Ugh finally done with this.

Technically this could be described as a Japanese crime/mystery, but without any sense of suspense or urgency. In case you were wondering, a mystery without suspense makes for a huge waste of times and a lot of boredom. Since the Japanese are generally a very stoic, calm culture I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that their perspective on crime would be similarly measured and controlled, but I wish I'd made that connection before starting (and thus, having to finish) this book.

Definitely a slog- a very painful slog of the narrators gradual loss of identity as he finds himself unequal to the task of solving a missing persons' case. If not for some of the intriguing descriptive language (I can only assume a byproduct of the Japanese to English translation) it would have been a total loss.

Not the genre for me at all.

The detectives insanity was more the storyline than the actual case he was trying to solve.

For me, the highlights of The Box Man had to do with the level of weirdness combined with a comment on identity and dropping-out of society. These themes come up often in the films I have seen based on Abe novels as well (Woman in the Dunes, Face of Another) Unfortunately, The Ruined Map is quite lacking in every way.

This time Abe presents us with a fairly straightforward mystery. There are a couple of diversions into bizarre Japanese underworld territories, but overall these didn't really capture my attention. In fact, I am sad to say, that I was often quite bored while reading this, and found my mind often wandering onto unrelated subjects. The characters were flat, the sexiness felt forced, and the "shocker" moments could hardly rouse any emotion. It was by no means a terrible book, just not Abe at the top of his game, and sure to be very forgettable.

The biggest mystery contained in this novel is why E Dale Saunders felt it was necessary to translate it into English. The book follows an unnamed detective on a missing persons case that leads him to such savory encounters as with the leader of a male prostitution ring, a swarmy voyeur who commits suicide and the client without any personality who drinks in her house all day. The entire book is nausea-inducing. The writing is desciptive, but it is wasted on the mundane, the seedy urban filth of the industial outskirts and housing blocks of Tokyo. On top of that, the mystery is never solved. It is not even apparent if the clues he found were even real clues. The first person narrator seems to pass from depression and moral ambiguity into delerium and attempts to drag the reader down with him. Take heed: stay well away from this loser.

Not a novel for everyone, perhaps not even for all of those who have enjoyed Abe’s other works. Although much is described, little is explained or revealed; indeed, the twist in the narrative ribbon towards the end is, frankly, somewhat confusing (perhaps it was meant to be). A clever work that has, I think, over-reached itself.

So I picked up this book because it promised to be a mix of Kafka and Chandler. Kafka yes, Chandler no. I have no idea what happened in this book, but I could tell it had a lot more to do with how we perceive our place in a modern anonymous city than finding a missing husband.

One of most inviting aspects to reading The Ruined Map (1966) is that it is, essentially, a mystery novel. There is a desire harbored in the heart of every devotee of contemporary literature who began life as a fan of genre fiction, be it mystery, western, or science fiction; and that is to see an established literary master direct his skills to one's beloved genre, to enrich and redeem it with a creation that is elegant, thoughtful, and most of all, literary. The Ruined Map satisfies this craving for the mystery aficionado -- the protagonist is a detective and first-person narrator of the novel, and it begins with a missing persons form, filed by a wife in search of her husband.
But this is no simple mystery. The ruined map of the title is a symbol with multiple meanings. In one sense, it's the map leading the detective to his quarry; ruined because it is incomplete and must be interpolated with clues. In a broader sense, the map is a guide for living. Here, we again see the existentialist emerge -- of course, there is no absolute guide for living, and thus the map is ruined. Because the map is flawed, the detective cannot limit himself to safe places, and must adopt a trial and error approach to his explorations, wandering into unsavory and dangerous -- both physically and mentally locales.


"He says a single map for life is all you need. It's a saying of his. The world is a forest, a woods, full of wild beasts and poisonous insects. You should go only through places where everyone goes, places that are considered absolutely safe, he says."

The existence of the map is crucial because the detective does not have an internal compass and relies exclusively upon the external guidance provided by the map. Ultimately, we see that the ruination of the map causes a loss of orientation and eventually identity itself. Due to its incompleteness, the map is incapable of providing direction to the detective, and he becomes lost. This first loss is gradually followed by a second, more profound loss -- that of self. We see finally that reliance on a map to give us direction is doomed, because a complete, absolute map does not exist, and any attempts to assemble one are inherently flawed and impossible.

Virane Harita için İsa Darakcı'nın aşağıdaki linkte yer alan K24'teki yazısını okumasaydım içine biraz gizem katılmış sıradan bir dedektif hikayesi diyebilirdim. Film noir türünün güzel bir örneği olan hikaye benim için bu yazı ile anlamlı hale geldi.

*ilgilenenler için link
https://t24.com.tr/k24/kitap/virane-h...

