[In the following review, Iwamoto offers a mixed assessment of Kangaroo Notebook.]

Kobo Abe's last novel before his death in 1993, Kangaroo Notebook, originally published in Japanese in 1991, refigures with imaginative vigor those ingredients that have become trademarks in the novelist-playwright's works: metamorphosis, the theme of alienation and the problem of personal identity, and the journey motif through a labyrinthine modern dystopia. In this world fantastic elements coexist with all-too-real features in an exasperating and unnerving amalgam, and humor, albeit of the darkest sort, mitigates the often absurd, frightening, and incomprehensible incidents that occur.

As in many other Abe novels, the “hero” of Kangaroo Notebook, the first-person narrator of the story, remains nameless, suggesting perhaps Everyman and/or a lack of individuality; and the backdrop for the narrative, while containing certain peculiarly Japanese attributes like references to the Buddhist hell, could be almost any modernized country with high technology and its attendant neuroses. One morning, the narrator (a products developer for an office-supply company who on a whim had suggested a notebook with pouches—hence the novel's title) wakes up to find that his shins have turned into patches of “cleft-leaf radish sprouts.” Horrified by this transformation, he rushes to a nearby dermatology clinic, where the doctor, baffled and equally horrified, loads him, skewered with an IV tube and a urine catheter, onto a self-propelling bed that sets him on a journey in which the destination, though seemingly a sulphur springs called Hell Valley for treatment, becomes increasingly unclear. Now stripped of the credit and insurance cards on which he had relied for identification, he travels through a bleak, surreal, and alienating landscape where the boundary between illusion and reality is indistinct: a dark underground tunnel with eerie lighting; a murky canal on which two unmanned boats propelled respectively by the sex organs of male and female squids chase each other; a department store featuring a variety shop called “Worldly Desires”; a riverbank where child-demons milk aged tourists for contributions with a chant, “Help me, help me, help me, please”; a cabbage field where he encounters the ghost of his disfigured mother, who accuses him of infidelity; the outskirts of a city where the signal lights are all askew; and a hospital inhabited by patients with wacky personalities.

The incidents that occur and the characters who appear in this landscape are equally bizarre and are related in a disjointed narrative with segments resembling dialogue in an absurdist play. While the episodes individually are often captivating and sometimes make cogent comments on such matters as bourgeois values, it is difficult to see how they link up with one another into a coherent whole. What is one to make, for instance, of the sloping-eyes nurse who, appearing in different incarnations over the course of the novel, has been voted “Miss Blood Collector” for three years straight and is now aiming for the “Dracula's Daughter Medal,” and for whom the narrator feels a curious sexual attraction? Or of the hairy American nicknamed Mr. Hammer Killer who is making a documentary film called “Fatal Accidents” and is organizing a Japanese Euthanasia Club? At the close of the novel, the narrator escapes the hospital where he has ended up, only to submit passively to the child-demons who stuff him into a box with a peephole through which he sees his own terrified likeness. A notice at the very end announces the discovery of a corpse whose identity has not been established.

Kangaroo Notebook lacks the mesmerizing power of, say, The Woman in the Dunes or The Ruined Map, but what is evident is the author's still vivid and playful imagination at work in conveying his essentially nihilistic vision of life in an absurd and meaningless modern world.