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Kobo Abe (1924-1993) |
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Avant-garde novelist and playwright and a superb storyteller, who shared with Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco a similar, absurd sense of humor. Central themes in Kobo Abe's work are loss of identity, alienation, isolation of the individual in a bizarre world, and the difficulty people have in communicating with one another. In the West, Abe is best-known for his novels, such as The Woman in the Dunes (1962) and The Face of Another (1964). "The woman turned when she saw the lamplight. Skillfully handling the shovel, she was scooping sand into a big kerosene can. Beyond her the wall of black sand soared precipitously up and seemed to be bending inward on them. It must have been up there that he had walked during the day in his search for insects. When two kerosene cans were full, the woman carried them, one in each hand, over to where he was. As she passed him she raised her eyes. "Sand," she said in a nasal voice. She emptied the sand from the kerosene cans near the path in the back where the rope ladder hung. Then she wiped away the sweat with the end of a towel. The place was already piled high with the sand she had hauled over." (The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abé, translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Sounders, with drawings by Machi Abé, New York: Vintage Books, 1972, p. 32; originally published in Japanese by Shinchosha as Suna no Onna, 1962) Kobo Abe was born in Tokyo to Abe Asakichi and Yorimi, but he grew up in Mukden in Japanese-occupied Manchuria
(present-day Shenyang in Liaoning Province), where he moved with his family in 1925. His father, a physician, was
a member of the staff of a medical school. As a young man Abe was interested in mathematics and insect collecting.
Perhaps his many years outside Japan and its contemporary cultural life led him to study such Western philosophers
as Heidegger, Jaspers and Nietzsche. In 1941 Abe moved to Japan and entered in 1943 the University of Tokyo to
study there medicine. Because of respiratory illness, Abe was exempted from military service. During the war he
returned to Manchuria. After repatriation Abe continued his studies and graduated in 1948, with the promise that he would never practice. Instead Abe started his career as a writer. He became a member of an avant-garde group named Night Group (Yoru no Kai), a loose confederation of writers, philosophers, and intelligentsia led by the writer Kiyoteru Hamada. They were committed to the goal of fusing the techniques of Surrealism with Marxist ideology. "The students, simultaneously, as if they'd agreed on it, raised their faces and looked at the crowd around them. The teacher smiled:" No, it's not the case that all these people are sticks. When I say that being a stick is excessively ordinary, I speak in the qualitative rather than the quantitative sense. It's the same thing as mathematicians not saying much about the properties of a triangle. Because there are no new discoveries to be made from it." Pausing, he added: "By the way, what punishment do you two intend to hand down?"" ('The Stick' by Kobo Abe, in Late Chrysanthemum: Twenty-One Stories from the Japanese, translated by Lane Dunlop. with etchings by Tanaka Ryohei, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986, p. 172) His first book Abe had actually written in 1943. His writing, often stiff and formal, reflected
his preoccupation with ideas rather than stylistic techniques. Important writers for his own artistic
development were Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, Rainer Maria Rilke and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In 1947 Abe
published at his own expense a collection of poems. His reputation as a writer Abe established with the
novel Owarishi michi no shirube ni
(1948), about the story of an opium addict. The defeat of the Japanese
empire in World War II left Abe disillusioned about the future of his country. Beasts Head for Home
(1957),
a story about a parentless young man, Kuki Kyūzō, who is searching his
way
to Japan in northeast China, reflected his changing ideas about Japan
and being a Japanese: "Perhaps Japan doesn't exist anywhere," Kyūzō
thinks. "With every step I take, the wasteland walks together with me.
Japan just flees further away . . . " (Ibid., p. 190) The themes of loss, isolation and search
for meaning recur constantly in Abe's work. In the 1950s, Abe
joined the Japanese Communist Party. However, in 1962 he was expulsed from the party because of
critical articles towards JPC, partly as a result of a trip through Hungary, some months before
the national uprising in 1956 against Communist rule. Abe supported the independence of Hungary from the
Soviet Union. In 1961, Abe and twenty-seven
other literary figures
declared their opposition to JPC'S Stalinist policies. Along with writers such as Yukio Mishima,
Yasunari Kawabata, and Kenzaburo Oe, Abe published a statement
protesting China's approach in dealing with the rights of writers,
artists, and intellectuals. Abe's experimental works first gained popularity among the younger generation of readers. He received prizes for his three stories, 'Akai mayu' (1950, Red Cocoon), 'Kabe' (1951), and 'S. Karuma-shi no hanzai' (1951). In the last mentioned, the style and subject matter are reminiscent of Kafka, and he also employed many elements from science fiction and detective stories. A broadcast of Bo ni natta otoko (The Man Who Turned into a Stick) won the Geijutsusai Shorei Prize. For Yurei wa koko ni iru (1958, The Ghost Is Here) Abe won Japan's highest drama award, the Kishida Kunio Drama Prize. Abe's novels and plays are characterized by calm observations and
avant-garde techniques. Often the situations which his characters face
are surreal and their behavior is explored through the concept of free
will. Dai-Yon Kampyoki (1959, Inter Ice Age 4 ), originally serialized in the journal Sekai
from 1958 to 1959, was set in a future Japan threatened by the melting
