hich situation should I declare 'real' and which one a 'dream'?" That's the question that plagues the narrator of "The Kangaroo Notebook," who, after awakening to discover radish sprouts growing out of his shins, embarks on an eerie adventure -- in a world that seems increasingly hostile and mysterious -- to get rid of them. The question, however, might equally plague the reader of this surreal, playful and almost unassailably enigmatic novel, the final to be written by the late Kobo Abe, a former finalist for the Nobel Prize for Literature and one of Japan's foremost modern writers.
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