Beyond Nation: Time, Writing, and Community in the Work of Abe Kōbō

By Richard Calichman

In the work of writer Abe Kōbō (1924–1993), characters are alienated both from themselves and from one another. Through close readings of Abe's work, Richard Calichman reveals how time and writing have the ability to unground identity. Over time, attempts to create unity of self cause alienation, despite government attempts to convince people to form communities (and nations) to recapture a sense of wholeness. Art, then, must resist the nation-state and expose its false ideologies.

Calichman argues that Abe's attack on the concept of national affiliation has been neglected through his inscription as a writer of Japanese literature. At the same time, the institution of Japan Studies works to tighten the bond between nation-state and individual subject. Through Abe's essays and short stories, he shows how the formation of community is constantly displaced by the notions of time and writing. Beyond Nation thus analyzes the elements of Orientalism, culturalism, and racism that often underlie the appeal to collective Japanese identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Mar 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9780804797559

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Stanford University Press

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©2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Calichman, Richard, author.

Title: Beyond nation : time, writing, and community in the work of Abe Kobo / Richard F. Calichman.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | ©2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015037622 | ISBN 9780804797016 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Abe, Kōbō 1924–1993—Criticism and interpretation. | Identity (Psychology) in literature.

Classification: LCC PL845.B4 Z59 2016 | DDC 895.63/5—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037622

ISBN 9780804797559 (electronic)

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Palatino

BEYOND NATION

TIME, WRITING, AND COMMUNITY IN THE WORK OF ABE KŌBŌ

RICHARD F. CALICHMAN

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE. Markings in the Sand: On Suna no onna

TWO. The Time of Disturbance: On Uchinaru henkyō

THREE. The Lure of Community in Tanin no kao

FOUR. Interventions: Of Abe Kōbō

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was supported in part by a City College Humanities Enrichment Grant, a PSC-CUNY Research Award, and an AAS Northeast Asia Council Award.

I would like to express my thanks to Eric Weitz and Carlos Riobó of the City College of New York. I am particularly grateful to the book’s reviewers, whose insightful comments helped raise the overall quality of the manuscript. Jenny Gavacs, my editor at Stanford University Press, provided valuable advice and support. Toba Kōji of Waseda University has taught me much about Abe, and I would like to express my gratitude here. Finally, my deepest thanks go to Hirayama Keiko and Hirayama Yōko, whose warm hospitality sustained the project from beginning to end.

The book is dedicated, once again, to K.

INTRODUCTION

IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD, Abe Kōbō (1924–1993) is primarily known today as a Japanese writer whose fictional works explore the theme of alienation through focusing on the individual’s actions within a repressive society that seeks to deprive him of his freedom and autonomy. It is the aim of the present book to complicate this image, to show that Abe’s text seeks to problematize such received notions as alienation, freedom, and autonomy, unsettling the simple opposition between individual and society, while also placing in question what it means to be Japanese. My reading attempts to bring to the fore the disturbing implications of Abe’s thought for any interpretation that would identify him too quickly and narrowly, without examining its own methodological presuppositions. Such presuppositions can begin to be shaken, I believe, by sustained reflection on the notions of time, writing, and community as they appear in Abe’s work.

This work took various forms over the course of Abe’s career: novels, essays, short stories, plays, poetry, as well as scripts for film, radio, and television, etc.¹ And yet these writings might all be considered art in the particular sense given this word by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, as the medium that is only identified as that which cannot be identified.² For Abe, the notion of identity must be forcefully problematized by reconceiving the relation between movement (idō) and fixity (teichaku). Traditionally, these concepts are seen as existing in a strictly oppositional sense. In Abe’s understanding, however, movement is to be considered primary, with the result that fixity must now be grasped as a derivative effect of movement, that which is inscribed within the general space of this latter. If identity is to be conceived in terms of an entity’s selfsameness, the intrinsic unity it possesses that serves to establish its presence to itself and thus difference from other entities, then the fixity of such identity must henceforth be regarded as fundamentally displaced. This displacement of identity requires that thinking turn its attention to that which precedes identity, both allowing for it and destabilizing it from within.

