Beasts Head for Home: A Novel

by Kobo Abe, Richard F. Calichman (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231544665
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	05/23/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Abe Kobo (1924–1993) was one of Japan’s greatest postwar writers, widely recognized for his imaginative science fiction and plays of the absurd.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Beasts Head for Home

Editorial Reviews

Abe Kōbō is one of the most respected postwar Japanese fiction writers and internationally recognized for the unique style, philosophical depth, and experimental quality of his fiction. Although Beasts Head for Home is not one of Abe’s most well-known works, readers will be eager to see how he wrote about an important historical moment from an essentially realist perspective. An excellent translation of a novel in need of an English-language version.

Travis Workman

The earliest work by one of Japan’s foremost writers to appear in English, Beasts Head for Home tells the story of a young Japanese man who undertakes a harrowing journey in an attempt to reach Japan after the collapse of the Japanese Empire. The story is particularly affecting to read in this historical moment with so much forced migration all over the world. Calichman’s translation is flawless.

J. Keith Vincent

Calichman’s superb translation of Abe’s semiautobiographical novel brings us a Kafkaesque world of displacement where settlers of Manchuria undergo the loss of home, identity, and belonging after the collapse of the Japanese empire. Beasts Head for Home is a haunting and gripping story and an indispensable read for anyone interested in postcolonial studies, settler colonial studies, and the history of empire.

Katsuya Hirano