Solution and Dissolution

THE RUINED MAP by Kobo Abe. Translated by E. Dale Saunders. 299 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

In literature and electronics, the Japanese urge to modernize has had much the same effect. Japanese novelists often study Western models as faithfully and earnestly as their engineering brothers ingest technical manuals. The result is that too often the final product resembles nothing so much as a dubbed-in Oriental film. Occasionally, though, a novelist, borne along on his own exquisite and honorable psychological insight, transforms a Western genre into a vehicle for approaching a universal truth.

The Woman in the Dunes was such a book. Kobo Abe, one of Japan's most important writers, took an absurdist nightmare--the tale of a man's adjustment to life in an escapeless pit--and gave it both mythic reality and a moral power. Abe's The Face of Another, a novel about a chemist with a burnt-out face who attempts to function behind a life mask he has fashioned for himself, is as direct as any contemporary exploration of the identity-crisis theme. The Ruined Map, his newest novel to be translated into English, involves the Japanese version of a traditional Western private eye, but the view is strictly from an Eastern slant. The suspense is stirred up metaphysically rather than neatly plotted. The landscape is always as delicate as it is ominous.

The story still begins as generically as any Chandler. A detective is engaged to track a missing husband. The wife is alcoholic, inscrutable and intriguing. Armed with few clues and a feeling that he is embarked on a useless yet necessary quest, the detective proceeds to make a grand detour of the local underworld scene. What started out as a whodunit winds up as a "Who-am-I?" Separated from his home, and a victim of a sense of alienation to boot, the detective begins to identify with the missing husband and yearn for his own wife, to the point of self-return: "No good hunter pursues his quarry too far," he rationalizes. "Rather he puts himself in his quarry's place as he looks for the path of flight; by pursuing himself he corners his quarry."

As straight mystery the book will probably disappoint most Western readers. Wispy implications substitute for concrete clues. The end is not solution but dissolution. Yet the hand of a novelist of quality is omnipresent. The book is not unlike a Greene entertainment or a serious Simenon; one never feels too far removed from the chill that comes from brushing up against the raincoat tails of true mystery--the real nature of human experience.

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