The Road Sign at the End of the Street
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| Author | Kōbō Abe |
|---|---|
| Original title | 終りし道の標に Owarishi michi no shirube ni |
| Cover artist | Unknown |
| Language | Japanese |
| Genre | Fiction & Literature |
| Published in | Kosei (1st installment only) |
| Publisher | Shinzenbisha |
| Publication date | 1948 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 236 |
| LC Class | PL845.B4 O8 1948 |
The Road Sign at the End of the Street (終りし道の標に Owarishi michi no shirube ni, 1948) is the debut novel by Japanese writer Kōbō Abe, originally meant to be serialized in the literary journal Kosei, though only the first installment was published in the February 1948 issue.[1][2] Later that year, in October, it was published in its entirety in book form by Shinzenbisha. Abe revised the work in 1965, to which he added a postscript.[3]
The novel is written using the first-person narrative voice and is divided into three "notebooks," entitled “The Road Sign at the End of the Street,” “The Unwriteable Words,” and "The Unknowable God,” along with a brief conclusion. The work has yet to be translated into English; because of this, there is no standardly recognized title, and it sometimes appears variously as On the Sign at the End of the Road, To Mark the End of the Road, and even As a Signpost for the Road I Have Come (or some permutation of the preceding three variants), in the critical literature.
It bears the epigraph:
To my deceased friend, Kaneyama Tokio:
Why did you reject your homeland so obstinately?
Would you reject even the fact that only I made it back?
It may be that attempting to erect a monument to you, who died while so obstinately rejecting being loved,
May itself be connected to the reason why you were killed . . .[4]
Background and composition
At the time of the novel's composition in 1947, Abe was in the process of completing his medical training at Tokyo Imperial University, but ended up spending more of his time writing poetry than attending to his studies (he earned a degree the following year, but never practiced medicine). Abe shared the manuscript of the novel with his former high school German teacher, Yutaka Haniya, an avant-garde novelist and literary critic, on whose recommendation the novel was first serialized.
Plot summary
The story concerns a man known only as "T," an opium addict suffering from tuberculosis, who lives in Manchuria at the end of World War II.[5]
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Reception
The work has been described as a "highly abstract difficult spiritual autobiography," and it contains many of the same themes that Abe would return to his later works, such as alienation, loss of freedom, and lost identity.[3][6]
References
- ↑ O’Neil, Patrick M. (ed.), Great World Writers: Twentieth Century, Vol. I. New York: Marshall Cavendish, c2004, p. 12.
- ↑ Rubin, Jay (ed.) Modern Japanese Writers. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001, p. 3.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Yamanouchi Hisaaki. The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 187.
- ↑ Yi, Christina. "Epitaphs to Empire: On Abe Kōbō and the (Un)Making of the Repatriation Narrative." Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 57, No. 2, October 2023.
- ↑ Witalec, Janet (ed.) Short Story Criticism: Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers, Vol. 61. Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2003, pp. 19–21.
- ↑ Introduction to Contemporary Japanese Literature: Synopses of Major Works, 1956-1970. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1972, p. xxxiii.
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