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Intuitive Understanding
| Article
# : |
13645 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
2,205 Words |
| Author
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J. Thomas Rimer
J. Thomas Rimer teaches Japanese literature at the University
of Maryland and has written widely on Japanese modern
literature and theater. |
Kobo Abe (or Abe Kobo, to state his name in proper Japanese fashion, family name first) has always been a difficult writer for Western readers to categorize. Born in 1924, Abe first began writing at the end of the war. By the 1950s, he had already earned a prodigious reputation in Japan, first as a playwright with Marxist leanings, then as a writer of fiction and drama in what might be called the international absurdist mode. Western reviewers examining the English version of his 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes expressed some dismay over the fact that a Japanese writer could conceptualize his work without reference to geisha, cherry blossoms, and the haiku mentality that constituted, and still constitutes to a large degree, the accepted boundaries assigned by Western readers to Japanese modern literature. Once translated, that book's spare and eloquent symmetry eventually won it a lasting readership. That same audience, won over to the author by this style, was soon to express dismay about certain popular elements that Abe later came to borrow, albeit much transformed, from the realm of the detective story and the rhetoric of science fiction. Abe seemed to move too quickly to be pigeon-holed.
The danger of putting writers in categories, of course, is that the process permits readers to classify their authors and so to dismiss the cutting edge of their work. How many people walk through an art gallery, say "It's a Degas," and feel, the style once identified, they need stop to look no further? In Abe's case, however, each book must be read and pondered on its own terms. Over the years, the mental file card prepared for him, "novelist, Japanese," had first to be amended to "novelist, Japanese, avant-garde," only to require the penciling in of the phrase "style popular/difficult," as well. The Ark Sakura, published in
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