![]() ![]() (It isn’t a negative, as the inversion below, which I made in Photoshop, demonstrates: the photograph in The Box Man is actually cut from a contact sheet.) The photo is referred to as a “negative,” and it is said to be attached to some documents. I’ve tried to give an impression of that here by scanning half the page. It is reproduced the size of a contact sheet-that is, natural size-so it is small on the page. ![]() The first photograph in the book is a frame, and a portion of another frame, from a roll of 35mm film. I don’t think it’s important to think about what Abe may actually have done: but the descriptions do tend to suspend a reader’s suspension of disbelief, pointing outside the narrative in ways that are analogous to the ways photographs-any photographs-point outside of fiction. The stains on the inside of the box, the function of a small shelf under the observation window, the various uses of a plastic tablet, outdo Nabokov in their myopic realism, and they produce, for me, a creeping sense that the author, as opposed to the narrator, enacted some of his subject. Those passages are so full of unusual detail that I don’t doubt Abe constructed such a box, and also a periscope (pp. The book offers several precise descriptions of the boxes: it opens with instructions for making one, and closes with observations about writing on the inside of the boxes. “Box men” are supposedly homeless men who walk around inside cardboard boxes fitted with viewing portals, listening holes, and various supplies. 217 (2014) Yasufumi Nakamori informs me there is also a BA essay by Kumagaya Yoshiki (Kanazawa College of Art, Japan, 2001). There is relatively little written about the photographs in Box Man. Ivan Vartanian’s essay “Kobo Abe as Photographer” is in Aperture vol. It’s also the case that Abe could have photographed the obsessive (and often nauseating) details his narrators describe-but he chose to limit his photographs to middle-distance subjects.Ībe also wrote about his photography practice, for example in the essay “Layer of Bubble,” and in essays in the journal Sogetsu which he edited. The 26th volume of his collected works in Japanese has his essays together with photos and 56 of his photographs. (I have not seen the last two items I thank Mina Ando, of Tokyo Geidai, for this information.) This matters because it sets limits on what a reader might plausibly have been expected to notice. There is a website with at least one installation shot of the Wildenstein exhibition, and it seems some other images were printed in larger formats. The Wildenstein catalog reproduces the eight captioned images even smaller than in the English translation. I will amend this page when I have seen the original Japanese edition and the English hardcover, but it seems likely Abe wanted them to be quite small on the page. I am not entirely sure how much visual detail we are meant to see in the images. The eight photographs were posted online around 2014, from the original Japanese edition: The book has a 35 mm “negative,” reproduced more or less life size, eight captioned photographs set against black backgrounds, and two pages of newspaper reports. (In 2014 Amazon listed one copy at $1,800.) I will be reporting on that catalog and the book itself in this post. (Here is the publisher’s site for the complete works.) Abe was also a photographer, and there was at least one exhibition of his works, at Wildenstein Tokyo, in 1996 this exhibition apparently traveled to Columbia University’s Donald Keene Center for Japanese Culture. The resulting exhibition catalog, Kobo Abe as Photographer, is difficult to find. This book, 箱男 Hako otoko in Japanese, was first published 1973.
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