Kōbō Abe

The native form of this personal name is Abe Kōbō. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Kōbō Abe
安部 公房
Kōbō Abe in 1967
Born	Kimifusa Abe 安部 公房 Abe Kimifusa (1924-03-07)March 7, 1924 Kita, Tokyo, Japan
Died	January 22, 1993(1993-01-22) (aged 68) Tokyo, Japan
Education	Seijo High School University of Tokyo
Occupation	Writer
Notable work	The Woman in the Dunes The Face of Another The Box Man
Movement	Modernism
Spouse	Machi Abe
Children	Neri Abe
Awards	Akutagawa Prize Yomiuri Prize Tanizaki Prize

Kimifusa Abe (安部 公房, Abe Kimifusa; 7 March 1924–22 January 1993), known by his pen name Kōbō Abe (安部 公房, Abe Kōbō), 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. Abe's family was in Tokyo at the time due to his father's year of medical research in Tokyo. 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. This may be what lies behind the 'hometown phobia' that runs in the depth of my feelings. All things that are valued for their stability offend me." As a child, Abe was interested in insect-collecting, mathematics, and reading. His favorite authors were Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Abe returned to Tokyo briefly in April 1940 to study at Seijo High School, but a lung condition forced his return to Mukden, where he read Jaspers, Heidegger, Dostoyevsky, and Edmund Husserl. Abe began to study medicine at Tokyo Imperial University in 1943, partially out of respect for his father, but also because "[t]hose students who specialized in medicine were exempted from becoming soldiers. My friends who chose the humanities were killed in the war." He returned to Manchuria around the end of World War II. Specifically, Abe left the Tokyo University Medical School in October 1944, returning to his father's clinic in Mukden. That winter, his father died of eruptive typhus. Returning to Tokyo with his father's ashes, Abe reentered the medical school. Abe started writing novellas and short stories during his last year in university. He graduated in 1948 with a medical degree, once joking that he was allowed to graduate only on the condition that he would not practice.

In 1945 Abe married Machi Yamada, an artist and stage director, and the couple saw successes within their fields in similar time frames. Initially, they lived in an old barracks within a bombed-out area of the city center. Abe sold pickles and charcoal on the street to pay their bills. The couple joined a number of artistic study groups, such as Yoru no Kai (Group of the Night or The Night Society) and Nihon Bungaku Gakko (Japanese Literary School). Their daughter, Abe Neri, was born in 1954.

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." By 1956, Abe began writing in solidarity with the Polish workers who were protesting against their Communist government, drawing the Communist Party's ire. The criticism reaffirmed his stance: "The Communist Party put pressure on me to change the content of the article and apologize. But I refused. I said I would never change my opinion on the matter. This was my first break with the Party." 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.

The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 disgusted Abe. He attempted to leave the Communist Party, but resignations from the party were not accepted at the time. In 1960, he participated in the Anpo Protests against revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty as part of the pan-ideological Young Japan Society. 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. According to translator John Nathan, this statement led to the falling-out between Abe and fellow writer Kenzaburō Ōe.

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." The trash of the marsh was a truth of life, as were the crows, yet Abe's recollections of them tie them distinctively. Further experiences with the swamp centered around its use as a staking ground for condemned criminals with "[their] heads—now food for crows—appearing suddenly out of the darkness and disappearing again, terrified and attracted to us." These ideas are present in much of Abe's work.

Career

Abe was first published as a poet in 1947 with Mumei-shishū ("Poems of an unknown poet"), which he paid for himself, and as a novelist the following year with Owarishi michi no shirube ni ("The Road Sign at the End of the Street"), which established his reputation. When he received the Akutagawa Prize in 1951, his ability to continue publishing was confirmed. Though he did much work as an avant-garde novelist and playwright, it was not until the publication of The Woman in the Dunes in 1962 that Abe won widespread international acclaim. 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. Until the end of the decade, he trained performers and directed plays. The decision to found the studio came two years after he first directed his own work in 1969, a production of The Man Who Turned Into A Stick. The production's sets were designed by Abe's wife Machi, 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. The Seibu Theater, an avant-garde theater in the new department store Parco, was allegedly established in 1973 specifically for Abe, though many other artists were given the chance to use it. The Abe Studio production of The Glasses of Love Are Rose Colored (1973) opened there. Later, the entirety of the Seibu Museum was used to present one of Abe's photographic works, An Exhibition of Images: I.

