by Donald Keene
It was about lunchtime, so I invited all three of my visitors to a Chinese restaurant on 110th Street. I was suffering from jet lag, having only recently returned from Japan, and I suppose that I may have acted in a somewhat somnolent manner. Abe, a graduate of the medical school of Tokyo University, observed me carefully and concluded from my manner of walking that I was a drug addict, as he later informed me. All in all, one could hardly say that our first meeting had been a success.
Three years later, in the spring of 1967 while I was on sabbatical leave in Japan, Ōe Kenzaburō, with whom I had become friendly, suggested that we invite Abe to join us for dinner. I welcomed the suggestion, but Abe evidently did not. He went instead to a prizefight. It was later explained to me that Abe was a devoted fan of Fighting Harada, who had a match that night, but Ōe and I, watching the television of the bout, searched in vain for Abe—or anyone at all wearing dark-rimmed glasses—among the spectators. It seemed likely that the dismal impression I had created on Abe in New York, even more than devotion to Fighting Harada, accounted for his unwillingness to dine with us. It took Ōe considerable time and effort to overcome Abe’s resistance to meeting me again, but once it happened, with the aid of a considerable amount of liquor, we became friends and remained close until his death in 1993.
I did not know Abe’s writings very well at this time. The first of his works I read was The Woman in the Dunes in the fine translation by Dale Saunders. Later, I read in Japanese Abe’s novel The Face of Another (Tanin no kao) and some stories of the 1960s. This was a period of extraordinary activity for Abe. For example, in 1964, the year of our disastrous first meeting, he was publishing serially two major novels simultaneously in different magazines. He also published a collection of short stories and a collection of essays, and he won a prize for the best radio drama of the year.
Two years earlier, in 1962, Abe had been expelled from the Communist Party. In fact, his former membership in the party had made it difficult for him to obtain an American visa in 1964, and it was finally issued only with severe restrictions on where he might travel and how long he might stay. Well after his books had made it clear that he had rejected Communist ideology and even after he had become persona non grata in Soviet Russia, he continued to experience the same hampering restrictions when visiting America. As far as I could tell, however, this seems not to have inspired in him the kind of anti-Americanism that was so prevalent in Japan, especially during the Vietnam War.
Abe was a maverick, incapable of aligning himself for long with any political movement or writing works in accordance with doctrinal lines. His independence and breadth of vision were often attributed by Japanese—who tend to emphasize geographical considerations as determining factors in a man’s life—to his having grown up in Manchuria rather than in the insular world of Japan.
Abe was born in Tokyo in 1924. At the time his father, a medical doctor, was a professor at the Medical University of Manchuria (Manshū ika daigaku) but was temporarily in Tokyo doing research. The family moved to Mukden (Shen-yang) in the following year, and Abe spent his childhood there, attending Japanese schools. Although such schools were products of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and signified the Japanese intention of remaining there permanently, the official line taught to the pupils was not that the Japanese were superior to the other inhabitants but that the five constituent peoples—Japanese, Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, and Russians—must live on terms of equality and harmony. As a boy Abe believed in this ideal, although he also must have been aware that other Japanese, enjoying their privileged position, accepted as a matter of course their predominant role in the new country. Even though Abe seemed to be permanently domiciled in Manchuria, he never forgot that he was Japanese. I recall Abe saying that boys in his school wore gloves in winter to distinguish themselves from the Chinese boys who wore mittens, even though mittens were much warmer.
But such awareness of the distinction between the Japanese and the other peoples of Manchuria was probably less important to Abe than what he unconsciously absorbed from the place. If he did not become a Manchurian, he was quite unlike a typical Japanese schoolboy. The textbooks he read in school, intended for children in Japan, contained such sentences as “In our country, the streams are pellucidly clear and the mountains are green.” But the streams in Manchuria were few and likely to be muddied, and there were no mountains in sight, only immense, dusty plains merging imperceptibly into the desert. The contradiction between the textbook descriptions of “our country” and the visible reality of sand dunes behind the school building made the boy question the veracity of the textbooks. It inspired contradictory feelings: a yearning for Japan but also a sense of alienation from Japan. In later years, when he was actually living in Japan, such feelings kept him from identifying himself with Japanese landscapes. He told me once that he never could understand why Japanese were so fond of the ocean. More important, he developed a suspicion and even a hatred of manifestations of love of the soil—any soil—an emotion he came to associate with fascism.
