A writer of ideas and a creator of striking images, Abe writes more from the head than the heart. Only one story, "The Dream Soldier," in its evocation of family love and shame, is more affecting, less cerebral. Business cards turn into the people they represent a mysterious dead body disappears in an apartment and creates a test of courage for a young man and an advertising agency that has developed a "System" to stimulate creativity commissions a bizarre building from an architect. A Martian asks a noted authority on space travel ("The Special Envoy") for his help, but is rejected by the pompous and self-absorbed professor, who dismisses him as a lunatic. In the end he even wonders whether the time before his loss of memory "had itself been a strange dream." In "Dendrocacalia," a young man idly kicking a stone by the side of the road ends up as a rare plant in a conservatory. There are tantalizing memories of past associations that he does not trust-he could be a thief returning to the scene of a crime, or a traveller who once stopped there en route to somewhere else. In the title story, a man suddenly becomes amnesiac on his way home, just before the curve on the road. All the stories depend on a similar premise: a seemingly commonplace situation that increasingly becomes menacing and surreal. A short-fiction collection from the noted Japanese author Abe (Woman in the Dunes, The Ark Sakura, etc.)-pieces whose originality is sometimes overwhelmed by their relentless surrealism.
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