of polar icecaps. The protagonist, professor Katsumi, has developed a
computer program that predicts the creation of genetically engineered
children, who are adapted for life in the rising seas. The computer has
also found out that Katsumi will oppose this progress and his unborn
child is enlisted into the ranks of the mutated water-breathers. Suna no Onna (1962, Woman in the Dunes) was a kafkaesque
story of Niki Jumpei, a teacher and an amateur etymologist, who turns
into a modern Sisyphus. On a holiday expedition, he intends to collect
insects that lived on the dunes, but becomes imprisoned like an insect
in a remote village. "The village, resembling the the cross-section of
a beehive, lay sprawled over the dunes. Or rather the dunes lay
sprawled over the village. Either way, it was a disturbing and
unsettling landscape." (Ibid., p. 10) Jumpei accepts shelter from a woman, who lives
alone in a house, at the bottom of a sandpit. The house is in danger of
being buried by massive sand dunes that threaten to bury the whole
community. The woman's husband is dead and Jumpei is pressed to help,
to shovel the eternally increasing sand so that the life in the
community could continue. When a chance to escape comes, he refuses to
take advantage of it – he gives up his freedom and stops questioning of
his belonging to this, or perhaps to any organization. "The novel traces the evolving emotional responses of this rueful Robinson Crusoe as he adapts, rejects, then ultimately comes to terms with this most peculiar world. Abe uses every emotion, from pride and fear to sexual desire and despair, to force his protagonist, and so his reader, into an acute self-awareness of the absurdity of human condition." (A Reader's Guide to Japanese Literature by J. Thomas Rimes, Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1988, p. 179) Woman in the Dunes attracted the film director Teshigahara Hiroshi, whose film based on the book gained a huge success in 1963. The film won a special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Kyoko Kishida, who starred in the role of the young widow, became later known for her voice-over work in Moomin and other animated films. Teshigahara Hiroshi cooperated with Abe also in The Pitfall (1962) and The Face of Another (1966). In Moetsukita Chizu (1967, The Ruined Map), alienated people have found new, alienated ways to use everyday items: "Actually, binoculars, if used in a certain way, give the effect of X ray. For instance, you can read more expressions and characteristics from a single photo of a given person than you can by meeting him face to face." Mikkai (1977) was a surrealistic detective story about an unidentified man searching for his wife in a hospital. The protagonist of Hako otoko (1974, The Box Man) leaves his ordinary life and starts to observe the mad world of Tokyo through a cardboard box, which he pulls over his head. Secret Rendezvous (1977) was set in an underground hospital, a labyrinth of of twisted logic and strange technological inventions, where a nameless jump-shoe salesman is on a search to find his missing wife. "This novel is short and almost indescribably unpleasant," said John Updike of the work, one of the weirdest of all Abe's novels. In the 1970s, Abe wrote several plays, and directed his own theater company in Tokyo, the Abe Kobo Studio, which dissolved
after seven years. His theater toured in the U.S. and performed in
New York City in 1979.
For the next five years, he published almost nothing. The Ark Sakura,
which came out in 1984, was his second-to-last novel. The themes of
solitude and alienation in his plays were dealt with similar way as in
the theatre of absurd and works of Samuel Beckett and
Harold Pinter. In Friends (1967) the apartment of an office worker
is invaded by a family that takes control of his life, and finally, he is killed by one of the daughters.
Although the members of the family claim to be devoting themselves to social good, their actions are cruelly
destructive. The Suitcase (1973) depicts two women who worry over the contents of a suitcase, said to
contain the ancestors of the husband of one of the women. After the death of Mishima on November 25, 1970, Abe gained status of the major dramatist of Japan. Moreover, he took over for some years Mishima's monthly acticle appearing in the literary magazine Nami. Abe took a neutral position concerning Mishima's suicide. "We enjoyed sharing our despair over a drink of sake together. Eventually Mishima came to despair of the theatrical medium itself, while I survived and in contradiction to my convictions, established my own actor's group." (quoted in Fake Fish: The Theater of Kobo Abe by Nancy K. Shields, New York: Weatherhill, 1996, p. 72) Many of the essays were later collected as Warau tsuki (1975, Grinning moon). Kobo Abe died of heart failure on January 22, 1993, while writing his final novel, The Flying Man, which appeared posthumously in 1993. For further reading: Crisis in Identity and Contemporary Japanese Novels by Arthur G. Kimball (1973); Metaphors of Alienation: The Fiction of Abe, Beckett and Kafka by William Currie (1973); Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel, eds. by Kinya Tsuruta and Thomas E. Swann (1976); Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions: An Introduction by J. Thomas Rimer (1978); The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature by Hisaaki Yamanouchi (1978); Fake Fish: The Theater of Kobo Abe by Nancy Shields (1966); Abe Kobo: An Exploration of His Prose, Drama and Theatre by Timothy Iles (2002); Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe Kōbō by Christopher Bolton (2009); Beyond Nation: Time, Writing, and Community in the Work of Abe Kōbō by Richard F. Calichman (2016); 'Abe Kōbō's Manchurian Past and His Border Thoughts' in Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia by Miya Qiong Xie (2022) - Muita teoksia suomeksi: työnimellä Kertomus meediosta vuonna 1943 julkaistu romaani on ilmeisesti Aben ensimmäinen teos, eikä useiden lähteiden mainitsema Owarishimichi no shirushibe (1948). Selected bibliography:
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