Two Japanese novels about a man in disguise

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Both novels are about a man in disguise - one wears a sheep
costume, the other cuts holes for arms, eyes and mouth into a box and
puts it over him (it reaches down to his knees). Both are surrealistic
and really weird. If you have not read them I highly recommend you do.

Here are reviews of both novels, both taken from The New York Times (at the time the English translations came out):

A Wild Sheep Chase:

''A
Wild Sheep Chase'' by Haruki Murakami is a bold new advance in a
category of international fiction that could be called the trans-Pacific
novel. Youthful, slangy, political and allegorical, Mr. Murakami is a
writer who seems to be aware of every current American novel and popular
song. Yet with its urban setting, yuppie characters and subtle feeling
of mystery, even menace, his novel is clearly rooted in modern Japan.
This
isn't the traditional fiction of Kobo Abe (''The Woman in the Dunes''),
Yukio Mishima (''The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea'') or
Japan's only Nobel laureate in literature, Yasunari Kawabata (''Snow
Country''). Mr. Murakami's style and imagination are closer to that of
Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving. In fact, the 40-year-old
author, one of the most popular novelists in Japan, has translated the
works of several American writers, including Irving and Carver. His
outlook is international; he now lives in Rome.
There
isn't a kimono to be found in ''A Wild Sheep Chase.'' Its main
characters, men and women, wear Levis. They are the children of
prosperity, less interested in what Toyota or Sony have wrought than in
having a good time while searching in jazz bars for self-identity.
They
take comfort in drinking, chain-smoking and casual sex. Listening to
their conversation, they could be right at home on the Berkeley campus
in the 1960's. It may help that the novel is racily translated from the
Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum, an American who grew up in Tokyo and who
studied at the University of California.
The
unnamed, newly divorced 30-year-old protagonist of ''A Wild Sheep
Chase'' has moved on, somewhat haphazardly, from college life into
advertising and public relations. He and a partner turn out corporate
newsletters and display the proper degree of contempt for their clients -
and themselves.In
describing a right-wing magnate simply named the Boss, who has cornered
the advertising business in Tokyo and extended his power into national
politics, the protagonist's partner could pass for an ad man sounding
off at the end of the day on Madison Avenue or Fleet Street:''To
hold down advertising is to have nearly the entire publishing and
broadcasting industries under your thumb. There's not a branch of
publishing or broadcasting that doesn't depend in some way on
advertising. It'd be like an aquarium without water. Why, 95 percent of
the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid
for.''
Their
own cynical newsletters, he continues, contribute to corporate
concealment: ''Every company's got a secret it doesn't want exploded
right in the middle of the annual shareholders' meeting. In most cases,
they'll listen to the word handed down. In sum, the Boss sits squarely
on top of a trilateral power base of politicians, information services
and the stock market.''
But
Mr. Murakami isn't simply taking a swipe at big business here. As part
of his developing plot, he is setting up the characters of his young
people and distancing them from the godfatherly Boss and his sleazy
lieutenant, who has a degree from Stanford University. As a former war
criminal who has escaped trial, possibly with the collusion of the
American occupation leadership, the Boss seeks something more than to
sit on top of a domineering communications empire. Dying, he wants to
gain the spiritual power of a legendary foreign sheep with a star on its
back - the only one of its kind in all of Japan -that dwells somewhere
in the lonely mountainous snow country.
On
the surface, ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' is just that: a mystery story with a
long chase. A photograph of the wild sheep has appeared accidentally in
a newsletter; like Dashiell Hammett's Maltese falcon, the singular
sheep is pursued by clashing interests. Is the sheep a symbol of
something beyond the reach of an ordinary man, a devilish temptation?
Does this wild sheep represent heroic morality or a Nietzschean
superpower? Nietzsche is mentioned in the novel; so is the obsessive
quest for Moby-Dick. The answer, if any, is left to the reader's
perception.
Along
the chase route, we meet interesting characters. One is called the
Sheep Professor, another the Rat, a rather nice fellow despite his name.
The most appealing is the protagonist's girlfriend, who is
plain-looking except for one feature that arouses him - and reveals the
author's offbeat sense of humor and style. Here is how she is described,
with echoes of the hard-boiled California school of detection:
''She
was 21, with an attractive slender body and a pair of the most
bewitching, perfectly formed ears. She was a part-time proofreader for a
small publishing house, a commercial model specializing in ear shots
and a call girl in a discreet intimate-friends-only club. Which of the
three she considered her main occupation, I had no idea. Neither did
she.''
What
makes ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' so appealing is the author's ability to
strike common chords between the modern Japanese and American middle
classes, especially the younger generation, and to do so in stylish,
