelities that happens basically in the light of day. Our Psychiatrist is a successful man and therefore he gets to fuck around on his wife with no real consequences. And no mask required!

Mr. Okuyama is, essentially, getting his wife to cheat on him . . . with himself. Although-because this is a Kobo Abe story-the question arises: if a relationship is fraudulent, and loveless . .  aren't we always fucking around with a stranger . . . just one we happened to be chained to by marriage?

Maybe, just maybe, going to the extra effort of putting on a mask actually just affirms what we already know: that life is already a form of social theater, and we are different people in different contexts/relationships, and our troubles grow from rigid adherence to roles we either choose or are imposed upon us.

Meanwhile . . . there's another thread involving a young woman with a radiation scarred face. She's sexually harassed by young men in the street who don't see her scars at first, and then express revulsion when they do. This young woman works as a volunteer at a psychiatric hospital for World War II veterans. As she arrives at the hospital we see men muttering to themselves and in catatonic states and we hear the manic, barking voice of Hitler on the sound mix. Perhaps some of these insane soldiers think Uncle Adolf is still transmitting orders to their brains. A group of men play an open-ended baseball game that gets interrupted by hallucinatory air raids and phantasmagorical confusions about who's higher on the chain-of-command-basically, a super-fucked-up version of The Sandlot. 

The scarred young woman does laundry for these damaged souls, and, for her trouble, one of the old soldiers tries to rape her. She's able to get away, even as we hear Hitler barking away again on the sound mix.

I find these scenes to be the darkest in the whole movie. They seem to depict the madness of war and fascism-the obsession with rigid roles, and hierarchies and the resort to force-and link it to a terrifying misogyny. You hear the voice of Hitler as a Japanese soldier attempts to rape a woman who tries to show compassion and bring comfort to troubled souls, for Christ's sakes!

Yeah . . . maybe this situation goes deeper than the "talking cure" can touch.

And these scenes lend a creepiness to the tacky German beer hall bits . . .aren't Mr. Okuyama and our Psychiatrist plotting their own kind of "putsch?" Sure, sure, it could just be a couple of entitled men getting deep up their own asses as they toss back too much beer, and dose themselves with a little morphine from the secure cabinet . . . but they do see themselves as superior. And they ultimately have a vision of all people as infinitely malleable and carried along by fashion and social pressures and fate . . . why not use these insights to live as you please?

The entire world was convulsed by war not so long ago. Japan's rulers led the nation down a road of empire and humiliating defeat. Unspeakable savagery practiced by those who claimed supremacy over all others. The slaughter was incalculable. Japan was firebombed and nuked without mercy when they refused to surrender. Entire families and cities and histories obliterated. Not so long ago.

And now-1966-Japan finds itself between the nuclear powers of USA and USSR. US military bases on Japanese soil launch aggression against Vietnam. The whole situation could spark off into global nuclear armageddon. 

So why cling to a past or even your own face? Especially when the same old savagery wells up out of the abyss of the human heart over and over again. 

Yesterday's Righteous Victors . . . Today's Villains . . . and what will Tomorrow bring?

In the German beer hall, a beautiful woman sings of a stranger she sees in the fog. Is this stranger a lover from the past? Jack the Ripper? A new dictator? A colleague from work? Godzilla? A new friend? An old friend? A drunk?

Later, our Psychiatrist and Mr. Okuyama have a seemingly shared vision of a crowd of their fellow citizens exiting a movie theater with bizarre faces of clay. 

Do they see the truth, or is this their warped vision?

Or is it the common perception, clarified?

Maybe, our Psychiatrist and Mr. Okuyama had to take the long way round to realize what everyone sorta already knew but tried so very hard to forget. 

MOVIE REVIEW: WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964)

 

Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara 

Screenplay by Kobo Abe from his novel 

Cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa 

Music by Toru Takemitsu 

Edited by Fusako Shuzui 

Art Direction by Totetsu Hirakawa and Masao Yamazaki 

Produced by Kiichi Ichikawa and Tadashi Ono

Starring 

Eiji Okada as Man from Tokyo

Kyoko Kishida as Woman in the Dunes

…

"Are you shoveling sand to live, or living to shovel sand?"

…

Review by William D. Tucker. 

