by Donald Keene
Perhaps you too have brought forth a life
Inside the fruit of the apple.
Perhaps you have ripened a certain joy,
Multiplying again and again shadows that pass over
The cheek, still green on one side.
I accepted it quietly in both hands,
And, for a long time, still vacant,
Trembled with the premonition I sustained
Within the hollow of my hands.
Abe never again wrote poetry, and he was so dissatisfied with this first collection that he refused ever to allow it to be reprinted. The poems, included in the edition of his complete works that appeared after his death, represent a minor part of his art, but they are among the rare works in which he permitted himself a lyrical, romantic tone. Although the expression in his novels was sometimes poetic, he was fundamentally a writer of prose, much more likely to describe sex than love. He tended to write about things rather than emotions. The beginning of his story “Beyond the Curve” (Kābu no mukō; later incorporated into the novel The Ruined Map [Moetsukita chizu]) displays this tendency at its most extreme:
Slowly I came to a halt, as if springs in the air were holding me back. My weight, which had started shifting from my left toes to my right heel, came flowing backward again, settling heavily in the region of my left knee. The incline was good and steep.
The road was surfaced not in asphalt but in rough concrete, with narrow grooves at four-inch intervals to prevent cars from skidding. But that did pedestrians little good. Besides, the rough texture of the concrete was effectively smoothed out by deposits of dust and tire scraps. On a rainy day, in old, rubber-soled shoes, the going would be slippery. Still, these grooves could make a significant difference if you were driving. They could be just what was needed in winter, draining off excess water from melting snow and ice.*
The description is objective, rather in the mood of the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet, but Abe was by no means an impassive witness. His essays make clear his profound concern with developments in the world, but he chose not to express this concern on the surface of his novels. The difficulties that many people experience in reading his novels and plays do not stem from the language he used, which is generally perfectly clear, but from the unspoken meanings, which Abe hoped the reader would sense even when the writing seemed absolutely bare.
In the years following the war, it was by no means clear if Abe would ever be able to earn a living by writing works of literary intent. He was obliged to turn out a stream of children’s stories, radio dramas, anything at all that would bring in money. These early works, like the poems, were unknown until a few years ago, when the diligent editor of the Complete Works uncovered them. In later years, after Abe had established his reputation as a novelist, he totally refused to write occasional pieces, perhaps recalling his years in the galleys.
The poverty in which he lived probably made Abe more susceptible to joining the Communist Party. It was also the one political party that preached internationalism. It is not clear exactly when he joined. Although thanks to the American Occupation, any Japanese could join the Communist Party freely, not all employers welcomed persons who were known to be party members, and a clandestine atmosphere surrounded membership in the party. Abe probably did not worry too much when he joined the party that his writings might be affected by membership in an organization that was known for its insistence on party discipline. It is inconceivable to me that he would ever have accepted directives as to what he might write. This was the period when the leaders of the Japanese Communist Party were doing their best to make their party seem “lovable,” and they do not seem to have attempted to coerce writers into mouthing party doctrines.
Abe’s works of the immediate postwar period are at times openly leftwing, but the political message is certainly less striking than the avant-garde techniques he employed. Most of the writers and other intellectuals of his generation, probably as a result of the war, were affected by Marxism. The leftward shift of literature after the war was not, of course, unique to Japan. Postwar Japanese authors, again in contact with world literature after the war years, turned to the French first of all and discovered that many important writers, headed by Sartre, were sympathetic to Marxism. Those Japanese who were attracted instead to American literature were likely to turn to John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, or Upton Sinclair, all of whom, at least during one period of their careers, had openly expressed left-wing convictions. To Japanese who had suffered through years of right-wing fanaticism, the left wing seemed humane by comparison, and anything was better than a revival of militarism.
The writings of many Japanese authors who would later be associated with quite different political views, or with no political views whatsoever, were often colored during the postwar era by a specifically proletarian ideology. What was more natural than for an author describing the burnedout slums of Tokyo to express bitterness over the wartime ideology that had caused such misery or to express the hope that a new and democratic Japan, hand in hand with other progressive nations, would bring equality to all?
A typical feature of literature of the postwar era was the formation of groups of like-minded authors. Usually the common bond among the authors was political rather than specifically literary, and some writers who are now totally forgotten exercised power because of their political stance. The groups to which Abe belonged, however, consisted mainly of writers and critics of distinction, not party hacks. In 1951 Abe published several of his best-known stories, including “The Wall; The Crime of S. Karma” (Kabe; S. Karuma shi no hanzai) and “The Red Cocoon” (Akai mayu), each of which won a literary prize, including the most important for a young writer, the Akutagawa Prize, often the first step in a successful career.
