Beasts Head for Home

Starred review from April 3, 2017
In this early novel from Japan’s master surrealist, Abe (The Box Man) casts a young man’s journey home as an agonizing exploration of the depths of human suffering. Three years after the surrender of Japan in World War II, Kyuzo escapes from his hometown in Manchuria amidst the Chinese Civil War. He yearns for his ancestral homeland of Japan, a place he has only ever “imagined from his textbooks.” His train is derailed in the fighting, and he is led away from the wreckage on a treacherous march through the countryside by a man named Ko. They are soon lost in the “endless repetition of stones, ditches, withered grasses, and swelling hills” and only survive due to “a beastlike visceral impulse.” The bulk of the novel is taken up by this journey, its every trial chronicled with riveting ferocity by Abe. Kyuzo wonders, “Could anyone promise that human beings were less cruel than nature?” 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.

April 1, 2017
You can't go home again--especially when you don't know where home is.In a scenario reminiscent of European contemporaries Wolfdietrich Schnurre and Friedrich Durrenmatt, eminent Japanese novelist Abe (1924-93) imagines a liminal and forlorn compatriot who has grown up somewhere in Manchuria, the child of colonists who now, as Japan's Asian empire crumbles into dust at the end of World War II, must somehow find his way to a homeland that is alien to him. As this slim novel, originally published in 1957, opens, Kuki Kyuzo, still a teenager but now without parents, is in the hands of not unfriendly Soviet occupiers in a kind of no-man's land between Siberia, Mongolia, and China. He tucks away matches, a little food, a bottle of vodka to make good an escape. But from what, and to what? The months pass, with one Soviet emerging as a gruff guardian angel, though he refuses to let Kyuzo leave for Japan: "Outside there are fascists with bared teeth roaming about." When China breaks out in civil war, the Soviets finally withdraw, and Kyuzo crosses into another frontier, now in the company of a multilingual "communications agent" of mixed ethnicity and shadowy background who declares himself "more like a newspaper reporter" than the spy Kyuzo figures him for. His new companion seems a godsend in some tough scrapes, but his motives are as murky as his identity. Though fearful that he'll wind up like one of the unfortunate soldiers of whatever side whose insignia eventually come forth from "the bellies of wolves," Kyuzo eventually finds his way onto a refugee ship out of B. Traven--but even so the wolves are still at his heels, so to speak, as if to suggest that the war and its torments will never end and the uprooted will never find a homeland after all. With subtle echoes of a samurai classic, Abe's autobiographical novel is a memorable portrait of statelessness, exile, and wandering.

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