Customer Reviews

The Box Man

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

a contemporary novel of fragmented identity which examines the ultimate failure of signification...so comparisons to beckett are pretty relevant i would say. as with beckett, 'the box man' confronts readers with a real rupture of traditional narrator/reader relationships, and delivers the narrative in such a dispersed manner that you are really left without a cohesive idea of what agency gave you the information you read. the real box man, the fake box man, the real doctor, the fake doctor...all of these are thrown out there for you to sort out. characters begin to refer to ideas or possible actions rather than tangible indentities. in the end, abe tells a story of the contemporary predicament of representation and the psychology of a society in which we increasing interact with representations of things rather than the things themselves. the box man is a man who, saturated with the mediated representations of radio and television, is unable to have normal human interactions with people, he can only look and never be looked at. 'the box man' is an excellent treatment of these very relevant contemporary cultural issues, a frustrating read, but an excellent novel.

If you like Kafka, Pynchon, Beckett, or Burroughs you will probably like this novel. This is a work that will occupy your mind long after you have finished the last page. Its greatness lies in Abe's keen ability to personify the darkest dreams and innermost desires of modern humanity. The main character, the Box Man, could be anyone. He is merely an anonymous person who yearns for escape from the dehumanizing conditions of modern life. The plot is interesting, alluring, and above all puzzling, without being inaccessible to the average reader. This is a work to be read and reread, and for those who take the time there will be few who are disappointed.

If you liked Samuel Beckett's book "Watt", then you'll love 'The Box Man'. 'The Box Man' is a psychotic tale of disassociation in a world that echoes that of the medical nightmares in William S. Burrough's 'Blade Runner: A Movie'.

You really don't want to know more about 'The Box Man' at this moment, deciding what is going on is one of the main pleasures of reading the book, Abe's wacked style is another.

I'd never read any of Kobo Abe's work before and found 'The Box Man' fascinatingly disturbed. If you want it weird, get this book. I'm definitely going to read more of his works.

Having put off reading this book until I moved back to Tokyo I'd say the box man mentality fits nicely with foreigners trying to understand Japan. Someone first descibed living in Tokyo to me like floating in a warm bubble. Unless you speak the language or fit in culturally you'll always be a casual observer. The longer you stay in that bubble the more distorted your view becomes. For those on the fringes of Japanese society it's easy to see how one might simply want to stick a box on their head and call it a day.

Aside from the obvious Japanese angle on things Abe weaves a nice commentary on communication in general. Mary M. Watkins' "Invisible Guests" treads a similar path by examining how we construct imaginary personas. Over time what we imagine and what we experience blend into the same thing. Part of the appeal in reading The Box Man is that we're dumped right into the main character(s) head and it's left up to us to figure how many people and scenarios are actually "real". For all we know the whole thing might be in the box man's head - or not. The uncertainty when reading it can be rather disorienting. Anyone who reads it is ultimately a box man themselves; a passive observer just trying to digest some weirdness. His reality is in now your head whether you like it or not.

I had to read The Box Man for my Japanese Culture class. I can honestly say it was one of the most powerful novels I've ever read. Abe takes you into a fantastical story in which the very pilars of human behavior are challenged to the utmost. It is just as ontologically significant as novel like Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, or The Methamorphosis by Kafka. After reading some more of his work, I cannot believe Kobo Abe never received a Nobel Prize, but oh well, at least he was nominated several times. :)

I picked this up on a whim at the library and read the back:

"...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."

I thought that sounded like an intriguing concept and have enjoyed other works by Abe in the past and his Kafka-esque sense of reality so I took it out.

I was quite disappointed once I finished it. I did not enjoy reading The Box Man and struggled to finish it.

There are things I liked about it - the concept is intriguing, the intricate narrative structure, and I liked the mystery of just who the Box Man is. It is also quite original but that alone doesn't make it a good book. The Box Man simply isn't a pleasure to read, the story and the characters are about as compelling as watching grass grow, it's overwritten, pretentious, boring, and at less than 200 pages, too long. I also think that Abe explores the nature of identity much better in his other books, particularly The Ruined Map: A Novel. Here it just seems forced and muddled.

If you're going to read Abe, I recommend the aforementioned Ruined Map or The Woman in the Dunes over this.

I won't compare this book with all the other books out there, like my fellow reviewers did, I don't think that's fair. The book describes a man who lives in a box. This book describes everything with such clarity and surreal realness that its impossible not to believe what is written.

I think of The Box Man by Kobo Abe and I try to recall one memorable image, or one compelling character, or one trenchant observation, or indeed one particularly inventive or colourful turn of phrase. I can't come up with a single one. It baffles me how someone can write something as memorable, compelling, trenchant, inventive and colourful as Woman in the Dunes, and then write something as devoid of any of these qualities as The Box Man. My only explanation is that this was written by a Kobo Abe from a strange parallel universe where Abe never wrote anything good, and somehow made its way here through a rift in space and time.

Upon picking up The Box Man and reading the first page, I naively and laughably thought that this was to be a sort of social commentary or just a story about homeless people. No, that wasn't at all the case. Apparently, unlike a regular homeless person, a "box man" has some sort of extremely deep philosophy that singles him out as someone who lives on a higher plane of existence. Except after reading the book, I came not a bit closer to understanding what this philosophy is, or to caring about finding out. This was exacerbated by Abe's extremely self-indulgent style, in which no concern is exhibited for time or flow, random unidentified narrators come and go with no warning, pages and pages are occupied with pseudo-intellectual "societal observations" and uninteresting non sequiturs, and so forth.

Keep in mind that such a style doesn't have to be bad. Plenty of authors like to jump around in time and make up their own stylistic rules. Plenty of authors like to wax eloquent about society. Plenty of authors come up with absurd premises and make great works out of them. But there are authors who do this well, and those who do not. The Box Man has laughably been called "surreal." But something like, say, Un Chien Andalou, though it also has absolutely no actual narrative structure, is chock full of striking images, which are memorable despite having nothing to do with reality or even with each other. The Box Man tries to be like that. It tries very, very hard, and it is very self-conscious about it. But it fails, because there is nothing above the norm in it - just a desire to "break conventions" for the sake of breaking conventions, to break conventions as a substitute for narrative, commentary, characterization, originality, emotion, and any worthwhile thought. Supposedly there is a nominal narrative here (there's something about an unsolved murder in places), and supposedly there's an existential parable here (some people ask themselves and each other some wooden and ham-handed questions about existence), but really, there is nothing even original (to say nothing of "masterful") about any of this. And don't even get me started on the oh-so-affected "photo inserts" with their oh-so-affected captions.

Woman in the Dunes leaves me spellbound, but The Box Man is an utter waste of time. It's shorter than Woman in the Dunes (178 pages in my edition) but every single line is an excruciating exercise in tedium. And as you read, you'll get the feeling that Abe is deliberately insulting your intelligence by writing such pretentious nonsense when he has shown himself to be capable of masterpieces. Stay far, far away from this "novel."