THE WALL THAT KOBO BUILT: Four Short Stories by Abe Kobo by ANDRAS HORVAT B.A., University of British Columbia, 1968 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF Master of Arts in the Department of ASIAN STUDIES We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA March, 1971 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada This thesis is divided into three parts: Chapter I, Chapter II, and the Appendices; each of these parts fulfills different purposes. Chapter I concerns itself with Abe Kobo's life and working environment. Although the argument that a man's life and his works should be kept separate, may be valid when we examine the works of an author of our own cultural-Unguistic environment, such an examination of style, devoid of human experience would be meaningless when applied to the works of a man who is little known and whose culture still remains to be studied by most North Americans. This thesis, therefore-, examines both the man and his works. Furthermore, Japanese critics, as can be seen in the first part of Chapter I, would never consider separating the author's personality from his literary creations. Chapter I comes to the conclusion that a connection does exist between Abe and his heroes, albeit a much more subtle one than the typical one-to-one, author-hero relationship of Japanese confes sional literature. Chapter II is an examination of seven of Abe's stories, four of which, "Oshimusume" [The Deaf Girl, 1949], "Inu" [The Dog, 1954], "Yume no heishi" [The Dream Soldier, 1957] and "Toki no gake" [The Cliff of Time, 1964], are translated and appended at the back of this thesis. Two of the remaining three, "Akai mayu" (Red Cocoon 1950, trans. John Nathan 1966), and "Dendorokakariya" (Dendrocacalia 1949, trans. M. Jelinkova 1965), are available in English, though the remain ing one "Kabe—S. Karuma shi no hanzai" [The Wall, The Crime of S. Karuma Esq., 1951], an extremely long short story remains to be trans lated. These three works represent not only stepping stones in Abe's career, they also testify to the painstaking experimentation in which Abe was engaged before abandoning the surrealist style of his early years. In the second part of Chapter II, the four translations men tioned above are examined in chronological order and are analyzed in detail to show Abe's change in style at about the time he wrote "Yume no heishi." Some facts concerning Abe's politics are also explained. Appendix I and II contain the four short stories in chrono logical order: first the translations and then the originals. Appendix III Is a list of Abe's original works, in order of publication. The corpus of this thesis, four translations, three stories in the original, several novels in translation, as well as the works of criticism consulted, should provide the basis for some tentative conclusions. First, Abe's style is not confessional, but descriptive and explanatory. Second, Abe abandoned the politically directed surrealism of his early days for a more subtle, documentary style. Third, Abe's heroes struggle with outside forces against which they are powerless; their defeat is intended to prove some failing present in all of us. It is hoped that the materials introduced, and the conclusions arrived at in this thesis will help to form the basis for more detailed research. Table of Contents Chapter 1 1 Chapter II 19 Notes 44 Appendix I i The Deaf Girl 54 ii The Dog 66 iii The Dream Soldier 79 iv The Cliff of Time 91 Appendix II i Oshimusume 105 ii Inu 112 iii Yume no heishi 118 iv Toki no gake I26 Appendix III List of Abe Kobe's Original Publications 135 Bibliography 140 The introduction of Abe Kobo's Zj?^ works to a wider audience, presents a number of problems. First of all, despite the world-wide critical acclaim which (The Woman in the Dunes, trans., E. Dale Saunders, 1962) received, little is known about Abe outside Japan. Second, the information regarding Abe's life and works that is available in Japanese, is written by critics whose concerns differ considerably from those of critics in North America. In order to deal with the first unknown, the author's life and environment, I have sketched a short biography of Abe, trying to show which events in his life have influenced aspects of his literature. The problem of differing critical vantage points is much more difficult to deal xdLth. It is Impossible to sum up, in a few words, the critical concerns of the Japanese reading public, to say nothing of the criticism which emanates from the bund an x£Jy§i » Japan's literary world. It is the differences that make themselves most apparent. An almost exclusive concern with the life and personality of the author, at the expense of more objective information concerning techniques of plot, description, and characterization, is one quality which might perplex many foreign critics. However, it would be useful to keep in mind the fact that literature in Japan is a popular pastime, readily