We can see this insight operating powerfully throughout Abe’s corpus, as for example in his 1946 poem Jikan to kūkan [Time and Space]:

Here Abe aims to dislocate the borders that have traditionally determined the genre of poetry by introducing concepts and terms that derive specifically from the discourse of philosophy. In question, however, is not simply how we determine the poetic and literary in their difference from what is held to be the non-poetic and non-literary. By investigating the nature of time and space, Abe explicitly raises the issue of how we are to conceive of the self in its experience of change. Is the self exposed to the movement of time and space once it has been formed as a self? If so, then spatiotemporal inscriptions must be considered to be derivative of the self’s identity as such. However, if the self is marked by the difference of time and space from the initial moment of its appearance, then identity can only be constituted retroactively. This retroactivity introduces an irreducible element of contingency to the determination of self-identity. Regardless of whether this self be determined individually (I am I) or collectively (e.g., I am Japanese), the turn to the past from the vantage point of the present draws attention to the instant of decision, which resists any empirical grounding and requires for its occurrence a singular time and space.

In this poem Abe can be seen to offer two divergent conceptions of time. In the first, time is presented in quite classical fashion as circular. Following nature’s rhythms, spring turns to autumn only to then return to itself the following year. These opening lines of the first stanza are then repeated with a slight alteration in the closing lines of the second stanza. There it is the unit of the day that is foregrounded: this day today vanishes at the end of its allotted time and yet is reborn the following day as a new tomorrow. Time is thus represented as governed by the cyclical movement of nature. This requires that identity and difference be determined as repeating one another in a series of constant alternations, for the seasons change only to then reappear, just as a day changes while nevertheless remaining a day. Abe skillfully mimics this natural movement through repetition of the verb to come, thereby joining the beginning of the poem to its end: When spring comes, the appearance of spring / When autumn comes, the appearance of autumn / [ . . . ]Then when today comes, the self today / When tomorrow comes, the self tomorrow.

This circularity of time, as demonstrated by an entity’s departure from itself only to subsequently return to itself, is contrasted by Abe to an other thinking of time, one that must be regarded as rigorously non-circular. By presenting this other notion of time within the circularity of the poem, Abe implicitly poses the question of the relation between identity and difference (or fixity and movement) in terms of borders. If these borders contain a non-circular conception of time, Abe asks, are they truly capable of containing that time? Is there not perhaps something within this notion of time that threatens the very possibility of containment in general, hence forcing us to rethink the relation between inside and outside, internal identity and external difference? For Abe, time is to be conceived ecstatically, implacably outside of itself. Time must be understood as departing from itself since it disappears at every instant of its appearance, and yet such departure strictly proscribes the possibility of return. This strange movement of disappearing in the very event of its appearing is necessary for there to be any temporal movement at all. From Abe’s perspective, such movement can be glimpsed even in the rhythm of nature’s repetition. In the passage from spring to autumn no less than in that from today to tomorrow, what is foremost at issue is a coming (kureba). This word, which Abe repeats in the brief span of his poem a remarkable four times, names the exposure to temporal alterity that must take place in order for any entity to maintain itself as such. Identity requires this coming and yet dissimulates its threat. For Abe, however, anything that exists must be essentially temporal, and this means that it stands continually exposed to the coming of other times and other spaces in order to be at all.

Abe returns to this notion of a non-circular coming of time in his 1962 essay ‘Kyō’ wo saguru shūnen [The Tenacity to Search for Today]. Just as the self in Jikan to kūkan can have no existence outside of time, which thereby redetermines it in its singularity as "this self" (kono mi), "the self today" (kyō no ono ga mi), and "the self tomorrow" (asu no ono ga mi), so too does Abe now reveal man’s yielding to the coming of the future: Even if the future is created by the accumulation of ‘todays,’ it doesn’t necessarily belong to ‘today.’ For example, if someone from the Stone Age were to appear in our present day, it is unclear whether he would regard this present as hell or heaven. No matter what he thought, however, it is absolutely the case that what judges is not him, but rather the era itself. To live, ultimately, might be to envision oneself in the future. The future always comes. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily the case that one will appear within that future in the manner one expects. Even if one were to devote every ‘today’ for the future, tomorrow might well be something reserved strictly for the people of tomorrow.⁴

