The Box Man - Softcover

Kobo Abe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865474613 ISBN 13: 9780865474611

Publisher: North Point Press, 1995

Synopsis

A man who chooses to exist in a small cardboard box records life in the box and his observations of the world from its small window

About this title

Review

The nature of identity itself is the ostensible subject of this bizarrely fascinating existential novel from the great Japanese fiction writer and dramatist Kobo Abe. In the story, a man decides to give up the self that he has been all his life to attain a state of blissful anonymity. He leaves his world behind and moves onto the streets of Tokyo. He puts a large box over his head, cuts a hole for his eyes. It is as strange as it sounds, but Abe's light touch and narrative innovation makes it compelling.

From the Inside Flap

Abe, the internationally acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes, combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett.

In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo and scribbling madly on the interior walls of his box, he describes the world outside as he sees or perhaps imagines it, a tenuous reality that seems to include a mysterious rifleman determined to shoot him, a seductive young nurse, and a doctor who wants to become a box man himself. The Box Man is a marvel of sheer originality and a bizarrely fascinating fable about the very nature of identity.

Translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders.

Edition details

• Publisher: North Point Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865474613
• ISBN 13: 9780865474611
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 178