Abe Kobo

▪ 1994

      (ABE KIMIFUSA), Japanese novelist, short-story writer, and playwright (b. March 7, 1924, Tokyo, Japan—d. Jan. 22, 1993, Tokyo), created portrayals of alienation and loss of identity in modern life that reached a wide audience in postwar Japan and later throughout the world. His writings commonly depicted loss and loneliness among the desolation of urban life (one of his characters changes into a plant; another moves into a box to be free of the world). He read such Western writers as Kafka and Dostoyevsky and was often compared to the former. Abe grew up largely in Manchuria, when that part of China was under Japanese military occupation, where his father taught at a medical school. (Kobo is the rendering in Chinese of Kimifusa.) He himself graduated (1948) in medicine from the University of Tokyo, although he never practiced. His earliest published writings appeared in the 1940s, and he established a reputation with the novel Owarishi michi no shirube ni ("The Road Sign at the End of the Street"), published in 1948. His best-known work was the novel Suna no onna (1962), published in English in 1964 as The Woman in the Dunes. The book was translated into some 20 languages, and Abe wrote the screenplay for a prizewinning film version. In all, he published 13 novels and more than 50 short stories, as well as several stage plays and radio and television dramas. It was estimated that worldwide his books sold more than nine million copies. He won a number of awards and honours, both in Japan and abroad.

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▪ Japanese author

pseudonym of  Abe Kimifusa  

born March 7, 1924, Tokyo, Japan

died Jan. 22, 1993, Tokyo

      Japanese novelist and playwright noted for his use of bizarre and allegorical situations to underline the isolation of the individual.

      He grew up in Mukden (now Shenyang), in Manchuria, where his father, a physician, taught at the medical college. In middle school his strongest subject was mathematics, but he was also interested in collecting insects and had begun to immerse himself in the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lewis Carroll. Abe went to Japan in 1941 to attend high school. In 1943 he began studying medicine at the Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), but he returned to Manchuria in 1945 without obtaining a degree. Repatriated to Japan in 1946, he was graduated in medicine in 1948 on condition that he never practice. By this time, however, he was deeply involved in literary activity. He published in 1947 at his own expense Mumei shishū (“Poems of an Unknown”), and in the following year his novel Owarishi michi no shirube ni (“The Road Sign at the End of the Street”), published commercially, was well received. In 1951 his short novel Kabe (“The Wall”) was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, establishing his reputation. In 1955 Abe wrote his first plays, beginning a long association with the theatre.

      Since the early 1950s, Abe had been a member of the Japanese Communist Party, but his visit to eastern Europe in 1956 proved disillusioning. He attempted to leave the party in 1958 when the Soviet army invaded Hungary, but he was refused, only to be expelled in 1962. In that same year Suna no onna (The Woman in the Dunes), Abe's most popular (and probably his best) novel, was published to general acclaim. It was made into an internationally successful film in 1964.

      From the mid-1960s his works were regularly translated on both sides of the Iron Curtain. They include Daiyon kampyōki (1959; Inter Ice Age 4), Tanin no kao (1964; The Face of Another), Moetsukita chizu (1967; The Ruined Map), Hako otoko (1973; The Box Man), Mikkai (1977; Secret Rendezvous), Hakobune Sakura-maru (1984; The Ark Sakura), and Kangarū nōto (1991; Kangaroo Notebook). Beyond the Curve, a translation into English of short stories drawn from various periods of his career, was published in 1991.

      Abe formed the Abe Kōbō Studio, a theatrical company, in 1973. He regularly wrote one or two plays a year for the company and served as its director. The best-known of his plays, Tomodachi (1967; Friends), was performed in the United States and France. In theatre, as well as in the novel, he stood for the avant-garde and experimental. Several of his most successful plays appear in Three Plays by Kōbō Abe (1993), translated into English by Donald Keene.

Additional Reading

Timothy Ilse, Abe Kōbō: An Exploration of His Prose, Drama, and Theatre (2000); Nancy K. Shields, Fake Fish: The Theater of Kobo Abe (1996).

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