Tomoji Abe


Tomoji Abe was a Japanese novelist, social critic, humanist, and translator of English and American literature. Although he began writing as a modernist, in his later works he represented the intellectual movement in Japanese literature. This movement departed from Japanese traditional thinking and from established forms of narration, which focused on esthetic values and emotional states of mind ; it also departed from modernist views, which continued to be popular in world literature and in Japan. Abe's intellectual approach was incompatible with the socio-political atmosphere of Japan in the early Shōwa period, with rising fascism and militarism, and the crusade to preserve Japanese feudal traditions.

Early life

Tomoji Abe was born in Yunogō, Mimasaka, Okayama, the second son of Ryōhei Abe, a junior-high-school teacher of natural history, and his wife Hayo Mori. Ryōhei's job postings took his family to Yonago in Tottori Prefecture and Kizuchi in Shimane Prefecture; Tomoji attended Yōran elementary school, Himeji Middle School in Himeji, Hyōgo and Dai-hachi High School in Nagoya. In 1921, while in high school, Abe took a one-year leave to recover from a lung illness, which proved to be non-threatening, and during this year began to write tanka poems under the guidance of Kōhei. In 1923, Abe published his poems in Kōyukai Zasshi magazine. At this time he admired the tanka poet Akahiko Shimagi, and read the novels of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. In 1924, after finishing high school, Abe enrolled at Tokyo Imperial University's Department of English Literature. He was particularly interested in the British Romantic poets of the 19th century. Abe's personal contact with foreign thinking and attitudes was through one of his teachers, the English poet Edmund Blunden who in 1924 taught English Literature there. Abe, together with Blunden's other students, at first surprised with the Englishman's informal and approachable manner and, perhaps with his pacifism, liked and admired him, and Abe later said that Blunden was Japan's best friend and brought out the best in them. Abe became acquainted with British modernism, and especially the concepts of intellectualism associated with T.E. Hulme, Herbert Read and T.S. Eliot.
In 1927, Abe graduated from Tokyo University with a thesis on Edgar Allan Poe as a poet and then enrolled in graduate school.

Early work

Tomoji Abe began his writing career as a modernist. In November 1925, while at university, he contributed his maiden work, Kasei, and an essay, Kyoseisha no Tamashii to Shumon, the Department of Literature's magazine. He became acquainted with the editor of Shumon, writer Seiichi Funabashi, who in 1967 received the Noma Literary Prize for Suki na Onna no Munakazari . Abe, Funabashi and others advocated modernism in opposition to Marxism. In 1926, Abe associated himself with Aozora, a coterie magazine published by the young writers Motojirō Kajii and Nakatani Takao, and the then-budding poet and literary critic Tatsuji Miyoshi. In 1928, after Aozora folded in 1927, Abe contributed to another coterie literary magazine Bungei Toshi with Seiichi Funabashi, the young writer Masuji Ibuse and the critic and writer Hidemi Kon. In 1929, partly in response to Ryunosuke Akutagawa's suicide, Abe wrote Shuchi-teki Bungaku-ron, which he published in Shi to Shiron magazine, founded in the previous year by Tatsuji Miyoshi and the writer Sakutarō Hagiwara.
Abe's professional debut was Nichi-Doku Taiko Kyōgi ; it appeared in the January 1930 issue of the avant-garde literary magazine Shinchō and was instantly welcomed as a promising young writer by the Shinkō Geijutsu movement. The heroine, the young wife of an elderly professor, becomes erotically fascinated with German athletes, especially one of them, and in her thoughts succumbs to the sexual temptation though she never acts upon her impulses. The work is considered to have a feminist overtone because it exposes the unhappiness of an arranged marriage of a young woman to an elderly man.
1930 was the year in which Abe wrote several modernist-style short stories and in which Shuchi-teki Bungaku-ron was published by Kōseikaku in book form with other essays.
Abe's last modernistic work, written in 1936, was Fuyu no Yado. It became his acclaimed work and the basis for his post-war writing. It is the story of a Japanese family split between the debauched, wasteful and cruel husband, Kamon Kirishima, and his devout Christian wife, Matsuko, sexually repressed, whose forbearance seems limitless. However, there is an undertone of desire to control in Masako's patience. The narrator, who witnesses their lives, recounts the story in calm, objective manner. Despite this cool, formal objectivism, however, the novel disconcerts by exposing the irrational complexity of human psyche with its antagonistic forces and repressed desires, the conflict between two fundamental elements of human nature—instinct and intelligence. On another level, Fuyu no Yado is seen as Abe's attack on Japan's strengthening nationalistic fascism, which is represented by Masako's manipulations to convert others to Christianity, while the negative consequences of her efforts, her declining health, the disintegration of the family and its final destruction, predicts the country’s future.

