Abe is somewhat of an acquired taste. His work is original, yet brings to mind a strange hybrid of a less cerebral Beckett, a non-epileptic Dostoyevsky, and a Murakami with writing ability. If that sounds intriguing then this would probably be the best place to start. In his larger works Abe, like Beckett, has at times what some might find an enervating writing style. Personally, I've found it enthralling. But Abe confined to 30 or less pages is a fine way to introduce yourself to his unique brand of creativity.

Abe has a prolific imagination, and surprised me with stories like The Life of a Poet, a Marquez like plunge into fantasy. At his weakest, he is either cryptic or too purely sci-fi, with the same weakness for odd gimmicks that makes Murakami so annoying. While it doesn't pack the existential message of his larger works, Beyond the Curve is an entertaining collection and well worth reading.

Beyond the Curve by Kobo Abe is one of the best compilations of short stories I've read. His style is like a blend of Rod Serling, Stephen King and Salvador Dali. Each tale is strange and unique and tests the limits of your imagination. As much as I like his other books, this one is my favorite because it runs the gamut of his storytelling style from novels like Woman in the Dunes to the outrageously surreal Kangaroo Notebook. If you haven't read any of Abe's work, Beyond the Curve is a great introduction.

This was a beautiful book by Abe, and certainly the most engaging one for me. The dire outlook on the future, the concept of genteic engineering, is frightening in view of the world we live in today as opposed to when Kobo Abe first wrote this book. I would certainly recommend this to any lover of Japanese fiction.

Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes in both an existential allegory as well as a masterpiece of sensual terror.

The story begins when teacher and amateur entymologist, Jumpei Niki, decides to get away from things for awhile and searches for insects in an isolated desert region of Japan near the sea. When he realizes he's missed the last bus back to a "real" town, the local villagers offer to find him a place to stay for the night.

Although there are no hotels available, Jumpei is escorted to a rope ladder extending down into a pit in the sand. At the bottom he finds a ramshakle hut and a lone woman living in a bizarre situation; she spends the entire night, every night, shoveling sand away from her home in order to stave off her own burial and the subsequent destruction of the village. The sand is given to the villagers in return for water and other necessities, something the woman views as "community spirit."

To his horror, Jumpei awakens to find the rope laffer gone and discovers he's been targeted as the woman's new partner and "helper." Jumpei resists and even makes a futile attempt at escape, to which the woman says, "I'm really sorry. But honestly there hasn't been a single person to get out yet."

Inevitably, Jumpei and the woman engage in a series of sexual encounters that have more to do with an affirmation of life than with physical or emotional attraction. This book is many things, but a love story is definitely not one of them.

When the woman (who remains nameless) suffers an ectopic pregnancy, Jumpei suddenly finds himself alone in the pit and free to go, yet enigmatically (or so it may seem), he refuses to do so.

Obviously, this shattering and gorgeous story is open to many levels of interpretation; only a few are obvious.

Jumpei clearly represents the "new, Westernized" Japan, while the woman personifies "traditional" Japan and tate mae. Rather than buying into the futility of life, the woman calmly accepts the role life has assigned to her with dignity and patience.

Although she is often treated unfairly (and even abused) by Jumpei, the woman in the dunes still bathes him regularly and cooks his dinner every day, accepting him without anger or scorn.

Westerners may view the woman in the dunes as complacent and weak, but in reality, she is anything but. Her ability to carry on day after day, in the face of overwhelming odds, as well as her seeming peace of mind personify the maxim that suffering exists only in the eye of the beholder.

At times, the message of this book may seem to be that life is futile; that no matter how much you struggle, you'll simply be forced to struggle again and again, so much so that when opportunity does come knocking, a useless existence may seem safer than an uncertain freedom.

The real problem, however, and the crux of this book, is one of perspective. Although Jumpei's "old" life may seem to be the better and the more fulfilling (as well as the more free), is it really? If you were to ask the woman in the dunes, I think she might smile, turn her head shyly and suggest you get back to work.

