Kōbō Abe - WikiHQ

, known by his pen name , was a Japanese writer, playwright and director. His 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes was made into an award-winning film by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1964. Abe has often been compared to Franz Kafka for his modernist sensibilities and his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society. He died aged 68 of heart failure in Tokyo after a brief illness.

Biography

Abe was born on March 7, 1924 in Kita, Tokyo, Japan and grew up in Mukden (now Shenyang) in Manchuria. His mother had been raised in Hokkaido, while he experienced childhood in Manchuria. This triplicate assignment of origin was influential to Abe, who told Nancy Shields in a 1978 interview, "I am essentially a man without a hometown.

As the postwar period progressed, Abe's stance as an intellectual pacifist led to his joining the Japanese Communist Party, with which he worked to organize laborers in poor parts of Tokyo. Soon after receiving the Akutagawa Prize in 1951, Abe began to feel the constraints of the Communist Party's rules and regulations alongside doubts about what meaningful artistic works could be created in the genre of "socialist realism." The next year, Abe traveled to Eastern Europe for the 20th Convention of the Soviet Communist Party. He saw little of interest there, but the arts gave him some solace. He visited Kafka's house in Prague, read Rilke and Karel Čapek, reflected on his idol Lu Xun, and was moved by a Mayakovsky play in Brno. He later wrote a play about the protests, The Day the Stones Speak, which was staged several times in Japan and China in 1960 and 1961. In the summer of 1961, Abe joined a group of other authors in criticizing the cultural policies of the Communist Party. He was forcibly expelled from the party the following year. His political activity came to an end in 1967 in the form of a statement published by himself, Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and Jun Ishikawa, protesting the treatment of writers, artists, and intellectuals in Communist China.

His experiences in Manchuria were also deeply influential on his writing, imprinting terrors and fever dreams that became surrealist hallmarks of his works. In his recollections of Mukden, these markers are evident: "The fact is, it may not have been trash in the center of the marsh at all; it may have been crows. I do have a memory of thousands of crows flying up from the swamp at dusk, as if the surface of the swamp were being lifted up into the air." In 1970, Abe's Inter Ice Age 4 became the first Japanese science fiction novel to appear in English, in a translation by American scholar E. Dale Saunders.

In the 1960s, he collaborated with Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara on the film adaptations of The Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, and The Man Without a Map. Woman in the Dunes received widespread critical acclaim and was released only four months after Abe was expelled from the Japanese Communist Party.

In 1971, he founded the Abe Studio, an acting studio in Tokyo., and Hisashi Igawa starred. Abe had become dissatisfied with ability of the theatre to materialize the abstract, reducing it to a passive medium. Until 1979, he wrote, directed, and produced 14 plays at the Abe Studio. He also published two novels, Box Man (1973) and Secret Rendezvous (1977), alongside a series of essays, musical scores, and photographic exhibits.

Awards

Among the honors Abe received were the Akutagawa Prize in 1951 for The Crime of S. Karuma, the Yomiuri Prize in 1962 for The Woman in the Dunes, and the Tanizaki Prize in 1967 for the play Friends. Kenzaburō Ōe credited Abe and other modern Japanese authors for "[creating] the way to the Nobel Prize", which he himself won. Abe was mentioned multiple times as a possible recipient, but his early death precluded that possibility.

|1951

| Chinnyusha

|"Intruders"

|Juliet Winters Carpenter

|Collected in Beyond the Curve

|1951

| Shijin no Shougai

|"The Life of a Poet"

|Juliet Winters Carpenter

|Collected in Beyond the Curve

|1951

| Ueta hihu

|"The Starving Skin"

|1952

| Noa no hakobune

|"Noah's Ark"

|Juliet Winters Carpenter

|Collected in Beyond the Curve

|1952

| Suichu toshi

|"The Underwater City"

|1954

| Inu

|"The Dog"

|Andrew Horvat

|Collected in Four Stories by Kobo Abe

|1954

| Henkei no kiroku

|"Record of a Transformation"

|Juliet Winters Carpenter

|Collected in Beyond the Curve

|1954

|Shinda musume ga utatta

|"Song of a Dead Girl"

|Stuart A. Harrington

|Collected in The Mother of Dreams and Other Short Stories: Portrayals of Women in Modern Japanese Fiction

|1956

| R62 gou no hatumei

|"Inventions by No. R62"

|1957

| Yuwakusha

|"Beguiled"

|Juliet Winters Carpenter

|Collected in Beyond the Curve

|1957

| Yume no heishi

|"The Dream Soldier"

|First translation, 1973 by Andrew Horvat Second translation, 1991 by Juliet Winters Carpenter

|First translation collected in Four Stories by Kobo Abe Second translation collected in Beyond the Curve

|1957

| Namari no tamago

|"The Egg of Pb"

|1958

| Shisha

|"The Special Envoy"

|Juliet Winters Carpenter

|Collected in Beyond the Curve

|1960

| Kake

|"The Bet"

|Juliet Winters Carpenter

|Collected in Beyond the Curve

|1961

| Mukankei na shi

|"An Irrelevant Death"

|Juliet Winters Carpenter

|Collected in Beyond the Curve

|1964

| Toki no gake

|"The Cliff of Time"

|Andrew Horvat

|Collected in Four Stories by Kobo Abe.

Adapted into a short film in 1971 starring Hisashi Igawa that was directed by Abe himself.

|1966

| Kabu no mukou

|"Beyond the Curve"

|Juliet Winters Carpenter

|First collection published in English

| Bou ni natta otoko

|The Man Who Turned Into A Stick

|Donald Keene

|Collected in The Man Who Turned Into A Stick: Three Related Plays

The 1969 production was the first time Abe directed his own work. His wife designed the set.

Essays

{| class="wikitable"

! Year

! Japanese Title

! English Title

! Translations available

! Notes

|1944

| Shi to shijin [Ishiki to muishiki]

|Poetry and Poets (Consciousness and the Unconscious)

|Richard F. Calichman