German Title: Metafiktion und Männlichkeiten in den frühen Romanen und Kurzgeschichten von Abe Kazushige

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Abstract

Eclectic in style and elusive in genre, Abe Kazushige’s 90s fiction defies categorization. My dissertation situates the author’s novels and short stories published until 1999 within what it considers to be a global field of postmodernist poetics and politics since the late 1970s. It uses the term écriture to indicate the deconstructionist narrative discourse of the texts as an experimental ‘writing’.

Abe’s fiction describes the worlds of men. All the same, research on the author has not analyzed his novels and short stories from a perspective of masculinities studies yet. My dissertation fills this gap; I argue that the metafiction of Abe’s early novels and short stories provides a literary counter-discourse to cultural narratives on shifting male identities in post-bubble Japan by evoking conflicting images. On the one hand, the protagonists, who struggle to come of age as flexible workers in mid-1990s Japan, resort to physical violence in order to affirm archaic images of embodied masculinities to counteract their subordinate male status. On the other hand, this affirmation is queered, as the men are not able to form heterosexual relationships and instead obsess over homosocial bonds with peers.

Moreover, Abe’s early novels and short stories as well as his media appearances can be considered nodal points of larger avant-garde debates that challenged established assumptions of how literature was supposed to be written in Japan at the time. In fact, Abe was at the centre of a ‘90s generation’ of writers emerging during the decade. During a marketing campaign labelled ‘J-Bungaku’ (J-Literature), launched in 1998, these writers positioned themselves as a new group within the literary field (sezon-kei) in order to initiate a public discussion about outworn hegemonies of high literature.

In the first monograph-length analysis of these important cultural discussions surrounding Abe’s fiction and his public persona in the mid-1990s, I highlight Abe Kazushige’s crucial role as both public face and main facilitator of this literary movement. I further reframe the 1990s in Japan as a formative phase for what some call the literature of global modernity. In the very first monograph-length study on Abe Kazushige, I introduce an under-translated author and his works into the global canon of World Literature.