A very strange book by Kobo Abe. I can't help but feel like either the translation or the dialogue itself is dated or rote in some fashion. This seems to happen with a number of Abe's books: Woman in the Dunes, for example.

Not as strange as The Box Man, but still up there.

Uhhhhhhhhhhh it’s definitely a good book. I appreciated many of Kobo’s monologues about the main characters psychological feelings of sonder. Many of the thoughts expressed by the main character have once been expressed in my own mind. Very epic, cool, and beautifully written.

Best line: “Would you like to drink my piss?” - weird Japanese gang member inside a funeral hall

This is not a book for those that want the story's ending to have anything to do with the story. The Ruined Map is more or less an exercise in the construction and deconstruction of identity. The thing is, if a reader knows that and can accept that, the story, the writing, and the pace of this novel are all brilliant. Abe's descriptions are haunting, his fixations on repeating events of no importance are provoking, and what he does in the end--not just to his main character, but to his reader--is nothing short of brilliant.

Detective noir meets surrealism. Not sure about the translation here. The writing seemed very stilted in places.

I had a lot of trouble following this novel until I made a rough timeline and map (haha). I was surprised that it takes place over 4 days, with the meat of the action happening on the middle two days.

The characters in this book take on a game NPC-like quality, I think many were doubly-intended as a symbol in a fiddly social network of symbols. What I came to as an interpretation was this.

On Day 1, the detective enters the world of the novel and begins his investigation. On Day 2, the detective investigates places related to the missing husband, hindered by unhelpful characters. It ends in the brother's death in a chaotic fight scene set in a workers' encampment near a river.

Up to that point, the brother had been protecting the wife from the outside world. On Day 3, the detective becomes markedly more aggressive and unreasonable, maybe from the near-death experience at the riverside (a ghostly setting of aggression and pent-up oppression)

I think at this point it becomes clear that the story of the "social network" of the missing husband - comprising of: the wife, the wife's brother, Tashiro (the husband's co-worker) - that story can be read as an allegory on the detective's life up until the events of the story.

That is, on one level this book is a fairly fruitless investigation, but on another level the detective is following the disappearance of a husband who can be seen as analogous to the detective himself.

Some things that led to this interpretation - the wife decides to get a job AFTER the brother dies. The brother is strangely omnipresent and skilled, and always protective of the wife. The brother reads to me as an overly defensive force restraining another force (pick your interpretation - the book seems to point towards a worker's relation to the rat race of the quickly growing 1960s Tokyo.)

If we view those four characters as some aspect of the detective's mind - then Tashiro seems to be some kind of paranoid, obsessive, mad character who can't make up his mind on whether he's a liar or not, but ultimately exits the book via suicide.

With the brother dead, husband gone, wife more proactive, and Tashiro dead - the detective finally 'breaks free' from his Job as a detective (and his past as an office worker / husband of a fabric store owner). Removed from his job, the landscape he's in (where he began the investigation) becomes meaningless. Without social context or motivation, any given city space becomes a collection of mostly random signs and people.

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Days 1/2 and 3/4 neatly divide the book in half. I found the "NPCs" that the detective meets on day 3 - his ex-wife, a Taxi driver, the paranoid Tashiro, a Highway, and a Funeral, to be pretty interesting Meeting the ex-wife gives context to the detective's past and what he broke away from, the Taxi driver speaks loosely about people finding new jobs or lives in the city (alluding to the missing husband and the detective's lives). Purposelessly driving on the Highway (but not escaping) is a visual setting with a handful of interpretations (there's no purpose for the detective outside the city, as long as he's a detective).

The places on Day 2 are more straightforward in the events that happen - offices, coffee shops, parking lots. I like that they feel like a 'regular detective story facade' to the more complicated settings of the book's second half. In a way, the contrast of locations here reminds me of my game Anodyne 1 and the contrast of the game's back half/deeper layer and the game's first half (which of course has origins in the 'deeper' areas of the game Yume Nikki vs. the immediately door-nexus-accessible areas).

