A review by tom_f
The Box Man by Kōbō Abe

4.0

As far as I can tell this is Abe’s best novel. Instead of anticipating a fall from society (into a hole, into the maze-like bureaucracy of a hospital, into the cognitive dissociation of a cursed procedural investigation), this narrative starts you from the outside looking in. This allows you to luxuriate in Abe’s evocative sensory descriptions and the neurotic, endlessly self-justifying worldview of his protagonist without hanging on the illusion of narrative progress. Nevertheless, there is progression here, but it’s of a kind of poetic variety, where ideas and emotions and thought-processes are approached with sketchy inaccuracy, parenthetical digressions, dreamlike illustrations and analogies. It’s an immersive and very unsettling experience, though also one that justifies its narrator’s assertions of the beauty and limitless stimulation of seeing the world from the ground through a makeshift peephole in a vinyl sheet, a viewpoint from which foreground and background, backdrop and detail become meaningless distinctions. The paratextual inclusions here — photographic negatives, illustrations — as well as the patchwork structure of the text create an eerie, disoriented weightlessness that plays into the unreliability of the narrator’s voice(s) (in one section the text lapses into the second person, to gothic and claustrophobic effect). A disquieting reflection on social isolation and impotence, on the power balances of observation and intolerance of otherness.