A couple of facts about The Ark Sakura help to contextualise it. First, it was written by a Japanese writer. Second, it was first published in 1984 at the height of the Cold War. The threat of nuclear annihilation was particularly topical during the eighties. And Japan remains the only nation to have been attacked with atomic weapons. Finally, you may wish to look up the Oya Stone Quarry in Japan. The quarry operated for hundreds of years and the last parts of it were closed down in 1986, two years after the publication of The Ark Sakura, but the museum, itself, opened in 1979. Here are two links to websites about the quarry if you’re interested in looking at it further: 1: Japan Heritage Utsunomiya, Home of Oya Stone 2: Oya History Museum. Though I have no proof, it wouldn’t surprise me if Oya was an inspiration for the setting of this novel.

In The Ark Sakura Pig, or as he prefers to be called, Mole, lives alone in a vast underground quarry. Mole is overweight and a social outcast. His existence is the product of a rape and he is estranged from his rapist father, Inototsu. When he was a teenager Mole was also accused of rape, although he only witnessed it. Nevertheless, his overbearing father chained him to a massive industrial strength toilet in the abandoned quarry for a week as punishment. Inototsu’s crime and the accusation made against Mole are an interesting parallel, as is the hypocrisy of Inototsu’s action. The novel is peppered with parallel situations and hypocrisy which sometimes highlight or magnify the actions of one character or group through another.

Mole refers to his vast underground estate as a ship or ark. He plans to recruit hundreds of worthy people to live in his ark when nuclear war begins and thereby save the future. But Mole’s plan to achieve this seems limited. On the occasions he leaves his shelter he carries with him a key to the quarry entrance and a card with a map to the quarry with the words ‘Boarding Pass – Ticket to Survival’ printed on the front. Somehow he must find a way to vet potential recruits. His efforts seem naïve, even childish. But on this occasion when he leaves his shelter he makes contact with an insect seller at a market and also attracts the attention of the insect seller’s two shills who have helped persuade Mole into a purchase. Mole gives the insect seller a ticket, and the insect seller remarkably decides to return with Mole to his ark. But the two shills have also taken tickets without being asked, and Mole realises that his ark may be breached by unwanted companions before he and the insect seller can make it back ahead of them.

If the premise of the novel seems a little weird, then I can assure you that that is somewhat surreal. It is easy to glean Abe’s influence on Haruki Murakami. The novel has widely been described as ‘dream-like’. Mole describes the vast underground caverns created by four unscrupulous mining companies each trying to quarry its rock. The caverns seem impossibly large, with their farthest reaches yet unexplored by Mole, and with dead ends and small rooms where shafts were started, only for the rock to be found unsuitable. Throughout his ark Mole has placed booby traps against possible intruders and has created his own personal armoury, much of it from toy guns converted into fireable weapons. And in one cavern sits the massive toilet to which Mole was once chained, which becomes the centre of much of the action in the story. While he still lives alone Mole sits on this toilet and views stereoscopic three dimensional aerial photographs. He even cooks next to the toilet! The toilet is large enough and powerful enough that Mole has been using it as a waste disposal solution. He could probably even get a body down it ...

This surreal quality extends to the action and interaction between characters. Abe creates situations that don’t appear to reflect the way people respond in reality, but which assume a logic of their own within the story. Mole is told by the female shill that her male counterpart has cancer and no longer than six months to live. Yet the man seems virile and he supposedly does not know he has cancer. Later, the man tells Mole the same thing about his female companion. Who does Mole believe? Could both things be true? Why did they even tell him? The relationships between the characters seem strange, too. Mole is a needy person. He desires to be validated and his position of authority recognised. He wishes to be called ‘Captain’, but will not ask the insect seller to do this. Even so, like the wish fulfilment of a dream, the insect seller decides to start calling him captain only two pages later. We expect that the insect seller and his shills assume that Mole is somewhat simple and they will take advantage of him once they have entered his ark and he is outnumbered. Even Mole, when he considers giving the insect seller a form to sign stating that Mole is in charge, realises that, “if he had a mind to disobey, no mere signature was going to stop him.” Nevertheless, they show a level of unexpected loyalty to Mole, as though implicitly understood structures of traditional social authority along with the titles given to power are enough to overcome individual history and intent.