Kobo Abe's excellent novel "The Woman in the Dunes" examines the nature of how man relates his responsibilities to his sense of freedom. The protagonist is a schoolteacher named Niki Jumpei who collects insects as a hobby and, on a holiday, goes to a sandy seashore in search of rare specimens. Near the shore he finds a most curiously constructed village -- the houses are sunk into individual sand pits. When he misses the last bus back to civilization, the villagers assign him to spend the night in a house at the bottom of one of the pits. Dwelling in the house is a nameless woman who must shovel sand out of the pit constantly to keep the entire village from being buried in the encroaching sand dunes. Soon Niki learns that the villagers have no intention of letting him out of the pit and that he must help the woman with shoveling. Faced with the prospect of spending the rest of his life imprisoned and forced to labor in the sand pit, he must accustom himself to his new environment and become the woman's sexual mate.

Some of the images, especially the strange village and the sand formations, are difficult to envision, but Abe rises to the challenge with beautiful, vivid descriptions. Similarly, Niki's daring schemes to outwit the implacable villagers who grimly supervise the work are written with the skill of an author who understands and masters the delicate balance between thought and action.

The novel is not merely a retelling of the myth of Sisyphus because Niki and the woman's task has a practical, if unrealistic, purpose. Rather, I see it as an allegory of man's complacency with his existence in the world. He is not born of his own will, but once alive, he has personal, familial, and communal responsibilities that he must fulfill or else risk physical and social deprivation (starvation, loneliness, societal reproach). He must consign himself to these responsibilities, and usually he finds something that interests him and makes life more bearable -- for some, this may be a chosen profession; for others, a hobby. (Note how Niki's hobby shifts from collecting insects to discovering a new method of drawing ground water as he assimilates himself to life in the pit. His interests adjust to fit his environment.) In fact, our personal interests are the only things by which we individuate ourselves from others in a world where we are all shoveling the same sand out of our own little pits.

This was the first Kobo Abe book that I have read, but it will not be the last. This book is about a school teacher named Jumpei Niki who enjoys collecting insects to escape his mundane life. Junpei is not the most likeable of characters He is cruel, abusive, and seems to think that he is superior to those around him. On a short vacation, he decides to go to the coast to find a certain type of bug in the dunes. He does not find it, however. He is also too late to catch the last bus home, so he stays the night with a woman who lives down in a sand hole. The next morning the rope is gone, and Junpei is stuck with the woman who spends every night shoveling sand. Junpei of course puts up quite a fuss, who wouldn't, but his demands to be released fall on death ears. Junpei does manage to escape once, but is caught and put back into the hole. This nearly crushes his spirit.

This is a very interesting book very sparse like the works of Kawabata and it is centered around the one man Junpei, Thw woman is never given a name. The woman, however, is the most interesting character in the book she is a very hard worker, who is very complacent, doing almost whatever Junpei says. However, when Junpei goes against the ways of the dune she mildly speaks her mind, and when he pushes her too far she pummels him.

A very nice read. Check it out.

I think of The Box Man by Kobo Abe and I try to recall one memorable image, or one compelling character, or one trenchant observation, or indeed one particularly inventive or colourful turn of phrase. I can't come up with a single one. It baffles me how someone can write something as memorable, compelling, trenchant, inventive and colourful as Woman in the Dunes, and then write something as devoid of any of these qualities as The Box Man. My only explanation is that this was written by a Kobo Abe from a strange parallel universe where Abe never wrote anything good, and somehow made its way here through a rift in space and time.

Upon picking up The Box Man and reading the first page, I naively and laughably thought that this was to be a sort of social commentary or just a story about homeless people. No, that wasn't at all the case. Apparently, unlike a regular homeless person, a "box man" has some sort of extremely deep philosophy that singles him out as someone who lives on a higher plane of existence. Except after reading the book, I came not a bit closer to understanding what this philosophy is, or to caring about finding out. This was exacerbated by Abe's extremely self-indulgent style, in which no concern is exhibited for time or flow, random unidentified narrators come and go with no warning, pages and pages are occupied with pseudo-intellectual "societal observations" and uninteresting non sequiturs, and so forth.

Keep in mind that such a style doesn't have to be bad. Plenty of authors like to jump around in time and make up their own stylistic rules. Plenty of authors like to wax eloquent about society. Plenty of authors come up with absurd premises and make great works out of them. But there are authors who do this well, and those who do not. The Box Man has laughably been called "surreal." But something like, say, Un Chien Andalou, though it also has absolutely no actual narrative structure, is chock full of striking images, which are memorable despite having nothing to do with reality or even with each other. The Box Man tries to be like that. It tries very, very hard, and it is very self-conscious about it. But it fails, because there is nothing above the norm in it - just a desire to "break conventions" for the sake of breaking conventions, to break conventions as a substitute for narrative, commentary, characterization, originality, emotion, and any worthwhile thought. Supposedly there is a nominal narrative here (there's something about an unsolved murder in places), and supposedly there's an existential parable here (some people ask themselves and each other some wooden and ham-handed questions about existence), but really, there is nothing even original (to say nothing of "masterful") about any of this. And don't even get me started on the oh-so-affected "photo inserts" with their oh-so-affected captions.

