Inter Ice Age 4 by Kōbō Abe

First published:Daiyon kampyōki, 1958-1959, serial; 1959, book (English translation, 1970)

Type of work: Science fiction

Time of work: The near future

Locale: Tokyo

Principal Characters:

• Professor Katsumi, the narrator, a computer scientist at the Institute for Computer Technique
• Tanomogi, his assistant
• Wada Katsuko, a young female assistant
• Dr. Yamamoto, in charge of the electronic and diagnosis room at Central Welfare
• Professor Yamamoto, his brother, in charge of Yamamoto Laboratories

The Novel

Inter Ice Age 4 is narrated by a scientist, Professor Katsumi, who is attempting to overcome bureaucratic interference so that his institute can build a supercomputer capable of predicting the future. Katsumi soon loses sight of this goal, however, as mysterious events threaten his safety. He uncovers a plan by a group of industrialists and government officials to develop mutant humans, called aquans, capable of living in undersea colonies. In this respect the novel merges several genres, including science fiction, the detective novel, and the novel of ideas.

The novel begins with a cryptic prelude describing a huge tidal wave heading for the Japanese coast. The significance of this event—a harbinger of the eventual flooding of the earth—is not clear until much later.

Professor Katsumi’s narrative, divided into two program cards, an interlude, and a blueprint, explains that he and his research staff are building a forecasting machine in response to the Soviet computer Moscow I, which can predict events in the immediate future. Suddenly, however, the Russians announce a new and more powerful computer, MII, which predicts the end of capitalism by the year 2080. The United States responds that it deplores such an application of scientific resources and refuses to use its own computer to predict political events. The Japanese government, influenced by the United States, tells Katsumi not to apply his computer to political events.

The staff at the institute, however, wishing to test the Soviet hypothesis, soon discover that practically any prediction has political overtones, and they let the computer decide how to proceed. The machine suggests choosing a private individual and predicting his future; the man must not know that he is being observed. Katsumi and his assistant, Tanomogi, decide on an anonymous man in a cafe, who seems to have been stood up by a date. They observe him wandering aimlessly and making phone calls; eventually they follow him to a woman’s apartment, where Tanomogi reports hearing a mysterious thud. The next morning Katsumi discovers that the man, an accounting superintendent, has been strangled by his mistress.

The research staff decide to proceed with the study, connecting the dead man’s body to the computer. The computer reveals that the accountant was curious about how the secretary in whose apartment he was killed could have afforded a large purchase; she told him that she had been paid to have an abortion at a special laboratory. The dead man’s memory, visualized through a computer monitor, also reveals that the woman was not in the apartment when he was killed. Katsumi is worried that suspicion will fall on himself and Tanomogi. Throughout their investigation, a strangely familiar voice on the phone warns Katsumi to stop asking questions.

Mysterious and threatening events escalate: The murder suspect commits suicide; Katsumi’s wife is forced to have an abortion; Tanomogi hints about a special laboratory that enables mammal fetuses to evolve into underwater animals with gills; Katsumi recognizes the threatening voice as his own, reproduced by the computer.

Finally, in the chapter entitled “Program Card No. 2,” the truth is revealed to the protagonist. At Professor Yamamoto’s laboratory, a group of scientists, including Katsumi’s assistants Tanomogi and Wada, have been working on a project to develop mammals for work in undersea colonies, using the premature fetuses from abortions. To keep the project secret, Tanomogi had to murder the accountant; Katsumi himself will have to be killed because he resists the change demanded by his own creation, the forecasting machine. At the lab, Katsumi sees the living fetus of his own son, as well as groups of other aquan children bred to live underwater. An assistant explains that a fourth ice age is about to flood most of the Earth’s surface and that a group of businessmen and government officials has formed the Society for the Development of Submarine Colonies in order to prepare society for the catastrophe.

In the final chapter, “Blueprint,” a computer shows the future state of Japan after the flooding—a society dominated by the aquans. As the novel ends, Katsumi hears the footsteps of his assassin outside the door. In the postscript, the novelist states that his purpose has been to confront his readers with the cruelty of the future that lies before them.

