The Wall

The Wall is a collection of early short fiction by the Japanese writer Abe Kōbō and a landmark work with which he broke with the tradition of the Japanese I-novel and established his place in the literary world. The volume comprises three parts. The first, The Crime of Mr. S. Karma, won the twenty-fifth Akutagawa Prize: one morning its protagonist, Karma, discovers that his name has vanished into thin air, and that even his business card has transformed into a double of himself and taken his place. Having lost his name, Karma gradually loses the warrant for his existence in the real world, undergoes a series of absurd and bizarre encounters and a trial, and at last arrives at the end of the world, where he turns into a wall. In the second part, The Badger of the Tower of Babel, a poet's shadow is devoured by a strange beast, the badger, and he himself becomes an invisible man with nothing left but two eyeballs; led to the Tower of Babel, he meets the souls of many famous figures past and present. The third part collects four short stories—The Red Cocoon, The Flood, The Magic Chalk, and The Business: a homeless man gradually decomposes himself on the street until at last only a huge empty cocoon remains; a worker's body liquefies into a disaster that becomes a second great flood drowning the world; a poor painter discovers that whatever he draws with red chalk in the absence of sunlight turns into real objects, and so shuts himself away, vainly attempting to play the creator, only to fail in the end; and the last piece, in the monologue of a capitalist, satirizes the logic that processes everything, even people themselves, into raw material for commodities. Deforming images such as the wall, the cocoon, liquid, and chalk run through the whole book, and in a seemingly absurd shell Abe Kōbō writes out the identity anxiety of the lonely in the city, the loss of the subject, and the oppression of social discipline.