Beasts Head for Home by Kobo Abe (1957, translated to English, 2017)

Works Read So Far for Japanese Literature Challenge 11

1.  "The Children" by Junichiro Tanazaki
2. Beasts on the Way Home by Kobe Abe


Most people into the Japanese novel read Kobe Abe's (1924 to 1993) towering classic, Woman of the Dunes, and never read anymore of his work. Woman of the Dunes is for sure must reading for anyone into post WWII Japanese novels.  I would say most all  list makers would put it in the top ten

The Japanese Literature Challenge - Year -- Hosted by Dolce Bellezza

Japanese novels. Kenzaburo Oe said Abe should have been given a Nobel Prize instead of him.  In addition to this I have read and greatly enjoyed in past Japanese Literature Challenges reading his

The Ark Sakura and The Face of Another.  All these novels have elements of surrealism whereas the written earlier Beasts on the Way Home is a realistic work, drawing on his childhood in Manchuria.  (There is some biographical data on Abe in my prior posts and the Wikipedia article is decent.) Abe enrolled in medical school to avoid being drafted into the Japanese Army.  He received an M.D. but never practiced.  He did say all his friends with liberal arts degrees died in the war.

Beasts on the Way Home is set in Manchuria, right after the defeat of Japan.  All Japanese have to leave the place they viciously ruled for over a decade.  A young   Japanese man is trying desperately to cross Manchuria to make it to a port from which he can catch a ship for Japan.  He is crossing a war ravaged territory, where the Chinese hate the Japanese.  He teams up with another Japanese youth and they begin a nightmare journey.  They face robbers, wild bands of homeless dogs, Chinese soldiers and near starvation.  The narration is very suspenseful and totally believable.

Those new to Japanese literature for sure should first read Woman of the Dunes.  Then study his other works to see if you wish to proceed on.  Those into Japanese WWII literature should add Beasts on the Way Home to their list.

I was kindly given a review copy of this book.

Mel u
The Reading Life

The Face of Another by Kobe Abe (2003, in translation, 256 pages)

Most people into the Japanese novel just read Kobe Abe's (1924 to 1993) towering classic, Woman of the Dunes, and never read anymore of his work. Woman of the Dunes is for sure must reading for anyone into the post WWII Japanese novels.  I would say most list makers would put it in the top ten Japanese novels. Kenzaburo Oe said Abe should have been given a Nobel Prize instead of him.

I am way behind in my posts on the works I have recently read so I will keep my remarks on this work brief.

  The Face of Another is an incredibly intelligent account of the nature of the mask we construct for ourselves, how we hide and try to create illusions to shield us.  In readings for Irish Short Story Week I came upon Oscar Wilde's famous saying that if you give a man a mask to wear he will tell you the truth.  If Wilde knows something about masks, and he knows a lot, then Abe immeasurably more.  Abe went to medical school and that training shows in this novel.  It is also a meditation about how WWII impacted the narrator.  There is an amazing scene set in a mental hospital for Japanese WWII veterans where a woman scarred terribly at Hiroshima volunteers to do laundry once a week.  In broader terms, the novel is a serious pondering of the human condition.  It is a deeply intellectual novel.  

This is my third Abe Novel.  There are eight of them in translation as kindle editions and I hope to read them all.  My next Abe novel will be The Boxman, about a man who walks all over Tokyo with a box on his head.  

Mel u

Ark Sukura by Kobo Abe 安部 公房

Ark Sukura by Kobo Abe (1984, translated by Juliet Carpenter)

As Strange a Book as I have Read in a Long Time

The Reading Life Japanese Literature Project

Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe (1924 to 1993-Japan) is one of the "Big" books of the post war Japanese novel.    It is on almost all lists of the ten most important Japanese novels (for sure it is on mine)  of all times.    (There is some background information on Abe in my prior post on him.  He has a medical degree but never practiced.)     I really enjoyed reading it but there are those who were turned off by its reduction of humans to the conditions of insects (and Kobe Abe has a "thing" for insects)  and found it to bleak for their liking.   Forgetting these issues,  Woman in the Dunes  is must read for anyone who wishes to seriously read in the Japanese novel.   It is taught in universities around the world as an example of the Existential novel in the tradition of Albert Camus.   Kenzaburo Oe said Abe should have been given the Nobel prize instead of him.

