Crisp, stark, pristine scenes of gaunt settlements, vast wilderness, and tense human encounters fill this 1957 novel by Abe K\u014db\u014d, the story of Ky\u016bz\u014d, a Japanese youth raised in a nondescript city in the interior of Manchuko during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.<\/p>\n
Japan\u2019s defeat in 1945 finds an orphaned Ky\u016bz\u014d living as a prisoner-servant in a garrison of Soviet soldiers. But Ky\u016bz\u014d manages to escape, hoping to reach the coast and find a boat that will carry him to Japan for the first time, his head filled with idyllic notions from his local Japanese school, textbook scenes of an honorable, cherry-blossom homeland.<\/p>\n
Ky\u016bz\u014d stows away on a southbound train but is discovered\u2014before the train rolls out\u2014by his Soviet captors, who have come looking for him; in a touching moment they don\u2019t ask about the supplies he has stolen, including some of their personal possessions, and even give him a generous roll of cash to help him on his way. Beyond that charitable instant, the demons of deceit and treachery hover over every scene as Ky\u016bz\u014d\u2019s journey becomes an agonizing pilgrimage fraught with gruesome suffering and abysmal confusion.<\/p>\n
The train crammed with Japanese refugees is sabotaged and waylaid in the frozen winter wilderness by Chinese nationals intent on preventing their escape. When the train tries to ram its way through the blockade, Ky\u016bz\u014d\u2019s hopes of a swift journey home are literally derailed. The ensuing train wreck and its aftermath are intense and startling\u2014a firefight breaks out, and a Soviet fighter swoops down to strafe the scene:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe battle ceased for some time. The groans of the wounded sounded just like the call of beasts. Although cold dulls the pain, those who cannot move from loss of blood soon freeze if they don\u2019t scream and warm the body. A cry like a large-throated bird rang out two or three times from the passenger car above. Perhaps it was a baby. The wind began to pick up.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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In the fearful chaos that follows, Ky\u016bz\u014d finds himself accepting advice, and then orders, from an older man named K\u014d, a worldly, dangerous character; alternately brigand and guide, he pressures Ky\u016bz\u014d to throw in his lot with him, claiming to be the young man\u2019s best bet for making it home.<\/p>\n
As the two men leave civilization behind, moving through the liminal world of the wilderness in a phantasmagoria of mutation, the novel\u2019s focus on man\u2019s incessant, fruitless struggle with his bestial nature informs nearly every page.<\/p>\n
The mark of the beast is almost always in sight. The examples are many, from small details\u2014Ky\u016bz\u014d\u2019s jacket is lined with rabbit fur, K\u014d\u2019s with dog hair\u2014to weird, nightmarish scenes, such as when the men seek refuge from the chaos and biting cold in the dark forest: \u201cWhen they struck a match to investigate, a round bird the size of a human child suddenly appeared before them, flying off with a loud squawk like the sound of horse hooves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ky\u016bz\u014d\u2019s fear of wolves in the woods is rebuffed by K\u014d, who reminds him that the animals will sate themselves on the abundant corpses from the train wreck and battle. Nonetheless, a wolf does come to spy on them: \u201cHearing a sound, [K\u014d] pointed beyond the fire. A beast that looked like a filthy dog slowly passed by with slanted, faltering steps, its neck hanging so low that it nearly touched the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n
The two men walk, run, stagger, stumble, and crawl their way through a brutal, frightening trek for survival across the frozen wastelands of central Manchuria, heading south toward Liaodong Bay to find a ship out of China. Trying to move through the wilderness undetected by unfriendly Chinese soldiers, the two undergo a memorable epic of real suffering\u2014starvation, frostbite, thirst, injury, amputation\u2014faring worse than animals, at one point stalked by four hungry wild dogs that, given the chance, just might attack and eat them.<\/p>\n
The fear and desperation of their increasingly weird nightmare together evoke the frightening journeys found in a variety of stories, such as Edgar Allen Poe\u2019s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantuckett<\/em>, J. M. Coetze\u2019s Waiting for the Barbarians, <\/em>and more recently Jeff Vandermeer\u2019s bizarre Southern Reach Trilogy, but perhaps the most telling analog is Akira Kurosawa\u2019s great 1975 film Dersu Uzala, the Hunter.<\/em> Kurosawa\u2019s film is an adaptation of the 1923 memoir Dersu the Trapper<\/em> by Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev, in which he recalls how, as captain of an army troop surveying the western reaches of Siberia, he meets and makes friends with Dersu, a Nanai hunter who has lived his whole life in the wild. However, Ky\u016bz\u014d and K\u014d\u2019s survival story enjoys none of the noble brotherhood that develops between Vladimir and Dersu; instead, their relationship is lunatic, desperate, and depraved. And while they are driven to avoid detection until they can reach the coast, Ky\u016bz\u014d\u2019s greatest fear, and strangest nemesis, is K\u014d himself.