Abe Kōbō, Literary Strategist: The Evolution of His Agenda and Rhetoric in the Context of Postwar Japanese Avant-garde and Communist Artists' Movements (review)

Abe Kōbō died on 22 January 1993. The Asahi newspaper reported his death the following day, emphasizing the international appeal of this writer who had managed to remain at the cutting edge of literary culture for over forty years. The article argued that while Mishima Yukio, another author with a worldwide reputation, would always be associated with his native land, Abe was "no writer of that 'mysterious country' of ukiyoe, kabuki, and bushido, but rather a writer from a 'modernity' in which factories exist, science moves forward, and the metropolis generates labyrinths" (Asahi shinbun, 23 January 1993). The utterly modern, fully cosmopolitan sensibility that the article identifies has undoubtedly shaped the critical reception of the writer's works outside of Japan (or at least in the English-speaking world). In terms of subject matter, we appreciate Abe's novels and plays as subtle, insightful representations of the alienated, surreal experience of the contemporary world, but we do not often encounter landscapes or characters that are unmistakably rooted in the history or culture of the writer's native land. The same is true for his style and technique: Abe's deployment of both scientific precision and disorienting incongruities reminds us immediately of Kafka and Beckett, but does not lend itself readily to inclusion in a narrative of Japanese cultural or literary history. In short, we read Abe as a great writer, but not often as a great Japanese writer. Kawabata Yasunari and Ōe Kenzaburō, on the other hand, can be read through the lens of their national culture, and surely this fact partially explains why they are Nobel laureates while Abe is not (in spite of recurring rumors that the recognition was imminent). The same fact also suggests a primary reason why Abe does not appear on college syllabi as often as the other two writers.

Thomas Schnellbächer's book, Abe Kōbō, Literary Strategist, alters this impression by introducing us to a very different Abe Kōbō, one that has long been ignored. Most significantly, Schnellbächer situates Abe squarely in his place in time and space, the world of avant-garde literature and art movements in Japan's early postwar period (defined in this study as 1945 to 1962, the year Abe left the Japan Communist Party). Equally important is the manner in which Schnellbächer reframes Abe by focusing on him as a theorist rather than the novelist or playwright that we have heretofore read and appreciated. In this detailed, meticulous study we hear nothing of Woman in the Dunes as an existential response to the alienation of the modern city; we do learn a great deal about how, for example, Abe's early treatises are held together by "an 'editorial' meta-discourse that mediates between all the heterogenous mono-discourses that it integrates" (p. 317). Yes, this portrait of Abe's work is a theoretically dense one—as is only fitting, perhaps, in light of the type of texts examined.

This is not to say that the widely appreciated literary sensibilities that bring to life Abe's The Man Who Turned into a Stick or The Box Man are entirely ignored in favor of explicating the abstract vision or philosophy that Abe espoused. On the contrary, charting just such literary sensibilities in a genre (aesthetic/literary theory) that is not often associated with them is central to the task that the author of this study sets himself. While seeking at one level to restore to Abe's work the politicality that both drove the writer in the early years of Japan's postwar and set the parameters of his art for the length of his career, Schnellbächer also turns Abe's various theories of a revolutionary art back upon the very manifestos and critical essays that...