Heavily entrenched as it is in misogyny and fatphobia which belongs indiscernably to Mole as a character or the Author, this book offers a lot to think about with regards to how space, place, and system works. So, naturally, even though I hated most of the characters (something, granted, which I think is intentional on Abe's part), I couldn't help but keep reading this book. There are some very poignant, interesting investigations in The Ark Sakura.

But, I was advertised Science fiction. I was advertised Kafka, Poe. This is definitely not science fiction (though perhaps scientifically oriented historical fantasy at best), and the unease which it cultivates it (with the exception of a frw scenes) does not achieve gracefully or through framing, but content. Rape is uncomfortable; I was made uncomfortable. Distributing high school girls as glorified sex slaves to old men is uncomfortable; it made me uncomfortable. Shit (as in excrement) is gross; talking about it heavily made me uncomfortable. Crazy how that happens.

Ultimately, if I wanted to engage with a cartoonish preemptice depiction of a redditor, I'd have just stayed on reddit.

Onvan : The Ark Sakura - Nevisande : K��b�� Abe - ISBN : 679721614 - ISBN13 : 9780679721611 - Dar 352 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 1984

3.5
This was my first Kōbō Abe and it was a very surreal. A recluse called Mole who lives underground decides he needs some crew for his 'ship' which can become self supporting once the nuclear apocalypse happens. From the very start he struggles to control what happens, who his crew might be, what they think should happen and what actually happens. It felt like very little happened for a lot of the book, a number of characters tell strange anecdotes that go on for pages and then suddenly the characters seem to jump around.

I did find the treatment of the girl irritating and the predicament of the junior high school girls very worrying. I would be intrigued to read more Abe and see whether some of his other female characters are treated similarly.

Also there is a giant toilet. Don't ask.

No idea why Penguin decided this might be Science Fiction but it wasn't worth it for me. The juvenile main character was annoying and the plot meandered to nowhere

My goal for 2025 is to read 110 books with about two-thirds of those being science fiction (hopefully of a higher quality than in 2024), with an emphasis on translated fiction across the genre-board because I believe real literary diversity comes from different cultures and languages. I thought that Kobo Abe's *The Ark Sakura* would go towards both my "read significant science fiction" and "read translated fiction" goals because it was published in Penguin's gorgeous purple paperback Science Fiction Classics reprint line, but it turns out that it's not science fiction at all; it's literary fiction which deals with themes of modernity which border upon themes tackled by science fiction, but it's not the real deal. That doesn't change how good the book is, but it does make the book a bit weirder and stand out a bit more - if you're looking for something screwy and surreal, this is a tale for you. If you need a little more convincing, well... here's my summary, with spoilers clearly marked, and critique to follow.

*The Ark Sakura* is about a man who calls himself Mole who lives in a complex inside a mountain which had been carved into a bunch of different quarries by a bunch of different mining companies over the years. He lives there not only to stay away from his father (who punished him after he was wrongly accused of rape as a twelve-year old by chaining him in this same quarry) but to build it up as a self-sufficient "ship" which is meant to help humanity survive the nuclear apocalypse which Mole knows is on the horizon. One day he's travelling into town and hits up an amateur market and ends up trading a ticket onto his ship to an insect dealer who's peddling "clockbugs" (a made-up insect that is said to spend its own life moving in a circle to eat its own excrement, a lifestyle which Mole feels sums the culture he envisions), but a couple of passes end up in the hands of two department store "shills" (planted buyers). Mole and the insect dealer, who's skeptical of the whole thing, rush to beat the shills to the ark. Mole is nervous because he's booby-trapped the whole ship (if you pull this draw you get a face full of insecticide, these stairs are meant to make you slip down, etc), and he doesn't want the shills dying. Luckily, even though they arrived there before him and the insect dealer, they're only past the bottom of the main entryway's stairs, and the girl feigns having a broken ankle after having slipped down said steps. There's a lot of tension in the room, but they end up eating some food and getting shown the toilet. A power struggle for the girl starts seething across the men, and then, maybe halfway through the book, the male shills disappears and returns swearing that he saw someone...

