Free The Box Man by Kobo Abe Page B

when the time comes. After disposing of the box that I have taken off, I shall visit the hospital again at precisely eight o’clock. Since outpatients start coming at ten, I shall anticipate as much extra time as possible before that. However, if I am too early, I will incur their displeasure and that will cause problems. Eight o’clock is a good time, and I won’t disturb them while they are still asleep. I estimate that I can get them to spare me a couple of hours for negotiations, though I can’t go so far as to say that that will be sufficient. It’s possible that I could get them to take the day off from examinations and to make than accept going on with the negotiations. At any rate the negotiations will take plenty of time … but what negotiations… ?
    (Let me put this down before I forget. A clincher has just occurred to me that I should like to use when I see her. “I don’t want you to laugh or get angry. I don’t care about others laughing or getting angry, you’re the one who’s important.”)
    Now calm down. Let’s go for broke. If I manage without a breakdown in the negotiations, I imagine they’ll come to an agreement, and if they don’t there’s nothing to do but break off the negotiations. Rather than worrying about the negotiations, what is important now is to calculate the procedure necessary to arrange things so that I can be there at eight o’clock. I say arrange things, but there is nothing particularly troublesome. If I tear the box up into three or four pieces and fold them up, it will be ordinary trash. That will take scarcely five minutes at the most. Even if I liquidate my possessions, in any case they are articles of daily use for a life on the move, and they won’t amount to much. For example, this plastic board that I am using now as a pad for my notes. It’s simply a piece of rather thickish board, ordinary, milky white, sixteen by eighteen inches, but it is an absolutely essential item that I cannot do without in my life. First of all, it replaces a table. A stable level surface is necessary at all costs for eating and telling fortunes with cards. It also becomes a chopping board when I cook. It’s a shutter against the rain over the observation window on winter nights when the wind is strong, and on summer evenings when there’s no breeze at all it conveniently takes the place of a fan. It’s a portable bench for sitting on the wet ground, and it becomes a perfect worktable for undoing the cigarette butts that I have collected and for rolling them again.
    Of course, as it is, it has taken time and trouble to cull out my personal possessions as much as I have. When I first started living in a box, there was a time when I was quite unable to abandon the common idea of convenience and stored away willy nilly things I didn’t even know how to use, not to mention those articles that seemed as if they might come in handy. My baggage was endlessly increased with various items: a tin can on which were embossed three Technicolor nudes holding a golden apple (surely that would serve some purpose), a precious stone (perhaps an ancient implement), a slot machine ball (it would come in handy for moving heavy things), a Concise English Japanese Dictionary (indispensable sometime, one never knew), a high heel, painted gold (the shape was interesting, and it might be used in place of a hammer), a one hundred and twenty five watt, six ampere house socket (it would be a problem if it wasn’t around when I needed it), a brass doorknob (attached to a string, that could be a dangerous weapon), a soldering iron (surely useful for something), a key ring with five keys (it was not impossible that sometime in the future I would come on a lock one of them would fit), a cast iron nut one and five eighths inches in diameter (suspended from a string, it could be a seismograph and would also be handy as a weight when I dried film). When it got so that I couldn’t move for the cramped quarters and