was a Japanese novelist, social critic, humanist, and translator of English and American literature. Although he began writing as a modernist, in his later works he represented the intellectual movement in Japanese literature. This movement departed from Japanese traditional thinking and from established forms of narration, which focused on esthetic values and emotional states of mind (such as appear in the works of Junichiro Tanizaki and Ryunosuke Akutagawa); it also departed from modernist views, which continued to be popular in world literature and in Japan (Japanese modernist writers included Haruo Satō, Sei Ito, Tatsuo Hori, Riichi Yokomitsu and Yasunari Kawabata). Abe's intellectual approach was incompatible with the socio-political atmosphere of Japan in the early Shōwa period (1925–1945), with rising fascism and militarism, and the crusade to preserve Japanese feudal traditions.
Early life
Tomoji Abe was born in Yunogō, Mimasaka, Okayama, the second son of Ryōhei Abe, a junior-high-school teacher of natural history, and his wife Hayo Mori. Ryōhei's job postings took his family to Yonago in Tottori Prefecture and Kizuchi in Shimane Prefecture; Tomoji attended Yōran elementary school, Himeji Middle School in Himeji, Hyōgo and Dai-hachi High School in Nagoya. In 1921, while in high school, Abe took a one-year leave to recover from a lung illness, which proved to be non-threatening, and during this year began to write tanka poems under the guidance of Kōhei. In 1923, Abe published his poems in Kōyukai Zasshi magazine. At this time he admired the tanka poet Akahiko Shimagi, and read the novels of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. In 1924, after finishing high school, Abe enrolled at Tokyo Imperial University's (now Tokyo University) Department of English Literature. He was particularly interested in the British Romantic poets of the 19th century. Abe's personal contact with foreign thinking and attitudes was through one of his teachers, the English poet Edmund Blunden who in 1924 taught English Literature there. Abe, together with Blunden's other students, at first surprised with the Englishman's informal and approachable manner and, perhaps with his pacifism, liked and admired him, and Abe later said that Blunden was Japan's best friend and brought out the best in them. Abe became acquainted with British modernism, and especially the concepts of intellectualism associated with T.E. Hulme, Herbert Read and T.S. Eliot.
In 1927, Abe graduated from Tokyo University with a thesis on Edgar Allan Poe as a poet and then enrolled in graduate school.
Early work
Tomoji Abe began his writing career as a modernist. In November 1925, while at university, he contributed his maiden work, Kasei (Metaplasia), and an essay, Kyoseisha no Tamashii (The Spirit of Rectifier) to Shumon (Red Gate), the Department of Literature's magazine. He became acquainted with the editor of Shumon, writer Seiichi Funabashi, who in 1967 received the Noma Literary Prize for Suki na Onna no Munakazari . Abe, Funabashi and others advocated modernism in opposition to Marxism. In 1926, Abe associated himself with Aozora (Blue Skies), a coterie magazine published by the young writers Motojirō Kajii and Nakatani Takao, and the then-budding poet and literary critic Tatsuji Miyoshi. In 1928, after Aozora folded in 1927, Abe contributed to another coterie literary magazine Bungei Toshi (Age of Art and Literature) with Seiichi Funabashi, the young writer Masuji Ibuse and the critic and writer Hidemi Kon. In 1929, partly in response to Ryunosuke Akutagawa's suicide, Abe wrote Shuchi-teki Bungaku-ron (On Intellectualist Literature), which he published in Shi to Shiron (Poetry and Poetic Theory) magazine, founded in the previous year by Tatsuji Miyoshi and the writer Sakutarō Hagiwara.
Abe's professional debut was Nichi-Doku Taiko Kyōgi (The Japan-Germany Athletic Games); it appeared in the January 1930 issue of the avant-garde literary magazine Shinchō and was instantly welcomed as a promising young writer by the Shinkō Geijutsu (Modern Art) movement. The heroine, the young wife of an elderly professor, becomes erotically fascinated with German athletes, especially one of them, and in her thoughts succumbs to the sexual temptation though she never acts upon her impulses. The work is considered to have a feminist overtone because it exposes the unhappiness of an arranged marriage of a young woman to an elderly man.
1930 was the year in which Abe wrote several modernist-style short stories and in which Shuchi-teki Bungaku-ron was published by Kōseikaku in book form with other essays.