Kitabın üslubu, biçimi ve olaylar hakkında sitenin gediklileri zaten yeterince şey yazmış. Ben Kobo Abe'nin okuduğum diğer kitabı Kumların Kadını ile Kutu Adam'ın bende uyandırdığı ortak duyguya değinmek istiyorum: Kaçınılmaz sondan kaçmaya çalışmak.
Her iki kitapta da karakterin yapmak istediği bir iş var. Bunlar bir yerden kaçmak, kendisine dayatılan şartlardan kurtulmak veya başka faydalar için kendi kimliğinden sıyrılmaya çalışmak -kutudan çıkmak- gibi şeyler. Karakter sürekli kendi kendine çok yakında istediği şeyi yapacağını telkin ediyor. Bunun için hamlelerde bulunuyor. Gerekli imkanları bir araya getirmeye uğraşıyor ama hep bir mani çıkıyor. Elbiseler kurumuyor, kaçış için bulunan çareler işe yaramıyor...
Bir debdebe sürerken aslında farkediyoruz ki kendine bile itiraf etmese de aslında karakterimiz yapmak istediği şeyi hep erteleyerek bir şekilde aslında içinde bulunduğu durumdan gizlice -ve suçlu hissederek keyif alıyor. Kaçmak istemiyor, Kutuadamlığı seviyor.

Romanlar farklı bitsede ben bu rahatsız gibi görünen ama suçluca sevilen durumdan kurtulmayı içten içe ertelemek hissini çok yoğun hissediyorum okurken. Düşününce de kendi hayatımda bol bol örneğini buluyorum. Finallere çalışmak gerekirken etrafı temizlemek. Yürümeyen ilişkiyi bitirmek gerektiğini bilirken hep bir bahane arayışı. Spora yeniden başlanacak olan gelecek haftanın hiç gelmemesi...

such a cool premise ruined by your typical japanese classic literature misogyny & weird male gaze... only finished because i had nothing else to read on a 12-hour flight and because hot viennese architect gave it to me

absolute nightmarish distortion. reading kobo abe always feels like you're scrolling through the scribbles of a senile outcast. i believe that the box man best reinforces the type of distorted surrealism abe strives for. an unsettling examination of the freedom and transparency, of the tangible and intangible. loved it, an automatic fave

Abandoned at 34%.

I found this really intriguing at the beginning, but there's such a thing as too weird. The Box Man is like finding some random pages torn out of the diary of a very troubled person, reading them, and afterwards having a fragmented nightmare in which you simultaneously inhabit and observe an unfamiliar body. Interesting, yes, but not exactly pleasurable. It's oddly impenetrable: quite easy to read, yet I felt like I wasn't taking anything in except some exhaustively dull descriptions of a woman getting naked, the protagonist's leg fetish, and hysterically serious repetition of ideas about 'box men'. (Actually, I think this was part of my issue. The box man thing itself. The concept has no internal logic, and doesn't make any sense within the story, never mind without.) Also, the more I read, the more I realised that things I initially assumed to be quirks of the narrator's voice were more likely errors in the translation.

Madrecita de mi vida, Abe, que libro más jodídamente extraño te marcaste.

A decir verdad, creo que ni debería puntuarlo, pero, como pese a la rareza, me ha resultado sumamente gratificante, pues ahí van mis cuatro estrellas.

hmm nz isk
ima lepe izjave i ono sto ja mislim da je ideja knjige je iskreno super medjutim realizaciju ne kapiram, na trenutke se prelazi sa jednog dogadjaja na drugi i onda se vraca nazad i nekako se spajaju dogadjaji i likovi i odjednom ima jos likova i samo je malo sizo onako
volela bih da je procitam opet, mozda je nisam dobro shvatila
ali svidela mi se
5.4/10

Damn--

J-Lit Binge #11: The Box Man by Kobo Abe.

This is another masterpiece from Kobo Abe. In its sheer metafictional ingenuity, it probably surpasses Nabokov's Lolita, Danielewski's House of Leaves, and other tricksters of modernism.

Damn.

Seemingly, it's a story about a man wearing a cardboard box getting involved in a mysterious series of events involving a beautiful nurse he falls in love with, a fake doctor who wants to become the new box man, and a real doctor who is a drug addict and who is killed (with his consent) by the fake doctor.

And things get all weird as it seems like the "book" is written by the fake doctor and then the real doctor. Then the "author" returns to the original voice and starts rambling, asking the reader rather incoherently to find out who was NOT the box man instead of who was the box man. Things get even more confusing as events seem to happen out of chronological order and there are these footnotes inserted by someone...

The story ends more or less abruptly and you're left to wonder what just happened and WHO wrote the story. Of course, the book is meant to be read more than once and it's supposed to make sense.

So I cheated and looked up. It's crazy how many tricks the author manages to squeeze into this seemingly simple, short story (clocking at 230 pages, which would probably be about 100 pages in US-size books).

First, there are these discrepancies and contradictions throughout the text, and the reader can figure out when the author is lying. The rules of good detective fiction applies to the book. So for example, all the clues are given to the reader. As a realist story, any ridiculous things—like the claim that there are countless box men in the country—cannot be true. The footnotes that describe the pen's ink and handwriting, for example, cannot be false because they are specifically for the reader OUTSIDE the story.

