Two Japanese novels about a man in disguise
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Topic: Two Japanese novels about a man in disguise
Posted By: BaldFriede
Subject: Two Japanese novels about a man in disguise
Date Posted: May 09 2019 at 07:58
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Both novels are about a man in disguise - one wears a sheep
costume, the other cuts holes for arms, eyes and mouth into a box and
puts it over him (it reaches down to his knees). Both are surrealistic
and really weird. If you have not read them I highly recommend you do. Here are reviews of both novels, both taken from The New York Times (at the time the English translations came out): A Wild Sheep Chase: ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' by Haruki Murakami is a bold new advance in a category of international fiction that could be called the trans-Pacific novel. Youthful, slangy, political and allegorical, Mr. Murakami is a writer who seems to be aware of every current American novel and popular song. Yet with its urban setting, yuppie characters and subtle feeling of mystery, even menace, his novel is clearly rooted in modern Japan. This isn't the traditional fiction of Kobo Abe (''The Woman in the Dunes''), Yukio Mishima (''The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea'') or Japan's only Nobel laureate in literature, Yasunari Kawabata (''Snow Country''). Mr. Murakami's style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving. In fact, the 40-year-old author, one of the most popular novelists in Japan, has translated the works of several American writers, including Irving and Carver. His outlook is international; he now lives in Rome. There isn't a kimono to be found in ''A Wild Sheep Chase.'' Its main characters, men and women, wear Levis. They are the children of prosperity, less interested in what Toyota or Sony have wrought than in having a good time while searching in jazz bars for self-identity. They take comfort in drinking, chain-smoking and casual sex. Listening to their conversation, they could be right at home on the Berkeley campus in the 1960's. It may help that the novel is racily translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum, an American who grew up in Tokyo and who studied at the University of California. The unnamed, newly divorced 30-year-old protagonist of ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' has moved on, somewhat haphazardly, from college life into advertising and public relations. He and a partner turn out corporate newsletters and display the proper degree of contempt for their clients - and themselves. ''To hold down advertising is to have nearly the entire publishing and broadcasting industries under your thumb. There's not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn't depend in some way on advertising. It'd be like an aquarium without water. Why, 95 percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for.'' Their own cynical newsletters, he continues, contribute to corporate concealment: ''Every company's got a secret it doesn't want exploded right in the middle of the annual shareholders' meeting. In most cases, they'll listen to the word handed down. In sum, the Boss sits squarely on top of a trilateral power base of politicians, information services and the stock market.'' But Mr. Murakami isn't simply taking a swipe at big business here. As part of his developing plot, he is setting up the characters of his young people and distancing them from the godfatherly Boss and his sleazy lieutenant, who has a degree from Stanford University. As a former war criminal who has escaped trial, possibly with the collusion of the American occupation leadership, the Boss seeks something more than to sit on top of a domineering communications empire. Dying, he wants to gain the spiritual power of a legendary foreign sheep with a star on its back - the only one of its kind in all of Japan -that dwells somewhere in the lonely mountainous snow country. On the surface, ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' is just that: a mystery story with a long chase. A photograph of the wild sheep has appeared accidentally in a newsletter; like Dashiell Hammett's Maltese falcon, the singular sheep is pursued by clashing interests. Is the sheep a symbol of something beyond the reach of an ordinary man, a devilish temptation? Does this wild sheep represent heroic morality or a Nietzschean superpower? Nietzsche is mentioned in the novel; so is the obsessive quest for Moby-Dick. The answer, if any, is left to the reader's perception. Along the chase route, we meet interesting characters. One is called the Sheep Professor, another the Rat, a rather nice fellow despite his name. The most appealing is the protagonist's girlfriend, who is plain-looking except for one feature that arouses him - and reveals the author's offbeat sense of humor and style. Here is how she is described, with echoes of the hard-boiled California school of detection: ''She was 21, with an attractive slender body and a pair of the most bewitching, perfectly formed ears. She was a part-time proofreader for a small publishing house, a commercial model specializing in ear shots and a call girl in a discreet intimate-friends-only club. Which of the three she considered her main occupation, I had no idea. Neither did she.'' What makes ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' so appealing is the author's ability to strike common chords between the modern Japanese and American middle classes, especially the younger generation, and to do so in stylish, swinging language. Mr. Murakami's novel is a welcome debut by a talented writer who should be discovered by readers on this end of the Pacific. The Box Man: “This is the record of a box man.” So begins Kobo Abé's spooky novel that crawls under the bedclothes of our own mad century to examine the pathology of a murderous, spying everyman in a town called “T.” The landscape is hardly peculiar