In Abe’s novel The Woman in the Dunes, the hero, a collector of rare insects that live in the dunes, finds himself as dusk comes on without a place to spend the night. He visits the village cooperative and asks their help. He notices a placard on the wall: “The Spirit of Love for One’s Home-Place” (aikyō seishin). Later, he comes to understand that attachment to the soil, love of home-place, accounted for the villagers’ determination to remain in the bleak dunes, eternally shoveling sand. The man appears just at a time when the villagers are in need of another hand to help shovel the sand. They lead him to a house buried in the dunes whose owner, a woman, welcomes him. Gradually he realizes that he is a prisoner, given enough to eat and provided with a woman, but compelled to keep shoveling the sand. Late in the novel the man, whose various attempts to escape have been frustrated, asks the woman why people go on living in such a place. She says it is because of the sand:
“The sand?” The man clamped his teeth together, rolling his head.
“What good is the sand? Outside of giving you a hard time, it doesn’t bring in a penny.”
[The woman answers,] “Yes, it does. They sell it.”
“You sell it? Who do you sell such stuff to?”
“Well, to construction companies and places like that. They mix it with concrete …”
“Don’t be silly. It’d be a fine mess if you mixed this sand with cement—it’s got too much salt in it. In the first place, it’s probably against the law or at least against construction regulations …”
“Of course, they sell it secretly. They cut the hauling charges in half too …”
“That’s too crazy! Even if it was free, that wouldn’t make it right when buildings and dams start to collapse, would it?”
The woman suddenly interrupted him with accusing eyes. She spoke coldly, looking at his chest, and her attitude was completely different.
“Why should we worry about what happens to other people?”*
The woman is elsewhere portrayed as a sympathetic though very nearly mute character, but in this one scene she reveals her love of the soil, the place where (she says) the bones of her child are buried, so strong that she is indifferent to whether or not the sand causes people to die in other places. Abe, who had two homelands—Manchuria and Japan—was attached to neither. I can hardly imagine him feeling either nostalgia or local pride, but he never forgot Manchuria, his lost homeland. He did not describe his life in Manchuria in the kind of first-person novel that is typical of twentieth-century Japanese literature, but his early writings evoked experiences on the continent, and it is probably no coincidence that the novel that established his reputation, The Woman in the Dunes, describes the part of Japan that most resembles the windswept dunes of Manchuria.
Abe left Manchuria in 1940 (when he was sixteen) in order to study at the Seijō High School in Tokyo. At school he excelled, especially at mathematics. He told me once, not long after he had attended a high-school r
eunion, that his classmates remembered him as a mathematical genius. His knowledge of science was also remarkable. Some years before his death, he appeared on a television program with an eminent physicist who, assuming that a novelist would have trouble understanding the terminology of modern physics, attempted to make things easier by simplifying his expression. To his astonishment, Abe brushed away the explanations with such assurance as to make the physicist look foolish.
Perhaps Abe inherited his fondness for science from his father; if so, perhaps he inherited his love of literature from his mother, an unusually well educated woman for the time, who had taught Japanese classical literature and had even published a novel. The house in Mukden was full of books, and Abe was an omnivorous reader, especially translations of foreign literature.
One of the mysteries of this mysterious man was his inability to learn foreign languages. He told me once that at the age of fifteen he had qualified as an interpreter of Chinese, but I never heard him utter a word of Chinese, and I doubt that he remembered anything of the language. He was a genius at forgetting languages, both the Chinese and the English he had studied from middle-school days onward and the German he later studied as a requirement for entry into medical school. When Abe was in America, the kind of people who assume that every intelligent foreigner must surely know English frequently addressed Abe in English. If I informed them that he did not understand, they would snap back, “Of course he understands. You can see it in his eyes.” Unfortunately, he did not understand, not even simple phrases, but he always looked intelligent.