It’s a small point, but one which makes me think that the novel is more than just a parable about nuclear disaster and what that might look like. No disaster has taken place, in fact, at least as far as we know, and what this novel begins to look more like is a study of human nature and our presumptions about civilisation. The matter that kept occurring to me as I read begins with names which define status, like Mole’s preferred ‘Captain’, and his self-chosen appellations, ‘Pig’ and ‘Mole’. We never learn his real name, but ‘Pig’ is an allusion to his weight and the implicit assumption that he is gluttonous. Pig rejects this name in favour of ‘Mole’, which captures the flavour of his situation – his living underground – as well as his isolation and social blindness. The point is, there are attempts in the world of Mole’s ark to replicate aspects of human society, but there is a vein in the novel that is ironic, exposing human nature reduced to its animality.

Mole and others imagine an imminent annihilating war, so the whole purpose of the ark is bound to their survival. And in this survival situation Mole’s studies of human history cause him to posit his Grand Manhole Theory: that it is waste disposal that is of foremost importance for any functioning society, not any higher thought or purpose. It is true not only for beach resorts, he argues, but he draws on Japan’s history and its moveable capital which, he claims, has relocated frequently throughout history to overcome the problem of “Sewerage, trash ... and dead bodies.” It is little wonder that the entrance of Mole’s ark is concealed by mountainous trash, or that the central feature around which everyone congregates is the outsized toilet.

But I think the point is that the small scale of society within the ark and the limitations of its resources reveals aspects of the human animal which civilisation suppresses. Lenin famously asserted that any society is only three meals away from anarchy, and what Mole’s ark becomes, as it is infiltrated by the Broom Brigade, (an organisation of septuagenarian street cleaners hoping to create their own Kingdom) and the Wild Boar Stew Gang (a group of young men considered the lowest of the low), is an experiment in social engineering. Inspired by the threat of imminent nuclear disaster, The Broom Brigade plan to create a new sovereign nation which will untether them from the consequences of mainstream laws, while the young Boar’s (another pig appellation) have no fixed plan, except they hold their belief in their certain right to also exist.

And we have the same situation with these groups, now writ larger, that we have seen in Mole’s desire for captaincy. It seems there is almost no-one or any group which doesn’t wish to define and aggrandize themselves through titles. Mole’s Grand Manhole Theory, for instance, is really just a pretentious name for saying you need a way to get rid of shit. Abe satirically undermines the pretence of the markers of civilisation. It is telling that so many characters assume titles while few have actual names. Mole becomes ‘captain’, the Shill is dignified with the title of ‘president’ (an elevated title in a small company in the outside world) and Manta Komono, the insect dealer, is elevated as leader of the Broom Brigade and receives a gold-plated badge with three stripes to signal his importance. They call him Commander.

I was reminded of the final scene in The Lord of the Flies when the British officer lands on the island and finds a group of boys who were only moments before chieftains, hunters and the hunted: who, in the absence of civilisation and the organising principles of adults, had formed their own society, only for it to devolve into barbarism. Abe’s characters are a little like this. Removed from society they are able to form their own groups and rules along with the principles upon which they are predicated. Most notable is the Kingdom of Essential Castoffs which the Adjutant from the Broom Brigade hopes to establish. The title is grand and the sense of purpose and identity it bestows his misfit group elevates them in esteem and purpose. Part of the point is that grand-sounding names and self-importance rationalise actions. The adjutant anticipates a long ‘trial’ of the population, one at a time by phone, by which those deemed worthy to survive will be welcomed to their society; the rest, it is assumed, will be left to die. It’s a terrible and hubristic attitude which appals Mole, except that he realises his own plan had really been no different. Again, a hypocritical parallel.