I decided to read The Ruined Map because I came across it in a charity shop and respected the weirdness of Abe's The Ark Sakura (without enjoying it). Although The Ark Sakura is apocalyptic scifi and The Ruined Map ostensibly a noir mystery, I found the latter stranger and more baffling. It was hard to read, in fact. The conventional setup of a private detective investigating a disappeared husband becomes disorientating and existential as any clue only produces more mysteries. The detective narrates his explorations of seedy locales and shifty people in first person, with a tone that starts deadpan and gradually lapses into bewilderment. Reality itself seem to be collapsing.

Now he is standing here, balancing the weight of unfulfilled dreams with what he has lost. What will he do? I search and fumble for him... but in vain. This blackness I am seeking is after all merely my own self... my own map, revealed by my brain. I am the one standing here, not he. Properly speaking, the place where I should be standing is not here but in front of the board fence around the constuction site from which the window of my wife's room is visible. I stand trembling, seeking the window of a stranger who has only the accidental relationship with me of being my client.

I think the above is hallucination brought on by head injury, possibly concussion? By the end, I was reminded of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, which also tore the mystery genre into confetti, and Martin McInnes' Infinite Ground, which I much preferred as it transforms a missing person mystery into ecological fiction. I found The Ruined Map so incomprehensible that I wonder whether something was lost in translation. It's also highly plausible I'm lacking necessary the social and spatial context of 1960s Japan to unravel its meaning. Honestly, it's atmospheric but I understood absolutely nothing.

I seem to be picking pretty disorienting books lately. I have always wanted to read Abe and this was my first pick. On the surface, the story seems simple enough. A beautiful, enigmatic, alcoholic woman hires a private detective who is also the narrator, to find her missing husband. With a lack of concrete clues and unreliable witnesses, and aided only by a "ruined map" the narrator begins his investigation. But soon, facing an existential crisis, the narrator begins to question his identity and probably ends up insane?

If you think that sounds ok, you should read Abe's prose. Dark, twisted, confusing, meandering, magical, mystical - you are frequently re- reading sentences and trying to assimilate what you just read. And towards the end of the book you are left wondering whether any of it was truth or fact. Was the woman true or was she lying? Was her brother complicit with the husband or wasn't he? Is the narrator insane and in his insanity imagining himself to be the missing man or is the last part of the story actually narrated by the husband?

Through all this Abe also explores themes of live, truth, sexuality and violence. My only issue with the book was that the narrative seemed broken in places. Sentences ended abruptly. Scenes shifted without warning. Could be a narrative device of the author or probably a lot was lost in translation.

All in all a brilliant book and definitely a book that will make you read it again and again and each time it will surely show you something you hadn't noticed before.

I've never read a novel so overly descriptive yet vague at the same time. The nameless private eye would spend paragraphs describing the angle of an object in relation to the rest of the room, and yet I didn't have much of a grasp on what was going on half the time. I know that's partially the intent here, to leave the reader disoriented, but I was never able to fully become absorbed into the story, as often there was nothing substantial for me to latch onto, and sometimes no transition from one scene to the next. That so many of the characters speak in non sequiturs did nothing to help me regain my footing.

Don't get me wrong, I love me some weirdness, even if it's just for weirdness' sake, but the fact that I never felt invested in anything that was happening resulted in pure boredom at various times. Maybe the fault lies in the fact that I treated this too much like a mystery to be solved, instead of just enjoying it for what it is: a strange, psychological exploration of identity, and the loss of identity. I will say, however, that the ending was very well done and made the previous 280-some arduous pages worth it in the end, if only just.

3.0 Stars

The beauty of Abe's prose is that it's so horrifically pedantic. It's a claustrophobic subjectivity devoid of the human element, or the world stripped bare then categorised and described according to its function. What Abe knows (and his narrators do not) is that there is always some evasive excess to worldly matter, and so when something in it changes the narrator becomes convinced it's conspiring to crack their brain in half. The Ruined Map works within the detective format because it is structurally conspiratorial. People and objects conceal their essence from the protagonist, and so the world recedes from comprehension the more it is uncovered.

A detective investigates a missing man. He likens new settlements to faded photo albums, the people in them as ghosts. He often stops to describe, at length, concrete and cockroaches. Abe rejects the orthodoxy of the suiri shōsetsu (deductive reasoning fiction) by disturbing deduction as a process, and corrupts the shakai ha (social school) by rendering social realism through the grotesque. His world shape-shifts and distorts, empties itself out and then rises to sudden clamorous violence. There is no grand conspiracy. For Abe all is entropy, and the only useful guide in a world unfixed is the ruined one. Words fail, thoughts fail, conversations sail over heads. He punishes the narrator for thinking he can make sense of the world, and the reader for thinking along with him.

While Abe is not the only author to use detective fiction to challenge its method, he does extend this epistemological pessimism to the human being in general. That is, the world as it is thought fails to touch the world as it is, and so as thinking beings we are fundamentally estranged from the world, and one another. For the author this is both a curse and an opening. He often spoke of a 'hometown phobia', or life-long suspicion of (social, political, epistemological) structures that promise stability, and which runs through all of his fiction. The Ruined Map is maddening by design and uncompromisingly bleak. But then it's manically comic, and in its depressive mania finds hope in derangement.