The Box Man

A strange, dry, inhuman book: just the kind of thing I like. "Box men" are homeless men who walk around inside cardboard boxes. The boxes are fitted out with viewing portholes, little shelves, hooks, and supplies. Three things make this book strange, and the last two also make it bitter, misogynistic, and misanthropic.

1. I read the book because it uses photographs, and I am trying to survey 20th century books that use illustrations in fictional settings. This book has one of the oddest uses of photography I've found. There are a half-dozen grainy black and white illustrations distributed through the text. Each one has a few lines of text underneath. At first it seems those captions are excerpted from the novel itself, but it turns out they aren't. Even at the end of the book, a reader isn't quite sure where those text excerpts are supposed to come from. Of the half-dozen photos, only the first one connects with the narrative: it shows a figure walking away into the darkness. It fits, sort of, with a central episode in the story. In general, we're supposed to think the photographs are made by the narrator, a box man and photographer; but they aren't described in the text. It's as if they come from a separate part of the narrator's life, and their accompanying texts come from a diary the narrator doesn't mention. And that lack of reference becomes itself increasingly odd.

2. The descriptions of the box are so vivid, so precise and unexpected, that it seems they could only be the result of actually building such a box and living in it. Abe is extremely precise about what goes into the box—what the box man carries around with him—and how such a box is constructed. I would expect that from any realist or surrealist novel; but those details are inserted into unexpected places in the narrative, where they would only occur to someone who has actually spent time in such a box. The stains on the inside of the box, the uses of a small shelf under the observation window, the uses of a plastic tablet—they outdo Nabokov in their myopic realism, and they produce, for me, a creeping sense that the novelist did more than just research his subject. I haven't looked into this, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were such things as "box men" in 1970s Japan, and if Abe wasn't one himself. That's a kind of narrative unreliability that goes well beyond what a reader might infer about the author of "In Cold Blood" or "Lolita."

3. Those first two points are quizzical and memorable. This last point is unpleasant. The story turns around a "box man," another person who may want to become a "box man," and a nurse they both like. The other man is explicitly a Doppelgaenger and projection of the narrator, so in terms of men's roles, the book is about the nakedness of walking around in public without a box, the temptations of the box's security, and the odd feeling of slipping out of society and living in, and as, a box. In terms of women's roles, the book is substantially more bleak. The nurse only exists in the story to take off her clothes and pose. She is watched by the "box man," once from outside a window, and later from inside a hospital room. The narrator fantasizes about cutting her up and eating her, but that's just a passing thought. Mostly he is stricken with embarrassment about his own body, and the sum total of his idea of relations with women is watching them undress. It's an openly childish, openly masturbatory fantasy. Over the course of the book, the effect of that relentless, unreflective, supposedly natural way of representing relations is extremely unpleasant. If Abe had thought of this state of affairs ironically, or if he had tried to analyze it, or if he had presented it as a degeneration of normal relations, then it could have worked: but when he wrote this book, Abe's imaginative universe was so shriveled, so dried up and poisoned, that he could only imagine women as things that are peered at from inside cardboard boxes. I have no problem with violent, misanthropic, deranged or psychotic narratives or narrators: but this one is also unreflective, and therefore especially sour.

The narrative is quirky to the point of opacity, often uncontrolled, wandering, and shapeless. At one point the narrator admits he has made up the other "box man" entirely; several pages are devoted to a fantasy of turning into a fish and drowning; the narrative is often interrupted by notes about the color of the writer's ink or the nature of the paper he is writing on. I take all those shapeless experiments as strategies to keep writing, to get the bizarre story down on paper. I also take the entire novel as a purge: Abe has lived this way, somehow, and somehow he wants to get past it. A fascinating and very memorable book. ( )

The idea of living in a box seems one step lower than the life of a beggar. In addition to being completely anonymous, a man in a box is also unseen. As the story opens, a city dweller feels annoyed by the presence outside of his apartment by a box man whose presence no one else wants to recognize. The apartment dweller takes careful aim with his air rifle and shoots the box man in a way so as not to permanently harm him but to make him move. The box man does move slowly, but not in an erect manner, away from the vicinity of the apartment dweller. Meanwhile, inside the box, the anonymous man is keeping a record of the man who shot him.

Abe does a bizarre psychological examination of the meaning of having no identity. He does this by having his anonymous man in a box that completely hides that person’s physical features. It matters not whether the box man is alone or in a crowd. The complexity of the character of an “unknown” person takes place completely within a box.