Woman in the Dunes leaves me spellbound, but The Box Man is an utter waste of time. It's shorter than Woman in the Dunes (178 pages in my edition) but every single line is an excruciating exercise in tedium. And as you read, you'll get the feeling that Abe is deliberately insulting your intelligence by writing such pretentious nonsense when he has shown himself to be capable of masterpieces. Stay far, far away from this "novel."

Half the time I wasn't sure what the heck was going on so I consider this book to be, in part, a book questioning reality/ontology. The "box man" would ramble on about some scenario/reality/happening and then reveal that it was all his imagination. That's pretty much how my life goes about, more imagination than substance, so this book is a rather effective looking-glass. Given that, this plays a significant role in the play of "my dissatisfaction with the book." I don't want to be reminded of my anonymity and social lackings. I have little problem recommending this book to others--sometimes i recommend bad books to people for my own kicks--but there are other books I'd prefer to see sittin in my lap. In keeping with the question of reality, if its even addressed in this book (what the heck do i know--answer: nothing) I'd prefer to read Mark Daneilewski's House of Leaves or Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and definitely The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban (I list these books only to impress you. It's pure show.).

There are elements of identity problems in this book, as far as I can see anyway. The person lives in a box, he/she doesnt have a name, and he/she usually only looks at people while they in turn, people, only see a box, if that. That's pretty cut n'dry. Again, there are other books that attack this idea more vicously. See: Fight Club

My biggest problem with the book is this: I have no clue if the box man was a murder or not. I love biggest problems and I consider this to be a rather large one, unanswered questions. So, Ill give this my recommendation, but, will the joke be on you?

Nah.

The Box Man delves into what it is to be seen and what it is to see, the phenomenon of looking and being looked at. There are many parallels with sartre's Being and Nothingness - the idea that one despises being looked at because he is forced to think about his imperfect facticity, and that the unseen viewer, be it at sartre's keyhole or abe's observation window, is put in the privledge position of remaining pure transcendance, or purely beings of the mental realms that are untouchable by the outside world. Abe's style of writing leaves the reader guessing whether or not he is the voyeur or the exhibitionist.

Kangaroo Notebook is a difficult novel to understand, but you'll love it anyway. The plot is bizzare, to say the least. A man discovers that he has radish sprouts growing from his shins. His condition baffles the doctor at a local dermatology clinic, who sends him away in a self propelled hospital bed, telling him to try hot spring treatment. While en-route to the hot springs, he is cast down a dark tunnel and ends up on the shores of hell. From there, the plot gets really weird (but very addicting) as the narrator meets a child-demons, a vampire-esque nurse intent on drawing enough blood to win the "Dracula's Daughter" award, and an American photographer interested in achieving population contrl through traffic accidents.

The novel's symbolism becomes less obscure when one considers the great shame and self loathing "deformed" or "imperfect" members of Japanese society feel. Early in the novel, the narrator comments that marsupials are essentially inferior versions of mammals. The narrator, a terminally ill or deformed individual, feels like a marsupial, followed, wherever he goes, by his deformity (just as the narrator is followed by his hospital bed). At the novel's conclusion, the narrator sees himself in a box, perhaps a coffin, readers are presented with an exerpt from a newspaper regarding the discovery of a man found dead in a train station with self-inflicted slashes to his shins. The police, the article mentions, do not believe the slashes to the man's shins were the cause of death. The reader is left with the vague impression that the narrator, seeing his impending death, committed suicide (or perhaps was assisted).

Kangaroo Notebook is often compared to Burroughs' Naked Lunch or a cross between Kafka and Alice in Wonderland. I found the novel to be far more. Kangaroo Notebook is more than a strange story; it's an honest and deeply personal look into the mind of an individual whose disease is turning him (quite literally) into a vegatable. Read the novel, and see why Abe was considered Japan's leading author of modern fiction before his death.

