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Title: Ark Sakura by Kobo Abe ISBN: 0-679-72161-4 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 March, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: This ark has a few leaks....
Comment: Pig, who prefers to be called Mole, has taken up residence in an abandoned stone quarry, slowly converting it into an ark to save humanity during the inevitable nuclear holocaust. He has room for a little over 300 people to become his crew, but must be selective in his choosing. Only those who he deems acceptable will be offered safe harbor in his huge ship.
During one of his few outings to buy provisions for the ark, he comes across Komono, an insect dealer, and after lunching with him, offers one of the keys to the ark. Komono asks if he can think on it and walks off to use the bathroom. In the meantime, two sakura, or shills, trick Mole into giving up two keys. They immediately make a run for the ark, followed by Komono and Mole in hot pursuit. When they reach the ark, they discover that they are not alone in the depths of the quarry.
The remainder of the book discusses a wide variety of topics from old age in the form of the Broom Brigade, environmentalism, survivalism, murder, loyalty, sex, humanity and nuclear devastation. More and more chaacters are added as the book progresses, each with a different story to tell, making it difficult to follow along and unenjoyable to read. I still am not sure exactly what point the author is trying to make with this novel, or even if there is a point to it. The characters themselves were not believable to me, especially Mole, a big, fat man who is obsessed with the end of the world and the female shill's behind, continually wanting to pat it even when his life is in danger.
The only saving grace for me is Abe's writing. He has a very fluid style that's descriptive and easy to read. But, with the piling on of characters and story lines, I can't say that I would add this to a must-read list.
Rating: 2
Summary: Don't bother.
Comment: In many ways, The Ark Sakura is practically a rewrite of The Box Man, an earlier Abe novel which I greatly disliked. Note just how much from that novel recurs here: there's your mysterious and often antagonistic figure of "the pretender," the doctor in The Box Man and the "shill" in The Ark Sakura; there's his nameless female companion who often acts excessively girlish but who, it is stressed with much pomposity, never reveals her "true nature"; and there's a bizarre murder mystery which appears out of nowhere, is constantly mentioned, but never is explained. Also instantly recognizable from The Box Man is Abe's infuriating noodling - all those nonsensical metaphors for life with all the subtlety of a plum pudding, described lovingly in the most roundabout style imaginable, in which very many words are expended with very little meaning. The canonical example of this in The Ark Sakura is, without a doubt, the "eupcaccia," a legless and completely fictional insect. Abe takes great pains to describe it, with all the grotesque details that will make you wish he'd just stop, and of course, _of course_ finishes with "At the risk of sounding pretentious, let me say I believe that the eupcaccia is symbolic of a certain philosophy or way of life." This is predictably referred back to countless times later, with phrases along the lines of "If only humanity decided to live more like the eupcaccia!" I hate to be the one to say it, but yes, sir, you do sound pretentious, and your metaphor makes no sense.
It's not a total loss. For all the similarity to The Box Man, The Ark Sakura is certainly better. It's about twice as long as The Box Man, but reads _very_ quickly; it took me only a few hours. There's only one mercifully short occasion where Abe delves into the incomprehensible nonsense that comprised most of The Box Man. That is to say, this time around he actually remembered to include an actual _story_ along with his philosophical burbling. And the story is by far the most successful part of the novel - the whole idea of the "ark" is so good that it really deserves a better book to be built around it. The same goes for the twist in the ending. With the exception of the very end, however, for the entire second half of the book Abe is too enamoured of his own cleverness for his own good. Hence we get the thrilling tale of The Broom Brigade (intimidating, is it not?), which is a neofascist militant cult comprised entirely of retired old men who make a living by sweeping the streets. I don't blame you if you're blankly staring at the preceding sentence trying to make sense of it; rest assured, there's none to be made. With the appearance of The Broom Brigade on the scene, the book falls headfirst into a bog of meaninglessness from which it does not emerge until the last two pages. It's vaguely reminiscent of Beckett's Pozzo, except more ridiculous and, in this setting, rather artless; with the way the story "develops," the whole backdrop becomes completely irrelevant and an initially promising premise is wasted. Abe's entitled to all the postmodernist irony he can exude, no doubt, but it won't make his books good. I've heard it said that he concentrates on "the inner workings of people's minds," but in my view he doesn't concentrate on people at all; he has some vaguely defined notions that he'd like us to pay attention to, and by and large, he only bothers with his characters insofar as he can make them reflect those notions. As a result, he creates neither convincing people nor a convincing philosophy. So, read Woman in the Dunes, a novel deservedly added to the modernist canon, but feel no obligation to explore Abe's other "works"; you're not missing much.
Rating: 5
Summary: Kobo Abe, Japanese Beckett
Comment: A truly weird and amusing novel, Ark Sakura by Kobo Abe (The Woman in the Dunes) has the extraordinary ability to abolish your everyday reality in favor of its vivid, voyeuristic depiction of the bizarre consequences of an utterly unsupervised reality, a twisted kindergarten of mad adults, ungoverned and unpredictable. the Mole has retreated, along with his disturbing family background and unpleasant appearance, into a secret world beneath the crust of Japan, and in these dank, reverberating caverns of an abandoned underground quarry has been able to rejuvenate his despairing perspectives by creating a smaller living world from the refuse of another greater world, utterly self-sufficient, certainly more than capable of surviving and surviving well any imminent global apocalypse. setting off into the common life above ground, having decided it is time to consider populating his subterranean ark in preparation for the expected catastrophe, Mole encounters a peculiar group of human cast-offs, all becoming irrevocably enmeshed in a strange and surreal tale that is a beautiful open sore in the skin of the human condition. admirers of Beckett will be unable to resist Kobo Abe's magnificent ability to evoke situations and settings at the same time vast and apparently endless, yet isolating and confining; fantastic prisons of the exiled and forgotton.
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Title: Kangaroo Notebook : A Novel by Kobo Abe ISBN: 0679746633 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Box Man : A Novel by Kobo Abe ISBN: 0375726519 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 10 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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