This passage discusses the work of Abe Kobo, a Japanese novelist of the twentieth century.
Abe Kobo is one of the great writers of postwar Japan. His literature is richer, less predictable, and wider-ranging than that of his famed contemporaries, Mishima
Yukio and Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo. It is infused with the passion and strangeness of his experiences in Manchuria, which was a Japanese colony on mainland China before World War II.
Abe spent his childhood and much of his youth in Manchuria, and, as a result, the orbit of his work would be far less controlled by the oppressive gravitational pull of the themes of furusato (hometown) and the emperor than his contemporaries.
Abe, like most of the sons of Japanese families living in Manchuria, did return to Japan for schooling. He entered medical school in Tokyo in 1944 just in time to forge himself a medical certificate claiming ill health; this allowed him to avoid fighting in the war that Japan was already losing and return to Manchuria. When
Japan lost the war, however, it also lost its Manchurian colony. The Japanese living there were attacked by the Soviet Army and various guerrilla bands. They suddenly found themselves refugees, desperate for food. Many unfit men were abandoned in the Manchurian desert. At this apocalyptic time, Abe lost his father to cholera.
He returned to mainland Japan once more, where the young were turning to Marxism as a rejection of the militarism of the war. After a brief, unsuccessful stint at medical school, he became part of a Marxist group of avant-garde artists. His work at this time was passionate and outspoken on political matters, adopting black humor as its mode of critique.
During this time, Abe worked in the genres of theater, music, and photography. Eventually, he mimeographed fifty copies of his first "published" literary work, entitled Anonymous Poems, in 1947. It was a politically charged set of poems dedicated to the memory of his father and friends who had died in Manchuria.
Shortly thereafter, he published his first novel, For a Signpost at the End of a Road, which imagined another life for his best friend who had died in the Manchurian desert. Abe was also active in the Communist Party, organizing literary groups for workingmen.
Unfortunately, most of this radical early work is unknown outside Japan and underappreciated even in Japan. In early 1962, Abe was dismissed from the
Japanese Liberalist Party. Four months later, he published the work that would blind us to his earlier oeuvre, Woman in the Dunes. It was director Teshigahara
Hiroshis film adaptation of Woman in the Dunes that brought Abes work to the international stage. The movies fame has wrongly led readers to view the novel as
Abes masterpiece. It would be more accurate to say that the novel simply marked a turning point in his career, when Abe turned away from the experimental and heavily political work of his earlier career. Fortunately, he did not then turn to furusato and the emperor after all, but rather began a somewhat more realistic exploration of his continuing obsession with homelessness and alienation. Not completely a stranger to his earlier commitment to Marxism, Abe turned his attention, beginning in the sixties, to the effects on the individual of Japans rapidly urbanizing, growth driven, increasingly corporate society.
The authors main purpose in the passage is to
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