A disenchanted man leaves Tokyo for a sandy coastal area-I guess it's a beach, but when he's in the thick of it . . . well . . . it's something beyond beach. This disenchanted man has very likely left behind a wife and a career as a teacher. He lies on his back in a ruined, perma-beached fishing boat, and ruminates on the existential paper trail that defines one's humanity: driver's licenses, tax returns, hunting licenses, gun permits, PTA memberships, IOUs, union cards, contracts,legal depositions, last wills and testaments-all the tedious proofs of himself, of all the people of contemporary Tokyo. 

The only physical validation this man willingly seeks is the perfect pinned insect collection. He's especially keen to discover a new species, and get his name into a field guide. Gotta catch 'em all. 

Our bug-collector discovers a strange community out in this sandy region of people who live in houses at the bottom of huge pits. They climb in and out by rope ladder. A seemingly unassuming local man greets the bug-collector and tells him it's okay to photograph the landscape and collect bugs so long as he's not secretly working for a government inspector's office. The people of the sandy area seem to want to stay off-grid. 

Our bug-collector misses the last bus back into town, and asks the local man if he can stay for the night. Local man offers up one of the houses down in the pit. The offered house is the home of a woman who is more than happy to accommodate the man from Tokyo.

Our bug-collector climbs down the rope ladder, thinking he has found lodging for the night. But he has unwittingly arrived in his new forever home. 

The all-too-accomodating woman of the house makes dinner and tea for the disillusioned city slicker. She informs him that the sand draws moisture, gets into everything, and creates decay and rot. The man-tone condescending-tells her that's not how that works.

"Use your common sense!"

But, as we will all discover in the fullness of time, the sand in this place is rather aggressive, and operates according to a different natural regime. The people who live in the pit houses must constantly clean the sand that finds its way onto all surfaces including human bodies. Every morning you wake up with those sinister grains clinging to you, invading every crevice and crack. Life in the pit involves cleaning yourself, your belongings, and shoveling back the encroaching dunes lest they bury you alive. 

The woman's husband and daughter were recently consumed by the hungry sands. And our man from Tokyo finds himself conscripted into a sick parody of domesticity as a replacement hubby. The rulers of the sandy area control the rope ladders, and they have no plans to let their latest captive go home. 

Our man resists his captivity, but we already know that some part of him was seeking a new life. And, perversely, he has blundered into a new existence. What we see onscreen might be an uncomfortable psychological allegory for rootlessness and lack of belonging. Our man-recently fallen out of love with Tokyo-could be an allegorical figure addressing a deep skepticism about postwar prosperity, maybe even civilization itself.

The people of the sandy area seem to be off-the-grid types, wanting nothing to do with laws and taxes and social norms. And yet they need fresh blood at regular intervals to avoid inbreeding, and so they have to capture outsiders to keep their bizarre way of life going. A brutal and sadistic courtship ritual late in the film graphically illustrates this process. Gotta catch 'em all. 

It is eventually revealed that the people of the sandy area fund their anti-civilization by illegally selling the aggressive sand to concrete manufacturers, even though this increases the risk of structural collapse in projects-such as dams, office buildings, government facilities-built with such concrete. 

At one point, our man from Tokyo, while in the depths of dehydration, hallucinates the doorframe of the pit house filled with spectral, shimmering water. Sometime after that, he discovers an unlikely source of water via "capillary action" that seems to be the reward of his hallucination. This strikes me as our man being co-opted by the "mind" of the dunes, since I think it's really the aggressive sand which is in charge. The sand inflicts an irresistible force of decay upon our illusions about civilization and domestic contentment. The people of the sandy area are thralls of this power, and they work to ship the sand to their ultimate Enemy: Tokyo. 

In the end, we are given a name for our man . . . but it might not be his name anymore. 

Maybe that name, and all that it was anchored to, gave him no happiness. 

Such discontent may also be the secret power source of the aggressive sand. 

MOVIE REVIEW: PITFALL (1962)

 

Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara 

Written by Kobo Abe

Produced by Tadashi Ono

Cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa

Edited by Fusako Morimichi

Sound by Kenji Mori and Junosuke Okuyama

Titles designed by Kiyoshi Awazu

Starring

Kunie Tanaka as the Man in White 

Hisashi Igawa as the miner

Kazuo Miyahara as the son

Sumie Sasaki as the candy seller 

Kanichi Omiya as the second miner

Shigeru Matsuo as the farmer

Hisashi Igawa as union miner Otsuka

Sen Yano as union miner Toyama

Kei Sato as the reporter 

Kikuo Kaneuchi as the photographer 

Hideo Kanze as cop 

…

"Why did you kill me?!"

…

Review by William D. Tucker. 

