Kōbō Abe (1924–1993)

Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist, seeks a rare beetle in the desert. The day ends, and he is lost in the sand dunes. In desperation, he agrees to assistance from another man who finds the entomologist shelter for the night. He is taken to a sand cliff from which he is lowered by rope ladder to a small house, partially covered by sand and inhabited by a lone woman. In the morning, the rope is gone but the woman remains.

The story was terrifying and engrossing all at once. It had the essence of one person being alone, yet not being alone; disappearing and yet not disappearing. Thinking of a person placed in a captive situation, it made me question whether it would be better to remain aloof or to befriend a captor. Presenting just as many questions as answers, this book turned out to be an incredible mind trip. I kept on trying to figure out what it all meant, whether it was a metaphor for anything at all or just a bizarre tale meant for entertainment. It was a story, complete with perfectly situated pen-and-ink drawings, about the meaning of being held captive and containing sequences of events and scenery which made for surreal and fascinating reading.… (mere)

Collapsed [...] like a marionette whose strings had been cut,

Abe is doing a couple interesting things here:
-Some play in the Mask Face relationship. Mask as a kind of face; face subordinated (in the animistic sense) to the mask; mask as the real self (simulacrum) and the self which is already a kind of mask.
-An attempt at technical detail that is almost believable (though reads as juvenilia compared to later accomplishments in The Box Man).
-Wearing a mask so he can date his wife, condemning her for dating him (scarred face), condemning her for dating him (mask face), condemning her for lack of prurience, condemning her for imagined prurience. condemning her for not seeing through the mask, but utterly destroyed when he realizes that she has seen through it/leaves him.

After a long time, I picked up this book, blindly, and thought, "this guy sounds like Kōbō Abe when he writes about women," so at least it can be said he has a style.… (mere)

Non è la sabbia che scorre, ma forse lo stesso scorrere è la sabbia. Non riesco a spiegarmi bene.

(109)

La respirazione, il camminare, la peristalsi dei visceri, i programmi quotidiani di ricerca, le domeniche ogni sette giorni, gli esami di fine stagione ogni quattro mesi, non solo non arrivano a darci la pace, ma ci incitano nuovamente al tran tran della vita. Di giorno in giorno, poi, si aumenta la quantità del fumo, e, dopo i sogni in cui si cerca affannosamente, con una donna dalle unghie sporche, un posto tranquillo e nascosto agli occhi dei curiosi, infine ci si accorge di essere intossicati, e poi, ricordandosi a un tratto del firmamento sostenuto dai cicli dei movimenti ellittici estremamente monotoni, e delle dune comandate dalla lunghezza d'onda di 1/8 di mm, improvvisamente ci si rende conto della situazione reale.

(224)

E resto sempre perplesso dal fatto che Sisifo ritrovi sempre il masso ad aspettarlo...… (mere)