Kangaroo Notebook - Hardcover

Kobo Abe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679424121 ISBN 13: 9780679424123

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996

Synopsis

In the last novel written before his death in 1993, one of Japan's most distinguished novelists proffered a surreal vision of Japanese society that manages to be simultaneously fearful and jarringly funny. The narrator of Kangaroo Notebook wakes on morning to discover that his legs are growing radish sprouts, an ailment that repulses his doctor but provides the patient with the unusual ability to snack on himself. In short order, Kobo Abe's unraveling protagonist finds himself hurtling in a hospital bed to the very shores of hell. Abe has assembled a cast of oddities into a coherent novel, one imbued with unexpected meaning. Translated from the Japanese by Maryellen Toman Mori.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

From the Back Cover

novel written before his death in 1993, one of Japan's most distinguished novelists proffered a surreal vision of Japanese society that manages to be simultaneously fearful and jarringly funny. The narrator of Kangaroo Notebook wakes on morning to discover that his legs are growing radish sprouts, an ailment that repulses his doctor but provides the patient with the unusual ability to snack on himself. In short order, Kobo Abe's unraveling protagonist finds himself hurtling in a hospital bed to the very shores of hell. Abe has assembled a cast of oddities into a coherent novel, one imbued with unexpected meaning. Translated from the Japanese by Maryellen Toman Mori.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Reviews

In his last novel, Abe, who died in 1993, repeatedly swings with ease from outlandish shenanigans to grisly surrealism. The unnamed narrator is a low-level employee at an office-supply firm who, in jest, proposes a new product called a Kangaroo Notebook. His assignment to produce a rough sketch of the notebook is interrupted, however, when he discovers, while eating breakfast, that radish sprouts are growing where his leg hair used to be. At a dermatology clinic, he meets a disturbingly seductive nurse, after which he is then strapped to a bed in an operating room and tranquilized. From this point, the narrator's experiences grow increasingly hallucinatory as he is released into the world with nothing more than a blanket and a hospital bed, which turns out to be a remarkable machine with its own agenda. Buffeted about, seemingly deprived of free will, the narrator lands in a corner of hell, where he takes a sulfur-spring cure and meets child-demons who perform for tourists and the villainous specter of his own mother. More than once, he is rescued by the nurse from the clinic, who, it turns out, collects blood for her own mysterious purposes and has a strange American boyfriend named Master Hammer Killer, who conducts research into sudden deaths. As events propel the narrator toward the Japanese Euthanasia Club, Abe (The Woman in the Dunes; The Ark Sakura) deftly blends antic comedy with metaphysical dread while maintaining the internal logic of a narrative which, in its lighthearted obsession with death, feels less like a whistling past the graveyard than a winking message from beyond.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The final novel ``completed'' by the late Japanese surrealist author (d. 1993) of such Kafkaesque contrivances as The Woman in the Dunes (1964) and The Box Man (1974). It's the hallucinatory account of its unnamed narrator's undiagnosed illness (radish sprouts grow out of his body) and hospitalization, during which he experiences, or fantasizes, a series of Alice-in-Wonderland-like adventures: a journey by hospital bed along a ``river of fire'' where he's harassed and befriended by ``child-demons''; meetings with a sensual nurse collecting blood samples (``Dracula's Daughter'') and a ghostly harridan who may be his mother; and encounters with a genially violent karate master (``Mister Hammer Killer'') and a nearly comatose old man targeted for euthanasia. One senses the implied theme of a resigned passage toward death, as well as the presence of such subthemes as familial estrangement (expressed in the title motif), AIDS, abortion, and radiation sickness--but one cannot be sure. Overall, the novel is simply too unrelentingly bizarre, and perhaps too private, to be confidently interpreted. It feels unfinished. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Reading Abe's triumphant final novel (published in Japan in 1991, two years before his death) is akin to becoming part of someone else's unsettling nightmares. From the first sentence, readers will be caught up in the mad momentum of the strange events experienced by the nameless narrator, a man hurtling madly toward death in a hospital bed with a mind of its own. When the narrator wakes up one morning, he discovers that radishes are sprouting from his legs. A trip to the dermatologist is only the first step in attempting to get rid of the disfiguring plants. Along the way, the hapless narrator meets doctors determined to treat the wrong disease, a Dracula-like nurse who loves taking blood from her patients, a group of singing orphans, and Mister Hammer Killer, an American scholar researching accidental death. By turns funny, satirical, sad, and horrifying, this elegantly translated novel tells us more (perhaps) than we want to know about life's unpredictable nature. It is a supremely fitting end of an illustrious writing career. Nancy Pearl

This is the last novel Abe wrote before his death in 1993. One of Japan's leading authors, best known for Women in the Dunes (1965), Abe leads us through a surreal adventure with a man who has suddenly grown radish sprouts on his shins and seeks help in a hospital. He is then pursued in and by his hospital bed, which has a mind of its own. Unfortunately, the adventure becomes distanced and uninvolving, partly because of the lack of coherence in the odd occurrences and partly because of an inept translation. Characters sometimes speak in a stilted fashion (for example, saying "unfilial" and "prosody") but also yell "shit." Recommended for comprehensive modern Japanese literature collections.
Kitty Chen Dean, Nassau Coll., Garden City, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679424121
• ISBN 13: 9780679424123
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 183