Kōbō Abe (1924–1993)

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Abe-Les-murs/341289

> [Japon]. LES MURS, par ABE Kôbô - Récits traduits du japonais par Marc Mécréant, Collection Unesco d’Œuvres Représentatives, 256 pages / 8,10 € Z ISBN: 978-2-87730-193-0. — Six récits qui nous entraînent dans un univers fantastique, celui du labyrinthe de l'identité aux frontières du réel et du rêve, et qui ont valu à leur auteur une renommée considérable au Japon avant même que La Femme des sables ne consacre sa renommée internationale en 1962.
—Catalogue Picquier Poche 2019… (mehr)

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.… (mehr)

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.… (mehr)