The Characters

Unaware of the undersea project at the beginning of the novel, Professor Katsumi represents the individual’s ignorance of the future and the difficulty one has in confronting such drastic change. The professor’s belief that he is in charge, that his machine is serving him, undercuts the notion that one can act freely or independent of social, political, and technological realities. One key example of this ignorance is Katsumi’s inability to recognize that his own voice (generated by the computer) has been making the telephone warn-ings. When he does recognize the voice, he assumes that someone else has manipulated the computer, not that the computer—which he initially programmed—has taken charge of the situation. The reader sympathizes with Katsumi nevertheless, sharing the same ignorance and despair. Not until the end of the novel does Katsumi discover the double roles that the others have been playing, or that he himself has been manipulated to serve the undersea project, even to the extent of contributing his own son to the colony. Throughout the course of events he believes that his colleagues are reliable; his discovery that his assistant Wada was responsible for his wife’s abortion and that Tanomogi is a murderer underscores the real separation between himself and others.

Since the novel focuses on the alienation and lack of awareness of its narrator, Professor Katsumi, most of the other characters are rather opaque to the reader. This opacity contributes to the ambivalence of the novel. In the postscript, Kōbō Abe remarks that the novel leaves not only the reader but also the writer with many doubts. Consider, for example, the motives of Tanomogi: Is the assistant a greedy capitalist, a revolutionary seeking to bring about a new society, or a reformer manipulating the capitalists in order to bring about a beneficent change? The conspirators are certainly intelligent, resourceful, and practical, and yet as a group they appear sinister and threatening. Whatever the motives of Tanomogi, Wada, or Professor Yamamoto, the reader is likely to feel distanced from them; although they are real characters and not simple abstractions or symbols, they remain mysterious and aloof.

Critical Context

Kōbō Abe’s novels stand apart from the tradition of earlier modern Japanese fiction in their unpolished prose and loose structure, in their experimentation with genre (often employing popular genres such as science fiction and the detective novel for conveying more abstract ideas), and in their emphasis on portraying philosophical conflicts, often at the expense of a sense of place and time. Inter Ice Age 4, for example, undermines the emphasis on subjectivity inherent in the Japanese “I novel,” thematically by representing the limits of the narrator’s understanding of the world around him, and structurally by concluding the novel with the first-person narrator’s anticipation of his imminent assassination, the realization of which makes the reader suddenly aware of the narrative apparatus and its artificiality—if the narrator is about to be killed, how can he pass this information on to the reader? The addition of a prelude and a postscript further define the limits of the narrator’s subjective perceptions. For the novelist, neither objectivity nor subjectivity holds the key for understanding the world, if any such key does exist.

Inter Ice Age 4, like many of Kōbō Abe’s novels, owes more to modern Western literature, particularly the novels of Franz Kafka, than to Japanese models. Like Kafka, Abe uses a protagonist whose search for meaning assumes that his own search is meaningful and will necessarily yield a solution. The disparity between the searcher’s confidence in his abilities to solve the riddle and the baffling complexity of the world suggests the absurdity of any search for a transcendent answer, a theme echoed in the modern dramatic movement known as the Theater of the Absurd. Like the French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, Kōbō Abe uses the form of the detective novel—a genre characterized by the search for intelligibility—to point out the ultimate unintelligibility of the world. More philosophical than its Western models, the work of Kōbō Abe nevertheless takes its place among them as an example of how modern literature tends to explore the world while at the same time refusing to accept its explorations as definitive or even valid, except insofar as they are able to question their own validity.

Bibliography

Hardin, N.S. “An Interview with Abe Kōbō,” in Contemporary Literature. XV (1974), pp. 438-456.

Kimball, Arthur G. Crisis in Identity and Contemporary Japanese Novels, 1973.

Williams, Phillip. “Absurdity and Kōbō Abe’s Art,” in Journal of the English Institute. III/IV (1972), pp. 129-143.

Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature, 1978.