Genesis tells us a great deal about Noah's ark. We know its length, width, and depth; what wood was used in its construction; the places pitch was applied; how many windows, doors, and stories it featured, and where. We know the people who boarded it--Noah, his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives--and much about the accompanying animals: two of every sort, a male and a female, whether clean or unclean, whether cattle, fowl, or "every creeping thing." We know the world was deluged for 150 days. We know that nearly a full year passed before the waters receded sufficiently for the ark to discharge its passengers into a world now emptied of evil and ready for those select passengers to replenish the globe. In short, we learn in Genesis how God took note of an earlier error ("And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart") and took action to correct it. We learn that Noah, the only righteous man, obeyed the Lord and so, fortunately for his descendants, fulfilled his plan; we learn that all of us trace our existence back to someone's lucky place on that single vessel of gopher wood.
There is a great deal we do not know, however. What, for example, could life have been like aboard ship on that nearly year-long voyage? The ark was not all that big. And after all, the presence of every sort of animal--in pairs, no less--cohabiting in close quarters not only with each other but with Noah's own family, must have made for some tense moments, some difficult encounters, surely a few embarrassing contre-temps. On this, however, Genesis is silent. Petty squabbles among the anointed survivors hardly matter. What does matter is that God had guaranteed those few passengers their survival, and generations hence, our own. Aside from those of Noah and his three sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, we never learn the names of either the survivors from whom we are presumably descended, or the specific species with which our distant forebears shared that crowded steerage. The focus of narrative attention is the stormy, watery world without, and the divine intent behind it. Protected by the fragile shelter Noah's ark provided, God's elect, but not their stories, survived.
Abe's ark, the "Sakura" of his most recent novel, seems the biblical ark's precise opposite. Unlike Noah's vessel, neither its dimensions--the complex of abandoned quarries the novel's protagonist, Mole, has turned into a nuclear shelter seems infinitely large in its rambling expanse--nor precisely what it is made of is described. More importantly, it is the world inside the ark, and not that without, with which we become acquainted. Descriptions of floods, such as that in Genesis, are replaced with precisely those little human dramas on which the Scripture's authors were so silent. Mole and his fellow passengers ("crewmen") on the ark/shelter, both those he has invited aboard and those he has not, fight and flirt, make alliances and betray alliances, and generally entertain and menace each other. What goes on beyond, in the world above them, is what no longer matters. Has the third and final world war really begun? Somehow we do not care: In The Ark Sakura, the world of Noah is turned inside out, or rather, outside in. The story here is not one of great historical or mythical sweep, but of minuscule, even tedious, detail.
In contrast to what we know of Noah and his family, we learn a great deal about Mole and his companions--more than we might prefer, in fact--in lieu of anything else. In Abe's work there often is nothing else; certainly, no hand of God directing plot and story, no ultimate
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