Best known for The Woman in The Dunes, Abe Kōbō is widely recognized as one of the most important Japanese writers of the 20th century. Today, we’re thrilled to partner with Columbia University Press to present an extract from a new and forthcoming Abe novel in English translation. Beasts Head for Home takes place shortly after World War II, when Japan was forced to give up its extensive colonial holdings throughout Asia, and Japanese civilians residing overseas began to return en masse to Japan. In the following excerpt, Kuki Kyūzō, a Japanese youth abandoned in what was previously the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (in Northeast China) stows away in a train in order to return to a homeland he has never seen.
As the wind died, the fog began to rise. On the railroad tracks, the blurred shadows of the patrolling soldiers turned back in the opposite direction. As soon as they disappeared, Kyūzō crawled out from the hollow space of the warehouse, cut across the tracks, and slid down the far side of the embankment. Here there were fields as far as the eye could see. On his right one kilometer away there appeared an iron bridge, directly in front of which the railway siding split o from the main line.
He rushed down the slope of the bank, jumping in short steps so as to avoid slipping. The milky white mass of fog gradually came into view.
Kyūzō soon detected the heavy echo of iron striking together. He then heard the jumbled sounds of footsteps and people speaking.
In the fog, it was best to stay low. He ventured to get as close as possible. A train! Just as he had thought.
One of the men standing there was a soldier, while the other seemed to be some type of maintenance worker. Suddenly a red light appeared in the cab of the train. It’s about to depart, Kyūzō thought, and he hurriedly slid down the embankment and ran toward the back of the vehicle. The train was surprisingly compact. There were two open freight cars, three large boxcars, two small boxcars, an additional three open freight cars, and finally two linked passenger cars in the rear. The passenger cars were of course out of the question, and the open freight cars would also prove difficult. He would thus need to choose from among the five boxcars in the middle. The small ones, with their many gaps and open glassless windows, seemed to be used for livestock transport. Yet they contained burlap sacks rather than livestock. The windowed cars would be more convenient in various ways, but the larger boxcars appeared best on account of the blowing wind.
In order to get a better sense of things, Kyūzō ducked under the train and emerged on its eastern side. It was already quite bright. The surface of the freight cars shone with a chalky texture. The first two cars were bolted tightly with wire, but the third car’s bolt had been removed, so he decided upon that one. The door was iced over, making it difficult to open. As soon as he exerted strength, his chilled body began to creak with pain. He changed position. Now the door opened easily. It was smooth, sliding back and forth properly.
Laughter could be heard near the train. It sounded very close, and Kyūzō hurriedly crawled inside. The car reeked of oil and mouse urine. It was dark and he could barely see anything, but it was empty inside, with apparently no cargo. He closed the door and struck a match. The front contained several machine parts wrapped in straw mats, while in the back there were casually tossed a number of wooden boxes of various sizes.
Kyūzō sat down on one of the boxes. Burying his face in the frigid gloves on his lap, he began panting like a dog.
Along the tracks, footsteps approached of someone stepping on the railway ballast. Kyūzō shifted his body, lying flat against the wall. The footsteps hammered something a few times underneath the freight car and then disappeared. Kyūzō’s anxiety, however, suddenly returned. Was it really possible that something so vital as a freight car could be left empty? At any moment now a truck or carriage would certainly arrive and workers would begin loading its cargo onto the train. If so, it would be impossible to conceal himself. It might be safer to stow away in a car where the cargo was already loaded, even if it were one used to transport livestock.
Raising his head, Kyūzō saw light dimly shining in above the door. There was a hole about the size of his thumb, and a dusty light could be seen whirling about. Peeking through the hole, he noted that the fog had nearly disappeared, and that several sheets of mist that had failed to escape hovered close to the ground, moving south. By the horizon a milky white light had begun to shine.
On his left, a large patch of fog was burning off in swirls, exposing the lowland that stretched from the northwest to the southeast. This was Xinghe. Here and there the snow had become bare, revealing a surface of ice that gleamed like new sheets of zinc. Further to the right, the town of Baharin stretched out like a stockyard of black brick.
In such light, however, it would no longer be easy to change cars. Suddenly the train emitted a burst of steam. Kyūzō stood motionless, vacillating, when again he heard the sound of approaching footsteps. They stopped directly in front of him. Someone rapped on the door with a stick and spoke in Chinese, with a provincial Shandong accent, “What happened to the cargo that was supposed to have been loaded here?”
Kyūzō pulled back, unconsciously grabbing the knife handle under his jacket. The other man replied in beautiful standard Chinese, “I hear that it was cancelled because it didn’t make it on time.”
The man with the Shandong accent followed up. “I’ll need certification for that. I’m an honest man, and it would be trouble if they thought I was cheating them.”
The two men set off, laughing.
Kyūzō leaned against the door. His shoulders heaved painfully. He told himself that things would work out, but his legs would not stop trembling. He pulled out the bottle and took a sip. The liquid flowed around his teeth.
He moved one of the wooden boxes in the corner, piling it up on the outside so as to create a small hiding place. Putting his belongings down, he returned to the peephole. It was now completely bright out. This flat town that was typically colorless and filled with smoke was now fresh and vibrant, illuminated by a pale backlight. The shantytown roofs beyond the mill tank ran on one after the other. For Kyūzō, they looked like dried fish skins. In the center, the upswept roof of a tall, many-walled Lama Buddhist temple glittered with a faint green light. Straight ahead past the river lay the alley through which he had just escaped. On his right, part of the bridge could be seen, and the smokestack of the pulp factory appeared especially high. Slightly in front of that stood the factory dormitory where Kyūzō was born and raised. A single red flag fluttered softly.
(“It seems I’m finally leaving.”)
The corner of an eroded sand dune could be seen where the river sharply diverged to again touch the edge of town. A few slanting Korean pine trees stood there, under which lay the unknown grave of his mother. When Kyūzō was in middle school, he had examined the sand dune’s movement as part of science class. He discovered that as the dune eroded with the annual spring floods, it moved northward by twenty or thirty centimeters. Before long it would overtake his mother’s grave, swallowing it up. After several hundred years, in the sandy plains created after the sand dune had swept through, what would someone think if they came across those crumbled, yellow bones?
The siren began its whine. It was 7:00. Martial law was now over.
Excerpted from BEASTS HEAD FOR HOME by Abe Kōbō. Translated by Richard F. Calichman. Translation Copyright (c) 2017 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
Abe Kōbō (1924–1993) was one of Japan’s greatest postwar writers, widely recognized for his imaginative science 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 Kōbō (Columbia, 2013).
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