So, if I have a blog, and am to use it, I may as well try writing again. I haven’t really written anything other than letters in the last few years, and my writing style has likely suffered for it. A letter can move fluidly from one thing to the next without losing coherence; presumed or actual, the intimacy of a letter makes up for any incoherence.



I’m about 2/3rds through The Ark Sakura, by Kobo Abe. It’s not very good, and is making me reconsider if any of his other novels I’ve read in the past are worthwhile.



I ran into a friend at the Winnipeg Science Fair last weekend who had read Woman in the Dunes. She really disliked it, and said that it was gross how it equated the titular woman’s body with the imprisonment of the man. When I had read it (two years ago, so my memory might be sketchy), I had taken the book for an allegory about how capitalism-patriarchy-etc. insinuates and enforces itself onto day-to-day relations between individuals. The book, I thought at the time, had misogynism in it, but wasn’t misogynistic. I’m not so sure now though, reviewing what I remember of other books I’ve read by Kobo Abe.



It was in early 2007 that I read my first Kobo Abe novel, Inter Ice Age 4, and was incredibly good speculative fiction that I’d still recommend to anyone. It was originally published in serialized form in the late 1950’s, and is very much of that time and place. In the novel, the Soviets and Americans have both built super-computers whose calculation power gives them the prescience to predict future events. The Japanese government, not wanting to be left out of the super-computer race, builds one of their own, but want to use it to predict the lives of individuals rather than geo-political/economic events. The protagonist is scientist commissioned to find a suitable test subject to have their future predicted. However when he has found his perfect subject, that subject is mysteriously murdered, and the novel turns into a mind-fuck whodunnit from there.



I read The Face of Another a couple months after that. A scientist, left horribly disfigured by liquid nitrogen, crafts a lifelike mask so that his wife won’t be disgusted by him. His personality splits and there’s a fight between the personality of his actual face and that of the mask, with his wife being the prize. I didn’t really have anything resembling a big-feminist-words-analysis when I read this, but it was uncomfortable to read all the same, as well as being a plodding and uninteresting book. I gave up on it about halfway through.



So that brings me back to The Ark Sakura. It’s narrated in the first-person by an obese recluse named “Mole” who has turned an abandoned quarry into a fallout shelter, large enough for thousands of people. He occasionally goes into town to look for the right kind of people to give “tickets to survival” on his “ark.”  Unfortunately for him, he attracts a shady trio of con-artists who are interested in his ark for, well, shady reasons. Again, with the misogyny/women as property or prizes in this one. The narrator is, again, an alienated, socially stunted man, creeping on ladies.



I guess why I’m writing all this is it feels weird to stick up for a ‘good book/author’ when there’s also fucked up stuff in their book/oeuvre. Can a book that’s propagating a lousy, oppressive worldview about women (or any oppressed group) still be a good book? I’d like to think so, but I’m also coming from a position of privilege where I can sort of overlook Abe’s misogyny (which at this point I kind of think is just there because he’s a misogynist, and not to make some sort of point) b/c it isn’t directly impacting me (though it is), it’s just really gross. I’ll probably just soldier on reading The Ark Sakura, hope it gets better (the book is pretty good, at least conceptually), and just recommend Inter Ice Age 4 & Woman In The Dunes with the caveat that some of it is p. fucked up and triggering.