While [Kobo Abe's] figurative language remains essentially Japanese ("His left shoulder made a sound like the splitting of chopsticks"), his themes are decidedly Western. Abe shares with writers like Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Robbe-Grillet an obsession for the hallucination vraie, the imaginary made "real" through an accumulation of precise detail. Abe's "visions" never fall apart upon a second reading, because the "science" in them is so solidly based.

But the key to understanding any Abe novel lies in the reader's ability to decipher the various levels of sexuality. All of Abe's protagonists are elitist mole-men, characters who resemble Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Kafka's K., and Robbe-Grillet's Wallas in that they are hypersensitive, fragile creatures with strong intellects and weak egos. They are all scientists, whose analytic and self-reflective powers have reached full maturity, but whose emotional capacities have either atrophied or become fixated in late adolescence. Pathetically isolated and introverted, they...