SOURCE: Garis, Robert. Review of The Ark Sakura, by Kōbō Abé. Hudson Review 41, no. 4 (winter 1989): 757-59.

In the following unfavorable review, Garis derides The Ark Sakura as lacking in coherence and meaning.

International high style at its most stupefyingly relentless is the achievement of Kobo Abe's The Ark Sakura, which lays out the ingredients for some sort of fable about the nuclear age or human survival or paranoia, and then shuts down without putting anything together. The first-person narrator named Mole (also Pig, a nickname he dislikes) is looking for people to joint him in his survival “ship,” a many-chambered abandoned underground quarry in which his father had once imprisoned him as a punishment, but which he has now fitted out with all sorts of provisions, booby traps against intruders and the like, as an “ark” for survival. The quarry's main feature is a huge toilet, with...