Labyrinths
 

Cover of the pamphlet Mumei shishu (Untitled Poetry
Collecdon).

works; manuscripts, photographs, and play
scripts; and some very rare publications, such
as the pamphlet Mumei shishu {XSniitXed Poetry
Collection). As a whole the Abe Kobo Col¬
lection permits an intimate look at the writer
and his attittides toward his work.

Abe's world as portrayed in his writing has
a mysterious quality similar to the atmosphere
of the ])hoiographic self-portrait. The novels
concern experiences on margins: margins of
society, such as Woman in the Dunes or Box
Man; margins of imagination, such as the
science-ficdon-like Inter-Ice Age Four, margins
of experience, such as The Man Who Turned
into a Stick. The title of a short essay manu¬
script in the Collection is a case in point:
"Chikyuno mushikui ana e no tabi" (Journey
to the Worm-Holes of the Earth). The essay
begins:
 

Once the earth was a giant labyrinth. It wasn't
only a spacial maze; many different times were
entangled in a mosaic—that is to say, it existed
like an aggregation of cul-de-sacs.

The modern earth has changed into a far
smaller, more easily understood thing. . . .

To Abe, however, and perhaps his many
readers as well, the understanding never
seemed simple. In the mid-1970s, in an essay
in a volume of collected works, Donald Keene
wrote that Abe's works seem to convey more
meaning than is clearly stated—a situation
that can unnerve his audience—and that his
works can only be truly grasped with reread¬
ing.^ Perhaps the most remarkable feature of
Abe's work is that the author himself seems to
have approached his own writing this way, and
to have reread, reperformed, and rewritten
major texts even after publication and per¬
formance. The Abe Kobo Collection incltides
two printed versions of his plav Tomodachi
(Friends), annotated with Abe's own hand¬
written revisions. One version was published
in the literary magazine Bungei in 1967, the
year Abe's play shared the Tanizaki Prize with
Oe Kenzabtu'o's Football.'^ A later version is one
which appeared in a volume of his collected
works in 1973. A comparison of the two texts
shows that the later version incorporates some
of the corrections made on the earlier one,
and that fiuTher changes reversed earlier al¬
terations. In the third scene, for example, a
stage direction was expanded in the margins
of  the   earlier   printed   version   to   include
 

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