Word: abe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Norman Mailer was the first journalist/novelist, Abe is the first photonovelist (he has graced The Box Man with nine of his own photos), equipped wherever he goes with a periscope-like camera and tape recorder. And, while he is one of the select few to be translated into English, Abe the technocrat and his box man narrator--both hopelessly intertwined--are the epitome of the man in the house with one-way windows. Abe's cold, logical precision is the summation of all the statistics that point toward Japan's industrial and cultural decline...
...inside of his box. Because we are all locked in our own boxes, this annoyingly anonymous fellow asserts, we are left to our imaginations, and they become just as valuable as the so-called real world we see around us. They are perhaps even more valuable in Abe's urban environment because it, too, is a product of our imaginations, and a particularly grim one at that. But, while it is important to understand these basic concepts, they do not become apparent immediately. They are hidden within an intrigue involving the box man's tentative release from his lonely enclosure...
Speaking of his trilogy of novels, The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, and The Ruined Map, Abe once said that they were "tied together by their concern with the city. You see, the city is the place where people first had to deal with the stranger who is not an enemy." And in a way, the box man is a stranger to himself, not an enemy, but still unknown, puzzling out his own existence before even attempting to cope with others...
...ABE'S THEME, in a word, is alienation. And because alienation has been cooked to a charred kernel, at least since Eliot's "unreal city" in The Wasteland, all that is left to do is pick it apart into ashes and let them scatter about in modernist prose, hoping that something new and different will happen. In Box Man every conceivable "new" technique is used--from describing the color of ink used in the marginalia, printed verbatim, to a fight between the box man and his fictitious alter-ego about who is the real narrator of the story...
...glimpse at the kind of muddling that goes into Abe's prose shows how much value he places in forcing the reader to unravel what should be simple statements...