accessible to people on the street. Magazines such as the Bungei Shunju "^C^cL^y^* Chuo K o r t n ^ / ^, Bungakkai jrg^ , Bungei ^ |- , Shincho gy;^ t ^L"^"' Hihyo anc* Usn:*-°^|fl' not to mention the monthly anthologies of taishu -j^ °r P°Pular works, are all for sale in bookstores and sometimes even in railway stations. It is in the above-mentioned magazines that the literature of modern Japan thrives; it is also in their pages that the questions of literary interpretation are debated. Literary criticism in North America is the occupation of professional scholars, not a popular pastime practiced by men of letters. Perhaps it is their close proximity to an attentive reader ship that has made Japanese critics concern themselves with describing the person as well as the works of authors. From the point of view of objective criteria, bundan critics are a breed apart from the scientific critics of North American universities. Although the university critics display perhaps too great a desire to establish elusive objective crite ria—Northrop Frye mentions in the preface to his Anatomy of Criticism that there is a Ph.D. dissertation which is devoted to measuring percentages of gloom in the novels of Thomas HardyJ—Japanese critics on the other hand seen to spend an inordinately large amount of their time listing "Influences" and "isms" which they are not at all eager to define. In one short four page article in his Muchi to koma, Haniya YutakaS^/^j^^] attributes Abe's genius to the influence of no less than nine other writers including Kafka, Rilke, Shiina Rinzo j^/^J$&^-> Hanada Kiyoteru ^\"53 ^$$> 311(1 Haniya himself. Bundan critics rarely write about a work with the intent of interpreting its meaning to readers; rather, they use a given work as a springboard for their own subjective extemporizations. Eto Jun 5*X-|^j[^|» l n an article entitled "Modern Japanese Literary Criticism," divides the critical art into two spheres: creative popular criticism and academic criticism. Naturally, he favours the former type: I personally do not take sides with the idea that literary criticism is, or should be, a kind of science, an idea generally accepted by academic critics.... However, I am interested in the idea that literary criticism can be a creative art, a genre of literature relying far more heavily on the art and personality of the critic than on abstract theory.^ Unfortunately, bundan criticism can often rely far more on the personality of the critic than on the character of the work in question. Very often criticism tends to degenerate to personal remini scences of the critic and come to have very little connection with the literary skills or personal message of the author. Honda Shugo Jf^^^jC^p takes up at least a quarter of his article on Abe describing how Abe grew a beard at about the time he went to Czechoslovakia in 1956, or that his father was a doctor and so was some other young author's father, or how Abe distributed a drug to guests at a party and that the drug did not take effect. This kind of celebration of the man is not at all limited to literary memoirs such as those of Honda and Eaniya. It would appear that there is altogether a greater emphasis on the author as a man in Japan than in North America. Isoda Koichi , writing in Bungakkai, introduces his article by describing Abe's unorthodox appearance at a meeting of writers. Abe wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, while the others, mostly I-novelists came in grey suits. Isoda comes to the conclusion that the I-novelists made a distinction between their images as people and as characters in their books, while with Abe there was no such contradiction. The implication, quite obviously, is that Abe is more sincere than the I-novelists who only claim to write sincere books. But then, an author's sincerity is purely a bundan concern; no North American professor of English would spend too much time on such a vague and seemingly naive issue. There are, however, very good historical reasons for the evolu tion of this exclusively Japanese critical attitude. Brett de Bary sums up the reasons as follows: Perhaps the roots of this concern can be traced to the foundations laid by Tsubouchi Shoyo's j^i^^j^JShosetsu Shinzui ;]^$^J|&(Essence of the novel) inl885. For despite TsuboucmNs insistence that it was the aesthetic beauty of a novel which justified its existence, he included as basic criteria the plot. This emphasis on realism, which the early Meiji novel had learned from its European models, was in the Japanese case never fully dissociated from certain moral qualities of the book's creator—his personal sincerity and the "truth" of the tale told. This equation of artistic realism x^ith personal honesty has not only resulted in the perversion of realism to confessionalism, i.e. suffer ing in order to write about it, but also in the elevation of the author's personality to a level at least on a par with his works. Seen in this