Even before man belongs to himself, Abe insists, he belongs to time, which is to say he remains essentially exposed to the coming of an alterity that repeatedly overtakes him and determines him otherwise. Typically time is understood as a continuum, with each now following one another in an infinite chain, but Abe draws attention to the interruptive force of each future moment. Even though the future is created by the accumulation of ‘todays,’ that future doesn’t necessarily belong to ‘today.’ In its difference from all that has preceded it, the future continually resists the present, jeopardizing the solidity of all forms of knowledge and ways of understanding the world. For Abe, this alterity of the future demands that we rethink the question of judgment. Judgment is generally regarded as a function of human consciousness, but Abe points to the limits of subjective interiority by placing the site of judgment in the future. No determinations can be made purely in the present since the present is constantly slipping outside of itself into the future. If, as Abe says, the future always comes, this coming does not take place simply after the present has constituted itself as such; on the contrary, the future repeatedly disrupts the present, threatening its unity and integrity. This explains why the tenacity to search for ‘today,’ to in other words cling to present conceptions of reality, must be seen as a failed project.

It is in this context that Abe specifically attacks the nostalgia that informs the desire for community. As he argues in a 1967 roundtable discussion (with the literary critic Sasaki Kiichi and filmmaker Teshigahara Hiroshi) entitled ‘Moetsukita chizu’ wo megutte [On The Ruined Map], For example, when people speak of ‘human relations,’ they tend to advocate the restoration of man, a proposition virtually no one questions. Man is alienated because of the complexity of contemporary society. To restore man, one has to restore the human connection; that is what they seem to imply. However, it is precisely this notion that I find to be extremely negative.⁵ Abe’s dissatisfaction with the concept of the restoration of man (ningen kaifuku) must be grasped on the basis of his understanding of time. If time in its ecstatic nature is never fully present to itself, then man in his existence within time can never be exempt from such lack of self-presence. As Abe observes, man’s divergence from himself is frequently reduced to the sociohistoric phenomenon of alienation (sogai). In this way, what is rigorously a general condition of impossibility (i.e., man can in principle never be fully adequate to himself) comes to be historicized as a mere empirical aberration. According to this narrative, it is contemporary society in its excessive complexity that has made man less human. In order to return man to his proper humanity, then, there must be a restoration of the human bond or connection (ningen no tsunagari). This involves a nostalgic return to the past with the aim of locating a more authentic form of community, one that allows man to realize his full potential as human.

Abe realized that such a restorative project depends for its success on a fantastic projection of an idealized image of the human into the past. Through this projection, a true form of humanity could come to be retroactively created, and this image might then be utilized as part of the effort to purify contemporary society of elements that are seen to be responsible for preventing man from achieving his proper self. For Abe, the historical entity that constantly mobilizes this ideology of authentic communality is the nation-state. In the context of modern Japanese literature, it is this fundamentally critical view of the nation that above all distinguished Abe from Mishima Yukio, the writer with whom he is frequently compared. In a 1969 lecture entitled Zoku, uchinaru henkyō [The Frontier Within, Part II], Abe himself calls attention to this important difference. Reporting Mishima’s boast that I participate in the Self-Defense Forces for my country, Abe contrasts this attitude to his own work of creating the art of a ruined nation (bōkoku no geijutsu).⁶ He explains this relation between art and the nation-state as follows: When discussing the question of the usefulness of art, for example, there is nobody in Japan, for better or worse, who claims that making art more useful will help rally a spirit of patriotism. Nevertheless, art was often used for this purpose in the past, and there are still countries that use art in this way. In general, however, art is intrinsically not something that serves the state; rather, it must ruin the nation. I don’t believe that art that ruins the nation exists alongside art that makes the nation flourish. In speaking with Mishima, I again realized that what we call ‘art’ must ruin the nation.⁷

Abe is unequivocal in his view that art be understood as a form of resistance to the nation-state. The nation-state operates according to an ideology of identity that transforms individuals into national subjects. Rather than questioning what it means to be Japanese, for example, Mishima allowed himself to be appropriated by this ideology, determining himself according to the most classical whole-part relation strictly as a member who forms part of the totality that is the nation-state Japan. If, as we noted earlier, art is only identified as that which cannot be identified, then Abe’s call for an art of a ruined nation involves at its core a resistance to all forms of national identification.

