Beasts Head for Home?: A Novel

by Kobo Abe, Richard Calichman (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231177054
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	05/23/2017
Series:	Weatherhead Books on Asia
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	841,115
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Beasts Head for Home

Editorial Reviews

With its historical setting and named characters, Beasts Head for Home diverges from the surreal landscape of Abe's best-known work, The Woman in the Dunes, but alienation is at the Kafkaesque heart of both novels. Though Kyuzo somehow manages to complete his physical journey, he remains an exile, unable even to define the home he seeks…The howling misery of his displacement circa 1947 resonates powerfully with the headlines of 2017: a grim story of the past for our grim present.

The New York Times Book Review - Janice P. Nimura

★ 04/03/2017
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. (May)

Publishers Weekly

[Beasts Head for Home] is a necessary part of Abe's important body of work, a book of vivid scenes and strange characters, a book that feels like the hollow terror after a nightmare passes.

Memphis Flyer - Corey Mesler

This early work of acclaimed Japanese writer Abe is finally available in English, and Calichman’s adroit translation also provides an essential context-establishing introduction. Abe’s novel is testimony to survival despite gruesome odds as well as a chilling warning about the cost to humanity of such struggles.

Booklist

An excellent introduction to Abe’s work.

Tony's Reading List

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.

Travis Workman

In a time when the world is increasingly faced with an obsession with borders and anxieties regarding what is called the "refugee crisis," this timely new translation of Kobo Abe's novel provides a necessary coming to terms with the experience of the ravages of war on the displaced. . . . Abe exposes the very fluidity with which our sense of belongingness, even ownership, must continually be tested and reckoned with.

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal - Lawrence Lacambra Ypil

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.

Katsuya Hirano

Beasts Head for Home is as riveting and as unforgiving as the frigid Civil War wilderness in which it is set.

Asian Review of Books - Peter Gordon

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.

J. Keith Vincent

This early work of acclaimed Japanese writer Abe is finally available in English, and Calichman’s adroit translation also provides an essential context-establishing introduction. Abe’s novel is testimony to survival despite gruesome odds as well as a chilling warning about the cost to humanity of such struggles.

Booklist

Calichman's masterful translation is recommended reading for the uninitiated reader and diehard Abe fans alike.

Japan Society Review

2017-03-27
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 Dürrenmatt, 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.

Kirkus Reviews