This Japanese Author has Blown My Mind!

The Box Man – Kobo Abe (1974)

            A few months ago, while searching the interwebnets for new reading material, I did a search for “Weird Books.”  I found many different lists, some showcasing books that have weird bindings or fonts, and others discussing weird books that seem more like art projects than writing.  One of the many “Top 10 weird books I have read” lists I perused included the mention of a very strange novel from Japan, “The Box Man”, which was described as hallucinatory, bizarre, oddly structured, and all-around weird book.  I headed to the M.D. Anderson Library and checked this bad boy out.

            It is usually difficult to discuss a novel without giving away crucial plot points, so I will try to refrain from spoiling this strange book for you.  However, let me say that the story is being recounted by a “box man,” which is exactly what it sounds like, a homeless person who has decided to cast off their outward selves and live full-time with a large box over their heads and torsos, while peeking at the world through a small slit cut out at eye level.  The narrator describes in hallucinatory, sometimes oppressively convoluted, sentences how the anonymity afforded by the box strips away the Self even more so than being a normal street person.  Even normal bums avoid the box men.  The world becomes very small when everything one owns is somehow rigged up to hang from the inside of the box.  The life described by the narrator is quite bizarre, especially in such an uptight and controlling culture like Japan.

The real weirdness begins when the story continues and it becomes apparent that perhaps the narrator is not reliable, that perhaps he is mentally ill, or that maybe he has switched places with another person who wanted to know what it was like to live as a box man.  This other person then seems to also sink into a miasma of internal chaos, brought about by the life of a box man.  It becomes difficult to tell who is speaking, or if the entire thing is all in the head of the original box man.  At times, various conflicting affidavits and confessions are reprinted, expanding upon the story and forcing the reader to re-question everything they had already questioned about the narrator and the experiences he is recounting.

I swear at one point I was reading the internal monologue of a dead person laying on a morgue slab, as various people attended to his body and worked to make it look like he had died in a drowning accident, something that is referenced several times earlier in the novel.  The only feeling I can compare this to is reading the chapter in Alan Moore’s Jerusalem which is told from the internal point-of-view of a mentally deranged woman in an institution.  It really does feel like the words on the page are re-wiring the pathways in your brain!  I felt something similar while reading the Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea.  My mind is not the same having read Kobe Abe’s “The Box Man.”  That is the wonder and power of reading.  It is a much more direct method of ingesting ideas than watching film, or other such story-telling modes.  I am interested in finding more books by Kobo Abe, and seeing if they are all as bizarre as this novel.

(This novel can be purchased here: THE BOX MAN  )