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Overall, while I suppose what has happened and happens to the detective is bleak, the city portrayed is so detailed with its array of characters, that I feel like the detective is bound to find some kind of new life within the myriad of tiny social networks and layers.

Stylistically... I don't like this as much as Abe's later work. It's quite dark and detailed, most people speak strangely outside of some occasionally enlightening monologues, and it's really hard to remember where you are without drawing a map. There's not as much humor to lighten up the otherwise labyrinthine, foggy tone. Still, a really unique structure and layer of symbols, so I liked it!

A Japanese detective is looking for a missing person. To do so, he tries to get into the mind of the missing. He starts retracing his steps, and starts living the life of his quarry.

Odd, but captivating.

Novela escrita por el japonés Kobo Abe y publicada en 1967, El mapa calcinado contiene las andanzas obsesivas de un detective contratado para encontrar a un oficinista desaparecido misteriosamente en las afueras de su departamento. A sueldo por la esposa del desaparecido sujeto, el detective sin nombre se encontrará en una extraña misión en donde la minuciosidad, la exasperación y el análisis llevado al absurdo serán los elementos recurrentes que lo acompañarán en una investigación que subterráneamente desarrolla interesantes reflexiones acerca de la relación ambigua que se origina entre la búsqueda de la verdad (si es que la hay) y la subjetividad y la interpretación de la realidad.

Cualquier elemento, sujeto o lugar sirven al investigador para desarrollar las hipótesis aparentemente lógicas que puedan ayudarle a dar con el paradero del desaparecido y por consecuencia finalizar el trabajo encomendando. Sin embargo, estas suposiciones, a medida que son desarrolladas y contrastadas con la "realidad", reportan una acentuada deformación de aquellos recursos que le otorgaban validez y por ende calidad de pista, las que sumadas a las extrañas circunstancias en las que se ve inmerso el investigador, insuman a una historia que va más allá del género del que se vale para presentar la trama y que en el camino lo resignifica a la luz de los temas que presenta Abe.

Un gran acierto de Kobo Abe.

The Ruined Map is a tough call. As a labyrinthine mystery book, the book presents the job of a private detective looking for a woman's lost husband; here, Kobo Abe demonstrates his ability to write well yet another genre of books. As a carrier of the internal anguish of the modern man, this same book becomes often impenetrable; here, the author has failed to make his language fully comprehensible. To conclude, an interesting but difficult read.

Bara fín sko :) ég var alveg hrifinn

An interesting translation and fun story. I especially liked the ending, which, for me, can make or break an entire story's spell.

Este libro tiene un lugar especial en el infierno para mí. No me gusta decir esto de un libro, pero lo odié.
Es de esos libros que me hizo cuestionar si no era yo la equivocada porque tiene un muy buen puntajes y hay reseñas que lo hacen ver como una obra maestra. Pero no sé, simplemente no puedo coincidir con nada de lo que le destacan. Y lo lamento mucho por el autor porque es considerado un maestro de la literatura pero dudo mucho alguna vez leer otro libro suyo. Simplemente prefiero leer cualquier cosa menos algo suyo después de esto.
La trama está bien, pero el final lo vi venir a kilómetros, y no es de esos que aun así me encanta cuando llegan porque tienen un algo especial.
No voy a ser tan dura criticando la pluma del autor porque leí una traducción, aunque se supone que leí una especialmente fiel al estilo del autor. Solo voy a decir que no es llevadera su lectura y tiene rebusques a mi parecer innecesarios.
No lo recomiendo salvo si conocen al autor y lo aman con profunda devoción.

Once she glanced over toward me, but she could probably make out nothing in this narrow, dark crevice. I continued to conceal myself as I watched her. She looked up worriedly at the sky, searching. I continued to wait intently, choking back my screams behind clenched teeth. Nothing would be served by being found. What I needed now was a world I myself had chosen. It had to be my own world, which I had chosen by my own free will. She searched; I hid. At length she began walking slowly away as if she had given up; suddenly she was cut off from view by a car and was already gone. I too left my crevice in the darkness and began walking in the opposite direction. I began walking, relying on a map I did not comprehend. I began walking in the opposite direction from her … perhaps in order to reach her.