Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T05:26:03.912Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 18 - Social Critique in the Japanese Post-War Surrealist Novel

from IV - Transnational Surrealism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2023

Anna Watz
Affiliation:
Linköpings Universitet, Sweden
Get access

Summary

With the publication of various translations of French surrealist essays and poems in Japanese avant-garde publications of the 1930s, small groups of writers and individual artists began to make surrealism their own. However, due to the multifarious misunderstandings and often inaccurate adaptations of these texts resulting from their translation into Japanese, the term chō-genjitsushugi (surrealism) expanded to incorporate culturally and regionally specific concerns and concepts. Novelist Kōbō Abe surveyed post-war Japan from a very particular vantage point, having spent years of his life witnessing war and conflict in Manchuria before settling in Tokyo’s metropolis. This chapter examines Abe’s engagement with French surrealism, his frequently black (surrealist) humour, and the quest for the marvellous that manifests across his oeuvre. Writing against the grain of Japanese modernist literary convention, Abe’s surrealism revels in the convulsive beauty of metamorphoses via animal, mineral, and plastic forms. Through the figures of the box, the mask, the dendrocalcalia, or the cocoon of thread, the reader is aligned with narrators who disrupt and critique the order of things, disturbing the surface so as to reveal a sham society that seems hellbent on dehumanizing its citizens.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×