The Box Man

The Box Man is one of Kobo Abe's more abstruse and obscure novels. Best known as the author of Woman in the Dunes, Abe combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett.

In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo and scribbling madly on the interior walls of his box, he describes the world outside as he sees or perhaps imagines it.

The protagonist lives a tenuous, fearful existence that includes a mysterious rifleman determined to shoot him, a seductive young nurse, and his doctor who wants to become a box man himself. 

Kobo Abe's The Box Man is a marvel of originality and a bizarrely fascinating fable about the very nature of identity.