swinging language. Mr. Murakami's novel is a welcome debut by a talented
writer who should be discovered by readers on this end of the Pacific.
The Box Man:
“This
is the record of a box man.” So begins Kobo Abé's spooky novel that
crawls under the bedclothes of our own mad century to examine the
pathology of a murderous, spying everyman in a town called “T.” The
landscape is hardly peculiar to Japan: trees, concrete, a bridge, a
sweet potato field, a bathhouse, an anonymous hospital, and a seaside
park. The novel's push is speculative rather than visual. It is one of
those swirling fictions that pounce into nasty corners like an
extravagant Ping Pang ball.
The
narrator of the book, a nameless scribbler, lives inside a cardboard
box. The box man has shed the trappings of an established identity, with
name, age, profession, ID card and permanent address. His box provides
him with a protective anonymity. But it doesn't free him of all baggage.
The box man has a radio, thermos, flashlight, plastic board, mug,
towel, ballpoint pens; he peeps out of his box through an observation
window equipped with a vinyl curtain. The particulars of the box man's
box and his eight or nine possessions furnish a macabre humor that
prevents the book from falling into an utterly sparse, metaphorical
life. For example, the plastic board is an indispensable item to the box
man. “First of all, it replaces a table.... It also becomes a chopping
board when I cook. It's a shutter against the rain over the observation
window on winter nights when the wind is strong, and on summer evenings
when there's no breeze at all it conveniently takes the place of a fan.
It's a portable bench for sitting on the wet ground, and it becomes a
perfect worktable for undoing the cigarette butts that I have collected
and for rolling them again.”
Schizophrenia
is the particular province of the box man. He is a “specialized voyeur”
who spies at replicas of himself through the vinyl curtain. Watching a
woman take off her clothes, he scribbles: “At the same time as I was
looking at her, another was looking at me looking at her.”
The
action of the novel seems to take place inside the box, which has
become a kind of labyrinth for the box man, a porous, breathing skin.
“The more you struggle, the more new passages you make in the labyrinth,
the more the box is like another layer of outer skin that grows from
the body, and the inner arrangement is made more and more complex.”
The
sad truth of the box man's existence is that the “waterproof room” he
wears on his back hasn't satisfied his quest to be without an identity.
Scribbling on the inside walls of the box, he invents a past, present
and future that crash together in his brain. With an irony, that turns
in upon itself, he becomes a creature of multiple identities. And
because of this, the box man is condemned to travel in a perpetual fugue
state: “Paralysis of the heart's sense of direction is the box man's
chronic complaint.”The
book dissolves into a series of hypothetical voices and events. A
murder may or may not have occurred. The box man may or may not be dead.
He may have been a former army surgeon, or the surgeon's assistant, or
both. The assistant may have taken over the surgeon's identity, together
with his clinic and his wife. The surgeon may or may not have scribbled
the notes that make up the novel. Or the notes themselves, including
the concept of the box man, may be a ploy, a trick used by the surgeon's
assistant to cover up the murder of a hobo that will allow him to mask
his identity and escape the police. Thus, “The Box Man” becomes a book
in search of a narrator. Arguing with one of his possible selves, the
box man speculates: “Perhaps it is I who am going on writing as I
imagine you who are writing as imagine me.”At
times the novel reads like a curious amalgam of Robbe‐Grillet and
Beckett, but without the precision of “Le Voyeur” or the crisp,
beautiful tones of “Molloy” (this, in part, can be blamed on the
creakiness of any translated text). Yet “The Box Man” is an invention
with its own crazy pull. It is a difficult troubling book that
undermines our secret wishes, our fantasies of becoming box men (and box
women), our urge to walk away from permanent address and manufacture
landscapes from a vinyl curtain or some other filtering device.
Abé's
book is a stunning addition to the literature of eccentricity, those
bitter, crying voices of Melville's Bartleby the scrivener and
Dostoevsky's underground man. It gnaws at the reader, forces him to
question his values, his Shibboleths and his ritualistic props, and
shoots an energetic poison into his ear. “The Box Man” is funny, sad and
destructive, an ontological “thriller” that bumps into and contradicts
its own clues.In
an earlier, celebrated novel, “The Woman in the Dunes,” an entomologist
searching for insects blunders into a village that is in danger of
being eaten alive by sand. The villagers, who are short of labor, trap
the entomologist in a house at the bottom of a sand pit. Here he is
forced into the company of a young widow whose husband and child
disappeared in a sandstorm. The novel records the entomologist's
attempts to escape, his spidery attachment to the woman, and his gradual
loss of identity. In language that resembles “The Box Man,” the
entomologilt thinks: “Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse
or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance,
someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family
records were in order?” The structure of the novel is a bit too visible.
The sense of allegory creeps out from under the sand. “The Box Man” is a
porch more daring creation. Rougher, less controlled perhaps, it is a
book. 

