There are a few universal features of outstanding fiction that most readers will readily identify as providing the most pleasure and satisfaction, that make the reading experience a fulfilling one. Some of these will likely be subtlety and nuance of characterization, skillful plotting, vivid descriptive writing, insightful communication of feelings, and excellent facility with language. Any fiction that contains a majority of these is, foreseeably, to be of quality. Interestingly, though, it isn't necessarily the case that a novel almost totally lacking in any of them will be a poor one or one disqualified from major status. It's possible that a novel contains wooden characters, plotting that's just OK, emotional aloofness, and writing that's merely competent and not much more, and still, in spite of all that, force us to put our ear to the wall of infinity and listen for the music of meaning. Inter Ice Age 4, by the great Japanese author Kobo Abé, is just such a book. Its power comes from the fact that it's a virtual intellectual and prescient explosion. Written under the guise of science fiction, this tale foresaw—in 1959!—the eventual importance that issues such as cloning, genetic manipulation, and global warming would take on for the human race; it also anticipated—and this is pretty incredible—important work in late twentieth century analytic philosophy done by thinkers such as Thomas Nagel in "What is it Like to be a Bat?" and John Searle with the Chinese Room argument. This, in and of itself, is fascinating, since virtually every piece of reference material available in English about Abé goes out of its way to stress his interest in Continental philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Jaspers, which is, in many ways, the completely opposite tradition.

Yet, we can see that it's so. Abé is often compared to Kafka—probably because the work of both is greatly concerned with the loss of individual identity—but I think that where Kafka approaches this question by means of psychological probing, Abé puts a different spin on it: he’s totally about the increasingly dominant role science and technology are assuming in human affairs. Abé, being an M.D., had a scientific background but never had any interest in practicing medicine. He seems to have obtained the degree out of a sense of obligation to his father, who ran a hospital in Manchuria after Japan was destroyed in World War II. (Abé once wrote: “I will never forget that my adolescence began amidst death and ruins.”) In retrospect, from the perspective of 2007, we can see that Inter Ice Age 4 isn't science fiction at all, although that wouldn't have been possible to declare in '59. And the fact that it isn't points to Abé’s ability to wed his capacity to forecast how science can both help and harm humanity with an overall pessimistic, materialistic view of human life. (He believed in discredited ideologies like Marxism and Socialism.) At one point, the narrator, Professor Katsumi, tells us:

Earlier, I mentioned some characteristics of great fiction and stated that this novel has none of them. However, there's one that I left out, and Inter Ice Age 4 does possess it, in excess: imagination. In truth, the sum total of Abé’s novels reveals that his imagination was inexhaustible. The book that made him famous all over the world, The Woman in the Dunes, illustrates that nicely. There, a scientist falls into a hole in the ground, on a beach, and encounters a community of people who spend their entire lives fighting against the encroaching sand. There's a minutely detailed synopsis of the plot of IIA4 HERE.

Without being quite so thorough, I’ll outline it in this column, just to fortify the point about imagination (remember, this is 1959):

A computer scientist named Katsumi and his assistant, Tanomogi, are working on a computer that has the ability to foretell the future. As it happens, scientists in Communist Russia have developed a similar machine which, after making extremely accurate predictions about world events, portends the global triumph of communism over capitalism. Katsumi is ordered to have his computer try something on a smaller scale: augur the future of a single human being. He and Tanomogi randomly pick a man to follow. The next day, the man turns up murdered. His mistress, confessing, is arrested for the crime. Katsumi’s machine had already been able to download the contents of the man’s mind and, in these “memoirs”, the dead man had observed that his girlfriend frequently seemed to have amounts of money in her possession that were out of all proportion to her quotidian job. Confronted with this, she tells a fantastic story to account for the cash: when she was pregnant, some people from a hospital approached her to abort the fetus and hand it over to them in exchange for seven thousand yen. Moreover, each time she provided a referral of another pregnant woman for the same purpose, she was paid an additional two thousand. No one believes the story and, in short order, she commits suicide. Eventually, Katsumi’s wife, herself pregnant, is approached and offered seven thousand yen for her fetus. Clearly, this is no coincidence, but Katsumi is unable to make sense of it all. Tanamogi keeps making covert suggestions about organizations that do work on animal fetuses to breed new species. Katsumi, at first, brushes this off; but, eventually, he comes to uncover a situation that's quite sensational: an effort to breed human babies with gills, able to survive underwater, because the polar ice caps are melting and Japan will soon be entirely submerged. The fish children, called “aquans”, are cultivated in a breeding farm; Katsumi has the unpleasant experience of seeing his own child, whom his wife sold, in the “birthing room”.

There are many details of the plot that I’m electing not to get into, here, because, honestly, while the story line is involved, it’s not especially exciting or suspenseful. The ideas that Abé takes up are what make the book so richly stimulating. The whole notion of being able to look into the future, for example, raises questions about free will and human freedom that have been debated for thousands of years. This rather long quote examines the question of free will, how knowing the future would affect it, and, at the end, a view of abortion that you’ll never see advocated, for example, in American politics:

The suggestion that the only reason to carry on with life is the state of being in love with another human being (“It’s usual enough...with someone”) is—like much of the dialogue and many of the concepts in this book—almost clinical, aspiring to be objectively detached and scientific; but we notice, in this example, that it’s put forward as a rebuttal to the idea that knowledge of one’s future would cancel one’s desire to keep living—itself, an interesting thought. And the suggestion that humanity—or personhood—is contingent upon the existence of a conscience is a startling hypothesis, to say the least. Of course, it’s impossible for most of us to study or talk about these subjects in a calm, unsympathetic way. They stir up our deepest emotions. This dichotomy comes up again and again, in almost every conversation in the novel. At one point, someone says, “Murder isn't bad because you deprive the victim of physical life, but because you deprive him of his future.” At another juncture, Yamomoto, the head of the aquan project, tells Katsumi, just before he shows him the breeding farm, “I should like you to take an intellectual—rather than factual—interest in what you’re going to see.” The clash of knowledge versus emotion, of intellect versus feelings, never stops.

I want to briefly touch on a suggestion that underlies the entire tale: that the human mind is, essentially, a highly sophisticated computer or, if you like, that computers can emulate human thought exactly, or, in yet another formulation, the question of whether or not a computer can be said to have consciousness and thoughts in the exact same way that a human being does. These questions were first seriously proposed, by the English mathematician Alan Turing, in the 1940s, and they've obsessed scientists and philosophers ever since. In popular culture, some of this usually surfaces under the term AI (Artificial Intelligence). This subject is nowhere near as familiar to the average person as global warming is, but its inclusion, by Abé, in a novel composed in the late '50s, is just as astonishing. The computer that lies at the center of operations strives to be like the one in Moscow, about which it's remarked “Until now, computers have had to be fed by humans. But Moscow I has apparently advanced to the stage of being able to self-program.” These are big questions that reach way beyond the scope allowable in this forum, but serious readers should be aware of the issues being raised.

Inter Ice Age 4 is one of the most provocative novels by one of the most provocative authors in twentieth century world literature. The questions it examines are among the most important of our time, and it examined them many years before they became widely shared concerns. As an introduction to Abé’s fully mature, fully realized novels (i.e., The Box Man, Ark Sakura), it's highly recommended. This is a book you can read with profit, every year or so for a lifetime.