Abe Kōbō (1924–1993)

Japanese novelist and playwright. He was a leader of the avant-garde, and his familiarity with Western literature, existentialism, surrealism, and Marxism influenced his distinctive treatment of the problems of alienation and loss of identity in post-war Japan. His books include the claustrophobic novel Suna no onna/Woman of the Dunes (1962) and minimalist plays such as his trilogy Bō ni natta otoko/The Man Who Turned into a Stick (1969).

Born in Tokyo, Abe spent his childhood and adolescence in Japanese-occupied Manchuria where his father was a professor of medicine. In 1940 he enrolled at Seijo High School, Tokyo, and entered Tokyo University Medical School 1943 in accordance with his father's wishes. His studies were cut short by nervous exhaustion and a short period in a mental hospital.

At the end of the war he was supporting himself as a street vendor while writing poems and short stories. He published his first book of poems, Poems by an Unknown, privately in 1947. Further poems, under the title Road Sign at the End of a Road, appeared in a magazine the following year. He joined a group of surrealist writers and artists and became interested in avant-garde cinema and theatre. His first collection of short stories, published 1951, won him the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary prize.

Woman of the Dunes told of an entomologist tricked into entering a sand pit and, like a trapped insect, forced to shovel sand for the rest of his life. The novel won Abe international recognition, and was translated into 20 languages. The film version by avant-garde director Teshigahara Hiroshi became a classic of the Japanese cinema. The hero of his equally disturbing second novel The Face of Another 1962 is a man whose face has been severely burnt. After learning the techniques of plastic surgery, he models himself a new, more handsome face. Seducing his wife, he is not sure if he is lover or husband; she is not deceived but does not know if she loves him for his former self or as his new self. In The Ruined Map (1969), a detective searching for a missing man gets lost himself and loses his self-identity in a soulless, labyrinthine megalopolis; Abe's depiction of present-day Tokyo. The Man Who Turned into a Stick recalls the nightmarish predicament of the hero of Metamorphosis by Czech writer Franz Kafka. Abe wrote many other works on psychological themes for the stage, such as Uniform (1955) and The Ghosts Are Here (1958). He formed his own theatre group in 1967, and took a production of his play You Too Are Guilty on tour to the USA in 1979.