I definitely like both, by the way.

Edited by BaldFriede - May 09 2019 at 08:00

Poll Question: Which novel do you prefer?
Poll Choice	Votes	Poll Statistics
Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase	1	[20.00%]
Kobo Abe - The Box Man	0	[0.00%]
I liked both	2	[40.00%]
I liked neither	0	[0.00%]
I only read the first and liked it	2	[40.00%]
I only read the first and didn't like it	0	[0.00%]
I only read the second and liked it	0	[0.00%]
I only read the second and didn't like it	0	[0.00%]
I read neither	0	[0.00%]
You can not vote in this poll

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BaldFriede Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Prog Reviewer Joined: June 02 2005 Location: Germany Status: Offline Points: 10261	Post Options Post Reply Quote BaldFriede Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: Two Japanese novels about a man in disguise Posted: May 09 2019 at 07:58
	Both novels are about a man in disguise - one wears a sheep costume, the other cuts holes for arms, eyes and mouth into a box and puts it over him (it reaches down to his knees). Both are surrealistic and really weird. If you have not read them I highly recommend you do. Here are reviews of both novels, both taken from The New York Times (at the time the English translations came out): A Wild Sheep Chase: ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' by Haruki Murakami is a bold new advance in a category of international fiction that could be called the trans-Pacific novel. Youthful, slangy, political and allegorical, Mr. Murakami is a writer who seems to be aware of every current American novel and popular song. Yet with its urban setting, yuppie characters and subtle feeling of mystery, even menace, his novel is clearly rooted in modern Japan. This isn't the traditional fiction of Kobo Abe (''The Woman in the Dunes''), Yukio Mishima (''The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea'') or Japan's only Nobel laureate in literature, Yasunari Kawabata (''Snow Country''). Mr. Murakami's style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving. In fact, the 40-year-old author, one of the most popular novelists in Japan, has translated the works of several American writers, including Irving and Carver. His outlook is international; he now lives in Rome. There isn't a kimono to be found in ''A Wild Sheep Chase.'' Its main characters, men and women, wear Levis. They are the children of prosperity, less interested in what Toyota or Sony have wrought than in having a good time while searching in jazz bars for self-identity. They take comfort in drinking, chain-smoking and casual sex. Listening to their conversation, they could be right at home on the Berkeley campus in the 1960's. It may help that the novel is racily translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum, an American who grew up in Tokyo and who studied at the University of California. The unnamed, newly divorced 30-year-old protagonist of ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' has moved on, somewhat haphazardly, from college life into advertising and public relations. He and a partner turn out corporate newsletters and display the proper degree of contempt for their clients - and themselves. In describing a right-wing magnate simply named the Boss, who has cornered the advertising business in Tokyo and extended his power into national politics, the protagonist's partner could pass for an ad man sounding off at the end of the day on Madison Avenue or Fleet Street: ''To hold down advertising is to have nearly the entire publishing and broadcasting industries under your thumb. There's not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn't depend in some way on advertising. It'd be like an aquarium without water. Why, 95 percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for.'' Their own cynical newsletters, he continues, contribute to corporate concealment: ''Every company's got a secret it doesn't want exploded right in the middle of the annual shareholders' meeting. In most cases, they'll listen to the word handed down. In sum, the Boss sits squarely on top of a trilateral power base of politicians, information services and the stock market.'' But Mr. Murakami isn't simply taking a swipe at big business here. As part of his developing plot, he is setting up the characters of his young people and distancing them from the godfatherly Boss and his sleazy lieutenant, who has a degree from Stanford