In the same year, Abe wrote the short story “The Intruders” (Chinnyūsha). It is the story of a family that invades the apartment of a young man—professing to do this for his sake—takes over his life, and eventually kills him. The work was obviously allegorical, and readers probably had no difficulty identifying the intruders as Americans and the victim the people of one or another country where America had intervened. This was Abe’s first work to be translated (into Czech). Sixteen years later, in 1967, Abe developed this short story into the full-length play entitled Friends (Tomodachi). By this time, his political outlook had changed considerably (he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1961, the year that The Woman in the Dunes was published). The intruding family were now recognizable as Communists, not as Americans. Although translations of the play were made into several languages of the Soviet bloc, they could not be published or performed until much later.
Abe’s political views began to shift in 1956 when he was invited to Czechoslovakia to attend a writers’ conference. Abe profoundly admired the writings of Franz Kafka, and when he learned that the Czech minister of education was a specialist in Kafka, he contrasted him with the undistinguished men who had held the equivalent position in Japan. He felt new admiration for a system under which such an appointment could be made. However, the Soviet Union’s suppression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956 against Communist rule could not be ignored by a man of his honesty, and for the first time he began to consider the contradictions between Communism as a philosophy and Communism as a form of government.
Another important factor in his change of belief was the result of his meeting in Moscow with his Russian translator. As a guest of the state, Abe had a room in the best hotel, and (unlike ordinary tourists and other visitors of the time) he did not have to wait two hours in the hotel dining room for his meal to be served. Everywhere he went in the Soviet Union, he was met with deference and friendliness as a distinguished visitor. Most Japanese writers who received this treatment were too pleased and grateful ever to probe beneath the surface, but gradually, bit by bit, Abe learned from his translator what life in the Soviet Union was really like—the knock on the door at two in the morning, the years of imprisonment without cause or tria
l, the constant fear. These revelations shook Abe, but he had no choice but to admit the truth of what he had been told.
Some years later, when I myself visited the Soviet Union for the first time, Abe gave me the translator’s name and address. I was unsuccessful in my attempts to reach her by telephone but found my way to her apartment. I rang the bell. There was no response. I rang again, but there was still no response. I tore a page from my notebook and started to write a message in Japanese, our common language, telling her where I was staying, when suddenly the door opened. The translator’s husband, observing me through a peephole, realized when he saw me writing Japanese that I was not from the police. I became friendly with the Russian translator, from whom I also learned much about the Soviet Union, and when I published my own translation of Abe’s play Friends, I dedicated it to her, using only her initials lest she be harmed.
In 1957 Abe published a book on his travels in Eastern Europe, the first of his works to deal squarely with the contradiction between the professed aims of a socialist society and the forms of those aims when put into practice. He eventually concluded that the ideals of socialism were corrupted when they became instruments of the state. He still considered himself to be radical and, in his essays, warned repeatedly of the danger of a revival of what he called the right-wing inquisition; but he was no longer bound by any ideology. In 1967 he joined with Mishima Yukio (a conservative), Kawabata Yasunari (a liberal), and Ishikawa Jun (a conservative radical) in signing a protest against the Great Cultural Revolution in China.
This political activity did not interfere with Abe’s literary production, and he won coveted literary prizes for not only his novels but also his plays. His first play to be staged was The Uniform (Seifuku, 1955). Abe told me in an interview how he had come to write this play. In response to my question of what led him to write this first play, he replied:
It was an accident. I had no intention whatsoever of writing a play, but I had no choice. It happened rather early in my career as a writer. I was asked by a magazine for a short story, but somehow I couldn’t manage to write anything. As the deadline approached, I became more and more frantic. At the time I still had trouble selling my stories, and I was worried that if I failed to meet the deadline, I would never again be asked for another. The night before the deadline I was absolutely desperate, when suddenly it occurred to me that it might be easier to work out something if all I had to do was to write dialogue, and I didn’t have to trouble myself with descriptions and the rest. I threw away everything I had written up to then, and in a great hurry composed a piece consisting entirely of dialogue. It took about three hours. This was my first play, called The Uniform. I had no previous experience as a dramatist, and Japanese magazine editors have an extreme aversion to publishing plays, especially by unknown writers. If I had told them in advance that I planned to write a play, they probably would have refused to print it. But with the deadline at hand, the magazine could not very well refuse to accept my manuscript. So, much against the editor’s wishes, they published it. Purely by accident, the play came to the attention of a producer who asked to stage it. The production was rather well received, and I later had requests for plays from various theatrical groups.
Abe had had no training as a playwright and probably had seen very few plays performed before he wrote one, but he instinctively knew what would be effective on the stage (or in a radio drama). At first his plays were directed by professionals, but in 1973 he founded the Abe Studio for training actors and actresses in the techniques of performance he had evolved and for staging the plays he wrote during the next six or seven years. His “method” proved to be so successful that several established actors joined the company in order to benefit from his guidance. Abe considered the plays to be an important part of his work. He told me during our interview:
As far as I am concerned, my plays are as necessary and as important as my novels. But I don’t think of my work in the theater as being confined to writing the plays. Most playwrights have traditionally felt that their responsibility ended when they delivered a finished play to the producer, but I do not distinguish all that much between a play and the performance. In my case it is not so much a contrast between writings plays and novels as between working in the theater and writing novels. Both have the same importance. If either was missing from my life, it would bother me.