to Japan: trees, concrete, a bridge, a sweet potato field, a bathhouse, an anonymous hospital, and a seaside park. The novel's push is speculative rather than visual. It is one of those swirling fictions that pounce into nasty corners like an extravagant Ping Pang ball. The narrator of the book, a nameless scribbler, lives inside a cardboard box. The box man has shed the trappings of an established identity, with name, age, profession, ID card and permanent address. His box provides him with a protective anonymity. But it doesn't free him of all baggage. The box man has a radio, thermos, flashlight, plastic board, mug, towel, ballpoint pens; he peeps out of his box through an observation window equipped with a vinyl curtain. The particulars of the box man's box and his eight or nine possessions furnish a macabre humor that prevents the book from falling into an utterly sparse, metaphorical life. For example, the plastic board is an indispensable item to the box man. “First of all, it replaces a table.... It also becomes a chopping board when I cook. It's a shutter against the rain over the observation window on winter nights when the wind is strong, and on summer evenings when there's no breeze at all it conveniently takes the place of a fan. It's a portable bench for sitting on the wet ground, and it becomes a perfect worktable for undoing the cigarette butts that I have collected and for rolling them again.” Schizophrenia is the particular province of the box man. He is a “specialized voyeur” who spies at replicas of himself through the vinyl curtain. Watching a woman take off her clothes, he scribbles: “At the same time as I was looking at her, another was looking at me looking at her.” The action of the novel seems to take place inside the box, which has become a kind of labyrinth for the box man, a porous, breathing skin. “The more you struggle, the more new passages you make in the labyrinth, the more the box is like another layer of outer skin that grows from the body, and the inner arrangement is made more and more complex.” The sad truth of the box man's existence is that the “waterproof room” he wears on his back hasn't satisfied his quest to be without an identity. Scribbling on the inside walls of the box, he invents a past, present and future that crash together in his brain. With an irony, that turns in upon itself, he becomes a creature of multiple identities. And because of this, the box man is condemned to travel in a perpetual fugue state: “Paralysis of the heart's sense of direction is the box man's chronic complaint.” The book dissolves into a series of hypothetical voices and events. A murder may or may not have occurred. The box man may or may not be dead. He may have been a former army surgeon, or the surgeon's assistant, or both. The assistant may have taken over the surgeon's identity, together with his clinic and his wife. The surgeon may or may not have scribbled the notes that make up the novel. Or the notes themselves, including the concept of the box man, may be a ploy, a trick used by the surgeon's assistant to cover up the murder of a hobo that will allow him to mask his identity and escape the police. Thus, “The Box Man” becomes a book in search of a narrator. Arguing with one of his possible selves, the box man speculates: “Perhaps it is I who am going on writing as I imagine you who are writing as imagine me.”At times the novel reads like a curious amalgam of Robbe‐Grillet and Beckett, but without the precision of “Le Voyeur” or the crisp, beautiful tones of “Molloy” (this, in part, can be blamed on the creakiness of any translated text). Yet “The Box Man” is an invention with its own crazy pull. It is a difficult troubling book that undermines our secret wishes, our fantasies of becoming box men (and box women), our urge to walk away from permanent address and manufacture landscapes from a vinyl curtain or some other filtering device. Abé's book is a stunning addition to the literature of eccentricity, those bitter, crying voices of Melville's Bartleby the scrivener and Dostoevsky's underground man. It gnaws at the reader, forces him to question his values, his Shibboleths and his ritualistic props, and shoots an energetic poison into his ear. “The Box Man” is funny, sad and destructive, an ontological “thriller” that bumps into and contradicts its own clues. In an earlier, celebrated novel, “The Woman in the Dunes,” an entomologist searching for insects blunders into a village that is in danger of being eaten alive by sand. The villagers, who are short of labor, trap the entomologist in a house at the bottom of a sand pit. Here he is forced into the company of a young widow whose husband and child disappeared in a sandstorm. The novel records the entomologist's attempts to escape, his spidery attachment to the woman, and his gradual loss of identity. In language that resembles “The Box Man,” the entomologilt thinks: “Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order?” The structure of the novel is a bit too visible. The sense of allegory creeps out from under the sand. “The Box Man” is a porch more daring creation. Rougher, less controlled perhaps, it is a book.-------------  BaldJean and I; I am the one in blue. |
Replies:
Posted By: Matti
Date Posted: May 09 2019 at 09:45
| Murakami's among my favourite authors. I haven't read Kobo Abe whose books haven't been much translated into Finnish, nor is the English translation (The Box Man) available in the libraries of my environment. |
Posted By: omphaloskepsis
Date Posted: May 09 2019 at 12:30
| Two excellent novels by my two favorite Japanese novelists. I like both. |
Posted By: moshkito
Date Posted: May 10 2019 at 07:51
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Hi, I feel guilty ... looking for both of them and hopefully I can get a couple of used copies to read! ------------- Music is not just for listening ... it is for LIVING ... you got to feel it to know what's it about! Not being told! www.pedrosena.com |