Objects & the Body in Abe Kōbō 'S the Ark Sakura and Kangaroo

1 HUMAN GARBAGE: Objects & the Body in Abe Kōbō 's The Ark Sakura and Kangaroo Notebook by Patrick Chimenti A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Program of Bachelor of Arts in the Program of International Literary and Visual Studies 2 Table of Contents 1. Acknowledgments..........................................................p.3 2. Introduction....................................................................p.4 3. Chapter I: Humor............................................................p.7 1. A World of Objects, Anecdotes, & History...............p.8 2. Sexuality & Bodily Impotence..................................p.20 4. Chapter II: Vanity............................................................p.30 1. Pathos of the Postmodern..........................................p.31 2. The “Eternally-Slipping Identity”.............................p.43 Notes............................................................................................p.52 Bibliography……………………………………………………p.56 Appendix A: A Translation of Laughing Moon by Abe Kōbō.....p.57 Translation Notes……………………………………………….p.141 3 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Dr. Charles Inouye for his guidance and kind assistance over the course of this project and my undergraduate career. I would also like to thank Professor Shiori Koizumi and Kiyoko Morita of Tufts University; without their teachings, this thesis would have been impossible. Finally, I would like to thank all of my editors, especially Meg Sinnott Rubin, for all of their help in editing this analysis. 4 INTRODUCTION Abe Kōbō has often been referred to as the Franz Kafka of Japan.1And, indeed, this idea has colored much of the criticism concerning Abe's work. Abe's background as a Japanese born in Manchuria during the Second World War places him in the fascinating position of a born expatriate, alienated from his nation before even having set foot in it. As a result, much of Abe's work eschews the aesthetics traditionally espoused by the Japanese literati in favor of a sparse style based heavily on examining the structures of societal labyrinths and human interaction. Criticism of Abe2, too, has given little attention to Abe's aesthetic creations and focuses more on the language and interaction of Abe's characters. This focus on Abe's language has often led critics to paint Abe in a heavily modernist light, identifying him more often with Western modernist and absurdist writers like Franz Kafka more than with his Japanese contemporaries like Kenzaburō Ōe. While it is tempting to relegate many of Abe's images as modernistic constructs of the absurd, painted as hypercritically bizarre in order to shock his readers, this reading diminishes their status as internal to Abe's personal experience. Most of Abe's most famous images are derived from his own dreams and experiences3, intrinsically linking the failure of his protagonists to parse their lives' meaning with his own struggle with the failure of logical systems. Abe's leading men are isolated in a world composed of “nothing” objects, constructs of societal convenience which serve only as a thin veil over the unreliable absurdity of the individual experience. What this amounts to, is the view that Abe's vision of the world was materialistically informed, relying on the phenomenological experience of the body and the objects of its environment rather than a belief in a consistent or pervasive “essence.”4 Though Abe's works are filled with a tendency to intellectualize and digress, these manipulations of language are purposefully structured within the context of failing efforts to parse the 5 physical and graphic realities built up in the heart of his artifice. This thesis will focus primarily on the works: The Ark Sakura (Hakobune Sakura Maru, 1984) and Kangaroo Notebook (Kangaroo Nōto, 1991), the two final completed novels of Abe's career. The reasoning behind this choice is twofold. First, both of these novels were completed following the end of Abe's theatrical career and thus, arguably, hold differences to his prior works based on the influence of techniques and insights developed during his time as a director. Notably, Abe's focus on the development of the theatrical techniques of “neutral position” and “rubberman games” both of which gave laborious attention to the positioning and the impact of the actor's body to the perception of the audience, arguably impacting the presentation and critical nature of the human form and the physiological experience to his works later on.5 Second, both The Ark Sakura and Kangaroo Notebook have received little critical attention in comparison to Abe's early works, due in part to their lack of comparable popularity, but also because of the complexity of the plot and structure of the novels, which focus less on the exposition of the characters and more on the visually-oriented aspects of the plot than his previous pieces. In this analysis, I will endeavor to elucidate the importance of Abe's fascination with these images