The Gothic Times

Issue date: 4/28/09 Section: Culture

The Ark Sakura opens with Mole, its overweight, socially awkward protagonist, examining a eupcaccia, or clockbug, at a curio stand. As described by the purveyor of the stand, the eupcaccia evolved in such a way that its legs atrophied and finally disappeared. The beetle-like bug then survived by feeding off of its own excrement, using its rounded stomach as a fulcrum on which to rotate in a perfect circle, excreting and consuming its excretion at a constant rate until its death.

Mole feels a "strong sense of intimacy with the bug" and its harmonious, self-sustaining existence. For Mole the eupcaccia is the ideal model for humanity's future and he envisions a society in which humans can also process waste as quickly as they produce it, thereby avoiding being engulfed by their own garbage.

The novel continues to explore this theme and others as Mole attempts to assemble a crew to populate a vast, underground fallout shelter that he has intricately constructed to be the "new world" after the global nuclear war he sees as inevitable. The shelter centers on an enormous and powerful toilet that can dispose of anything from feces to dead bodies, putting Mole's goal of a community that functions like a eupcaccia within reach. Like most ideals though, the "eupcaccia society" becomes perverted when Mole, a maladroit leader, tries to put it into practice at the helm of a band of outcasts with competing interests and skill sets.

Kobo Abe is often referred to in the West as the Japanese Kafka, and the similarities are obvious as both use bleak, surreal allegories to highlight the ills and absurdities of modern life. But where Kafka remains tightly focused on a single theme throughout the course of a novel or short story, Abe will address several themes within a single book (old age, social disconnect and survival/evolution are others touched upon in The Ark Sakura) and will work to develop action and characters which are not necessarily crucial to advancing his thesis.

Twenty-five years after its initial publication, the lessons and insights of The Ark Sakura still apply to an industrialized world that is too often choking on its own surfeit. That poignancy combined with Abe's able writing and varied characters make The Ark Sakura both an intellectually rewarding and entertaining read.


***The Ark Sakura by Kobo Abe, pub. 1984 in the original Japanese, 1988 Translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter, pub. Knopf.***

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