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

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