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

Thomas Schnellbächer, who teaches Japanese studies at Berlin Free University, earned a doctorate there in 2001 with a dissertation on which Abe Kōbō, Literary Strategist is based. This knowledgeable and perceptive study offers an intellectual (not literary or personal) biography of Abe Kōbō's first 15 years as a writer, 1947–62, with emphasis on his links to the Japan Communist Party (JCP) during most of this period. Schnellbächer focuses on Abe's many essays and treatises on writing, revolution, and the avant-garde; by design he comments only occasionally on the fiction Abe produced during these years, and hardly at all on anything published after 1962. The result is a thorough, indeed exhaustive (at times almost exhausting) excursus into Abe as a member of various artists' associations, as a communist party activist in the early 1950s, and as an essayist on writing as it relates to progressive politics and artistic autonomy in the early postwar period. Acknowledging that Abe's "best known, and no doubt his best and most important, work was written after his expulsion from the party and his withdrawal from politics" in 1962, Schnellbächer leaves to others the task of distilling "his essence of an author" (p. 17) by tying these formative years, however loosely or firmly, to the last three decades of Abe's career.

Abe Kōbō (1924–93), like so many East Asian writers since the late nineteenth century, was astonishingly well read in European literature of all eras. In his literary essays he placed himself squarely in a context illuminated by Western thought and letters, on which Schnellbächer elaborates freely. Yet Abe also devoted much attention in the 1950s to ideas of national or folkish literature as advanced by Takeuchi Yoshimi and others. As a communist party member from 1951 to 1962, he struggled with questions of socialist realism versus aesthetics, the individuality of the artist, programmatic party goals, and the writer as critic—even of the JCP itself. Schnellbächer's approach to Abe's essays is indebted considerably to Peter Bürger on the avant-garde, Jürgen Link on linguistics and rhetoric, and Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit on postwar Japanese literature.

Following extensive introductory material, the first half of the book offers the most detailed account of progressive literary and other artistic associations in Japan during the late 1940s and 1950s available in any language. In effect Schnellbächer updates for the early postwar period the analysis of the 1920s and early 1930s in George T. Shea's Leftwing Literature in Japan: A Brief History of the Proletarian Literary Movement (Tokyo: Hōsei University Press, 1964). Although Abe's role in the various organizations is sometimes unclear, and even though Schnellbächer's narrative relies extensively on house organs and other insider sources, these discussion societies, salons, avant-garde circles, and party-affiliated artists' associations are unmistakably pivotal for early postwar culture in Japan.

The volume ably chronicles activities of the innovative New Japan Literature Association (1945), Evening (Night) Society and Century Association (both 1948), Contemporary or Present Society (1952), Society for Documentary Art (1957), and the various publications associated with each—mostly in dialogic tension with the vagaries of the JCP, particularly after the party split in 1950 following criticism from Moscow and Beijing. "It is hardly surprising," Schnellbächer writes of the New Japan Literature Association's strife with the JCP, that "the attempt to impose a political dictatorship on a writers' organization that on the whole considered itself committed but autonomous led to a new series of conflicts between the party and the writers" (p. 106). This resulted in expulsions from the JCP in 1962 including Abe. In brief, Schnellbächer judges communism (not merely Marxism) to be an integral part of Abe...