Post-war work

Tomoji Abe's post-war writing had a humanistic and socio-critical nature. He opposed militarism and exploitation of human beings, and urged respect for human dignity. His novel Shiroi Tō, expressed anti-militaristic views and spoke against the excesses of financial/business monopolies. Intellectually independent and uncompromising, Abe was among the writers who believed in the need of rebirth of literature. He believed that literature, and writers, should be useful to society and stimulate its progress, and wrote, apart from works of fiction, numerous essays and theoretical works in which he expressed these views.

Personal life

Abe married Sumiko Ohama in 1930. They had two sons, Yoshio who became a scholar and professor of French literature, and Nobuo who became a critic and chief curator at the Bridgestone Art Museum, and three daughters, Hiroko, Michiko, and Noriko for a meeting of the Japan Pen Club and delivered a lecture on "War and Peace". He continued to be interested in Marxism but in the atmosphere of Cold War was cautious about revealing his interests and political views. Abe returned to Tokyo at the end of 1950. In 1953, Abe stood at the bar as special defender in connection with the May Day Incident of 1 May 1952, when, during the May Day demonstration, a Communist-led group forced its way to Imperial Plaza; in the subsequent clash between demonstrators and police people on both sides were killed and injured. In March 1959, Abe and Kiyoshi Aono issued a written protest against the revision of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan. Abe was a passionate and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. In May 1965, Abe, Rokurō Hidaka, a prominent academic and author of The Price of Affluence: Dilemmas of Contemporary Japan, and Yoshio Nakano, editor of the left-wing journal Heiwa protested against the Vietnam War and called for a united anti-war movement. In October 1966, Abe and Nakano called for a strike against the Vietnam War. In March 1968, Abe resigned from Meiji University and, with scientist Minoru Oda, called for a nationwide movement against the Vietnam War. In 1969, on a trip with his wife to Europe, Abe visited Edmund Blunden, his university lecturer.
In November 1971, Abe was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus and hospitalised. He died on 23 April 1973, leaving an unfinished novel, Hoshū, which he had been dictating in his last year of life and which was published posthumously.

Published works

Abe was a prolific translator of English and American literature. He is known as the translator of the Sherlock Holmes series. He also translated other foreign works from English; for example the Polish Nobel Prize–winning author Władysław Reymont'’s Peasants and Valmiki Ramayana.
Abe's other literary translations include:
Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, 1935 and The Happy Prince, 1954; Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, 1936 and Tess, 1969; Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, 1952; Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, 1954; Jack London's Call of the Wild, 1955; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Silver Blaze, 1958; Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer, c. 1959; Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, 1961; Jane Austen's Emma, 1965 and Persuasion, 1968; Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling, 1965; Eleanor Farjeon's The Silver Curlew, 1968; Walter de la Mare's Stories from the Bible, 1970.

Works translated into foreign languages

Fuyu no Yado trans. Ewelina Tchórzewska-Adamowska, Książka i Wiedza. 1973
Nichi-Doku Taiko Kyogi trans. Misako Matsumura in Abe Tomoji, Japanese Modernist Novelist as Social Critic and Humanist, the Early Years. A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfilment for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University. 1998. Published online.
The Communist trans. Jay Gluck and Grace Suzuki. Ukiyo: stories of "the Floating World" of Postwar Japan, Jay Gluck, ed., 1963
Shinema no Kokujin trans. Ayanna Bajita Doretha Hobbs. In Phallic Power of African American Men: a Study in Japanese Literature. A Thesis presented for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University. 1999. Published online.