This is a simple story with some crazy metafictional background stuff going on, and it's mind-blowing (and mind-muddling). Abe took six years in completing this and it makes sense. It's that complex and innovative.

Highly recommended, but only for those who like this kind of stuff.

A mystery-filled riff on the nature of identity, the significance of the gaze, the nature of looking and being looked upon and how this defines who we are.

The story is told primarily in the first person but we never know exactly who is doing the telling. Is it the box man (a man who, no surprise, lives in a box he has strapped on over his body so he cannot be seen), the fake box man (a doctor who tries on a box for himself and is a wannabe box man) or someone else - perhaps Kobo Abe who is obsessively scribbling this story on the inside of his own box?

There is a murder, or a suicide or an assisted suicide but we're never sure who the victim is or exactly what goes down.

There is a menage à trois between the box man, the fake box man and a seductive nurse who allows these men to gaze upon her in various states of undress.

There are questions about what it means to be looked upon. How does it define who we are? If you're hidden in a box and nobody looks at you, what are you? Like the proverbial falling tree in the forest, if you're not seen, do you exist? Or does the box become a kind of coffin?

In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be someone who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at.

This is possibly Abe's craziest book, which is really saying something. Not necessarily best, as book:Secret Rendezvous|10004] is crazy AND highly coherent, but the ways in which this is flirts with incoherency are extremely interesting. It's got the odd, broken time-frame diary format of Rendezvous but in actually a more ambiguous and complex manner, while the actual story has been stripped back to what first seems sheer bizarre simplicity, but then becomes an echo chamber of variations. There are a few cogent plot organizations, if you dig, but it's really more experiential than that. This isn't necessarily a book to be dissected for clues so much as traveled through, getting jerked back and forth by all the narrative switchbacks and rug-pulling maneuvers.

Any, what's it actually about. As I said, simple:
Put on a box, disappear.

(Also about gaze, looking, being looked at. There's some arguably problematic theory in this, but the structure is so-self-undermining that it's hard to hold Abe accountable, exactly. There's a lot going on, better to just soak it in, reflect, consider.)

In retrospect, perhaps all Abe's books are actually about disappearances. About the thin corrugated cardboard barrier that doesn't always prevent us from falling out of our lives entirely and into some other mode of unheretofore imagined existence. This seems to be Abe at a pivotal point, reflecting all that came before or after in a sanely insane box labyrinth.

داستان متفاوتی بود
پایان مشخصی نداشت داستان مشخصی نداشت ولی داستان متفاپتی بود
این کتاب تو ایران به چاپ نرسید و کاملا تو داستان مشخص میشه چرا
اما تجربه متفاوتی که به نظرم برای کتابخون ها خوبه باهاش روبرو بشن
داستان توضبح نمیدم چون توضیحش مساوی با اسپویل کل کتابه

رواية غريبة جدا وجميلة في الوقت نفسه، قد تبعث في نفسك بعض التقزز، ولكن.. إن لم تستطع الرواية ذلك فما فائدة قرائتها؟

سبر آبي اغوار النفس البشرية وطبيعتها و"عرّاها" من جميع ثيايها الاجتماعية والغريزية ليصور لنا تحفة "معلّبة" جميلة تجعلك تعيد النظر في "عُريك"

انصح بها لمحبي المغامرات واللا مألوف فقط..

“Kutudan baktığın müddetçe hiçbir manzaradan usanmazsın.”
.
Birey olmayı,zaman ve mekandan bağımsız önce varlıklarına sinmiş tutkularıyla anlatıyor Kobo Abe.
Bir kutunun içinde yaşamın aslında dört duvarda yaşamaktan çok da farklı olmadığını~
.
Altını çizdiğim cümlelerin çokluğu bir yana; beni sürekli sorgulamaya itti Kutu Adam.
*İzlemek ve izlenilmek
*suçun ne zaman suç sayılacağı
*şeffaflık ve teşhir
*kişiler arasındaki sınırlar ve kutuplaşmalar
*ve aslında ne istediğimiz.. 'gerçekten' ne istediğimiz.
Kimliklerimizden, sorumluluklarımızdan, bizi biz yaptığını sandığımız ancak derinine indiğimizde aslında hiç de bize ait olmayan şeylerden sıyrılıp; bir kutuya sığmak münkün.
Sıkışmak ve çıkamamak pahasına.
Alabildiğine geniş çevremizde kullandığımız alan aslında bedenlerimiz kapladıkları alan değil mi?
Biz hacmimiz kadar var değil miyiz?
Yoksa hepimiz birer kutu insanlar mıyız?
.
Kobo Abe okunurken kendini açmayan bir yazar. Sayfalar birikip; kapandıkça geriye kalan ağırlığıyla yer ediniyor aklınızda. Çoğunlukla bir sivrisinek gibi kanınızı emercesine~

Çeviride Devrim Çetin Güven yer alıyor.Kendisinin ‘yengeç konserveleme gemisi’ndeki çevirisini çok sevmiştim! Ancak Abe’nin eserlerinde Barış Bayıksel ve Aydın Özbek çevirilerini kendime daha yakın hissettiğimi söylemeden geçemeyeceğim~
Kapak tasarımı ise sade olduğu kadar güzel! Aslı Sezer çalışması ~