Book Review: "The Ruined Map" by Kōbō Abe

In comparison to the other Kōbō Abe books I have read, “The Ruined Map” may be a great concept, but I feel like it is not as well written as the others. With putting “The Box Man” at the most probable top and next coming “Secret Rendezvous”, this book is going to come at a safe third because of the fact that I did not feel the same sense of existential unpredictability and socially motivated self closure that I got from the other novels. This novel was more or less an original storyline of noir/criminal nature closer to the novels written by Haruki Murakami than the books he had written previously. However, the book still identifies with his two previous books in the sense that it is written is a style that can confound the reader quite a bit when reading it for the first time.

The storyline is, as I have previously said, a good concept. With only two, conceptually superficial items in order to find someone off, there seems to be a great amount of expansion to make the storyline very interesting as a cross between noir crime and dramatic surreal literature.

Here are some quotations that I thought were incredibly interesting in the book in order to commit to storyline and plot devices:

“And again, the dark street. The dark, dark street. The women out shopping for the evening meal of course, and baby carriage and the silver bicycle were already painted out by the darkness; most of the commuters too were already in place in their filing-drawer houses. A half-forsaken chasm of time .... ”

There is a great amount of atmosphere trapped within this beautiful quotation but honestly, it does not really depict any aspect of the characters that would possibly push the storyline forwards. It is giving us an image without depth. However, it is still a beautiful quotation. This is continuous throughout the novel and often, these images can crop up and then move on to something that is pretty much unrelated, making the reading experience a little stalled by atmosphere quotations that seemingly belong somewhere else.

“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…”

One thing that I thought was a risk in this novel was the use of the second person in a story which is seemingly about something else. Unlike “The Box Man” in which the narrator speaks directly to the reading for most of the novel, “The Ruined Map” does not and riskily takes the second person and pushes it into the narrative. This quotation is a good example of using the second person, but in other quotations it can seem shoe-horned in.

"If I could get them to take her at my wife's place, the membrane between the frog's toes would be even more beautiful--like purple rubber. What was broken? What was left? Again the usual face appeared in the veneer ceiling printed with the straight-grain cypress wood . . . a laughing moon . . . why was the dream I had a couple of times a year, where I was pursued by a laughing full moon, so frightening? It was still a puzzle I could not understand no matter how I racked my brains…”

This quotation perfectly demonstrates something I have been seeing in this book for a while now and that’s the fact that there are often over-packed sentences that kill the tension that is made around the fact that this person has gone missing and that there are absolutely no real clues for finding them. In the grand scheme of things, this ruins the way in which the reader experiences the story and is a fault of the storyline that I found quite surprising of Abe to do. I admit though, it probably is not done purposefully and perhaps is done in the want to remain writing in the same style as his other novels. However, it does not really suit all of his chosen storylines as we see here. Though it is a good book, there are improvements to make that are different to those previous books I have read by him