Your reviewer had better admit from the beginning that he could not make head or tail of Kobo Abe's The Ruined Map. A private detective, searching for his missing person in a vast industrial city, loses his reason and begins to imagine that he is the person he is hunting for. That much is plain. As soon as the detective starts looking for the fellow, his reasoning becomes so blurred and his reactions so goofy that one decides he must have been hired as the stupidest private detective available….

When the detective, in a philosophical and introspective kind of way, begins to concentrate on a match box to the exclusion of everything else, we realise this is no normal detective thriller. It is Mr Abe's oblique and circuitous way of making a statement about the problems of identity in urban society. The characters are all as deliberately anonymous...