University. As a former war criminal who has escaped trial, possibly with the collusion of the American occupation leadership, the Boss seeks something more than to sit on top of a domineering communications empire. Dying, he wants to gain the spiritual power of a legendary foreign sheep with a star on its back - the only one of its kind in all of Japan -that dwells somewhere in the lonely mountainous snow country. On the surface, ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' is just that: a mystery story with a long chase. A photograph of the wild sheep has appeared accidentally in a newsletter; like Dashiell Hammett's Maltese falcon, the singular sheep is pursued by clashing interests. Is the sheep a symbol of something beyond the reach of an ordinary man, a devilish temptation? Does this wild sheep represent heroic morality or a Nietzschean superpower? Nietzsche is mentioned in the novel; so is the obsessive quest for Moby-Dick. The answer, if any, is left to the reader's perception. Along the chase route, we meet interesting characters. One is called the Sheep Professor, another the Rat, a rather nice fellow despite his name. The most appealing is the protagonist's girlfriend, who is plain-looking except for one feature that arouses him - and reveals the author's offbeat sense of humor and style. Here is how she is described, with echoes of the hard-boiled California school of detection: ''She was 21, with an attractive slender body and a pair of the most bewitching, perfectly formed ears. She was a part-time proofreader for a small publishing house, a commercial model specializing in ear shots and a call girl in a discreet intimate-friends-only club. Which of the three she considered her main occupation, I had no idea. Neither did she.'' What makes ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' so appealing is the author's ability to strike common chords between the modern Japanese and American middle classes, especially the younger generation, and to do so in stylish, swinging language. Mr. Murakami's novel is a welcome debut by a talented writer who should be discovered by readers on this end of the Pacific. *The Box Man*: “This is the record of a box man.” So begins Kobo Abé's spooky novel that crawls under the bedclothes of our own mad century to examine the pathology of a murderous, spying everyman in a town called “T.” The landscape is hardly peculiar to Japan: trees, concrete, a bridge, a sweet potato field, a bathhouse, an anonymous hospital, and a seaside park. The novel's push is speculative rather than visual. It is one of those swirling fictions that pounce into nasty corners like an extravagant Ping Pang ball. The narrator of the book, a nameless scribbler, lives inside a cardboard box. The box man has shed the trappings of an established identity, with name, age, profession, ID card and permanent address. His box provides him with a protective anonymity. But it doesn't free him of all baggage. The box man has a radio, thermos, flashlight, plastic board, mug, towel, ballpoint pens; he peeps out of his box through an observation window equipped with a vinyl curtain. The particulars of the box man's box and his eight or nine possessions furnish a macabre humor that prevents the book from falling into an utterly sparse, metaphorical life. For example, the plastic board is an indispensable item to the box man. “First of all, it replaces a table.... It also becomes a chopping board when I cook. It's a shutter against the rain over the observation window on winter nights when the wind is strong, and on summer evenings when there's no breeze at all it conveniently takes the place of a fan. It's a portable bench for sitting on the wet ground, and it becomes a perfect worktable for undoing the cigarette butts that I have collected and for rolling them again.” Schizophrenia is the particular province of the box man. He is a “specialized voyeur” who spies at replicas of himself through the vinyl curtain. Watching a woman take off her clothes, he scribbles: “At the same time as I was looking at her, another was looking at me looking at her.” The action of the novel seems to take place inside the box, which has become a kind of labyrinth for the box man, a porous, breathing skin. “The more you struggle, the more new passages you make in the labyrinth, the more the box is like another layer of outer skin that grows from the body, and the inner arrangement is made more and more complex.” The sad truth of the