<\/p>\nK\u014d is a crafty survivor, a shapeshifter, of no certain nationality\u2014he alternately veers, as it suits him, toward being Japanese, Chinese, or Korean; sometimes he is the wise older guide, at other times he must depend on the younger man, even as Ky\u016bz\u014d, fearing that K\u014d might murder him for his money, wonders if it\u2019s all an act. Even so, they experience a peculiar inversion of authority. As Ky\u016bz\u014d is forced to take charge of an ill and delirious K\u014d, the reader is challenged to reconsider Ky\u016bz\u014d\u2019s naivet\u00e9, his lack of experience outside his hometown, in the face of K\u014d\u2019s cynical opportunism.<\/p>\n
Their hell, which is each other\u2014the naive Japanese youth who has never known his homeland, and the peripatetic grifter of uncertain, fluid nationality\u2014is bottomless. Even as they traverse the wilderness and make it back to civilization, what seems their creepiest, possibly lowest point\u2014 finding in an abandoned farmhouse the old mummies of a family who died on their own pilgrimage to nowhere\u2014is really an antechamber to darker depths.<\/p>\n
Using recent twentieth-century tragic history as a backdrop, Abe\u2019s 1957 work posits the protagonists\u2019 antagonism as both a reflection and an inversion of betrayal. The Japanese invasion and colonization of Manchuria was brutal for both the Chinese and, as the novel shows, to the Japanese who perished there for the emperor\u2019s cause. Ky\u016bz\u014d\u2019s parents both die there, his father, for reasons unclear, early in their settlement, his mother from a stray bullet just after the Soviets arrive. Ky\u016bz\u014d\u2019s tragedy thus encompasses a strange land where he does not belong and a homeland he can never reach, one he can only imagine in the most stereotypical notions. Similarly, K\u014d, a manic two-bit criminal without a nation, fights for neither the Nationalist Army nor the Communists, and despite a formidable will to survive he cannot endure the depredations of those more ruthless than himself.<\/p>\n
The novel\u2019s title suggests both a homing instinct\u2014Ky\u016bz\u014d\u2019s drive to find his imaginary homeland\u2014as well as a predator\u2019s fixed gaze as it homes in on its prey. The beasts of this novel are human, rapacious conquerors and ruthless survivors, as well as those degraded, driven, and deranged by usurious circumstances, stripped of, or forced to abandon, their humanity. The greatest mercy Ky\u016bz\u014d receives comes from a street urchin who survives by trapping and slaughtering stray dogs, and selling their meat. Ky\u016bz\u014d even seems in danger of suffering a similar fate, but his own fate might be worse.<\/p>\n
Ky\u016bz\u014d\u2019s guileless determination makes him a sympathetic figure, and while every clue points toward disaster, one hopes for the best for him to the very last. But the only Japan Ky\u016bz\u014d reaches is a Japanese merchant marine ship where his hosts offer him a Blackbeard\u2019s bargain: don\u2019t go snooping around and things might turn out alright. Ky\u016bz\u014d doesn\u2019t know that he\u2019s seeking refuge in the arms of the nation that committed the massacres in Nanking, a nation that lost its greatest war and has nothing more to lose; and even when this fact is explained to him bluntly, it cannot, does not, register. He is the unfortunate innocent who has depended on others his whole life; despite remarkable strength and weeks of endurance, his journey seems an inevitable descent into madness that only reduces him to a cypher.<\/p>\n
Richard F. Calichman\u2019s smooth, lucid translation offers the reader a dark, memorable flight into increasing claustrophobia, no less grim than plots by Kafka or Beckett, with a palpable share of the latter\u2019s bleak humor. Beckett\u2019s tragicomedies trace absurd closed loops\u2014Abe K\u014db\u014d\u2019s choking M\u00f6bius strip of disasters and betrayals is as snug as a guillotine yoke, but the urge to test its fit is nearly irresistible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beasts Head for Home by Abe K\u014db\u014d Translated from the Japanese by Richard F. Calichman 191 pgs.| pb | 9780231177054 | $25 Columbia University Press Review by Brendan Riley Crisp, stark, pristine scenes of gaunt settlements, vast wilderness, and tense human encounters fill this 1957 novel by Abe K\u014db\u014d, the story of Ky\u016bz\u014d, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":427712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-427682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427682"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":427722,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427682\/revisions\/427722"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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