 | Beasts Head for Home: A Novel Subjects: Japanese -- Manchuria -- Fiction; Identity (Psychology) -- Fiction; Manchuria (China) -- History -- 1945 -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Following his nation's defeat in the Pacific War, Kuki Kyuzo, a Japanese youth, struggles to return home to Japan from Manchuria. What follows is a wild journey involving drugs, smuggling, chases, and capture. Kyuzo finally makes his way back to Japan but finds himself unable to disembark. His nation remains inaccessible to him, and now he questions its very existence. Beasts Head for Home is an acute novel of identity, belonging, and the vagaries of human behavior from an exceptional Japanese modern author. Abe Kobo (1924-1993) was one of Japan's greatest postwar writers, widely recognized for his imaginative fiction and plays of the absurd. Richard F. Calichman is professor of Japanese studies at the City College of New York, CUNY. He is also the translator and editor of The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kobo (Columbia, 2013). |