A pair of subsistence miners wander hills and mountains, seeking work, a little boy in tow, while one daydreams about getting a secure union job, and the other fantasizes about being reborn as a demon in hell.

Okay, the child is also a subsistence miner. The guy who daydreams of unionization seems to be his father, though the details of this are left vague. I found myself interpreting this desperate trio as an improvised family unit-wanderers in the wilderness deciding not to be totally alone, at least for the moment. They come from nowhere. They might be fugitives from justice-except I'm not sure 'justice' exists in the world of this movie. So, like, they're  fugitives from injustice, I suppose. Perhaps they exist because a writer wrote a screenplay and a director supervised a casting call and jobbing actors showed up to do their thing. 

The trio con an elderly farmer into mining his property for non-existent ore-but it could also be the case that the old man simply took pity upon the obviously malnourished three and set them upon an absurd task so they can maintain a tragic working man's pride. The wages of this job are balls of sticky white rice and water. 

A sinister dapper man dressed all in white surveils the union-dreamer at a distance with a telephoto lens. This MIW-Man-in-White-rides a motorscooter and eventually reveals himself to be an assassin working for the mining company or an allegorical embodiment of murderous capitalism or a mad psychopath or a stand-in for some authorial figure-God? Fate? A novelist? A film director?-or all of the above. Or none of the above. Maybe he's just a guy likes to fuck with people. Maybe he's a MIB-Man-in-Black-in disguise as a MIW. Like one of those dudes who intimidates UFO witnesses and tries to keep a lid on Mothman and the Goatsucker. Maybe this creep realized he could make a better living as an enforcer for capitalism instead of fooling around with the high strangeness tinfoil tabloid crap. Makes sense. That's probably what I would do in his situation. 

The trio find their way to a recruiting station for the big mining company in the region, and the demon-dreamer gets arrested for some unspecified crime and dragged out of the film. The union-dreamer is given directions to a worksite after he is shown a photo of himself.

"Follow this map to your new boss."

Our union-dreamer does as he's told and ends up murdered by the MIW en route to a bogus worksite that turns out to be nothing but an abandoned town. But in this cruel world, death is not the end. Nor is there an Afterworld-no Heaven, no Hell. No Jesus, or Buddha, or Satan, or God, or L. Ron Hubbard waiting to embrace you. You’re just a ghost who can't communicate with the living, who can only spectate the ensuing desultory police investigation of your own corpse, and holler impotently for justice and answers and reasons why that do not exist in this reality. 

Believe it or not . . . it actually gets worse for our ghost. 

Because as he wanders the land, invisibly trailing cops and journalists as they investigate his brutal murder, he discovers that he has a double. This double is a miner who is also a union leader. The assassin was seemingly targeting this other more consequential guy, and mistakenly killed the subsistence miner. Our ghost realizes that his death was not only pointless . . . but that this other guy who looks exactly like him has been living his dream. What a mindfuck, right?

Meanwhile, our MIW bribes a potential murder witness into silence . . .only to later murder her on a whim. This witness is a candy seller scraping by in the abandoned town. She is also the person to call the police and report our subsistence miner's murder. And, before she is strangled to death by the weirdly indecisive MIW, she is raped by the uniformed cop who responds to her call. The candy seller also ends up as a pissed-off ghost. 

I suppose the one good thing is that the ghosts can see each other and speak to one another. The dead can commiserate . . . but only with the dead. 

And it gets worse for those among the living. The actions of the MIW end up causing paranoid conflict among the unionized miners who are already pressured by the company to fight among themselves for more productive veins of ore. 

It doesn't end well. 

But it all looks and sounds amazing. 

Authentically harsh outdoor locations evoke industrialized man-made hells-on-earth shot in pristine deep focus black and white.

Gruelling summer weather and its effects upon human bodies are captured for-fucking-real on film. No pampered Hollywood pretty people luxuriating inside air conditioned green boxes on this one. 

No stunt team, either. When a couple of pissed-off dudes fight to the death in the mud and slurry of a tapped-out former mining site, it's as down and dirty as you can get short of a snuff picture. 

The discordant soundtrack hammers home the theme of a world where injustice for the living means restless ghosts and cruel children who pull apart frogs for fun. 

That's right: the little boy survives, but who knows what kind of killer he may grow up to be after all the trauma, starvation, isolation, and moral insanity to which he has been exposed. 

Hey: maybe that’s how you get a headstart on the MIW career track. 

Pitfall is an immaculately bleak hellscape for the whole family!

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.