![]() Lost Identities Abe garnered international acclaim for The Woman in the Dunes (1962). ![]() Apocalyptic fears drive the absurdist plot of Inter Ice Age Four (1959), a science fiction novel set in a futuristic Japan threatened by melting polar ice caps. Theĭevastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic weapons also hovered over postwar Japanese culture. Some traditional Japanese artists remained committed to a more pastoral vision of the nation, which had largely disappeared by the early 1950s, when the American occupation ended. His popularity grew quickly.Ībe was the first major Japanese writer to present avant-garde narratives of urban alienation, in keeping with Japan's rapid postwar urbanization. ![]() The latter work typifies Abe's thematic obsessions its narrator loses the ability to communicate with other people. He won prizes for his short story “Red Cocoon” (1950) and his novel The Crime of Mr. Under the influence of Hanada Kiyoteru, Abe became interested in European surrealism and Marxism and how to combine them. In the troubled years following Japan's military defeat in World War II, Abe joined a group of avant-garde writers and intellectuals attempting to reassert humanistic values through art. Some critics believe Abe's scientific studies may have developed his abilities to describe situations, and even emotions, with detached precision. Encouraged by his literary success, he never practiced medicine. His first novel, The Road Sign at the End of the Road, was published in 1948, the same year he earned his MD degree. Abe began to experiment in writing poetry and fiction as the war was ending. Yet he took no pleasure in preparing for a medical career the stress was so intense that at one point he checked himself into a mental hospital. In 1943, at the height of World War II and following his parents' insistence, Abe entered the medical school at Tokyo University. He was a voracious reader, preferring works by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Jaspers and literature by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, and Franz Kafka. Postwar Japan As a young man, Abe attended a private high school in Tokyo. He had already discovered the sense of alienation that would pervade his creative work. Displaced from his home country, disgusted by militant nationalism and by the conduct of the occupying army, he changed his name from Kimifusa to Kobo, a more Chinese-sounding rendering. Growing up in a foreign country occupied by Japanese forces gave Abe a certain ambivalence about his Japanese identity. Japan captured Manchuria in 1931, going on to attack mainland China in 1937. When he was an infant, his father took the family to Manchuria, in northern China, where he served as a doctor in the city of Mukden. Kimifusa Abe was born in Tokyo, Japan, on March 7, 1924. Works in Biographical and Historical Context A Childhood in Manchuria He was also a noted theater director and photographer. His fiction is rich in allegory and metaphysical implications, employing an intriguing combination of detailed realism and bizarre, nightmarish fantasy. ![]() His work was successful abroad and often translated into English and other languages. Abe's novels, plays, and screenplays drew from developments in Western avant-garde literature rather than from Japanese sources. MAJOR WORKS: The Woman in the Dunes (1962) The Face of Another (1964) The Ruined Map (1973) The Ark Sakura (1984) OverviewĪn important figure in contemporary Japanese literature, Kobo Abe attracted an international audience for novels exploring the alienation and loss of identity experienced by many in Japanese society after World War II.
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