The Box Man

Kobo Abe, the internationally acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes, combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett. In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo and scribbling madly on the interior walls of his box, he describes the world outside as he sees or perhaps imagines it, a tenuous reality that seems to include a mysterious rifleman determined to shoot him, a seductive young nurse, and a doctor who wants to become a box man himself. The Box Man is a marvel of sheer originality and a bizarrely fascinating fable about the very nature of identity. Translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders.

The Lukassers seem to be an ordinary Austrian family. Dr. Robert Weiss had passed through their village years ago, a stranger. He rented a room from them for the night. Niki Lukasser was a baby then, fighting the fever of appendicitis. Dr. Weiss saved Niki's life that night, and accepted no payment. It was just what you did for another human being. Years later, Dr. Weiss appears again at the door. It is 1943, and he is asking to be hidden from the Germans. This also, it now appears to Niki, is just what you do for another human being. Mr. Lukasser walls Dr. Weiss into the barn loft. Then begins, beneath the quiet surface of Sankt Vero, a chain of powerful transformations.

An international TED Talk speaker, Tony Porter challenges manhood and male socialization, which he defines as the “man box.” Tony Porter works closely with the NFL, the NBA, the MLB, the US military, colleges, universities, and numerous other organizations to prevent violence against women and girls by promoting healthy, respectful manhood. Now, in Breaking Out of the “Man Box” Porter’s message is directed at all men. This book tackles the collective socialization of manhood and provides an in-depth look at the experiences of boys and men. In an effort to understand the many aspects of “what it means to be a man,” Porter suggests the topic is worthy of being rethought, challenged, and even redefined. This book will help men—fathers, husbands, brothers, coworkers, etc.—unpack and correct those realities. Breaking Out of the “Man Box” boldly exposes the connection between male socialization and the quest to end violence against women and girls. Porter provides an honest and transformative experience, empowering men to create a world where men and boys are loving and respectful—and a human race where women and girls are valued and safe. On the heels of national movements and initiatives such as the NFL’s NoMore.org, this book provides men with the knowledge and understanding to explore how to create that world.

During the Vietnam War, a Vietnamese boy must free the "Man in the Box," a captured American soldier, and bring him to safety. A powerful tale of friends in the midst of battle, "The Man in the Box" won the prestigious Oklahoma Sequoyah Children's Book Award in 1968. It remains as memorable today -- and its message of compassion and friendship as fresh -- as the day it was first published. Includes a Foreword by Ardath Mayhar from the 2006 edition, plus a new Publisher's Foreword by John Betancourt.

THE FIRST STORY TO BE TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH FROM THE SURREALIST AND ALTERNATIVE MANGA-KA Enter the strange world of Imiri Sakabashira, whose denizens are zoomorphic creatures that emerge from one another as well as their equally bizarre environs. The Box Man follows its protagonists along a scooter trip through a complex landscape that oscillates between a dense city, a countryside simplified to near abstraction, and hybrids of the two; the theme of hybridity permeates throughout. One is unsurprised to encounter a creature that is half elderly man, half crab, or a flying frog in this world where our guide apparent is an anthropomorphic, mollusk-like cat. Sakabashira weaves this absurdist tale into a seamless tapestry constructed of elements as seemingly disparate as Japanese folklore, pop culture, and surrealism.Within these panels, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, the real and the imagined—a tension that adds a layer of complexity to this near-wordless psychedelic travelogue. Imiri Sakabashira (real name Mochizuki Katsuhiro) was born in Shizuoka, Japan, in 1964, the same year that Garo, the influential manga anthology in which he would first be published, was founded.

Three plays by one of contemporary Japan's most prominent writers -- Involuntary Homicide, The Green Stockings, The Ghost is Here -- translated for this volume reveal Kobo Abe's deep love of absurdity in the face of universal concerns.

From stealing bikes at the age of ten to cracking safes in banks and supermarkets, Harry King's life was lived in the criminal underworld. His understanding and insights into this world give us unique insights into the making of a professional thief and the world he inhabits.

In The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature, Atsuko Sakaki closely examines photography-inspired texts by four Japanese novelists: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886-1965), Abe Kōbō (1924-93), Horie Toshiyuki (b. 1964) and Kanai Mieko (b. 1947). As connoisseurs, practitioners or critics of this visual medium, these authors look beyond photographs’ status as images that document and verify empirical incidents and existences, articulating instead the physical process of photographic production and photographs’ material presence in human lives. This book offers insight into the engagement with photography in Japanese literary texts as a means of bringing forgotten subject-object dynamics to light. It calls for a fundamental reconfiguration of the parameters of modern print culture and its presumption of the transparency of agents of representation.

Allegories of Time and Space explores efforts by leading photographers, artists, architects, and commercial designers to re-envision Japanese cultural identity during the turbulent years between the Asia Pacific War and the bursting of the economic bubble in the 1990s. This search for a cultural home was a matter of broad public concern, and each of the artists under consideration engaged a wide audience through mass media. The artists under study had in common the necessity to establish distance from their immediate surroundings temporally or geographically in order to gain some perspective on Japan's rapidly changing society. They shared what Jonathan Reynolds calls an allegorical vision, a capacity to make time and space malleable, to see the present in the past and to find an irreducible cultural center at Japan's geographical periphery. The book commences with an examination of the work of Hamaya Hiroshi. A Tokyo native, Hamaya began to photograph the isolated "snow country" of northeastern Japan in the midst of the war. His empathetic images of village life expressed an aching nostalgia for the rural past widely shared by urban Japanese. Following a similar strategy in his search for authentic Japan was the photographer Tōmatsu Shōmei. Although Tōmatsu originally traveled to Okinawa Prefecture in 1969 to document the destructive impact of U.S. military bases in the region in his characteristically edgy style, he came to believe that Okinawa was still in some sense more truly Japanese than the Japanese main islands. The self-styled iconoclast artist Okamoto Tarō emphatically rejected the delicacy and refinement conventionally associated with Japanese art in favor of the hyper-modern qualities of the dynamic and brutal aesthetics that he saw expressed on the ceramics of the prehistoric Jōmon period. One who quickly recognized the potential in Okamoto's embrace of Japan's ancient past was the architect Tange Kenzō. As a point of comparison, Reynolds looks at the portrayal of the ancient Shintō shrine complex at Ise in a volume produced in collaboration with the photographer Watanabe Yoshio. Reynolds shows how this landmark book contributed significantly to a transformation in the meaning of Ise Shrine by suppressing the shrine's status as an ultranationalist symbol and re-presenting the shrine architecture as design consistent with rigorous modernist aesthetics. In the 1970s and 1980s, there circulated widely through advertising posters of the designer Ishioka Eiko, the ephemeral "nomadic" architecture of Itō Toyo'o, TV documentaries, and other media, a fantasy that imagined Tokyo's young female office workers as urban nomads. These cosmopolitan dreams may seem untethered from their Japanese cultural context, but Reynolds reveals that there were threads linking the urban nomad with earlier efforts to situate contemporary Japanese cultural identity in time and space. In its fresh and nuanced re-reading of the multiplicities of Japanese tradition during a tumultuous and transformative period, Allegories of Time and Space offers a compelling argument that the work of these artists enhanced efforts to redefine tradition in contemporary terms and, by doing so, promoted a future that would be both modern and uniquely Japanese.