The story starts as a fascinating look into anonymity but eventually falls into kaleidoscopic plot which leaves readers stranded as to who is talking and what the author is trying to say or what the point of the book even is ( )

This is almost certainly the most mystifying book I have ever read! At the start of it, the narrator (or one of them) describes what a box man is (a man who lives with a box over his head that reaches to his hips and that contains the various items he needs for daily life) and says: at this juncture, the box man is me. It gets less clear from there.

In the first part of the novel, the box man describes how to make a box, his life as a box man, how someone else (?) became a box man, being attacked with an air gun, and so on. I found this section even more claustrophobic than I found Abe's The Woman in the Dunes and was almost ready to give up. Then more characters enter the novel including a woman who acts as a nurse and a doctor who may be the person who shot him and may be a fake box man and may be a figment of the box man's imagination. The narrator box man believes, or dreams, or writes, or fantasizes that the nurse has made a deal with him to pay him for the box, but he wants to return the money she has given him. The scene switches to the hospital and its housing area where the doctor and nurse work and live -- either it really shifts or it shifts in the box man's imagination.

There the box man's feelings about sex and love start to emerge. He seems to want contact with the nurse, but mainly just to see her naked. He was formerly a photographer and the idea of seeing without being seen is threaded through the novel in various ways, from taking pictures, to living in a box, to turning out the light, to hiding and looking, and more.

Later we learn a little more about the history of the doctor and the nurse (and another doctor who the doctor is pretending to be and who became addicted to morphine, and who may or not be the same doctor, or even the box man himself), and then there is a box man corpse too. Although some of this is told in a more realistic tone, it is unclear who the narrator is. At the very end, there is a revelation about an event in the box man's childhood that may shed light on his sexual psychology and psychology in general. In fact, there is a lot about sex in the book, including the narrator box man's idea that the legs are the most erotic part of a woman because they enclose her sexual parts (and I note that the box of a box man stops at his hips, so just his legs are exposed). In addition, the book includes grainy dark photographs with captions that are seemingly unrelated to the story.

I've read other reviews of this book, but I still really don't know what to make of it. It is clear that Abe is commenting in some way on how we try to hide ourselves, how repression eventually expresses itself, how we avoid looking at some people and long to look at others. But what this all means, and how to sort out the confusion of characters, narrators, real box men, fake box men, and so on, and whether in fact this is all some sort of drug-induced dream, or all the male characters are aspects of one character, is beyond me.

SPOILERS (possibly not even accurate ones)

What a confounding read! I feel like I got the point of the novel-- the themes, the allegories, that was all clear. But the plot? I think I got it, but I'm not 100% convinced and I'm not even sure it matters. That said, I did like the book, but I would've enjoyed it more if I knew what was going on a little more. It seems purposefully confusing.

A box man is essentially a man who chooses to shut himself off from society as a self protection mechanism. He observes but is himself invisible. The Box Man in the story is one such person, but finds himself lured out by the temptation of love/sex. He struggles. Does he want to put himself out there and take the risk, expose himself? Ultimately he takes the risk. I believe he was happy with that decision even though he was rejected in the end. But he does choose to return to isolation.

I got very confused with the story of the doctor/addict and in the end wasn't sure if there were 2 or 3 male characters, and which was which in the real versus fake box man scene at the hospital.

This book is not for everyone. Very few in fact. But I did identify and commiserate with the Box Man. Would everyone, if the book was more accessible?

3.25 stars ( )

"This is the record of a box man. I am beginning this account in a box. A cardboard box that reaches just to my hips when I put it over my head." The unnamed narrator goes on to describe how to become a box man. A box man lives an anonymous life on the streets, never leaving his box, scavenging for food, viewing the world through a narrow slit, and ignored by everyone.

The Box Man seems at first to be a commentary on the alienation of the individual in modern urban society. But then things get more complex and confusing. There is a false box man, who may also be a doctor, but may just be posing as a doctor. There is a nurse who isn't really a nurse. There is a dead box man, washed up drowned on the shore, who may be the narrator, or he may be the doctor, or the doctor whom the doctor is pretending to be. Many or all of the chapters may simply be dreams. The entire story may be a portrait of a mind deranged by a childhood trauma involving voyeurism and urination (interestingly two of the more pervasive elements in Finnegans Wake as well).

At times the novel is overtly metafictional, such as when one of the characters upbraids the narrator, saying he can't possibly have written the manuscript we are reading in the place and time he says he has written it. There are also several photographs in the books with captions that seem to have nothing to do with the pictures. There are inserted affidavits by other (maybe?) narrators. And for a novel in which nothing sexual actually takes place, there are some intensely erotic passages.

So what is one to make of this book? A social message on the repression of individualism? A psychological study of guilt and alienation? A literary thesis on the author (or reader) as voyeur? It may be all of these, and more. The Box Man is easy to read, but difficult to fathom. ( )