Word: abely
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What do "those clever Japanese" industrialists and Japanese writers' numbers games have to do with Kobo Abe? Everything (and of course, on the edge of the technological abyss, nothing). Abe is a Nikon camera incarnate, and his transistorized prose--a mixture of journalese and clinical report--combines some of the worst elements of the simple Hesse, the technical Barth, the mundane Beckett, and the grotesque-for-the-sake-of-grotesqueness Barthelme. He is as throughly modern as Japan's prodigal-car, the high on fuel consumption and low on credit...
...Norman Mailer was the first journalist/novelist, Abe is the first photonovelist (he has graced The Box Man with nine of his own photos), equipped wherever he goes with a periscope-like camera and tape recorder. And, while he is one of the select few to be translated into English, Abe the technocrat and his box man narrator--both hopelessly intertwined--are the epitome of the man in the house with one-way windows. Abe's cold, logical precision is the summation of all the statistics that point toward Japan's industrial and cultural decline...
...inside of his box. Because we are all locked in our own boxes, this annoyingly anonymous fellow asserts, we are left to our imaginations, and they become just as valuable as the so-called real world we see around us. They are perhaps even more valuable in Abe's urban environment because it, too, is a product of our imaginations, and a particularly grim one at that. But, while it is important to understand these basic concepts, they do not become apparent immediately. They are hidden within an intrigue involving the box man's tentative release from his lonely enclosure...
Speaking of his trilogy of novels, The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, and The Ruined Map, Abe once said that they were "tied together by their concern with the city. You see, the city is the place where people first had to deal with the stranger who is not an enemy." And in a way, the box man is a stranger to himself, not an enemy, but still unknown, puzzling out his own existence before even attempting to cope with others...
...fake "Parker" pens. Soon Eighth-Grader Vincent was pulling in "seventy or eighty bucks a week ... twice as much as my teachers." Flushed with the thrill of "the score," he passed up high school to study the practical wisdom of hustlers like "Willie the Wop," "Cigar Face Joe" and "Abe the Louse." During the Depression, Swaggi boasts he saved $10,000 in one year. By age 23 he had hustled his way through more than a decade of crime in four cities under two aliases...