A short life of the author
Kōbō Abe (1924–1993) was born Abe Kimifusa on 7 March 1924 in Tokyo and raised in Mukden, Manchuria. He studied medicine at the University of Tokyo but never practiced. He was a member of the Japanese Communist Party until 1962.
Life and Career
Suna no onna (The Woman in the Dunes, 1962) — about an amateur entomologist who is trapped in a sand pit with a woman who must constantly shovel sand to prevent her house from being buried — won the Yomiuri Prize and was adapted into Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film. It is his masterpiece: a parable about freedom, identity, and the human need for purpose that operates with the logic of a Kafka novel.
Tanin no kao (The Face of Another, 1964) — about a man whose face is destroyed in an industrial accident and who creates a lifelike mask — and Hakobune (The Box Man, 1973) — about a man who chooses to live inside a cardboard box — extend his investigation of identity and alienation.
Major Works and Themes
Abe wrote about identity, entrapment, alienation, and the boundary between self and world. His fiction is stripped of cultural specificity — his characters could exist anywhere — which made him the most internationally accessible of postwar Japanese writers.
Key Works
- The Woman in the Dunes (1962)
- The Face of Another (1964)
Collecting Abe
Japanese originals (Shinchōsha) are the primary collected form. The Woman in the Dunes in English translation (Knopf, 1964) brings $50–$150. Abe died in 1993.