the box man
There is no metaphor in the title. The narrator of this novel literally goes everywhere with a box on his head.
To this odd practice he has devoted himself with great care and practical foresight. The box, which comes down to his waist, has a small viewing slot at the front and holes in the sides to let through sound. There is a small battery powered light affixed to the ceiling and wire hooks for his personal effects. His narrative, which is the story we are reading, is scrawled on either the interior surface of his box or on note paper. All this is done to ensure he never has to leave the cardboard shell under which he scurries, hermit crabwise, through the city—either in pursuit of the three characters who appear most frequently before his viewing slot or in flight from them: A lascivious nurse who is the object of his fetishizing gaze; a menacing rifleman who wishes to kill him; and a man who has usurped the identity of a doctor and may or may not be the narrator himself. Such is the bizarre premise of Kobe Abe’s compact and intriguing novel. It seems to be concerned with questions of identity, voyeurism and death. The last-mentioned theme, death, may seem a touch unexpected but the narrator's fixation with suicide makes perfect sense on reflection. After all, a box man is someone who has already removed themselves from the universe on which they continue to gaze; who witnesses their own nonexistence; who exists in absentia. Reading this book, I was often reminded of Baucis, one of the imaginary cities catelogued by Italo Calvino, which rises up from the ground on slender stilts and is lost in the clouds above so that “nothing of the city touches the earth except those long legs on which it rests and, on sunny days, an angular shadow that falls across the foliage.” Or rather, I was reminded of the three hypotheses about its inhabitants: “One is that they hate the earth; another, that they hold it so sacred they regard all contact with it profane; the third is that they love the earth as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downwards never tire of contemplating their own absence.” Abe has crafted the pieces of his puzzle with amazing skill and artifice but he does not tesselate them. The novel closes without answering the questions it poses, atmospherically, ambiguously, with the approaching wail of sirens. |
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