in his later works as a signal of a powerful postmodern sentiment vital to the development of these later pieces. To this end, this thesis will examine these images in the context of two central thematic elements of Abe's pieces which gained greater significance with his later work: humor and vanity. Appended to this analysis is a translation of one of Abe's collections of short stories and essays, Laughing Moon (Warau Tsuki, 1975), which, though not among one of Abe's later works, provides unique insight into Abe's creative process as well as his development of images used in a number of his creative pieces, taken from his dreams and personal experience. Abe himself had mixed feelings about literary criticism. In an interview with Nancy Shields, Abe noted that, “If I had to write a book of 6 literary theory I could write one, but I wouldn't want people to read my novels in terms of literary theory.”6Abe's primary concern in this opposition to literary theory was likely due, in part, to the possibility that the authors may be misunderstood completely through systematic approaches to their work (a concern he expressed about dramatic theories developed by Brecht and Stravinsky).7 Indeed, in novels like Abe's, with such simultaneous dramatic complexity and simplicity in interactions of characters, pursuing a course to elucidate all of Abe's writings through a single system of thought is likely to be rather misleading. Many critiques of Abe's work have sought to categorize his works in the context of artistic movements of the West, including the Theater of the Absurd, Latin- American Magic Realism, and the French nouveau roman. While the influence of these movements on Abe's development as an artist are undeniable, I feel that to attempt a categorization of Abe in the context of these works presents a vast oversimplification of his evolution as a writer, overlooking his distinct collection of works which saw his transition from reticent Communist writer8 to social critic to absurdist-modernist prose writer to playwright and beyond. While Abe's masterful arrangements and use of language make a drawing of Western parallels tempting, that is not the focus of this study, which is to attempt an approach of Abe from an understanding of his imagery and transformations of the human body. Thus the essays and stories in Laughing Moon, many being candid and often entertaining insights from Abe into his own process of writing, offer an invaluable perspective in understanding both the thought process underlying both the technique and the origin of the imagery so critical to his pieces. It is the aim of this project to expand on the understanding of Abe Kōbō's later works and to attempt to offer new alternatives in considering the importance of imagery to his work, an aspect of his novels that has been widely ignored in established criticisms preceding this one. 7 CHAPTER I: HUMOR While there exists a somewhat natural sense of gloom and doom within Abe's writings, there is also an undeniable element of humor that pervades his work. Dreams of being transformed into a gramophone, the transformation of men into plants, or a dream of an object, Tab, which serves no known purpose and which no one knows how to make, are all filled with a strange sense of amusement. Indeed, the “lightness”9 of Abe's images invites a natural sense of play, and a there is a clear sense of humor in the absurd as the “natural” objects of Abe's world quickly transform into the non-sensical. There is also no doubt either that humor was incredibly important to Abe on a personal level. Abe once noted in an interview with Nancy Shields that his rejection of Sartre was not based on the trajectory of his philosophic views, but simply that “I don't like Sartre at all. He doesn't have any sense of humor,”10 and would later famously say himself that “Without humor, we cannot bear reality.”11 Reading Shields' interviews with Abe, the complexity of his personal life shines through. To Abe, the world presented a limitless source of humor and dread, and at no point could the two be clearly distinguished. In Abe's novels, stories taken from the evening news blend seamlessly with constructed digressions intended to both horrify and entertain. The human body, too, holding limitless potential for manipulation, transformation, and self-destruction, naturally inspires bemusement as one considers the image of the warped human form as Abe carefully details the phenomenological experience of characters stretched and pulled by invisible hands. This chapter will focus on the humorous elements of Abe's writings to more clearly elucidate the interaction of horror and humor that pervades his works. Specifically, this chapter will seek to examine Abe's humorous digressions (which, though a feature common to a great number of Abe's novels, occur especially frequently in The Ark Sakura and Kangaroo Notebook) and his depiction of the body's impotence, which readily expresses itself in his characters' often clumsy encounters with the sexual.

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