I wanted to like this more. It was the first book by Abe I’d read (although I had seen the screen adaptation of The Woman in the Dunes). I was expecting something akin to Ian McEwan’s short story ‘Conversation with a Cupboard Man’ (written about the same time) which I read when it was first published as has stuck with me all these years. Never a good thing to do, to start off reading something with high expectations. That said the book started off well. It was going to be a first person narrative from the point of view of a box man. The problem is that although the book continues with its first person narrative who that narrator is shifts and at times even the narrator seems unsure who is writing the book. There’s little plot. The original narrator, once a photographer, is shot by someone who shortly thereafter becomes a box man himself. A girl gives the photographer some money (having witnessed the shooting) so he can go to the hospital. In the hospital he encounters a doctor who has decided to become a box man and his nurse who he likes to have strip off in front of him. This fake box man—as the photographer insists on thinking of him (there’s more to being a box man that wearing a box)—sends his nurse later on and offers the photographer 50,000 yen to sell him his box which he agrees to do but then has second thoughts and wants to return the money at which point he gets involved in a long three-way philosophical conversation with the other two. Later on a box man is found dead in the river. It appears to be the doctor whose death has been faked to make it look as if he’d drowned by the man posing as him, living with his wife and who hired the nurse. Confused? This isn’t even the half of it. At times it looks as if the doctor and the nurse are merely figments of the photographer’s imagination which is quite possible because he’s privy to information only an omniscient narrator would normal be. This is a book about identity without a doubt and also about voyeurism too strangely enough despite the fact, because of the construction of the boxes, very little can be seen with ease apart from people’s legs. There’s a lot of good stuff in here but its muddled presentation wastes the opportunity. Had Paul Auster had this idea this would’ve been a far more readable and memorable book.
Why have I read this 3 times? People always say it is inscrutable, though must it be scrutable, what is valuable about scrutability anyhow?Yes, Abe is using a lot of modern fiction devices--compression of time, faulty narrators, plot hiccups, and even some of my personal fiction peeves. But he is sort of a prankster, a rug-puller, a juggler, a humorist, and I appreciate that, especially some of the more wanton chapters towards the end. "The Box Man" is dimensional, there is something spatial about the way he put it together; when you read it straight through it comes out crooked, and the crooks are never to the left or right, but (forgive me for this) on the Z-axis somehow. Dimensional. Does that make any sense? ...Yet, I do not think it is inscrutable, or random.I wonder if females take an interest in this book because I find it intensely male, all wrapped up in the problems seemingly specific to men and the construction of their identities, so-called careers, flights from responsibility, sexual objectifications, social personas, formative embarassments, fatherhood issues, relation to women, wasteful fantasy, general ineptitude, violent solutions, guilt and so forth. The female characters,despite some background rounding, exist primarily to give the male narrators an excuse to chew themselves up... perhaps for pity. Selfishness is a word that pops into my mind.
What do You think about The Box Man (2001)?
Social anxiety often appears in Abe’s work as allegory, but it’s never so temporal as to strand the reader in anything other than recognition of the submersion of the character in not only his surroundings, but his ability to parse them. The Box Man is another great example of Abe’s ability to stretch a ridiculous premise into art. Here, a guy decides to join the quasi homeless and start living inside a box on the street. What seems an impulsive decision leads to a series of events that strand the narrator again in an impossible continuum, like one of those Chinese finger traps populated with weird marooned characters of the sort you might find waiting in the code in an MMORPG, prodding the narrator further and further into himself only to find the hole endless. I don’t love The Box Man, but I love Abe for keeping at it beyond the necessity for resolution in the face of endless antagonism.
—Ipsith
Kobo Abe made really high quality, surreal fiction. "Japan's Kafka" or whatever, (IMHO, any critic who resorts to any version or variation of that fucking meaningless trick ought to be fired for laziness, then blacklisted for disrespect.)so if you are into writing serious surreal prose, I'd check him out.Oh, and I like The Box Man better than Woman In The Dunes; so if you liked WITD and happen to like the same things I like you'll probably prefer this book too. (Note: That fucking mad-ass trick where I totally deflated the sentence before it was finished is known as "Shirkery". "Shirkery" is only one of the many writing secrets I learned while attending the Secretive Writers Retreat and Plastic Bookmark Foundry. Ask me about it when you have $700, and feel ready to forge writing so real it hurts to read.)protect yo' neck,Jacob
—heel grabber
This is possibly Abe's craziest book, which is really saying something. Not necessarily best, as book:Secret Rendezvous|10004] is crazy AND highly coherent, but the ways in which this is flirts with incoherency are extremely interesting. It's got the odd, broken time-frame diary format of Rendezvous but in actually a more ambiguous and complex manner, while the actual story has been stripped back to what first seems sheer bizarre simplicity, but then becomes an echo chamber of variations. There are a few cogent plot organizations, if you dig, but it's really more experiential than that. This isn't necessarily a book to be dissected for clues so much as traveled through, getting jerked back and forth by all the narrative switchbacks and rug-pulling maneuvers.Any, what's it actually about. As I said, simple:Put on a box, disappear. (Also about gaze, looking, being looked at. There's some arguably problematic theory in this, but the structure is so-self-undermining that it's hard to hold Abe accountable, exactly. There's a lot going on, better to just soak it in, reflect, consider.)In retrospect, perhaps all Abe's books are actually about disappearances. About the thin corrugated cardboard barrier that doesn't always prevent us from falling out of our lives entirely and into some other mode of unheretofore imagined existence. This seems to be Abe at a pivotal point, reflecting all that came before or after in a sanely insane box labyrinth.
—Nate D