Abe spent day after day at the studio, often from morning to night, guiding the actors in intonation, movement, interpretation. The studio was open at all times, and the actors could therefore drop in whenever it was convenient to practice calisthenics, declamation, or any other aspect of performance. Abe emphasized movement, as opposed to the more naturalistic theater, and after 1976 he displayed an increasing interest in nonliterary plays. The Little Elephant Is Dead (Kozōwa shinda, 1979) pushed this concept to its furthest development: it is plotless and virtually without dialogue, depending instead on the movements of the actors, the lighting, and the music to arouse responses in the audience. Abe believed that this was the particular function of the theater. In 1979 his company performed the work in Japan and in four American cities. It relied so little on dialogue that there was virtually no language barrier, and the response of American audiences was overwhelmingly favorable. Abe told me—but again I felt impelled to take his statements with a grain of salt—that there were fistfights at the box office over who would get tickets. After the company had returned to Japan and was performing in Tokyo, Abe wrote a brief statement concerning his objectives. It opened, “This work represents the end results achieved during the seven years since I first began to participate in all aspects of theatrical activity. At the same time, it is a point of departure.” He expressed the conviction that literature had usurped the original purpose of theater and that critics who insisted that a play must have a “meaning” that they could analyze were anachronisms in a world in which “meaning” was not required of works of literature. Although he stated that The Little Elephant Is Dead was the beginning for future explorations in nonliterary theater, it was in fact his last play. He returned to being a novelist, a man of words rather than a man of the theater. Perhaps he found that he had actually reached the limits of what could be achieved without dialogue or a plot; the work seemed likely to turn into modern dance rather than into plays. He had been successful in these late plays (and a film based on one of them), but at a cost of sacrificing his most precious asset, his marvelous skill with words.
During the remaining fourteen years of his life—from 1979 to 1993—Abe devoted himself to fiction and the occasional essay. Increasingly, he had become to editors a maddeningly slow writer by Japanese standards; he kept rewriting his manuscripts again and again until he was at last ready to allow them leave his hands. From the early 1980s, he was helped by the use of a word processor—the first Japanese author to use this convenience—which made it possible for him to correct a page of manuscript without having to rewrite the whole page from the beginning, as had been his perfectionist custom; but the ease of corrections may in the end have induced him to tinker with the expression even more than before. He completed only two novels during these fourteen years, The Ark Sakura (Hakobune Sakura maru) and Kangaroo Notebook (Kangarū nōto). Neither of these novels was successful with the general public, but Kangaroo Notebook, in my opinion, is one of his major achievements.
Abe’s novels have never been great favorites with people who seek from fiction nothing more than entertainment or with commuters hoping to make the two-hour journey to work pass more quickly, but he has had a solid following and could count on sales of at least 100,000 copies for his novels. It is amazing that avant-garde works should have sold so well. But as they became more difficult, many readers who bought them because of the prestige of Abe’s name did not always read them to the end, and the critics often regretted that he had abandoned the easily followed narrative style of The Woman in the Dunes or The Face of Another for new experiments. But Abe was determined that his novels no
t be viewed merely as Japanese examples of some world trend in literature. Instead, he wanted to make the trends, even if this meant that his books would not be fully appreciated until some future time. When I casually mentioned to an editor that I had enjoyed Kangaroo Notebook, the story of a man with a strange malady—radish sprouts coming from his shins—he begged me to write an article for Shinchō, the literary monthly published by the company, because no one else had praised it. Probably my friendship with Abe had enabled me to understand, better than most critics, that this novel, so full of humor, is about death, and specifically about Abe’s own death.
Abe had always seemed unusually robust and youthful for his age. Although he spent countless hours poring over his manuscripts, he never gave the impression of an author who worked in a cork-lined study. He loved his cars and enjoyed driving, especially under difficult conditions. In 1986 at the Tenth International Inventors’ Exhibition in New York, in competition with inventors of everything from airplane engines to laser microscopes, he was awarded a silver medal for a device he had invented for changing tires.
Abe was an extremely skillful photographer, as exhibitions at Columbia University and in Tokyo demonstrated. He was uninterested in the usual subjects—the beauties of nature or the faces of people. His pictures most often show the end of a process, the lonely remains that reveal what has been. When in 1978 he arrived in Milwaukee in order to attend the performances of his play Friends, he was asked what he would like to see in the city. He answered, “The garbage dump.” People took this for a joke, or perhaps as a sly comment on Milwaukee, but I believe that he meant it quite literally. More than picturesque sites along Lake Michigan or the art museum, the dump would have told him about life in Milwaukee. Among his photographs of Japan, I am particularly moved by one series showing the debris of an abandoned coal mine, and another showing members of a family somberly pushing a wheelchair through the bright grounds of the Osaka Exposition.