Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Can you imagine a Kangaroo Notebook? The errant product of a Japanese stationary supplier, endlessly folding in on its marsupial pouchiness? Bounding across a written landscape all the way to hell?

Somewhere between the darkness of Kafka and and the magical lightness of Italo Calvino floats Kobo Abe’s Kangaroo Notebook. A novel about an unnamed salary man who wakes one morning to find radish sprouts repulsively growing on his legs and who has miraculous adventures whilst travelling on a psychically controllable hospital bed.

His companions on his adventures are likewise surreal. A hot as hell nurse bent on collecting a record amount of blood in order to (jokingly) win the Dracula’s Daughter medal, an American Karate expert (fluent in Japanese of course) by the name of Hammer Killer, and even a pair of horny as can be squid.

Kobo Abe passed away in 1993, and Kangaroo Notebook was his final novel. The theme of death hovers over the novel, but never darkly. There is a joy here in the horror of the living undead. Calvino wrote about the necessity of lightness in writing, meaning that the story should flow lightly – the translation at times here is heavy and clumsy, but the underlying story shines through. There aren’t many translators of Japanese who come close to Murakami’s translator translators, and it is in this regard that the only weak point of Kangaroo Notebook arises. To translate, one must also be able to write elegantly!

Abe isn’t terribly well known outside of Japan, but within the country he was known as being one of the most creative novelists that came out of Japan in the twentieth century. Adroitly humourous, Kangaroo Notebook is almost impossible to place as a novel – it is difficult to say what happened, or even to say where it happened. But it is a highly enjoyable journey nonetheless!