Beasts Head for Home?: A Novel

Kōbō Abe

Published by Columbia University Press 2017

Beasts Head for Home?

A Novel

Kōbō Abe
Translated by: Richard Calichman

In the series Weatherhead Books on Asia

https://doi.org/10.7312/abe-17704

Overview
Contents

About this book

In the aftermath of World War II, Kuki Kyūzō, a Japanese youth raised in the puppet state of Manchuria, struggles to return home to Japan. What follows is a wild journey involving drugs, smuggling, chases, and capture. Kyūzō finally makes his way to the waters off Japan but finds himself unable to disembark. His nation remains inaccessible to him, and now he questions its very existence. Beasts Head for Home is an acute novel of identity, belonging, and the vagaries of human behavior from an exceptional modern Japanese author.

Author / Editor information

Abe Kobo (1924–1993) was one of Japan's greatest postwar writers, widely recognized for his imaginative fiction and plays of the absurd.

Richard F. Calichman is professor of Japanese studies at the City College of New York, CUNY. He is also the translator and editor of The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kobo (Columbia, 2013).

Reviews

This novel is an excellent entry point into Abe’s writing, with much of his signature tone and style. He is a master of controlling the reader’s emotional investment while crafting an increasingly suffocating atmosphere of dread, resulting in a devastating reading experience.

With subtle echoes of a samurai classic, Abe’s autobiographical novel is a memorable portrait of statelessness, exile, and wandering.

Katsuya Hirano, author of The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan :
Calichman’s superb translation of Abe’s semiautobiographical novel brings us a Kafkaesque world of displacement where settlers of Manchuria undergo the loss of home, identity, and belonging after the collapse of the Japanese empire. Beasts Head for Home is a haunting and gripping story and an indispensable read for anyone interested in postcolonial studies, settler colonial studies, and the history of empire.

J. Keith Vincent, translator of Devils in Daylight by Junichiro Tanizaki:
The earliest work by one of Japan’s foremost writers to appear in English, Beasts Head for Home tells the story of a young Japanese man who undertakes a harrowing journey in an attempt to reach Japan after the collapse of the Japanese Empire. The story is particularly affecting to read in this historical moment with so much forced migration all over the world. Calichman’s translation is flawless.

Travis Workman, author of Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan:
Abe Kōbō is one of the most respected postwar Japanese fiction writers and internationally recognized for the unique style, philosophical depth, and experimental quality of his fiction. Although Beasts Head for Home is not one of Abe’s most well-known works, readers will be eager to see how he wrote about an important historical moment from an essentially realist perspective. An excellent translation of a novel in need of an English-language version.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Chapter 1. The Rusted Tracks Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 2. The Flag Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
Chapter 3. The Trap Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
Chapter 4. Doors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	143

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 224

eBook

Published: June 12, 2017
ISBN: 9780231544665