29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Dream World Just This Side of Madness, July 24, 2000
By A Customer
"Which situation should I declare 'real' and which one a 'dream?'" This is the question that plagues the narrator of Kobo Abe's Kangaroo Notebook, the last novel written before his death in 1993. We can consider ourselves lucky, indeed, that one of the world's most distinguished novelists left us with this surreal and unique vision of Japanese society that is both disturbingly fearful and hilariously funny.
On a morning that should have turned out like any other morning, the first person narrator of Kangaroo Notebook awakens to find radish sprouts growing out of his shins. Although his doctor in repulsed, the narrator finds he now possesses the strange and unique ability to snack on...himself.
An eerie adventure to rid himself of his malady takes the book's protagonist into an increasingly hostile and mysterious world, one that in turn, is surreal, playful and almost unassailably enigmatic.
The plot is a weird and wild ride to say the least. Unlike Kafka's narrator in Metamorphosis, our slowly unraveling protagonist checks into a dermatology clinic and soon finds himself hurtling on a hospital bed to the very brink of hell.
An attractive nurse, known only as Damselfly, straps him to a hospital bed and begins to administer huge quantities of unknown drugs. A short time later, still strapped to this hospital bed, still hooked up to his IV and still suffering from his mysterious malady, our protagonist is summarily discharged.
A cast of spooky characters is then introduced via visits to a glitzy department store, a cabbage field that serves as the final resting place of the narrator's dead mother and Damselfly's own apartment.
One of those characters, the hirsute Mister Hammer Killer, an American karate expert, has such a love of violence that our narrator once again finds himself confined to a hospital.
His situation only worsens with the arrival of the "Help Me! Club," a club whose members consist solely of demonic chanting children.
The sexy Damselfly, herself, turns out to be a bit of a vampire. Her quest to collect enough blood to win the "Dracula's Daughter" medal is nothing short of relentless. Despite these bizarre plot twists and turns, the finale of Kangaroo Notebook is undeniably perfect and, almost surrealistically, makes perfect sense.
Abe's typical protagonist is an "outsider" who is haunted by a sense of alienation and anxiety over the fragility of individual identity. Although seeking relief from society's pressure to conform, he still yearns for communal emotional connection.
These universal themes, combined with an ironic, satiric and often bizarre manner of expression, have led many to assume that Abe's writing bears a closer resemblance to Western writers, Kafka, in particular, than to traditional Japanese literary models. Yet Abe's fiction reflects his strong Japanese heritage in its vividly imagistic prose, its abundant incorporation of Japanese cultural icons and its satirical treatment of Japanese psychosocial dynamics.
Kangaroo Notebook is one of Abe's signature triumphs. He deftly uses a swiftly-moving barrage of morbidly fascinating images, characters and places to reflect cleverly-disguised, but recurring themes, and he balances hysterical humor with deadpan lines, such as, "Something's really odd." Sure, we think. You don't say.
Surrealistic fiction is so often not given its due since the bizarre and original happenings must, of necessity, supplant traditional storyline and character development, thus distancing readers emotionally. But for those readers who have achieved intellectual maturity and originality of thought, surrealistic fiction offers insights surely lacking in more mainstream works.
In Kangaroo Notebook, Kobo Abe takes us on a masterful, dizzyingly original romp to the razor-thin line between life and death, a theme-park of his own life and art.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Increadible! A must read for fans of Japanese literature., January 13, 1999
By A Customer
Kangaroo Notebook is a difficult novel to understand, but you'll love it anyway. The plot is bizzare, to say the least. A man discovers that he has radish sprouts growing from his shins. His condition baffles the doctor at a local dermatology clinic, who sends him away in a self propelled hospital bed, telling him to try hot spring treatment. While en-route to the hot springs, he is cast down a dark tunnel and ends up on the shores of hell. From there, the plot gets really weird (but very addicting) as the narrator meets a child-demons, a vampire-esque nurse intent on drawing enough blood to win the "Dracula's Daughter" award, and an American photographer interested in achieving population contrl through traffic accidents.
The novel's symbolism becomes less obscure when one considers the great shame and self loathing "deformed" or "imperfect" members of Japanese society feel. Early in the novel, the narrator comments that marsupials are essentially inferior versions of mammals. The narrator, a terminally ill or deformed individual, feels like a marsupial, followed, wherever he goes, by his deformity (just as the narrator is followed by his hospital bed). At the novel's conclusion, the narrator sees himself in a box, perhaps a coffin, readers are presented with an exerpt from a newspaper regarding the discovery of a man found dead in a train station with self-inflicted slashes to his shins. The police, the article mentions, do not believe the slashes to the man's shins were the cause of death. The reader is left with the vague impression that the narrator, seeing his impending death, committed suicide (or perhaps was assisted).
Kangaroo Notebook is often compared to Burroughs' Naked Lunch or a cross between Kafka and Alice in Wonderland. I found the novel to be far more. Kangaroo Notebook is more than a strange story; it's an honest and deeply personal look into the mind of an individual whose disease is turning him (quite literally) into a vegatable. Read the novel, and see why Abe was considered Japan's leading author of modern fiction before his death.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inventive, intriquing, ambiguous reading, September 12, 2000
Kangaroo Notebook is the last book written by Kobo Abe; in many ways, it is a reflection on the approach of death, on being an outsider, and, perhaps, on outsider as a kind of death. "Perhaps" because this book is written in a very ambiguous style that allows, even encourages, readers to find different interrelationships between the parts.
The narrator begins the story at his suggestion in his workplace being selected as the best - his suggestion, originally a joke, was a product, a kangaroo notebook. This leads to the proposition that marsupials are outcasts - the mammal version of each species being more viable than the marsupial counterpart. Within this context, the narrator notes that his shins are sprouting radishes.
Seeking treatment at a dermatologist is the beginning of a series of occurrences - real, dream, illusion, post-anesthetia confusion? This are absolutely delightful, humorous events - a bed traveling in the city through the narrator's mental efforts, of a hell-based sulfur springs treatment, of child demons, of dead mothers in cabbage fields, of an American graduate student studying fatal accidents, of euthansia ...
This astounding romp is a serious consideration of death, our beliefs regarding death (the limbo children) and of suicide/murder/euthansia/accident.
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