The name of Abe Kōbō has been familiar to English readers for over 25 years now, ever since E. Dale Saunders's translation of Woman in the Dunes (1962; tr. 1964)—probably still Abe's best-known novel in the English-speaking world—appeared in 1964, the same year in which Teshigahara Hiroshi's haunting monochrome film based on it received international acclaim. With a total of eight full-length novels, two plays, and a smattering of short fiction tucked away in anthologies and magazines currently available in English translation, Abe has achieved a firm position in the Western canon of modern Japanese literature as a writer who has made a radical departure from both the aesthetic worlds of Mishima Yukio (1925-1970), Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972), and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1886-1965) and the watakushi-shōsetsu (I-novel) tradition represented by Shiga Naoya (1883-1971).

Beyond the Curve is a valuable addition to the Abe canon in English not only because it is the first collection of his short fiction to appear in translation but also because it includes some of his earliest work, thus for the first time providing English readers with a clear view of Abe's point of departure as a writer. “Dendrocacalia,” the earliest of these stories, first appeared in 1949, when Abe was in his mid-20s; also included are “The Crime of S. Karma,” an excerpt from The Crime of S. Karma—the Wall [The Wall: The Crime of S. Kamura], which won him the Akutagawa Prize in 1951, and “Intruders” and “An Irrelevant Death,” the two stories on which the plays Friends (1967; tr. 1971) and You Too Are Guilty (1965; tr. 1979) were based. The collection, therefore, gives the opportunity for a reassessment of Abe's early career—to see how well his early short fiction holds up under the gap of several decades and to reexamine some of the preconceptions that have formed around Abe, such as the tendency both in Japan and abroad to regard him as a “Japanese Kafka.” (In a 1985 interview, Abe said that although Franz Kafka (1883-1924) had become extremely important to him, he did not actually begin to read Kafka until he had already been writing for some time.)

It is probably in the best interests of both Kafka and Abe to avoid connecting these two writers in terms of literary influence, which in any case is extremely difficult to detect and measure accurately. However, as Kafka weaves elements of popular Czech culture, such as the carnival, into his sinister fables of modern life, so are many of Abe's universal tales deeply rooted in the reality of everyday Japanese life. Residents of Japan will recognize familiar elements of the Japanese landscape in, for instance, the coffee shops that play important roles in “Dendrocacalia” and “Beyond the Curve” and in the meishi (business card) that usurps the protagonist's identity in “The Crime of S. Karma.”

It is likewise hard to imagine a story like “Intruders” happening anywhere but Tokyo—the sheer number of bodies in this metropolis, for the most part inadequately housed, seems to have given Abe his inspiration here. Probably few readers would dispute the literary superiority of Friends, in which Abe exposes the horror that lies hidden in that dearest of Japanese myths: that true happiness can only be found in the midst of a loving (or not so loving) family and that to be alone is a fate worse than death. (The recent establishment in Tokyo of an organization to assert the rights of people who live alone would indicate that this myth is still very much alive.) While not as polished as Friends, however, “Intruders” is also chillingly effective. In the earlier story, the protagonist's privacy is invaded not in the name of spurious love but on purely ideological terms. The family of nine intruders operates on the lofty principles of democracy, humanism, freedom, and justice; all decisions are reached on the basis of majority rule with K, the hapless protagonist, invariably the only one in opposition. Except for the 17-year-old daughter, the intruders make no pretense of loving K; they continually brand him a fascist for stubbornly refusing to support their culturally superior way of life. As the Czech translator Vlasta Winkelhöferová observed in 1968, a parallel for ideologically justified invasions from Hitler to Vietnam—and to this we might add the recent Gulf War—can be found in the black humor of this tale.

Yet in addition to stories like “Intruders” that achieve universality in an unmistakenly Japanese context, there is also a strain of the picaresque in Abe's early writing, represented here by “Record of a Transformation.” In this story, the souls of two newly dead soldiers guide the reader through a journey across war-torn Manchuria, where Abe himself grew up. Free from all burdens except a lingering regret at having abandoned their bodies, they carry the unencumbered picaresque hero into a new dimension and show us the brutality and absurdity of war from an entirely new angle. When passing through an apparently deserted village, only they can see the throng of angry souls of the massacred dead. The story ends when they discover that the “general” in whose truck they had been riding is actually a wandering soul who has perfected the art of invading dying bodies. After he is shot by one of his own men, he calmly displaces the soul of a dying waif, and the three souls “… set out with the fake general in the waif's body, on a most strange journey” (P. 100).

Other stories reveal the early Abe's penchant for fantasy. The protagonist of “The Crime of S. Karma,” for example, awakens with an ominous hollow feeling in his chest, only to find that his chest is in fact hollow. S. Karma's discovery that his meishi has taken his place at work makes for an amusing short story in itself; nevertheless, this excerpt might leave some readers in confusion about the “crime” of the title, which is actually Karma's capacity for unwittingly absorbing anything—from a picture in a magazine to a camel at the zoo—into the cavity of his hollow chest simply by gazing at it. Karma's trial for this crime, as recounted in subsequent sections of The Wall [The Wall: The Crime of S. Kamura], has more in common with Alice in Wonderland than anything Kafka wrote. If translator Juliet Winters Carpenter could prevail upon her publishers, a complete translation of The Wall would reveal a playful side of Abe that as yet remains unavailable to English readers.

In “Dendrocacalia,” the reader is struck not so much by the protagonist's loss of identity as by his essential lack of it to begin with. While the transformation of Common into “a poor-looking tree with chrysanthemum-like leaves” (P. 63) would seem to link Abe thematically to Kafka, we all know that metamorphosis in literature did not begin when Gregor Samsa (protagonist of Kafka's Metamorphosis) changed into a gigantic insect. When Common begins periodically turning into a plant, he goes to the library and finds references to similar phenomena in Dante and Greek mythology. In a last, valiant attempt to raise his fate to the level of the Olympian gods, Common rails against “the tribe of Zeus,” but when he finally allows the director of the botanical gardens to lead him to the pot that has been prepared for him and “quietly [holds] out his arms in the direction of the unrisen sun” (P. 63), we suspect that Common has always been as common as his name and that this is probably the only way he would have had a chance to flower—if poorly, at that.

Rather than leading us to any single conclusion about the fiction of Abe Kōbō, the 12 stories in Beyond the Curve show his breadth as a writer. It is interesting to note that over half the stories collected here have already appeared in one or more Eastern European languages; perhaps an intrinsic link between Abe and Kafka is revealed in the strong appeal his work apparently has for Czechoslovakian readers. In any case, Abe fans should rejoice that his early short fiction is belatedly finding its way into English, thus giving readers the opportunity for a fresh perspective on one of the most familiar of modern Japanese writers.