During my impoverished student years, I used to work at a local grocery store to meet ends. It was about two blocks away from my house. Everyday, my walks to work included terrifying encounters with a raggedy woman brimming with delusional paranoia of the world ending amid armageddon showers; her constant yelling was eerie and scared the daylights out of me.

Enter the world of 'Mole'- a middle-aged, stout man who stays true to his nickname; dwelling in an abandon stone-quarry in an obscure landscape away from civilization. He is a poster child for misanthropy and delusional paranoia. A self-confessed "Noah", presumes to build an ark to save mankind from future nuclear holocaust. Unlike Noah, I deem that his celestial prophecies were strictly induced from large amount of caffeine that he guzzled along with cheap beers. So, with the mirage of being "the savior", he goes on a monthly excursion to the malls to recruit the choicest specimens (people) who he finds worth giving a ticket to his futuristic ship. During one of his outings he assembles a trio- an insect seller, and a couple of shills. The group ultimately lands in the stone quarry and an onset of surreal and macabre atmosphere reveals the incongruous circumstances. The rest of the manuscript discusses an array of topics from old age in the form of the Broom Brigade, environmentalism, survival, murder, allegiance, sex, humanity and nuclear devastation.

The vocabulary commences strongly with personalized characterization of every actor, revealing idiosyncrasies with gritty metaphors making the individuals authentic thriving in their recluse milieu. The insect seller-Komono, who trades these paper-like fictitious insects-‘eupcaccia’, find affinity towards Mole; identifying these insects to be a placard of his own misanthropic lifestyle. Lacking friends or family, Mole compares himself to the eupcaccia, a fictional self-contained bug that feeds on its own feces. The concept of alienation shines with every passage giving a deep sense of the hermit life-styles and an acquired misanthropic quality with the fear of being ridiculed.

Abe’s bringing into play of creatures to be a metaphor to human life can be seen in his other book 'Woman in Dunes' correlating the mechanism of creepy-crawly manners to human philosophy.
"Take the anthropoids, which are thought to share a common ancestor with the human race. They exhibit two distinct tendencies: one is to make groups and build societies—the aggrandizing tendency—and the other are for each animal to huddle in its own territory and build its own castle —the settling tendency. For whatever reason, both these contradictory impulses survive in the human psyche. On the one hand, humans have acquired the ability to spread across the earth, thanks to an adaptability superior even to that of rats and cockroaches; on the other, they have acquired a demonic capability for intense mutual hatred and destruction."

Kobo Abe a proficient in surrealism and absurdity lacks lucidity in this particular manuscript. The assembly of classic outcasts and uncanny personality is quiet attention-grabbing with little quirks spilling from every character’s movements through the coherent narration. However, with introduction of new characters and embellishments of senseless jargon, the tale turns into this muddled cauldron of jumbling and irksome recitation.

Through endless yawns and blank stares, I eventually drifted building my own castle in the sky with flying ponies.

It was good. I don't think my favourite of Abe's. I found myself getting bored towards the end of the story, even when there was a little more action with the intruders and toilet situation. Still obscure and surrealist though, which I enjoyed. The Ark was an interesting design.



The ending.................................................I was left wondering why everything was transparent. My thought - was it that he was no longer living in the 'mole hill' without sun?


I can't find it now, but I liked the line about society needing all to function.

I wanted to like this book. But it was just weird.
The setting is cool but the characters are odd and the whole thing feels claustrophobic. There are plenty of other Japanese authors that you can sink your teeth into.

This book was hard to get through and hard to like. While perhaps intentionally surreal and nightmarish, I found very little interesting in this novel and don't have much I think I'll take away.

Cw for mentions of rape, sexual harassment, incessant fat shaming

خواندن كتاب خوب در زمان نامناسب باعث ميشه حس من به اين كتاب ٣ از ٥ باشه

I gave it 50 pages and it didn't grab me. Maybe I need to try another translator or maybe this author is not for me.

What the Flip?

3 1/2* Dadaist literature I think. The absurdist concepts and characters and behaviors create a lightly disturbing story that seems to have portentous meaning. The understandable anxiety of the Japanese about the threat of nuclear war and the consequent end of society has directed so much of their post WWII intellectual literature (and film) to the end that one cannot be certain if the behaviors described in this story are meaningful of themselves or are a sort of satirical distortion of the culture that emerged in the immediate decades after the bomb. Our protagonist seems envious of the life of a putative insect that spends it all circling around on its belly, consuming and dropping its own feces. This is a pretty dour model for life so one can suspect that it is actually a comment on how people generally live. By the way, "Sakura" we find is the Japanese word for cherry blossom used as slang for shills. Who is the true shill in this story? Is the author just having us on?

Getting your foot stuck in the toilet for a fourth of the book is pretty good but he should have been a lot more embarrassed in the front of the girl

Japanese Kafka, kinda. Weird but I like it.

This is my third attempt at reading Abe, and after being disappointed by one and the other just being kind of 'meh,' I was very hesitant to give him another shot. I couldn't be more pleased by my decision to give him another chance, The Ark Sakura is the kind of bizarre surrealist novel I was hoping to get from his other books. It definitely reminded me of Murakami, but with a lot more cynicism and caffeine pumped in. The book could have had a bit more finesse to it, as it felt a bit meandering at times, but otherwise I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a strange story about our potential impending doom and toilets.

i don't know what to think about it to be honest, but it really didn't live up to my expectations and it was hard to get through personally