Paper short abstract:

This presentation will consider some of the dynamics of movement and non-movement in the context of East Asia through a comparative reading of Abe Kōbō’s 1948 debut work _Owarishi michi no shirube ni_ and his 1957 novella _Kemonotachi wa kokyō o mezasu_.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will consider some of the dynamics of movement and non-movement in the context of East Asia through an examination of the repatriation narrative. By “repatriation narrative,” I refer to a postwar Japanese form of testimonial interlocution which features a first-person returnee narrator/author who explicitly or implicitly addresses a national audience that does not share the experience of repatriation; and which temporalizes repatriation as a memory reconstructed in the present, marked on one end by the end of the war and on the other by the returnee’s “homecoming” to Japan. This presentation will consider the discursive limits of the repatriation narrative by reading Abe Kōbō’s 1948 debut work The Signpost at the End of the Road (Owarishi michi no shirube ni) in relation to his 1957 novella The Beasts Head for Home (Kemonotachi wa kokyō o mezasu), focusing in particular on the various literary and geopolitical displacements in both texts. Although Abe Kōbō is today commonly touted as a “cosmopolitan” author whose “universal, dark, ironic” stories comment on the human condition writ large, equally important is his consistent consideration of the specific workings of the Japanese nation-empire. In reading Signpost and Beasts against the larger discursive history of the repatriation narrative, I aim to show how both texts evince a preoccupation with form that is itself a critique.