box man's existence is that the “waterproof room” he wears on his back hasn't satisfied his quest to be without an identity. Scribbling on the inside walls of the box, he invents a past, present and future that crash together in his brain. With an irony, that turns in upon itself, he becomes a creature of multiple identities. And because of this, the box man is condemned to travel in a perpetual fugue state: “Paralysis of the heart's sense of direction is the box man's chronic complaint.” The book dissolves into a series of hypothetical voices and events. A murder may or may not have occurred. The box man may or may not be dead. He may have been a former army surgeon, or the surgeon's assistant, or both. The assistant may have taken over the surgeon's identity, together with his clinic and his wife. The surgeon may or may not have scribbled the notes that make up the novel. Or the notes themselves, including the concept of the box man, may be a ploy, a trick used by the surgeon's assistant to cover up the murder of a hobo that will allow him to mask his identity and escape the police. Thus, “The Box Man” becomes a book in search of a narrator. Arguing with one of his possible selves, the box man speculates: “Perhaps it is I who am going on writing as I imagine you who are writing as imagine me.” At times the novel reads like a curious amalgam of Robbe‐Grillet and Beckett, but without the precision of “Le Voyeur” or the crisp, beautiful tones of “Molloy” (this, in part, can be blamed on the creakiness of any translated text). Yet “The Box Man” is an invention with its own crazy pull. It is a difficult troubling book that undermines our secret wishes, our fantasies of becoming box men (and box women), our urge to walk away from permanent address and manufacture landscapes from a vinyl curtain or some other filtering device. Abé's book is a stunning addition to the literature of eccentricity, those bitter, crying voices of Melville's Bartleby the scrivener and Dostoevsky's underground man. It gnaws at the reader, forces him to question his values, his Shibboleths and his ritualistic props, and shoots an energetic poison into his ear. “The Box Man” is funny, sad and destructive, an ontological “thriller” that bumps into and contradicts its own clues. In an earlier, celebrated novel, “The Woman in the Dunes,” an entomologist searching for insects blunders into a village that is in danger of being eaten alive by sand. The villagers, who are short of labor, trap the entomologist in a house at the bottom of a sand pit. Here he is forced into the company of a young widow whose husband and child disappeared in a sandstorm. The novel records the entomologist's attempts to escape, his spidery attachment to the woman, and his gradual loss of identity. In language that resembles “The Box Man,” the entomologilt thinks: “Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order?” The structure of the novel is a bit too visible. The sense of allegory creeps out from under the sand. “The Box Man” is a porch more daring creation. Rougher, less controlled perhaps, it is a book. I definitely like both, by the way. Edited by BaldFriede - May 09 2019 at 08:00
	BaldJean and I; I am the one in blue.

Matti Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Prog Reviewer Joined: April 15 2005 Location: Finland Status: Offline Points: 2071	Post Options Post Reply Quote Matti Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: May 09 2019 at 09:45
	Murakami's among my favourite authors. I haven't read Kobo Abe whose books haven't been much translated into Finnish, nor is the English translation (The Box Man) available in the libraries of my environment.

omphaloskepsis Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: October 19 2011 Location: Texas Status: Offline Points: 5860	Post Options Post Reply Quote omphaloskepsis Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: May 09 2019 at 12:30
	Two excellent novels by my two favorite Japanese novelists. I like both.

moshkito Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: January 04 2007 Location: Grok City Status: Online Points: 16146	Post Options Post Reply Quote moshkito Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: May 10 2019 at 07:51
	Hi, I feel guilty ... looking for both of them and hopefully I can get a couple of used copies to read!
	Music is not just for listening ... it is for LIVING ... you got to feel it to know what's it about! Not being told! www.pedrosena.com