Kobo Abe

And again, the dark street. The dark, dark street. The women out shopping for the evening meal of course, and baby carriage and the silver bicycle were already painted out by the darkness; most of the commuters too were already in place in their filing-drawer houses. A half-forsaken chasm of time ....

Loneliness__ince I was trying to escape it__as hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apparently happiness.

The world itself, like the mask, began to seem difficult to believe in, and I was stricken with an unutterable sense of loneliness.

The future is forever a projection of the present.

One measure of a civilization, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society.

If I were just in trousers, somehow I could go out into the world. It would make no difference whether I was naked from the waist up and my feet bare just as long as I had trousers on. Otherwise if you go walking around the streets without trousers, no matter how new your shoes and how elegant your coat, it__ enough to raise a big hue and cry. Enlightened society is a kind of trouser society.

You can only do what you can no matter how you try.

Clinging to one__ outward appearance interferes with living.

I want to spy on all sorts of places, and the box is a portable hole that occurred to me under the circumstances, it being impossible to punch holes throughout the world.

These days only a guerrilla or a box man would want to cover up his identity to the extent of refusing the convenience of instalment buying. But I am that box man. A representative of anti-instalmentism.

Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces its seeds just before it withers, sex is simply a struggle with death on the human level.

Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?

Defeat begins with the fear that one had lost.

They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin.

There are apparently two hypotheses about jealousy: that it is a product of civilization and that it is a basic instinct of animals.

When he saw the vista of the street reflected in the mirror in which he was looking, he was terror stricken. He had the impression that the whole view had turned into eyes that reproached him.

The dial of the clock wears out unevenly; Most worn Is the area round eight. As it is stared at with abrasive glancesunfailingly twice a day, It is weathered away. On the other side The area at two Is only half as worn, For closed eyes at nightPass without stopping. If there is one who possesses a flat watch evenly worn, It is he who, failing at the start, is running one lap behind. Thus the world is always A lap fast--The world he thinks he sees Has not yet begun. Illusory time, When the hands stand vertically on the dial; Without the bell announcing the raising of the curtain, The play has come to an end.

There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.