The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. Or is he? Abe's symbolic pantomime is not extroverted in fact it is very ingrown but it toys with images and ideas in a fascinating fashion, even while at the expense of both the reader's patience and sensibility.

There follows an inevitable duality-his mask is almost another identity ('I casually accompanied the mask out.') and after a renewal of his erotic inclinations, he approaches his wife, realizes he is cuckolding himself. 'A monster's face brings loneliness and the loneliness informs his heart.' After consulting K, who constructs artificial organs, he decides to model a mask spends considerable time in investigations, calculations, and finally the choice of a type (aggressive extroverted) for which he will need a consonant personality.

It not only alienates him, it isolates him. These notebooks are the record kept by a laboratory scientist whose face, after an accident, is covered with suppurating 'leech-like' scars.

And like Tanizaki, there's a certain morbidity of material. Perhaps more people viewed rather than read Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes (1964) and this sibling has very much the same character it is just as enclosed, physically and psychically just as intense, while using the most matter of fact detail-almost to the point of irritability.

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