Kangaroo Notebook

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A man wakes up to discover that his legs are growing radish sprouts. His doctor is repulsed. The condition provides, however, one unexpected benefit: the ability to snack on himself. In short order, the narrator finds himself hurtling through a hospital on a runaway bed, plunging into a surreal underworld that may be death, may be Japan, and may be a hallucination too vivid to dismiss. Kobo Abe's final novel, written before his death in 1993, is simultaneously fearful and jarringly funny — a surreal vision of Japanese society delivered as a fever dream of institutional absurdity. The body horror is real; so is the comedy; and the line between them is deliberately, mischievously absent. The last work of one of Japan's most original novelists — a farewell that proves imagination, like radish sprouts, grows most vigorously in the strangest conditions.