Ark Sukura (I have also seen it called The Ark Sukura) is about Mole, 250 or so pounds,  about five foot six and near blind in the sunlight from living underground.    Mole is a nick name he took for himself as he lives in an abandoned underground warehouse where he is building a concrete ark for a coming apocalyptic flood or/and for a shelter in case of a nuclear explosion in Tokyo (something feared as a  real possibility from terrorists organizations).   Mole has a number of tickets he plans to give to potential crew members for his ark who he sees as  the re-builders of the human race.    He lives underground but once and a while he goes to the surface to look in the malls  and the markets for candidates worthy to be on his ark.


As the story opens Mole is at a street market of some sort.    He spots someone selling insects.      He wants to buy one as soon as he sees a man with an attractive woman go crazy with joy when they buy one.    The insect (something Abe made up) is kind of a metaphor for Mole's view of  the state of his own life and maybe Abe's darker side's view of humanity.   The insect eats exclusively its own waste products.   (Think of the Japanese horror movies about monsters born in garbage dumps).   Mole eventually figures out that the couple are shills working with the vendor.  

After a confrontation, Mole invites the shill and the woman to join his crew (which so far is just them) underground to work on his ark/bomb shelter.   The woman is treated in a very objectified way.   Mole spends a lot of time looking at her body parts.  (One has to assume there has never been a Mrs Mole!)    All sorts of bizarre (and funny if you are a bit warped!) things happen.     Mole gets stuck in a giant toilet which is designed to be used should the ark ever go to sea.    (This is not a book for those squeamish about reading about human waste.)   Mole is looking for about 300 people to join his crew.   He has totally thought through this project.   I was fascinated to learn about some of the details of the ark.

There is just so much in this book.   Some readers will say it shows the influence of French Absurdist theater on Japanese literature (after reading Ubo Roi by Alfred Jarry I see this as very pervasive) of Becket with his characters out of the wastes of the world, and Camus.   I think it also has to be seen in part as an "anti Yokio Mishima work" with Mole as a farcical version of his heroes trying to reclaim days of glory.

A very important theme in much post WWII Japanese literature concerns finding a way to live an authentic valuable life in a world in which all of the values you were taught to believe in have been exposed as hollow lies.

Mel u

A WOMAN in the Dunes-by Kobo Abe-a second look

In my post on A Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe I talked almost exclusively about what the novel seems to be saying or manifesting about the man.   We know the man's name, we know his job and we know a lot about his life passion entomology.   The man has a place in society,  he fits in and is valued for what he does and what he knows.   In most posts on the novel on Goodreads and elsewhere the focus is entirely on the man.   Then I started to rethink the book a bit.   It is not called Man in the Dunes.  

We first meet the woman when the male protagonist of the novel seeks a place to stay for a night and gets trapped in a giant hole in  the ground.   The hole in the ground is the home of a woman.   We find out that her husband and child were killed in a typhoon.   We only have a vague idea how she got there.   She has sex with the man or more bluntly said she allows the man to mate with her.   She shows herself naked to the man but it is not clear if this part of a seductive routine or if she like an insect without self consciousness at all.   We are given no insights into her thoughts other than that she has a foreknowledge of the fate of  man and that her life goal is to have a radio.   She does not wish to escape her circumstances.   She seems to see her existence as natural to her species.   Her essence is to be a woman used as bait to keep a man in a hole in the ground shoveling out sand that forever comes back.   In my initial comments on Woman in The Dunes   I went into existentialist interpretations of the novel,   focusing on the man trapped in an absurd meaningless situation.  Now, thanks to the stimulus of the Woman Unbound Reading Challenge I want to talk about the woman in the dunes.  The woman is the existential anti-heroine.   She, with no sense of doing it, is  utterly trapped by an essence, an essential nature that she is no more is aware of than a fish is aware of water.   She is used by the micro society  of the dune who,  not by conscious design, have fashioned her consciousness in such a way that she is useful mainly as bait for a man.   She does not question it.   If she was reflective enough to ponder the issue she would probably say something along the lines of "this what was meant to be" or see it as part of a supernatural design.   The woman maybe seen as evoking the fate of women in rural Japanese society.    Just as in Japanese society prior to the end of World War II, women and men were taught that there role in life, the essence of  their being, was to serve their overlords and their Imperial God, so the woman in the dunes sees no alternative to her life in a hole in the ground.   Expanded beyond this, the  WOMAN in the Dunes, is any woman (or man) bound by what she things is her essence when that essence is just a choice made for her by some one else to impose this on her.   Of course it regresses back.   

