[In the following introduction, Keene traces the development of Abé's career as a dramatist and underscores the problems with translating the author's work.]

Kōbō Abe (1924-93) was a contemporary Japanese writer of world stature. Although he was best known as a novelist, especially for his Woman in the Dunes (1962), his achievements as a dramatist were almost equally important, and he published several outstanding volumes of criticism. He was frequently mentioned as a likely recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, but his death in his sixty-ninth year, when he was still at the height of his powers, prevented him from obtaining this honor.

Ironically, Abe's career as a dramatist began as a purely temporary expedient. Late in 1954 he was under pressure to meet a magazine's deadline for the story he was writing. He was such a meticulous craftsman that if ever he felt he must change a single phrase, he generally rewrote the whole page on which the phrase appeared. It seemed impossible that such a perfectionist would meet his deadline, but it suddenly occurred to Abe that recasting the story as a play would make it easier. The editor of the magazine was not pleased to receive the play instead of the promised story, but as there was no time to ask anyone else, he had no choice but to print Abe's play. To everyone's surprise, The Uniform attracted favorable attention, and it was successfully staged in March 1955. Abe's career as a playwright had been launched.

Three months after the production of The Uniform, Abe's next play, The Slave Hunt,¹ a much more considerable work, was performed at the Actors' Theatre, the leading showcase for contemporary Japanese drama. It was directed by Koreya Senda, for many years a central figure in Japanese theater, especially of the left wing. During the next sixteen years—until 1971—Senda directed nine new plays by Abe, including The Ghost Is Here (1958) and Involuntary Homicide (1971).²

In 1971 Abe announced the formation of a “studio”—a company whose distinguishing feature would be the active participation of the performers in creating the plays that were staged. Guidebook (1971) was the first production of Abe's studio. Although his controlling hand was apparent, he insisted that he himself had functioned merely as a “guidebook” for the actors to consult, and the play has not been included in his collected works.

The contributions of individual performers to subsequent plays staged by the studio were of less significance than the cooperative efforts they displayed under Abe's extremely careful guidance. The members of Abe's studio were mainly young actors and actresses, most of them graduates of the theater program of Tōhō Gakuen, the leading music and drama school in Japan. Abe trained the actors in every aspect of performance, working with them day after day from early in the morning until night on basic techniques of speech and movement. The studio itself was open twenty-four hours a day, and the performers stopped by whenever they felt like it to perform calisthenics or to practice their lines. A sense of belonging to a special company developed, and word soon spread of Abe's “method.” Several well-known actors, including Eiji Okada and Tatsuya Nakadai, joined the company and cheerfully accepted Abe's direction, though by this time they were already seasoned performers.³

The plays Abe wrote after 1976 reveal his increasing preoccupation with nonliterary theater. The Little Elephant Is Dead (1979) pushed this concept to its logical development: it is virtually without dialogue and depends on the movements of the performers, the lighting, and the music to arouse responses in the audience that Abe believed to be the true function of theater. In 1979 his company performed this work not only in Japan but throughout the United States; in fact, it relied so little on dialogue that there was virtually no language barrier to separate it from American audiences, and the response was overwhelmingly favorable.

Abe wrote a brief statement concerning the objectives of his company after it had completed its successful American tour with The Little Elephant Is Dead and was again performing the play for Tokyo audiences. 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.” Abe expressed his conviction that literature had usurped the original purpose of theater, and that critics who insist that a play must have a “meaning” that they can analyze are an anachronism in a world where “meaning” is not required of literary works. He pointed out that an actor's performance, because it can never be exactly the same twice, is always in a present, progressive state, and is not subject to categorization and being disposed of with analytical judgments. (“The true actor is always a cause; he cannot be a conclusion.”) Abe ended his remarks with these words addressed to the audience: “I would like to share with you, here and now, a world that you could never have experienced or even imagined before you first encountered this work.”

Although Abe believed when he wrote these words that The Little Elephant Is Dead was not only a summation of what he had achieved theatrically but a beginning for further exploration in nonliterary theater, it was his last play. He returned to being a novelist—a man of words, rather than a director of actors on a stage. Perhaps he found that he had actually reached the limit of what could be achieved without dialogue or a plot. He had been successful but at a cost of sacrificing his most precious asset, his marvelous skill with words.

The plays contained in this volume, far from being nonliterary, are written in language of consummate skill. But even if a play was an unqualified success when performed according to the original text, Abe generally did not leave it unchanged when the play was revived. Sometimes the changes were dictated by the available performers: for this reason, the grandmother in Friends became a grandfather when the play was revived. Or his attitude toward his material sometimes changed: for another revival of Friends he added a character, the third son, in order to establish a link between the family and the outside world, a matter that had previously not seemed essential. On the other hand, one fairly important character in the original text of The Ghost Is Here was eliminated in later performances, after Abe had decided he was unnecessary, and his lines were assigned to another character. Apart from such major changes, passages of dialogue were altered repeatedly, always in an effort to further refine his message.

Abe did not consider any text of his plays to be definitive. Although he did not disavow earlier versions, each was considered a work-in-progress. For this reason, I have chosen to translate the most recent text available to me.

The plays all present problems of translation. The most difficult was Involuntary Homicide. I know what the title (mihitsu no koi in Japanese) means, but I could not find a lawyer who was able to supply the English equivalent, and I had no choice but to use the dictionary translation. Yet that was the least of my problems. The dialogue of Involuntary Homicide is written in two distinct varieties of Japanese. The first is a dialect fairly close to the one spoken on an island off the coast of Kyūshū, the setting Abe had in mind. The second is the formal, rather stilted standard Japanese spoken by the characters of the play when making a deposition before an imagined magistrate. Abe suggested that I model the English of my translation of these sections on the language a New York policeman might use in court in reporting a crime, but this, alas, was beyond my powers. I hope that at least some of the differences between the two spoken styles of Japanese will be felt even in my English version.

The other two plays posed lesser problems of translation. One I never surmounted in The Ghost Is Here was the song the model sings toward the close of the play. For the refrain of “I love yūrei” (yūrei meaning a “ghost”), I simply could not come up with a pun that worked in both languages. In The Green Stockings, I translated the term sōshoku ningen as “herbivorous human being,” though I realized this was rather too much of a mouthful. But “grass-eating human” seemed even worse. Such problems, faced by every translator, are particularly troublesome when translating dialogue that must flow naturally from the mouths of actors and actresses. I hope that if these plays are performed in English the actors will modify the words to accord most easily with their own speech.

The modern Japanese theater originated at the beginning of the twentieth century but its development was slow because of the competition both from native forms of drama, notably Kabuki, and, later, from film. It has only been since 1945 that it can be said to have achieved maturity. The plays of Kōbō Abe, together with those by Yukio Mishima, were the first to be performed widely outside Japan. It is hoped that the plays represented in this volume will find an audience not only among Abe's many admirers but among all interested in the state of world theater.

Notes

1. A revised version of the play, originally called Dorei-gari, was produced in 1967, and in 1975 a much more thoroughly revised version, called Oo-way (the cry that gives the strange animals of the play their name), was produced by Abe himself.

2. Other plays by Abe of this period included You, Too, Are Guilty (1965), directed by Senda and translated by Ted T. Takaya in Modern Japanese Drama. Friends (1967) was directed by Masahiko Naruse, and The Man Who Turned into a Stick (1969), by Abe himself. The latter two plays have been published in my English translations.

3. Okada appeared in The Green Stockings as the doctor, and Nakadai in the revised version of Friends as the victim.