Yet how is such disidentification to be conceived? Here we might find a hint in Abe’s understanding of time in its particular relation to the notion of belonging. As he writes, "Even if the future is created by the accumulation of ‘todays,’ it doesn’t necessarily belong to [zoku shiteiru] ‘today.’ In the context of the ideology of national identification, an individual’s past consists of the markings of such determinations as birthplace, family affiliations, linguistic background, site of residency, etc. No individual arrives at the present without such markings, for these testify to one’s participation in a larger social world whose operations vastly exceed the control of any one person. Yet if the individual in his present identity is, to use Abe’s words, created by the accumulation" of these past determinations, it is nevertheless the case that no individual can simply be reduced to them. At every instant—that is to say, in every spilling forth of the present into the future—reality opens itself to being remarked. The notion of belonging functions to conceal this constant interruption of time in determining the individual strictly on the basis of those markings that have gradually fixed the sense of his present identity. In modernity, such markings have come to be powerfully shaped by the presence of the nation-state, not simply with regard to nationality, but in terms of the discursive categories of race and ethnicity as well. In order for these markings to retain their validity, however, they must constantly be repeated. It is at each moment of repetition that an individual’s identificatory belonging to the nation can potentially be disturbed, remarked otherwise. If such belonging requires repetition in order to be confirmed, then it is nevertheless also the case that each occasion of this repetition provides a chance to actively intervene in this cycle of identity.

A heightened awareness of the relation between identity and time can be developed through focus on the question of writing. Chapter One examines this notion in Abe’s widely acclaimed 1962 novel Suna no onna [The Woman in the Dunes]. I attempt to demonstrate the general force of this notion by conceiving it beyond its conventional determination as an act performed by a human subject. What is most urgently at stake in writing, I argue, can be approached in the terms of ontology, in which being articulates or determines itself at every moment through a marking that can no longer be understood as purely self-identical. Abe provides an important hint for this rethinking of writing in his repeated references to the concept of time. Writing names an instant of contact or relationality between disparate entities, and this contact leaves behind a trace of itself that can be read thereafter. In this regard, writing points to an impure temporality in which past, present, and future reveal themselves to be strangely interwoven. Such interweaving, I believe, bears upon the central tension in the novel between form and flow. Form provides the unity of identity, whereas flow exposes the fallibility of this identity in showing the interrelatedness between entities that are otherwise held to be strictly discrete and mutually exterior. Abe presents this tension in the example of his protagonist Niki Junpei’s sexual relations with the sand woman. But he also tries to think the connection between form and flow in his extended reflections on the sand itself. In this sense, Abe might be understood as opening his text to a broader engagement between the literary and philosophical.

Chapter Two turns to the series of essays written in the years 1968–1969 under the collective heading of Uchinaru henkyō [The Frontier Within]. My aim in this chapter is to investigate the relation between time and space as presented in these texts. I pursue a certain inconsistency in Abe’s argument, for he appears at moments to conceive of time as a pure movement that unfolds strictly prior to the intervention of space. This I show to be impossible, and that on the contrary Abe’s text also reveals that time and space exist as fundamentally interrelated. Both with and against Abe, I demonstrate that an entity’s exposure to spatiotemporal inscription takes place from the initial moment of its appearance, and it is for this reason that entities are unable to present themselves as such. Although Abe tends to oppose the movement of time to the fixity of space, the notion of alterity he sets forth involves a generalization of movement to include within it space as well as time. This insight bears directly on the thinking of politics he articulates in these essays, for he wishes to understand the Jew as a figure of movement that resists all appropriation by the nation-state. For Abe, the Jew is that entity which the state must simultaneously produce and destroy in order to maintain itself in its identity. I discuss certain problems with this conception of Jewry, but I also attempt to show the tremendous force behind Abe’s contestation of this identitarian logic that forms such a central part of nation-state ideology.

