I first became aware of Kobo Abe in 1964 when I trudged up to the Knopf office at Fiftieth Street and Third Avenue. I had just finished translating a series of nine short stories drawn from a collection published in eighteenth-century Japan, and I was not without considerable if uncertain pride. Harold Strauss was in charge of Japanese literature then, and he received me pleasantly enough. But he did not think that Knopf would be interested in publishing eighteenth-century stories. He was nonetheless pleased to meet someone who might be interested in doing modern translations from the Japanese. On his desk lay several volumes, including one by an author I was unacquainted with, and another by the well-known Mishima. Would I be interested in looking them over and seeing whether one or the other might interest me?
I left the office with a new Mishima and the other volume, by someone called Kobo Abe, under my arm. I spent the next week looking them over. The Mishima volume seemed about what I might have expected from that author. The Abe, with its vivid imagination and sprightly prose, entranced me, although he was at the time completely unknown to me and to the American public. I chose to translate the Abe book, The Woman in the Dunes, known here first through the English translation and, subsequently, through the haunting movie that proved to be immensely successful in the United States and Europe.
Thus began for me a decade devoted largely to the translation of Abe's works.
I first met Abe at the very end of my translation of The Woman in the Dunes, when we met in the Okura Hotel in Tokyo to clear up a number of passages that I could not sort out by myself. From the beginning, Abe was extremely gracious and friendly, answering my questions faithfully when he thought them pertinent, perhaps less so when he was unconvinced that they were really to the point. I remember one particular passage I could not grasp about what seemed to be soldiers marching with spoons. The spoons, it turned out, were metaphors for the upstanding members of soldiers marching in formation. He laughed and added that the whole thing was not very important, but he nonetheless gave me the literal meaning. He was right, of course, but it took an added word or two in the translation to bring out his point.
Abe studied medicine at the Tokyo University School of Medicine, and that experience certainly left its mark on him. Not that he became a medical doctor--indeed, he ultimately graduated in that discipline under the condition he would never practice--but rather from the mind-set such studies instilled in him.
In almost all his books Abe is concerned with categories and types, which he tries to define as precisely as possible. The beetles in The Woman in the Dunes are described with scientific care. Indeed, these animals become, in their struggles in the sand, a metaphor for man himself, caught in the net of his civilization. In The Ark Sakura Abe speaks of "a new system for classifying women into types.... I saw it in the paper. The 'quintuple approach,' I think it was called. According to that, the women fall into five main types--Mother, Housewife, Wife, Woman, and Human Being." Abe has chosen an effective method of redefining and at the same time expanding the meaning of certain key terms.
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