Kangaroo Notebook is the last book written by Kobo Abe; in many ways, it is a reflection on the approach of death, on being an outsider, and, perhaps, on outsider as a kind of death. "Perhaps" because this book is written in a very ambiguous style that allows, even encourages, readers to find different interrelationships between the parts.

The narrator begins the story at his suggestion in his workplace being selected as the best - his suggestion, originally a joke, was a product, a kangaroo notebook. This leads to the proposition that marsupials are outcasts - the mammal version of each species being more viable than the marsupial counterpart. Within this context, the narrator notes that his shins are sprouting radishes.

Seeking treatment at a dermatologist is the beginning of a series of occurrences - real, dream, illusion, post-anesthetia confusion? This are absolutely delightful, humorous events - a bed traveling in the city through the narrator's mental efforts, of a hell-based sulfur springs treatment, of child demons, of dead mothers in cabbage fields, of an American graduate student studying fatal accidents, of euthansia ...

This astounding romp is a serious consideration of death, our beliefs regarding death (the limbo children) and of suicide/murder/euthansia/accident.

"Which situation should I declare 'real' and which one a 'dream?'" This is the question that plagues the narrator of Kobo Abe's Kangaroo Notebook, the last novel written before his death in 1993. We can consider ourselves lucky, indeed, that one of the world's most distinguished novelists left us with this surreal and unique vision of Japanese society that is both disturbingly fearful and hilariously funny.

On a morning that should have turned out like any other morning, the first person narrator of Kangaroo Notebook awakens to find radish sprouts growing out of his shins. Although his doctor in repulsed, the narrator finds he now possesses the strange and unique ability to snack on...himself.

An eerie adventure to rid himself of his malady takes the book's protagonist into an increasingly hostile and mysterious world, one that in turn, is surreal, playful and almost unassailably enigmatic.

The plot is a weird and wild ride to say the least. Unlike Kafka's narrator in Metamorphosis, our slowly unraveling protagonist checks into a dermatology clinic and soon finds himself hurtling on a hospital bed to the very brink of hell.

An attractive nurse, known only as Damselfly, straps him to a hospital bed and begins to administer huge quantities of unknown drugs. A short time later, still strapped to this hospital bed, still hooked up to his IV and still suffering from his mysterious malady, our protagonist is summarily discharged.

A cast of spooky characters is then introduced via visits to a glitzy department store, a cabbage field that serves as the final resting place of the narrator's dead mother and Damselfly's own apartment.

One of those characters, the hirsute Mister Hammer Killer, an American karate expert, has such a love of violence that our narrator once again finds himself confined to a hospital.

His situation only worsens with the arrival of the "Help Me! Club," a club whose members consist solely of demonic chanting children.

The sexy Damselfly, herself, turns out to be a bit of a vampire. Her quest to collect enough blood to win the "Dracula's Daughter" medal is nothing short of relentless. Despite these bizarre plot twists and turns, the finale of Kangaroo Notebook is undeniably perfect and, almost surrealistically, makes perfect sense.

Abe's typical protagonist is an "outsider" who is haunted by a sense of alienation and anxiety over the fragility of individual identity. Although seeking relief from society's pressure to conform, he still yearns for communal emotional connection.

These universal themes, combined with an ironic, satiric and often bizarre manner of expression, have led many to assume that Abe's writing bears a closer resemblance to Western writers, Kafka, in particular, than to traditional Japanese literary models. Yet Abe's fiction reflects his strong Japanese heritage in its vividly imagistic prose, its abundant incorporation of Japanese cultural icons and its satirical treatment of Japanese psychosocial dynamics.

Kangaroo Notebook is one of Abe's signature triumphs. He deftly uses a swiftly-moving barrage of morbidly fascinating images, characters and places to reflect cleverly-disguised, but recurring themes, and he balances hysterical humor with deadpan lines, such as, "Something's really odd." Sure, we think. You don't say.

Surrealistic fiction is so often not given its due since the bizarre and original happenings must, of necessity, supplant traditional storyline and character development, thus distancing readers emotionally. But for those readers who have achieved intellectual maturity and originality of thought, surrealistic fiction offers insights surely lacking in more mainstream works.

In Kangaroo Notebook, Kobo Abe takes us on a masterful, dizzyingly original romp to the razor-thin line between life and death, a theme-park of his own life and art.

