Critics typically regard Abe Kobo (1924-93) as writing against realism,
due to his avant-garde aesthetics that challenged the Naturalist realism
dominating the literary mainstream and the Socialist realism of the
orthodox Left in postwar Japan. He considered his work thoroughly
realist, however, and starting in the early 1950s in a series of
avant-garde art and literary groups, he championed the possibility of a
vital, contemporary realism that challenged the reader to question the
"reality" represented in the text through increasingly self-conscious
writing strategies. Through a reassessment of the texts in which he
worked out his theory of realism, this study traces the development of
his commitment to making "truth from a lie"-to fiction, drama, and
reportage that openly display their artifice. Key argues that the
reflexivity of Abe's texts, which lay bare their own processes of
artificial construction in order to reflect how our everyday sense of
reality is constructed and maintained, created a critical space for
metatextual ideas that were not acknowledged by the literary
establishment of his time and have yet to be recognized by critics
today. Undergirding his theory and practice of realism was a critique of
conventional documentary and of the classic detective story. The texts
examined here expose the degree to which the documentarian and the
detective are active fabricators of meaning rather than neutral
observers of fact. By paying close attention to the tension between the
documentary and the fictive in Abe's works, Key draws out the ethical
implications of his documentary approach, arguing persuasively that the
documentary qualities of his writing, such as its valorization of
objectivity over psychologism and the realm of "concrete things" over
abstraction are strategies for challenging the dominant assumptions
about what constitutes good ethics and good art, as well as the
relationship between these two spheres. Truth from a Lie explores the
ways in which Abe put documentary and the de