The opposite face of Abe’s inability to learn foreign languages was his extraordinary interest in the Japanese language. Most writers, of course, take pride in their ability to manipulate their native language and are all too ready to point out stylistic flaws in the works of their contemporaries. Mishima, in particular, was contemptuous of writers who failed to make the characters in their novels or plays speak the kind of Japanese appropriate to their class. But most writers, whether they insist on maintaining the purity of the Japanese language or advocate (under foreign influence) a greater use of relative clauses, take the language for granted and do not stop to think why they speak and write it as they do.
Especially in the years immediately before his death, Abe became preoccupied with the origins of the Japanese language. Some linguists confidently assign Japanese a place among the Altaic languages (which include Korean and Mongolian). Others have pointed out grammatical similarities between Japanese and the languages of southern India. Others still have attempted to trace the common origins of Japanese and the Ainu language. Abe did not accept any of these theories. He read widely in linguistics, particularly studies of creoles—languages that have come into being spontaneously from combinations of existing languages but are not in a direct parent–child relation to any one language or group of languages. Abe was particularly interested in the creoles of Guyana and Hawaii as possible paradigms for the creation of the Japanese language.
Abe contributed funds to the research of Dr. Tsunoda Tadanobu, a specialist in the mechanics of hearing, who was studying the way in which the two halves of the brain process sounds. Tsunoda tried out on many people—including ordinary Japanese, persons of Japanese ancestry who had learned some other language first, and persons of non-Japanese ancestry who had learned Japanese from infancy—a test he had devised. He discovered that persons whose mother tongue was Japanese, regardless of their ancestry, all showed the same reactions to speech, humming, animal cries, music, miscellaneous noises, and so on. For example, they heard human speech and bird cries with the same hemisphere of the brain, but persons whose first language was not Japanese processed only human speech with that hemisphere of the brain. Abe was excited by what he took for a revelation of the fundamental nature of the Japanese language and even cited it jestingly to explain why he disliked opera so much. Many scholars subsequently denounced Tsunoda as a charlatan because he was the only person who could successfully perform the experiments; still others (mainly non-Japanese) considered the experiments to be deplorable examples of the Japanese tendency to emphasize their uniqueness. Tsunoda finally grew tired of the attacks and gave up his testing, despite Abe’s encouragement.
Abe’s special interest in the Japanese language may have originated in childhood perceptions of the differences between Japanese and Chinese, or it may have been his way of explaining to himself why he simply couldn’t learn foreign languages. (He always showed distrust of Japanese who could speak another language fluently.) In any case, as an author, language was of extreme importance to him, and he expressed annoyance when his works were labeled by critics as “novels of ideas,” as if his style—his use of language—were of only minor importance.
Abe was in Tokyo during most of the war years. I remember particularly his account of the first, small-scale American air raid in 1942. He told me how the boys at his high school excitedly gathered around the windows and cheered. I don’t really believe this. I have trouble also believing, according to Abe, that the principal of the Seijō High School, a liberal who hated the militarists, was so filled with animosity for Takamura Kōtarō, a poet known for his belligerence, that he was incapable of speaking when he had to introduce the poet to the students. Abe, a writer of fiction, may have had trouble at times distinguishing between what actually had happened and what might have happened if other people were more like himself.
Abe’s views of the truth were always entertaining. I remember, for example, his account of the difficulty he encountered in leaving Czechoslovakia because, at a village near the Austrian border, his passage was blocked by a gypsy woman who declared that she intended to make him her husband. Or, to give a less amusing instance, he related that while in Norway, a man deliberately bumped into him in a restaurant and said something insulting, supposing that he was a Vietnamese refugee. In view of Abe’s inability to speak any foreign language, his interpretation of what the gypsy woman or the Norwegian man actually said could only be intuitive, not factual. But there were enough improbable occurrences in Abe’s life to make almost any story he told seem plausible.
