Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #372128 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Synopsis
An ordinary man finds himself caught in the power of bizarre and unpredictable forces when he discovers one morning at breakfast that radish sprouts have begun to grow out of his shins.

Customer Reviews

Normal man in weird trouble
Kangaroo Notebook is the weird story of an otherwise normal man who one day notices strange plant growths on his shins. He goes to a clinic for help, which turns out to be the first step of a surreal journey. I found this novel to be quite gripping, wondering what strange things will happen next. Kangaroo Notebook is both funny and dark, and also very symbolic. The kangaroo for instance is a symbol of those who are different, those who cannot be accepted or compete with the normal members of society -- the main author explains early in the novel that for every `normal' (placental) mammal there is an equivalent marsupial and the marsupial would be unable to compete with the placental if both species occupy the same environment.

Strangely fulfilling
The premise of this book is, to say the least, odd. It starts of in a manner that is similar to Kafka's Metamorphosis but then goes off on a tangent. Occasionally obtuse and it sometimes seems like some things are inside jokes, but the sheer quality of it makes it worth reading.

Increadible! A must read for fans of Japanese literature.
Kangaroo Notebook is a difficult novel to understand, but you'll love it anyway. The plot is bizzare, to say the least. A man discovers that he has radish sprouts growing from his shins. His condition baffles the doctor at a local dermatology clinic, who sends him away in a self propelled hospital bed, telling him to try hot spring treatment. While en-route to the hot springs, he is cast down a dark tunnel and ends up on the shores of hell. From there, the plot gets really weird (but very addicting) as the narrator meets a child-demons, a vampire-esque nurse intent on drawing enough blood to win the "Dracula's Daughter" award, and an American photographer interested in achieving population contrl through traffic accidents.

The novel's symbolism becomes less obscure when one considers the great shame and self loathing "deformed" or "imperfect" members of Japanese society feel. Early in the novel, the narrator comments that marsupials are essentially inferior versions of mammals. The narrator, a terminally ill or deformed individual, feels like a marsupial, followed, wherever he goes, by his deformity (just as the narrator is followed by his hospital bed). At the novel's conclusion, the narrator sees himself in a box, perhaps a coffin, readers are presented with an exerpt from a newspaper regarding the discovery of a man found dead in a train station with self-inflicted slashes to his shins. The police, the article mentions, do not believe the slashes to the man's shins were the cause of death. The reader is left with the vague impression that the narrator, seeing his impending death, committed suicide (or perhaps was assisted).

Kangaroo Notebook is often compared to Burroughs' Naked Lunch or a cross between Kafka and Alice in Wonderland. I found the novel to be far more. Kangaroo Notebook is more than a strange story; it's an honest and deeply personal look into the mind of an individual whose disease is turning him (quite literally) into a vegatable. Read the novel, and see why Abe was considered Japan's leading author of modern fiction before his death.