Human Garbage: Objects & the Body in Abe Kobo's The Ark Sakura and Kangaroo Notebook.
Chimenti, Patrick Thomas.
2013
- Abe Kōbō has often been referred to as the Franz Kafka of Japan. And, indeed, this idea has colored much of the criticism concerning Abe's work. Criticism of Abe 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 ... read moremore 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. Many of Abe's images are derived from his own dreams and experiences , 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. This thesis will focus primarily on the works: The Ark Sakura (Hakobune Sakura Maru, 1984) and Kangaroo Notebook (Kangaroo Nto, 1991), the two final completed novels of Abe's career. Both The of these novels 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 characters and more on the visually-oriented aspects of the plot than his previous pieces. In this analysis, I work 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 pieces. To this end, this thesis examines these images in the context of two central thematic elements of Abe's pieces which gained greater significance in 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 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. It is the aim of this project to expand on the understanding of Abe Kb'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.read less
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