<i>The Woman in the Dunes</i> as Border Crossings:Abe Kobo, T.S. Eliot, and Paul Bowles

OBA, Kenji

doi:2016.3.1.63

The Journal of Japanese Language Literature Studies > Volume 3(1); 2016 > Article

Article

Border Crossings: The Journal of Japanese-Language Literature Studies 2016;3(1): 63-81.
doi: https://doi.org/10.22628/bcjjl.2016.3.1.63

The Woman in the Dunes as Border Crossings:Abe Kobo, T.S. Eliot, and Paul Bowles

安部公房、T・S・エリオット、ポール・ボウルズ

Kenji OBA

九州大学大学院地球社会統合科学府

越境する『砂の女』

大場健司

Correspondence Kenji OBA ,Email: kenji.oba.kyushu.university@gmail.com

Published online: 30 June 2016.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ABSTRACT

This paper is intended as an investigation of the relationships between Abe Kōbō (1924-1993), an avant-garde Japanese novelist, and American literature. This comparative study concentrates on the influences of Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), an American-born poet, and Paul Bowles (1910-1999), an expatriate American existentialist novelist, on The Woman in the Dunes (1962) by Abe Kōbō. Little attention has been previously given to those influences. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) was translated by Nishiwaki Junzaburō (1894-1982) and Fukase Motohiro (1895-1966) and became popular in 1950s and 60s Japan. Kindai Bungaku (1960.8-9) published a symposium on The Waste Land, in which Ara Masahito (1913-1979) and others discussed Eliot's depiction of a waterless desert and sexual impotence under the influence of the legend of the Fisher King. Abe was influenced by Eliot and also depicted a sexually impotent protagonist in the desert. But in contrast to Eliot, Abe insisted on nomadism, which was an early sign of his future anarchism. Abe also wrote “disappearance” in the desert under the influence of The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles. The Woman in the Dunes and The Sheltering Sky commonly depicted “disappearance” and holes in desert.

Keywords: Abe Kōbō, The Woman in the Dunes, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Paul Bowles, anarchism

キ―ワ―ド: 安部公房, 砂の女, T・S・エリオット, ポール・ボウルズ, アナキズム