Mole thinks this person may be one of the Broom Brigade, the fraternity of old men who clean the city outside and dump their trash near the ship. The male shill and them hunt around the ship for a little while, and little logical inconsistencies pile up until Mole's old friend calls him with a job: to dispose of a body down his toilet. This wouldn't be his first disposal job - he'd flushed some harmful chemicals down it for the Broom Brigade at one point before he found out the Brigade is being led by the very father who abused him as a child - and when his father calls, he (who thinks he has the other three people's loyalty as they call him "Captain") sends the insect dealer and the male shill to negotiate for him, but while they're gone he gets his foot stuck in the toilet due to his obesity and the vacuum under the toilet which he doesn't know how to control. The man and his old friend come back with his father's dead body in tow, and as the insect dealer shows up with a Broom Brigade lieutenant (he killed their leader so now he's in charge) he reveals how the Broom Brigade's teenage punk enemies led a bunch of junior high girls into the ark and are lost. They want to rescue and keep the girls so they can procreate in the ark after it gets sealed off due to nuclear apocalypse. The insect dealer is considering amputating Mole's leg so they can flush stuff down the toilet, and even though Mole seems to have the shills' loyalty, he triggers a grand explosion to seal the ship off from the outside world, and then escapes through a secret passageway, letting the others (except for the shills, who choose to stay anyways) think that nuclear holocaust has already happened....

This is a pretty thematic book, and Abe's themes probably matter more than the prose, the characters, or the plot. I'm not exactly sure at everything he was getting at, but I'm pretty sure it has to do with isolation (Mole is a social outcast, as much due to his fault as anybody's), survival, and the nature of reality and perception. This is a surrealist work, and a lot of what's happening on the surface doesn't quite make sense, but Abe shows his thematic hand early on when he introduces us to the clockbugs, a bug whose metabolism and lack of movement go hand in hand with Mole's desire to simply survive without really going anywhere; a summation of what life in the ark would be like. I'm not exactly sure about what Abe's deepest thematic core was drawing from, but that also might be because he's from a different culture. Some of Japenese culture's way of life on the novel was pretty straightforward (the extreme nuclear paranoia caused by Nagasaki and Hiroshima, etc), but I do feel like something about this novel's deep unreality wasn't quite translated to me. That's okay, though, because Abe was a good enough writer to make it feel worth my time no matter what.

Abe's writing made it worth my while too; he's a very smooth, contemporary writer whose prose was quite readable despite all of the zany stuff going on, and he has two big tricks up his sleeve. The first is his use of Mole's first-person point-of-view, which I'm not usually a huge fan of. Abe makes sure that we hear his thought processes and understand why he acts the way he does while never showing his hand too early; there are bits of his backstory that are well-placed throughout the story which are never infodumped, and there's also a lacking of finality with what he thinks. He's an unreliable narrator, but Abe isn't so crude as to wink and nod around that fact. He simply evades the cold, hard, truths in a way that leads you guessing what he knows until the very end, and yet also never lets you feel *disconnected* from Mole; Abe also uses this first-person perspective to effortlessly mix in strange and contemporary allusions, similes, and metaphors (his second trick) which weren't alienating to read as an American but did still give things a nice hint of flavor you wouldn't otherwise have.

I feel like I've written down a lot of sweet nothings, so far, since this book's plot is kind of hard to talk about. That's in part because there are quite a few nuanced inconsistencies which make the story seem like it's setting something up that, frankly, never comes to fruition. For example, at one point the shills mention that they actually came into the ark through a back entrance instead of the front one they'd use the key for, but then why did Mole and the insect dealer find them feigning injury at the bottom of the front entrance? Each shill also tells Mole in private that the other has terminal cancer and only has six months to live; this is not how normal people operate. There's also a lot of doubt about the Broom Brigade and the street punks, where the junior high girls ended up, and who disabled all the traps or how one in particular was disabled without a trace of, say, a small rodent that could've done it. All these little quirks pile up and make you think that some big reveal is coming at the end book, especially since the first chunk of it seems so unreal with the insect dealer and the shills and even the Broom Brigade lieutenant all calling Mole "Captain," like there's some kind of inside joke going on. I was really excited to see how it ended, and even though the surrealist absurdity of the Broom Brigade and the street gang unraveled quite nicely, it just didn't seem congruent with the first chunk of the book, and while that sense of purposelessness might just be part of Abe's whole schtick, I would've been perfectly happy with a bit more meat on the bones.