Chapter Three provides a reading of Abe’s 1964 novel Tanin no kao [The Face of Another] through focus on the notion of community. In its traditional determination, community presupposes that identity and difference be conceived as oppositional. For example, the collective identity that grounds communal existence in one case is typically seen as constitutive of its difference from other cases. Abe’s dissatisfaction with this understanding finds expression in his attempt to think communal formation on the basis of contingency. What this means, among other things, is that no community can exist as simply given. Here the identity required to form community conceals an even deeper level of identification, and this demands that attention now be directed to the question of ideology. In order to better understand the problem of identification in communal formation, I examine the notion of transference. What concerns me in Abe’s presentation of this notion is the tension that appears in his text between a commitment to dialectics and a thinking that exceeds dialectics. While untangling these threads, I attempt to shed light on Abe’s treatment of the figure of the minority. The minority must be understood structurally rather than empirically, I argue. Specifically, the community’s attempt to form itself requires that the minority be actively created as the community’s own negative image. By grasping that the minority comes to be determined as that entity against which the community posits itself, we are better able to situate Abe’s references in the novel to Korean residents of Japan and blacks in the United States as part of his attack against the complicity between nationalism and racism.

Chapter Four sets forth the notion of intervention in order to explore the manner in which Abe has been read in the U.S. Japan studies field. What interests me is the contradiction in which Abe’s attack against the logic of national affiliation has been disavowed through his national inscription as a writer of Japanese literature. Through the example of Abe, I attempt to show how the institution of Japan studies works to consolidate the hold of nationalism by tightening the bond between nation-state and individual subject. I follow the interpretations of Abe on the part of such scholars as Donald Keene and John Whittier Treat in order to locate a desire for a particularist Japanese identity, one that exists alongside expressions of culturalism, Orientalism, and racism. Through showing how the notion of intervention involves an originary co-implication of subject and object in the constitution of objects, I seek to demonstrate that the institutional appeal to Japanese objects remains grounded on a logic of identity that Abe’s texts continually disrupt. For Abe, logic must be understood as necessarily inscribed within time. This insight brings to the fore the importance of the contingency of decision. The absence of any objective basis for decision means that decisions must be repeated, each time differently. My reading of Abe aims to show that his thinking is irreducible to the status of research object, and that, on the contrary, an understanding of his work at the level of methodology must now be sought.

ONE

MARKINGS IN THE SAND

ON SUNA NO ONNA

Suddenly his eyes soared upward like a bird, and he felt as if he were looking down on himself. Certainly he must be the strangest of all . . . he who was musing on the strangeness of things here.¹

WRITING BEYOND THE SUBJECT

In Abe’s most celebrated novel, the 1962 Suna no onna [The Woman in the Dunes], the protagonist Niki Junpei repeatedly attempts to escape from the sandpit in which he has been trapped. Having failed in his first attempt, he conceives of a plan to tie up the woman in whose house he is imprisoned and force the villagers to release him. In the course of executing this plan, however, he suddenly finds himself imagining a future moment when, having successfully escaped and returned to his former life, he meets with a friend to discuss the written record he intends to make of the traumatic experience. Well, Niki, I am amazed, the friend remarks. At last you have decided to write something. It all comes down to experience. A common earthworm won’t attain full growth if its skin is not stimulated, they say. To this Niki replies, It’s meaningless, no matter how intense the experience, to trace only the surface of the event. The main characters of this tragedy are the local people there, and if you don’t give some hint of the solution through your writing about them, then that rare experience will be lost. The conversation then briefly digresses only to directly return to this question of writing. Niki: No matter how I try to write, I’m not fit to be a writer. Friend: This unbecoming humility again. There’s no need for you to think of writers as something special. If you write, you’re a writer, aren’t you? . . . Isn’t it good to be made to realize what sort of person one is? Niki: Thanks to this education, I have to be forcibly exposed to a new sensation in order to suffer new pain. Friend: Yet there’s hope. Niki: But one is not responsible for whether that hope thereafter turns out to be genuine or not.²