"The Woman in the Dunes" by Kobo Abe

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe (1964, translated from Japanese by E. Dale Saunders)

I was some how a little nervous as I began to read The Woman of the Dunes as my expectations for the book were so high.    My fears were misfounded.  It is, to me, a masterpiece.    Like other post WWII Japanese novelists, Abe was influenced by French Existential thinkers and writers like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.  (Side note, has anyone ever read The Plague by Camus who was not required to read it for a class?).   One of the basic tenants of existentialism is that there is no intrinsic meaning to life.  All the codes people are taught to live by are simply not true.   Some saw this as plunging us into a meaningless universe, some saw it as bringing man the freedom to create their own meanings.   It is easy to see why post WWII Japanese intellectuals would be attracted to this.   Much more so than the Germans, the world view of the Japanese people was destroyed by their defeat in WWII and the announcement of the Emperor that he was not divine.   (This theme is treated in Kenzaburo Oe's marvelous When He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears.)    The Bushido code by which the Japanese lived was reduced to a mockery and seemed something imposed on the people to make them slaves to their once master, the Emperor, now a figure of mockery.   A great sense of shame was felt by nearly all and everyone was quick to deny they have believed in the old ways anyway.   They only acted like they did out of fear of their overlords.

The central character of the novel, Niki Jumpei, is teacher.   This was just something he did to make money.  He has a girl friend but does not give her much thought.   His true passion in life was his work as an amateur entomologist.   One of the common characteristics novels by Japanese authors who were influenced by French post WWII novelists (I do not like the term "existential novelist" at all) is their narratives in passing will assert something as an obvious fact when it really may be a baseless absurdity.   Here is what we informed concerning the mental state of entomologists

Even in children, unusual preoccupation with insect collecting frequently indicates and Oedipus complex.   In order to compensate for his unsatisfied desires, the child enjoys sticking pins into insects, which he need never fear will escape.   And the fact that he does not leave off once he has grown up is quite definitely a sign that the condition has become worse.   Thus it far from accidental that entomologists frequently have an acute desire for acquisitions and that they are extremely reclusive, kleptomaniac, homosexual.   From this point to suicide our of weariness with the world is but a step.

The plot action is pretty simple.   (The back of the book in the edition I have gives it away and I really think most potential readers of the book  would know the basic plot before they read it any way so I do not see this as a spoiler).   Niki is on a holiday from his teaching job.   He goes to an area with a lot of sand dunes in the hope of discovering a never before cataloged beetle of some kind.   If does this, he will be famous among other entomologists.    He walks into a village of simple country people, in the sand dune area.   Sand is everywhere and in everything.   The shifting sand is constantly encroaching on the houses.   Niki  needs a place to stay for the night and ends up in the underground dwelling of a 30 or so year old widow.   The dwelling is a sixty foot deep in the ground hole which can be exited only by a rope ladder.   The woman's entire existence revolves around excavating sand.   Everyday what ever she excavates can be blown back by the shifting winds.  (The Myth of Sisyphus is one of the dominant themes in the work of Camus.)    The man finds himself unable to get out of the hole in the ground.   He eventually has sex with the woman (she may be a trap for him like the bait one would put out for an insect might be scent from a female of his species.).  Their mating is described quite clinically just as an entomologist from a far superior planet might detail in a report on  human mating customs.   Niki's life comes to resemble that of a beetle that lives in a hole in the ground and preforms an absurd act over and over again to live.   He slowly tries to find or create a meaning to his existence and always hopes he will escape.   The villagers reasons for keeping him trapped are totally without logic.   He comes to feel a kind of fondness for he woman while at the same time hating her and using her body for sex.   The woman's only goal in life is to somehow earn enough money to buy a radio.   Years go by.   The man loses interest in reading, forgets many of the details of his old life.  

I  know my account of the book makes it seem rather bleak.   One can take it as either a tale of an absurd universe where any adherence to a faith or creed is but groundless or you can take it as suggesting  that meaning can be created anywhere under the harshness of circumstances even after all the trappings of  your acculturation have been removed.    The themes in this work have ancient roots.   There has always been a few who laughed at the Gods and went their own way.   For some readers the dunes and the hole in the ground house will be society.   Niki is partially trapped by his desire to have sex with then woman in the underground house, trapped by his physical nature to perform an absurd action for a moment of transcendence.   In time, he makes as his  dominant goal in life to help the woman get a radio.  We never learn her name.   Woman in the Dunes  also be viewed as a comment on the life of women in post world war II Japan.

Woman in the Dunes is beautifully told.   We really feel we are in the world the novel creates.   We can feel the sand creeping into everything.   The story does not impose a meaning on us.   In one sense, if there is a meaning it maybe just that there is not one.   I endorse this work without reservations.   It is not a hard to read work at all.   After I read two or three more books by Kobo Abe, I think he will probably be among the Japanese novelists on my "read everything they have written TBR List".