Parables, as with social satires, have been considered both ripe for adaptation and stubbornly resistant to reinterpretation; although Kafka and Orwell have seen their fair share of respectable adaptations, the likes of Joyce and Beckett are considered too abstract — or abstruse — for any other (undoubtedly lesser) hand. But against this immovable object comes, sometimes, an unstoppable force so unrelenting in its visionary stabs at originality that we do entertain the prospect of putting to the screen words and narratives considered unfilmable. In the case of Kōbō Abe’s 1973 novel The Box Man, such a prospect is quickly dashed with Gakuryū Ishii’s uncompromising but ultimately confounding attempt to visualize the former’s Kafkaesque absurdity. The eponymous film, long in gestation ever since its filmmaker received Abe’s blessing to make it in 1997, assumes familiarity with the source novel and affords, accordingly, little reflexive distance from its weird wavelength. Its satirical subtext proves remarkably elastic, and consequently frustrating and inconsequential.
There’s a man in a box. Or, more accurately, there’s a man (Masatoshi Nagase) who peers at the world through a box-shaped hole from within a cardboard box. Not quite posthuman android nor pedestrian pervert (even if the photos he snaps, mostly of women’s legs, don’t quite shake that feeling off), the man blends into the backdrop of modern Tokyo, seen more as irritant than as existential threat — all except for a doctor (Tadanobu Asano), whose credentials are falsified and who, for some reason, desires to learn more about the box man so that he himself may become one. The box man, self-titled “Myself,” is a photographer who took over the role — and the box — from its previous inhabitant. Mere curiosity turned obsession? The logic of capitalism as fate predetermined? “Those who obsess over the box man, become the box man” is all we’re offered by way of explanation, and the film’s ensuing shenanigans play out in accordance with banally idiosyncratic lore.
For example, the box man has very timely referents — in Abe’s era, as well as ours — in the figures of the salaryman and the hikikomori, the latter literally boxed into their rooms and fully withdrawn from broader society. One is first tempted to read into the metaphor commentary on the debilitating psychology of wagie and weirdo alike; but The Box Man isn’t exactly content, to its credit, with such direct an allusion. Instead, as “Myself” attempts to dodge the doctor’s aggressive pursuits, the latter aided by a sultry, seductive nurse (Ayana Shiramoto) and an elderly general (Koichi Sato) who is ostensibly the doctor’s employer, he gradually begins to lose his grip on reality. More box men pop up out of nowhere; the doctor and nurse re-enact (possibly real, possibly imagined) sexual roleplay; the stubborn adherence to “Myself”’s POV could, on a meta-level, reflect the modern Diogenes’ individualism for individualism’s sake. Yet as a series of increasingly cryptic suggestions, finally placated with a thuddingly literal if flimsy interpretation of who or what the box stands for, the film doesn’t hold up except as an experimental curio from one of Japan’s most maverick and punk directors. If Ishii’s 1982 Burst City was a love letter to punk rock culture, The Box Man, with all its non-sequitur gags and serrated action scenes, may be considered a watered-down ode to the creative process itself.
