Kobo Abe (or Abe Kobo, to state his name in proper Japanese fashion, family name first) has always been a difficult writer for Western readers to categorize. Born in 1924, Abe first began writing at the end of the war. By the 1950s, he had already earned a prodigious reputation in Japan, first as a playwright with Marxist leanings, then as a writer of fiction and drama in what might be called the international absurdist mode. Western reviewers examining the English version of his 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes expressed some dismay over the fact that a Japanese writer could conceptualize his work without reference to geisha, cherry blossoms, and the haiku mentality that constituted, and still constitutes to a large degree, the accepted boundaries assigned by Western readers to Japanese modern literature. Once translated, that book's spare and eloquent symmetry eventually won it a lasting readership. That same audience, won over to the author by this style, was soon to express dismay about certain popular elements that Abe later came to borrow, albeit much transformed, from the realm of the detective story and the rhetoric of science fiction. Abe seemed to move too quickly to be pigeon-holed.
The danger of putting writers in categories, of course, is that the process permits readers to classify their authors and so to dismiss the cutting edge of their work. How many people walk through an art gallery, say "It's a Degas," and feel, the style once identified, they need stop to look no further? In Abe's case, however, each book must be read and pondered on its own terms. Over the years, the mental file card prepared for him, "novelist, Japanese," had first to be amended to "novelist, Japanese, avant-garde," only to require the penciling in of the phrase "style popular/difficult," as well. The Ark Sakura, published in 1984, is the latest of Abe's works to be made available in English. The reader is forced to find still another category for this new, strange, and obsessive work. The novel clearly represents another phase in the evolution of this very gifted writer and his work.
The Ark Sakura begins and ends, as it were, with a pun. The word sakura, has two meanings in the original Japanese. One is the word for cherry blossoms; the other is a slang term for a shill or decoy in a trick business venture. Abe thus begins by projecting a sense of wild ambiguity, and he continues to pile absurdity upon absurdity as the complicated narrative progresses. While many of his early works are lean and spare, Ark is as inflated, baroque, and odd-shaped as its peculiar (and unreliable) narrator, a vast fat man ("My nickname is Pig--or Mole") who lives in an immense subterranean cave. There, he informs the reader, he has constructed a vast ark capable of sailing away from the civilized world when mankind destroys civilization with a nuclear holocaust. The actual ark is never very clearly described, however, and as the reader continues through the peculiar narrative, it becomes apparent that deception, as well as self-deception, is part and parcel of Mole's world, in both its physical and spiritual aspects.
Early in the story, Mole picks up some unlikely crew members for his voyage, a shyster, his moll, and a confidence man. One deception begins to reflect off the next. The reader is treated to a wild swirl of barking, rapacious dogs, dynamited chambers in the rock, candy-and-beer lunches, even a vast toilet in which the protagonist gets his foot caught. This literary bouillabaisse contains a number of highly unlikely ingredients, but the taste is absolutely authentic, if a bit
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