It seems important to ask why, in this novel about captivity and escape, Abe chooses to include this scene of imaginary dialogue about writing. Two possible interpretations might be considered. First, Niki Junpei is a teacher, and, as his friend suggests, professionally they’re pretty close to writers.³ In this sense, Suna no onna could be regarded as thematically linked to such other fictional works in Abe’s corpus as the 1964 Tanin no kao [The Face of Another] and 1973 Hako otoko [The Box Man], as both of these texts center on protagonists who, although engaged in other professions, nevertheless maintain a keen interest in writing. In the case of Suna no onna, the stark contrast Abe draws between the city and the countryside might conceivably be reinforced through this theme of writing, given the traditional link between writing and the notion of civilization. Hence Niki’s acute sense of estrangement from the villagers, and particularly from the woman with whom he is forced to live in the sandpit, could be explained by the fact that he is (or at least intends to be) a writer, someone whose relations with the others around him are as distant and abstractly mediated as those between an author and his characters. Second, the introduction of this thematic of writing might be seen to derive from a self-reflective gesture on Abe’s part as authorial creator of this text. In this reading, Niki’s role as writer would function as an ironic double of Abe, effectively blurring the boundary between the levels of fiction and reality. Niki’s dialogue with his friend about such issues as the relation between experience and writing or the difference between writers and the act of writing, etc. might then be traced back to Abe’s own views on these topics, with an eye toward determining the degree of correspondence (and thus the possibility of ironic intent) between these two worlds. More radically, the references to writing in the novel could serve to call attention to the work’s status as construct or artifice, thereby alerting readers to the need for a heightened critical consciousness regarding the manipulative effects of narrative.

The problem with both these interpretations, however, is that they presuppose a concept of subjectivity that the notion of writing forcefully calls into question. Here we need to examine the ability of certain traditional aspects of literary criticism to take into account the movement of writing. The first interpretation determines writing first of all as a theme, that is, a topic or idea that is found to appear across a diversity of textual instances. Yet a theme can never be discovered as such, in the form of an empirical given. Its lack of any purely objective existence demands that it necessarily appear to or before someone, a reader who, in an act of abstraction, disengages the theme from those textual elements that surround it and which form its immediate context. If writing according to this type of literary analysis comes to be remarked as a theme, something extracted from the text, then the reader is likewise implicitly determined as a thematizing subject. For this subject, the activity of raising textual elements from their initial material inscription to the level of theme is above all a conscious operation. It is consciousness that allows the subject to identify the thematic of writing in Abe’s text in its distinction from those elements that appear to fall outside the border or frame of this theme. However, this immediately raises the question of whether writing so easily submits to this operation of consciousness. If one were to conceive of writing as in some sense irreducible to the subject’s thematic framing, then it might be possible to begin to define the act of writing as a kind of overflow, that which exceeds all attempts to contain it within conceptual borders. At the very moment the reader-subject presents to himself the thematic of writing, writing would have already slipped beyond his grasp.

Something quite similar can be seen to take place with regard to the second interpretation as well. There writing is considered on the basis of a self-reflexivity that can refer to either the writer or the reader. In the former case, Abe’s doubling of himself in the form of the protagonist Niki Junpei would appear to collapse the border between fiction and reality in raising the possibility that Niki’s remarks on writing may in fact be attributable to Abe himself. Yet this collapse reveals itself very quickly to be in fact a consolidation of a classical conception of literature that privileges the real world of the author as the giver of meaning to the fictional text he creates. In this instance, self-reflection is determined as a mirror in which the text can never be anything but a secondary image produced by external reality. Whether this image (i.e., Niki’s remarks on writing) corresponds to reality (i.e., Abe’s own ideas on writing) or not is of minor consequence compared to the subordination of writing to this structure of correspondence itself. Here the measure of writing is understood to be authorial intentionality, which again returns us to the subject in all of its sovereignty. Even when focus is shifted from writer to reader, as can be seen in the more radical aspect of this second interpretation, the question remains one of expanding the capacity of the reader’s consciousness. Recognition of the text’s artifice is enabled by an understanding of the presence of writing in Suna no onna as actually a writing of writing. This doubling of writing in turn brings about a doubling of the reader: the reader who emotionally identifies with Abe’s novel is now able to objectify himself, thereby gaining a degree of critical distance from himself in his greater consciousness of the various rhetorical and narrative devices used by the author to manipulate the text’s reception. Such self-awareness is indisputably valuable from both an epistemological and ethical perspective, but it must be recognized as ultimately insufficient when the task involves disrupting the force of subjectivity itself.

In order to understand the resistance of writing to any subjective appropriation in the context of Suna no onna, it is necessary to first reread Niki’s discussion of writing with his friend before we then proceed to other instances of writing in the novel. In our analysis, the urgency of the question of writing must be understood as inseparable from the dominance of modern forms of subjectivity. Abe both recognized this dominance and sought a way to attack or critically undermine it. As he writes in his 1944 essay Shi to shijin (ishiki to muishiki) [Poetry and