For modern audiences this rationalisation of actions finds some of its most disturbing ideology in the regressive attitudes towards the novel’s female characters. In particular, the female shill becomes the site of a less than subtle power struggle between Mole, the insect seller and his shill. The focus on the body of the female shill becomes obsessive. Understandably, Mole, who seems virginal, is first aroused by his proximity to an attractive woman. But the constant focus on her tight faux-leather skirt, on her hips, legs, breasts and abdomen, or of the sound of her urination, is telling us something. Desiring to assert his authority in the group, Mole realises he cannot allow the insect dealer to have sole access to the girl. Having witnessed the insect deal slap her backside, Mole gives her a slap on the backside, too. Later, the male shill becomes angry enough that he plans to kill the insect dealer if he finds him having sex with the girl. Mole understands that, “He who controls the woman controls the group.”

It is another point which is paralleled on a larger scale through the diabolical plans of the Broom Brigade and their vision of the future. A group of young school girls have become separated and lost within the labyrinthine bowels of the ark. With an apocalypse presumed to have taken place, the old men of the Brigade led by the Adjutant plan to find the young girls and make them bear their children, thereby supplanting the young men of the Wild Boar Stew Gang. Whether the girls will be ready for or desirous of this situation is of no consequence. The plan to “divvy them up by lots” and the possibility that the girls will form the basis of a barter system (“just as good as money, or better”) reduces their humanity to the level of livestock. The high-minded notions of the Adjutant are revealed to be the civilised clothing of a lascivious intent: “The younger the better – don’t you agree Commander? Like wet paper, in a way: the time you spend slowly warming them up, before they catch fire, is the most enjoyable.” The emerging ‘civilisation’ within the ark highlights the unequal power relationships within patriarchal structures.

This supplanting of the young men by the old for access to reproductive rights also suggests the role that civilisation plays in separating nature from power. Positions of authority and the organisational structures of a society regulate resources, and at the very heart of this is reproductive rights. Patriarchal power organises to frustrate the mechanisms of nature. The female shill tells Mole:

When a man does it [act dishonestly for gain], he’s a doctor, or the heir of a wealthy landowner, or a company executive, or something – he dangles his position or his property in front of his victim’s eyes as bait. But a woman’s only bait is herself. It’s a terrible disadvantage.

In this sense, civilisation is as anathema to nature and its tenets of natural selection as the bomb is to civilisation, itself. As civilisation may undo Darwinian advantages, so too may nuclear weapons redefine power. In a nuclear world the power of the weapon, alone, may become the rationale for action, deployed in any situation in which “the development of technology ... conferred automatic first-strike victory on the user, thus ending the balance of power.” But this power is capricious. Inototsu’s tale told to Mole about a Survival Game played in a school demonstrates that in nuclear war the odds of survival are tipped from the realm of Darwinian fitness, as of old, to chance.

Against these frightening prospects remains, like the bottom of Pandora’s Box, merely hope. It is remarkable how many times characters appear to act irrationally in this novel, but in essence their choices are predicated upon hope. The insect seller returns to Mole’s ark although he has little belief in the story Mole has told him. And for his part, Mole buys the eupcaccia bugs from the insect seller even though he is told they are fake. Eupcaccia bugs are the invention of the author. They come with a good story. The bug has no legs and spends its life rotating in one spot, eating its own excrement and continually spinning on the spot to continue feeding. It seems like a pointless and singular life, much like Mole’s existence before he makes contact with the insect seller. He literally prepared his food where he went to the toilet. But Mole continues to treasure the bugs even though he knows they are fake. “If you imagine it really happened,” the female shill tells Mole, “then it seems real.” And Mole also understands of his own ark, that it represents “not really survival per se, but the ability to go on hoping.”

So The Ark Sakura continues to be a relevant book because it ponders the possibility of nuclear annihilation, as well as the very tenets of our society and its role in our natures. I found it to be a curious and fascinating read, although I personally became a little impatient with it a little over two thirds of the way in when the Adjutant entered the story and delivered a lot of exposition to colour in some aspects of what was going on and explain the beliefs that were driving the action. And while the resolution to the problems that develop in the ark is well done, some readers will find the final short chapter a little unsatisfying in its ambiguity, or for the logic of the implied ending. Some will be uncomfortable with references to human waste and sexual aspects of the novel, too. Nevertheless, this is well worth a read.