Still, it kept me engaged; At times it almost seemed like a thriller novel as reality was breaking down! So between what I enjoyed about the book and what was just... there... I'd give it a 7/10. It's a good book, and it's well done, and I recommend it, but beyond being able to laugh with my friends about some of the wild crap that happens here and being able to say a little something about Japanese literature, I don't think I'm taking a whole lot away with me from this read. Maybe it deserves a 7.5... but that's neither here nor there. I do have a few more translated novels from the Penguin Science Fiction series to read (those would be *We* and *Trafalgar*, and I'm really looking forward to the latter), so I hope to see you when I review those. Otherwise, take care, and - as long as you can manage it with doomsday looming large - enjoy your reading.

3.5 ish ?

I really enjoyed this book. It reads much like Murakami without the magic.

Took me forever to read and ended up being really disappointing. The beginning is amazing and I will still look back on it fondly as it’s pretty secluded from the rest of the book, but honestly by the end I had absolutely no clue what was happening. I think the writing does a bad job at conveying what is happening on the page (but does a great job at explaining the MC’s inner thoughts). I think a lot of Abe Kobo books start off great and end less great, so this wasn’t that surprising but I don’t think I’ve seen a drop off this intense before.

3.5 stars, leaning 4.

A truly bizarre tale.

Sold as “science fiction” which is misleading - it’s much more absurdism. Recommended only for fans of Murakami, Kafka and Ionesco (importantly, fans of all three!).

Mole, the unlikeable, undesirable and unsociable protagonist, has built an “ark” (nuclear bomb shelter) in an abandoned quarry/mine. It’s booby-trapped to high hell. He issues an invitation to a bug dealer to join him, and two other invitations are stolen by two shills. The four of them enter the ark but soon suspect they are not alone. This is the last point in the story with any grounding in realism.

There is an all-important toilet, chemical waste, an old-person-only volunteer cleaning committee, father-son tension, casual sexism, sweet potatoes, and so much more. It’s a delirium, growing more and more grotesque and fantastical and absurd through-out the book, and entirely narrated by the emotionless, distanced, poorly socialised Mole. Every last character is repulsive but instead of being horrified, I found myself reading compulsively with sick fascination.

I’d like to read a commentary on what 1980s Japan was like - fear of nuclear war, sexual culture, and conformism - to understand this better.

At some point in this book it began to be evident that the characters, however fictitious, very likely do represent the way the author views the world. And it was way too distracting. At first I just accepted that Mole, the Insect Dealer and the Shill were all very sexist. But after the umpteenth time reading about their thoughts and actions towards the one woman in this book, without any tonal objections in the writing, I couldn't help but assume that Kobo Abe felt the same way as his characters: that women were simply bodies, specifically asses, meant to be grabbed, spanked, and objectified; and that it was all done to assert male dominance over the one female character. It was very frustrating to read.

And the writing itself was bothersome at times, though part of that could just be the translation. Abe relied so heavily on long, overdrawn similes and metaphors that didn't really help describe anything more clearly. The book was rife with them, but here are two frustrating examples just a page apart:

"Like a signboard torn off in a sharp gust of wind, she flew over to the bottom of the stairs and snatched up the crossbow."

And:

"War? What war? asked the girl. Curiosity made her voice rise and fall like a kitten arching it's back."

Any these were nowhere near the worst of them. It almost began to feel like filler, and it just threw me out of the text each time. I got so frustrated toward the end of the book that I figured I should copy down two of the ones in front of me.

Interesting subject, and a surreal moodiness, that could've been decent if it weren't for so many distractions, blatant sexism, and poor execution.

The Ark Sakura follows a man, who refers to himself as The Mole due to his burly, short stature and the fact that his habitation is in the tunnels under a large mountain, who finds himself entangled with an insect dealer and two shills/sakuras - people who are in the business of attracting customers to businesses in their own discreet ways. He's sorta looking for passengers to join him in his mountain ark should the world come to an end, but they'd have to be worthy of the position. The three people that he meets in the same day weren't the people he was expecting, but turned out to surprise him in different ways.

There isn't a pointed direction that the book heads in for the first half, and by the second half, it almost seems like everything is happening too much at once. The dynamics between the characters are somewhat comedically antagonizing and sometimes bleh (just imagine uninhibited men talking to a woman without any backlash), but it makes for an interesting proposal on what could happen by the end of the book. If it were a movie, I'd watch it.

Great creativity bogged down by casual sexism! <3
I enjoyed the main characters tonality <3