[Inter Ice Age 4] confirms once again [Kobo Abé's] mastery of the philosophical thriller. As its bleak geological title suggests, this is his furthest venture into the remote. Yet the time is just ahead of us in the interglacial epoch in which we live, and today the extrapolations of science fiction no longer seem quite so bizarre as they used to….

In Inter Ice Age 4 characterization sometimes yields to abstract speculation, or to a burst of virtuoso scientific imagery. But these passages, fascinating and poetic as they often are, only provide the setting for a compelling human drama. The sense of reality is even more vividly conveyed by the sensitivity of the central character, a vulnerable professor of computer technology, than by the mass of circumstantial detail….

The story is narrated by Professor Katsumi of the ICT (Institute for Computer Technique) in Tokyo, where [a self-programming computer with...