Kobo Abe Biography and List of Works

Avant-garde novelist and playwright who represented the outsider in the Japanese literary world of the 1960s and 1970s. Central themes in Abe's works are the loss of identity, alienation and isolation of the individual in a strange world, and the difficulty people have in communicating with one another. In the West Abe is best-known for his novels, such as The Woman in the Dunes (1962) and The Face of Another (1964).

"What were you looking at?"
"A window."
"No, no. I mean what were you looking at through the window?"
"Windows... lots of windows. One by one the lights are going off. That's the only instant you really know somebody's there."
(from The Ruined Map, 1967)

Abe was born in Tokyo, but he grew up in Mukden in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, where his father, a physician, was on the staff of the medical school. As a young man Abe was interested in mathematics and insect collecting as well as the works of the philosophers Heidegger, Jaspers and Nietzsche. In 1941 Abe moved to Japan and entered in 1943 the University of Tokyo, to study medicine. Abe was exempted from military service because of respiratory illness. He returned during the war to Manchuria, but after repatriation Abe continued his studies and graduated in 1948, with the promise that he would never practice. Instead Abe started his career as a writer. He became a member of a literary group led by Kiyoteru Hamada. They were committed to the goal of fusing the techniques of Surrealism with Marxist ideology. Abe's writing, often stiff and formal, reflected his preoccupation with ideas rather than stylistic techniques.

His first book, Abe had actually written in 1943, and in 1947 he had published at his own expense a collection of poems. Abe established his reputation the next year with the novel OWARISHI MICHI NO SHIRUBE NI. Important writers for his own artistic development were Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, Rainer Maria Rilke and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

"Actually, binoculars, if used in a certain way, give the effect of X ray. For instance, you can read more expressions and characteristics from a single photo of a given person than you can by meeting him face to face."
(from The Ruined Map)

Abe's experimental works first gained popularity among the younger generation of readers. He received prizes for his three stories, 'Akai mayu' (1950, Red Cocoon), 'Kabe' (1951), and 'S. Karuma-shi no hanzai' (1951). In the last mentioned, the style and subject matter are reminiscent of Kafka. Among Abe's novels are DAIYON KAMPYOKI (1959), TANIN NO KAO (1964), MOETSUKITA CHIZU (1967), MIKKAI (1977), a surrealistic detective story about an unidentified man searching for his wife at a hospital, and HAKO OTAKO (1973), in which the protagonist cuts a peephole in an empty cardboard carton, places the box over his head, and walks away from his anxieties. SUNA NA ONNA (1962, Woman in the Dunes) was a kafkaesque story of a schoolteacher, who is imprisoned in a bizarre village on a holiday expedition. He accepts shelter from a woman who lives alone in a house, which is in danger of being buried by massive sand dunes that threaten to bury the whole community. The schoolteacher is pressed to help, to shovel the eternally increasing sand, but when a chance to escape comes, he refuses to take advantage of it.

Abe also wrote several plays and directed his own theatre company in Tokyo. In his plays the themes of solitude and alienation were dealt with in a similar way as in the theatre of the absurd and the works of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. With the death of Yukio Mishima Abe gained the status as major dramatist in the 1970s. In Friends (1967) the apartment of an office worker is invaded by a family that take control of his life and finally he is killed by one of the daughters. Although the members of the family claim to be devoting themselves to social good, their actions are cruelly destructive. The Suitcase (1973) depicts two women who worry over the contents of a suitcase said to contain the ancestors of the husband of one of the women.

Abe's novels and plays are characterized by clinical observations, scientific nomenclature, and avant-garde techniques. Many of his works have been turned into films under the direction of Teshigahara Hiroshi. Abe died on January 22, 1993.

Dai-Yon Kampyoki (1959, Inter Ice Age 4) - A complex story set in a future Japan threatened by the melting of polar icecaps. The protagonist, professor Katsumi, has developed a computer program that predicts the creation of genetically engineered children, who are adapted for life in the rising seas. The computer has also found out that Katsumi will oppose this progress and his unborn child is enlisted into the ranks of the mutated water-breathers. The story explores the concept of free will and the moral questions of scientific research.

For further reading: Crisis in Identity and Contemporary Japanese Novels by A. Kimball (1973); Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel, eds. by K. Tsuruta and T.E. Swann (1976); Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions by J.T. Rimer (1978); The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature by H. Yamanouchi (1978); Fake Fish by N.K. Shields (1966); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Dteven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 1)

Books by Kobo Abe