The Burned Map

Kobo Abe is a brilliant star of the post-war Japanese avant-garde; his books are read all over the world, they are adapted into films and staged as plays. A continuator of the traditions of Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Alberto Moravia, a precursor to Haruki Murakami, in each of his novels he creates a surreal reality that reformats the reader's picture of the world, distorts—or clarifies—the prisms of perception, and every time completely stuns. It is no wonder that another well-known Japanese author, Kenzaburō Ōe, called Abe the greatest writer in the whole history of literature.
A detective is searching for a missing person—but no one wants to find him except the detective: the missing man's wife turned to a private investigation agency, but does not wish to provide any information about her husband, her brother gets in the detective's way, and the deeper he dives into the investigation, the more puzzling it becomes. «The Burned Map» is one of Kobo Abe's most famous novels—a story about paranoia, the impossibility of understanding, and the gradual loss of connection with the world and oneself.