Recent Reads . Kobo Abe
So I figured it was time to update you guys on my recent reads. For all the cult and obscure films I watch, I refuse to read pulp and mainstream novels. Strange, I know, but when it comes to books I’m one of those elitist “I read literature” types. I dig Japanese surrealists such as Haruki Murakami, Cyberpunking Canadians such as William Gibson, and nihilistic domestics such as Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis. My latest drug of choice: the late, great Kobo Abe. As much as I love Murakami, I think Abe is slowly edging him out as my fave. He writes beautifully tragic tales of mystery and wonder, with a dash of hard science to complement the surreal. So, in an effort to spread the word, here are brief blurbs on the last three books of his I’ve read:
Woman in the Dunes. A professor of entomology on a bug-finding vacation finds himself prisoner of a townspeople whose habitat is threatened by ever advancing sand dunes. Now a slave of the town, the man is forced to live and work at the bottom of a pit with a homely widow who may or may not provide a path to freedom. You may be familiar with the film adaptation of this novel, but even though it was adapted for the screen by Abe, I think this book is better (The film is quite beautiful in its own right though).
Secret Rendezvous. A married man awakes one night to find his wife spirited off to an undisclosed hospital in an ambulance they never summoned. Naturally, the man’s search for his wife proves an excursion into the bizarre: a labrynthian hospital with underground passageways, pseudo-scientific-sexual experimentation, a girl whose skeleton is slowly liquefying, and more oddball characters than you can shake a stick at.
The Ruined Map. A detective is hired by a young woman to find her missing husband, lost to her for almost a year. The only clues provided him are a matchbook and a newspaper article. Needless to say, his journey will lead him to discover many strange things, from fuel scammers flowing to yakuza gigolos, and leads both real and imagined. The investigation turns out to be more dangerous than he initially thought, and finding the phantom husband may mean the loss of his sanity. Note: This was actually made into a film starring Shintaro Katsu.
All Abe’s books share a similar thread of missing persons and spouses desperately trying to reconnect with each-other. And, more often than not the main characters come out of the tale either weak and dying or psychologically damaged. Abe’s writing is refreshingly concise, while providing ample food for thought (You’ll never see an unnecessarily bloated tome like Johnathan Strange or Snow Crash form the likes of him). It assumes the reader is intelligent enough to understand what is being suggested without extensive handholding and explanations of metaphors. If you’re looking for something different to read, something intelligent as it is entertaining, check out Kobo Abe.
