Abe Kobo: Writing From Nowhere

Abe Kobo, novelist, playwright, and essayist, is often referred to as "Japan's Kafka." Though the phrase may seem complimentary, it also reveals an inherent schism in his writings. To relate authors across national borders is to imply two separate meanings: one, that there are themes in their respective works that transcend cultural contexts; two, that they are lacking some aspect of those contexts, something inherently "Japanese" in Abe's case. To transcend is also to leave behind.

What is the relationship between Abe and Kafka? On one level, there is certainly a direct influence on Abe's subject matter. Kafka-esque themes such as transformation, absurdity, and surreal situations abound in Abe's stories. In the short story "Dendrocacalia," a man finds himself becoming a rare species of shrubbery, a direct homage to Kafka's Metamorphosis; the connection is also present in The Face of Another, where Abe's protagonist undergoes horrific facial scarring and subsequently changes psychologically. The surreal, frustrating, frightening developments of Kafka's The Trial are echoed in Abe's trapped entomologist in Woman in the Dunes, or the marauding houseguests who drive their unwilling hosts to suicide in the short story "Intruders."

On another level, the connection is deeply personal. In his essay "The Frontier Within" Abe himself alludes to being influenced not only by Kafka but by other Jewish writers such as Arthur Miller and Bertold Brecht. This is not to say that Abe felt himself to be Jewish, or that his role as a Japanese writer was directly related to Jewish writers. Instead, what he found in their writings was the language of exile. It is this language that he responded to, that he felt spoke directly to himself and his writing.

The concept of exile is key to understanding Abe's works. In "The Frontier Within" he relates anti-Semitism to national ideologies of land and agriculture. Jewish populations tended to gather in cities; this placement, for Abe, makes them the natural target of national anxieties. Cities are fluid spaces, their residents inclined to transience. In cities, neighbors are strangers, and alienation arises from that lack of intimacy. Abe's protagonists are almost always solitary, locked in their roles; much of their ensuing problems arise from their lack of communication with co-workers, neighbors, fellow citizens. His protagonists may be "home," but "home" is a concept without any meaning, and one that provides no support in times of crisis.

Did Abe believe himself to be in a state of exile? He was born in Tokyo in 1924, to a family who traced its origins to Hokkaido. He was not raised in Japan, however; instead, he spent his childhood and adolescence in Manshukoku, the puppet state in northeast China that Japan controlled from 1932-45. While anti-Semitism was reaching a fever pitch in Germany, Abe was growing up in a "nation" whose fragility became apparent when it abruptly collapsed in 1945. At the same time, he was far from Japan during the last years of World War II, including the detonation of the two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Small wonder, then, that "home" should be treated as an absurd concept throughout Abe's works. As his protagonist Niki Jumpei muses in Woman in the Dunes, "Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order?" The support systems of a nation-citizenship, police, taxes, jobs, hospitals-always fail to save his characters; they are exiles in their own country, simply by circumstance. For what Abe knows, with a deep, personal clarity, is that these systems are simply a fiction.

Small wonder, then, that Abe's characters are inevitably driven into quandaries of identity. The surreal events of his stories only serve to reveal the fictions his characters have based their lives around. If there is something "Japanese" missing in his writing, it is because he has torn it down, revealing it to be nothing more than a set of symbols that, once doubted, become meaningless. In a time when older writers such as Mishima Yukio and Kawabata Yasunari were becoming objects of veneration, Abe was writing about characters and places that could have been in any modern nation. Fluid spaces, fluid identities.

Think, then, of Abe's writing not in a national sense but in an international one; not in terms of a tradition but in relation to a larger movement of postmodern writing. To approach his writings with expectations of "traditional" Japanese writing will only yield frustration; to approach his writings with no expectations is to be rewarded with a powerful vision of modern humanity. A Japanese writer, writing about the world.

Abe Kobo died in 1993.

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Partial Bibliography

Mumei shishu, 1947 (Poems of an Unknown Poet)
Owarisi miti no Sirube ni, 1948 (The Road Sign at the End of the Street)
Kabe, 1951
Kiga domei, 1954 (King Dome)
Bo ni Natta Otoko, 1957-69 (The Man Who Turned into a Stick)
Kemonotati ha Kokyo wo mezasu, 1957
Daiyon Kanpyoki, 1959 (Inter Ice Age 4)
Yure ha Koko ni iru, 1959 (play)
Tomodachi, 1959 (play) (Friends)
Suna no Onna, 1962 (The Woman in the Dunes)
-film 1963, dir. by Hiroshi Teshigahara
Tanin no Kao, 1964 (The Face of Another)
-film 1966, dir. by Hiroshi Teshigahara
Enomoto Takeaki, 1965
Ningen sokkuri, 1967
Moetukita Tizu, 1967 (The Ruined Map)
Mihitu no Koi, 1971 (play)
Four Stories by Kobo Abe, 1973
Hako Otoko, 1973 (The Box Man)
Midoriiro no Sutokkingu, 1974 (play)
Mikkai, 1977 (Secret Rendezvous)
Hakobune Sakuramaru, 1984 (The Ark Sakura)
Kangaru Noto, 1991 (Kangaroo Notebook)
Beyond the Curve, 1993 (short stories, translated by Juliet Carpenter)
Three Plays by Kobo Abe, 1993 (translated by Donald Keene)

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Published on 10/30/01