Abe entered the Tokyo University Medical School in 1943, at the age of nineteen. This gave him temporary exemption from the draft, but in the following year his unsatisfactory scholastic performance endangered the exemption. When the time came to take a medical examination to determine whether or not he was fit for military service, he, with the help of a friend, forged a medical certificate stating that he was suffering from tuberculosis.
The ruse succeeded. Abe was pronounced unfit for military duty and made his way back to Mukden in 1944. At first he helped his father with his medical practice, but in August 1945, just before the end of the war, a typhus epidemic swept Manchuria and the father caught the sickness and died. Abe remained in Mukden. To support himself, he invented a new brand of soda pop that was so successful that he was soon rolling in money. He did not trust the banks, so he stuffed the banknotes into the shutter boxes of his house. He was unable to return to Japan until the end of 1946 when he and others were repatriated aboard an American landing craft. His experiences during this journey provided the background for his first full-length novel, Animals Head for Home (Kemonotachi wa kokyō wo mezasu).
Other experiences in Manchuria directly or indirectly colored Abe’s future writings. One came as a particular shock and affected not only his writings but also his outlook on life: it was seeing the lawless behavior of the Japanese troops in Mukden after the surrender. He felt such disgust on witnessing the crimes perpetrated by Japanese soldiers on Japanese civilians as to make him wish to renounce his identity as a Japanese. This disgust further developed into a hatred of any form of nationalism or of the belief that one “belonged” to a nation. In later years he was sometimes accused of being a rootless cosmopolite, but he accepted the charge. I once asked him why he so seldom gave names to the characters in his novels or plays. (They are called instead “the mother,” “the boxer,” “
the fiancée,” or simply, as in The Woman in the Dunes, “the man” and “the woman”). He said it was because it made things more difficult if he gave them names. He did not elaborate, but I wonder if he was not reluctant to confine his characters within the limitations of being Japanese—or any other nationality. He asked that when his plays were staged abroad, there be no suggestion of their Japanese origins.
Abe’s internationalism was expressed politically by his decision to join the Communist Party, probably in 1949. As a high-school student, he had been attracted by socialism, but now he was less interested in socialist economics than in a political stance that would favor a removal of the barriers of nationalism that separate country and country or people and people.
After his return to Japan from China in 1946, Abe lived in great poverty. Even if he had been able to take with him his fortune in Manchurian currency, it would have been worthless. For a time he lived in the house of a yakuza (gangster) boss who was so impressed by the young man from Manchuria that he wished to make him his successor. (This may be another example of Abe as mythmaker.) Later on, he lived in a crude shelter he had fashioned from loose timbers lying around a bombed site. Photographs of Abe taken at this time suggest that he did not eat very often. He told me once that he hadn’t enough money to buy a new pair of glasses after he accidentally broke the ones he was wearing. When he went to the movies, he would take the largest pieces of the broken lenses and hold them in front of his eyes. This way of life may have contributed to his indifferent performance at medical school. He graduated in 1948 but was given his degree only on condition that he never practice medicine; his lack of enthusiasm for medicine, reflected in his poor grades, had evidently been recognized by his professors.
The possession of a medical degree may have pleased Abe, but because he was unable to practice, the degree brought in no income. In any case, by this time Abe had become increasingly involved with literature, especially of the avant-garde. In 1947 he had published privately a mimeographed pamphlet entitled Collection of Anonymous Poems (Mumei shishū). He and his wife (they married earlier that year) took a stack of these pamphlets to Hokkaido, where he had relatives. They bought one-way tickets, expecting that the relatives would buy enough copies at least to pay for the return train fare, but this assumption was wrong—they sold hardly a copy. (Today, this book is one of the rarest works of modern Japanese works of literature.) The poems, influenced by Rilke (whom he read in translation), are not easy to understand. This is the opening of “Fruit of the Apple,” which he dedicated to his wife:
