[In the following unfavorable review, Garis derides The Ark Sakura as lacking in coherence and meaning.]

International high style at its most stupefyingly relentless is the achievement of Kobo Abe's The Ark Sakura, which lays out the ingredients for some sort of fable about the nuclear age or human survival or paranoia, and then shuts down without putting anything together. The first-person narrator named Mole (also Pig, a nickname he dislikes) is looking for people to joint him in his survival “ship,” a many-chambered abandoned underground quarry in which his father had once imprisoned him as a punishment, but which he has now fitted out with all sorts of provisions, booby traps against intruders and the like, as an “ark” for survival. The quarry's main feature is a huge toilet, with no seat and with immense water pressure in the flushing mechanism which makes it very inconvenient to use—it was this toilet to which his father had tied him. The candidates for survival Mole gathers (with no particular criteria) are an insect seller at a bazaar and a man and a woman who work as shills for him and whose animated conversation about one of the insects attracts Mole's interest. This insect, an eupcaccia, feeds entirely on its own feces, moving in a perfect circle just slowly enough to keep its nutritional system functioning smoothly, except during its mating season, when it rises precariously from its circle on flimsy wings, and then “time stands still.” Once Mole and his three recruits enter the Ark, there is a steady, boring action of exploration of the place itself, temporary disappearances of the male shill and the insect seller, much searching for them, suspicions that other people are hiding in the quarry, much searching for them too. Both the shill and the woman tell Mole that the other has cancer but doesn't know it. Two thirds of the way through, emissaries arrive from a group of old people called the Broom Brigade, who hope to survive in the “Kingdom of Quintessential Castoffs.” In the meantime, they serve as garbage-collectors. But they have contracted out their most dangerous product, poisonous industrial wastes, to Mole and his huge toilet, and now they want him to destroy a human body for them. In the last hundred pages the action speeds up; Mole gets his leg stuck in the toilet, from which he finally releases himself by setting off an explosion which changes the pressure in the water system. He tells the other characters that the explosion is a nuclear explosion, that nuclear warfare has begun; when he afterwards tells them the truth, they prefer to believe the nuclear explanation, and when Mole leaves them behind in the Ark, he finds that the world, including his own body, has become transparent.

These are the ingredients, but no fable emerges. “Sakura” is the Japanese word for “shill”: is Mole's survival ship a fake that manipulates people who are obsessed with nuclear disaster? You don't feel this as you read, and all the characters in the novel bring a kind of bland steadiness of attention to everything they do, without feeling obsessed or victimized, and you don't feel any irony about that. Apart from Mole's pleasure in little flesh contacts he makes with the flesh of the woman shill, particularly with her thighs or buttocks, and his pain when his leg is stuck in the toilet, the entire action is rendered without affect. None of the meanings promised in the action are made by the kind of connective process we are used to encountering when meaning happens. The strange insect, much discussed at the beginning of the novel, completely disappears, and we aren't given the wherewithal to connect any person or act with the insect's over-meaningful habits. Loud elements such as Mole's father's having chained him to the toilet for punishment, and the steady emphasis on the toilet and on excrement, seem continually on the verge of working up some meaning but remain inert; when we learn about Mole's job of disposing of industrial pollution, and eventually of disposing of a human body, our sense of being right on top of meaning without seeing it or feeling it generates an almost eerie emptiness which the book doesn't in any way register. The transparent outside world makes a very striking appearance formally, in a single-page final chapter, but the prose doesn't reveal either by tone or imagery what transparency means. And so on.

It is hard to guess what the novel would seem like to somebody without a reviewer's obligation to continue reading. Readers who have admired Kobo Abe in the past might find a positive value in what I experienced as negative: since the novel's consistent moderato narrative drive doesn't produce any meaning to distract us, it does bring that element of fiction—movement in time—to sharp focus. And I suppose it's possible to admire the odd skill with which Abe does in fact avoid meaningfulness—his foot never slips. When I had seen the film made from Abe's first novel, Woman of the Dunes, a highly regarded, portentously meaningful fable about some mysteries of sexuality, I read the novel itself to check whether the film had coarsened Abe's meaning and found that it hadn't. Abe's progress, which has led him to ever sterner renunciations of the conventional, has established him in a high place in the international literary scene. Other reviewers of this latest novel hint at the marvelous but ineffable experience they have had. For this reader there was nothing.