Though not as successful in achieving its aims as The Woman in the Dunes, this is still an intriguing twilight-zone type of story. A young private investigator is set on the trail of a man who, we are led to believe, has run away from his wife. The only clues are a torn piece of paper with a sketched map of where he last met someone in connection with his work. But as he carries out his investigation everything gets more and more uncertain, rather than becoming clearer. Each person he comes into contact with at the beginning of his investigation has an identity, a relation of some sort to someone else in the story, but as events unfold, each and every one of them becomes clouded in a mini-mystery of their own, until, after falling into the hands of the wrong people and receiving one hell of a beating, even the hapless investigator, who has by now lost his job and livelihood, loses his ow! n identity and is left wandering off we know not where. In some sense The Ruined Map is an attempt at a reversal of the psychological drama of The Woman in the Dunes. Rather than re-establishing his identity and fitting in in a totally bizarre environment, our hero drops out of an environment he is familiar with and apparently loses all sense of his own identity. While it is convincing, I feel that my liking for Abe's weird world is all that got me through the middle section of this book, though the odd beginning and the truly chaotic ending are very enjoyable. I suggest reading this one first before going on to The Woman in the Dunes which is all round a better read.

Kobo Abe, one of the greatest surrealistic novelists, liked to depict, with the precise calculation and unconstrained freedom of mind that Picasso gave his work, entangled and precarious relatiionships between an individual and the society to which he "belongs". In "The Ruined Map", Kobo Abe casts spotlight on his lifelong motif from a different angle. Unlike his other books such as "The Box Man" and "Kangaroo Note", "The Ruined Map" is based on a relatively realistic situation. Almost all characters act apparently normally, and there seems to be nothing that makes us question sanity in the situation that surrounds them. The hero, who is a private investigator, is asked to find a young woman's husband who suddenly disappeared several months ago. He tries to find "rational explantions" of her husband's abrupt disapearance, but however, the notion of rationality soon traps him, challenging his conventional understanding of the relationship between an individual and the society. Kobo Abe explores his unique conception of identity with more restrained techniques of surrealism than in his most famous work "The Women in the Dunes". Yet, an insightful reader should realize that Abe ingeniously embedded the surrealistic subject in a realistic setting.

Having read Abe's "Woman in the Dunes" (a masterpiece) already, I was expecting a strange story filled with odd characters and challenging situations. However, I felt that the book wasn't as tightly written as I expected. He changes perspective and has some characters that meld together which are confusing. There didn't seem to be a satisfactory explanation of the character's motivation or actions. There is also a bizarre sexual element that doesn't seem to pay-off. The book is an interesting read, but I would recommend that you read "Women in the Dunes" as it is a far better novel.

The hospital is a labyrinth of human depravity. A man wanders through it searching for his wife, constantly assaulted by odd and insane sights, sounds, and people. Written with mind piercing clarity and description.

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.

Story of a man preparing for that dark day of the apocalypse. The Ark itself was prepared to be a safe haven if/when it occured. The main character is a very interesting character. He seems nice, yet obesessed with Doomsday.

This in turned affects the rest of the other characters, and eventually persuaded them into thinking that the end has come while inside....

Why did Abe call it the Ark "sakura?" I believe that it elegantly captured the theme of deceiving others, and the dangers of believing such lies. And yet, sakura also means cherry blossom, which suggests something beautiful, lovely and fragile. Perhaps Kobo wished to show us how life is so beautiful and fragile, but yet somehow needs deception in order to be shown its value. And the preciousness of life, that we all must cherish.

*********************

sakura* decoy

sakura cherry blossom; cherry tree

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.

I've loved most of the Abe that I've read, but this one was terrible. The "philosophical musings" mentioned by one reviewer are complete BS. The main character constantly reads deep philosophical meaning into things that are very straightforward. Don't waste your money on this--read The Woman in the Dunes or Kangaroo Notebook instead.

Not one of the truly great novels, no doubt (and there are so few), but outstanding and amazing, nonetheless. Recommended, despite philosophical musings of a gratuitous density and complexity -- at times, quite beyond full comprehension.

I initially found this novel hard to respect since the central theme of a man and his mask seemed trite and a cliche. However this setup does allow the novel's main character to seduce his wife, posing as a stranger; a strange social situation which was described with much empathy and insight by Abe.