The Abe Studio provided a foil for much of the contemporary scene in Japanese theater, contrasting with the Haiyuza's conventional productions, opting to focus on dramatic, as opposed to physical, expression. It was a safe space for young performers, whom Abe would often recruit from the Toho Gakuen College in Chofu City, on the outskirts of Tokyo, where he taught. The average age of the performers in the studio was about 27 throughout the decade, as members left and fresh faces were brought in. Abe "deftly" handled issues arising from difference in stage experience.

In 1977 Abe was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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.

Bibliography

[Titles in brackets indicate a work that has yet to be translated into English]

Novels

• 1948 終りし道の標に (Owarishi michi no shirube ni) [The Road Sign at the End of the Street]
• 1954 飢餓同盟 (Kiga doumei) [Starving Unions]
• 1957 けものたちは故郷をめざす (Kemono tachi wa kokyou wo mezasu) Beasts Head for Home
• 1959 第四間氷期 (Dai-Yon Kampyōki) Inter Ice Age 4
• 1960 石の眼 (Ishi no me) [Stony Eyes]
• 1962 砂の女 (Suna no onna) The Woman in the Dunes
• 1964 他人の顔 (Tanin no kao) The Face of Another
• 1964 榎本武揚 (Enomoto Takeaki) The Traitor
• 1966 人間そっくり (Ningen sokkuri) [The Double of Human Being]
• 1967 燃えつきた地図 (Moetsukita chizu) The Ruined Map
• 1973 箱男 (Hako otoko) The Box Man
• 1977 密会 (Mikkai) Secret Rendezvous
• 1984 方舟さくら丸 (Hakobune sakura maru) The Ark Sakura
• 1991 カンガルー・ノート (Kangaruu noto) Kangaroo Notebook
• 1994 飛ぶ男 (Tobu otoko) [The Flying Man]

Short stories

• 1949 唖むすめ ("Oshimusume") "The Deaf Girl"Template:Efn-la
• 1949 デンドロカカリヤ ("Dendorokakariya") "Dendrocacalia"
• 1949 夢の逃亡 ("Yume no toubou") ["The Dream Escape"]
• 1950 赤い繭 ("Akai mayu") "The Red Cocoon"
• 1950 洪水 ("Kouzui") "The Flood"
• 1950 棒 ("Bou") "The Stick"
• 1951 魔法のチョーク ("Mahou no chouku") "The Magic Chalk"
• 1951 壁―S・カルマ氏の犯罪 ("Kabe―S・Karuma shi no hanzai") "The Wall: The Crime of S. Karma"
• 1951 手 ("Te") "Hand"
• 1951 闖入者 ("Chinnyusha") "Intruders"
• 1951 詩人の生涯 ("Shijin no Shougai") "The Life of a Poet"
• 1951 飢えた皮膚 ("Ueta hihu") ["The Starving Skin"]
• 1952 ノアの方舟 ("Noa no hakobune") "Noah's Ark"
• 1952 水中都市 ("Suichu toshi") ["The Underwater City"]
• 1954 犬 ("Inu") "The Dog"
• 1954 変形の記録 ("Henkei no kiroku") "Record of a Transformation"
• 1954 "Shinda musume ga utatta" "Song of a Dead Girl"
• 1956 R62号の発明 ("R62 gou no hatumei") ["Inventions by No. R62"]
• 1957 誘惑者 ("Yuwakusha") "Beguiled"
• 1957 夢の兵士 ("Yume no heishi") "The Dream Soldier"
• 1957 鉛の卵 ("Namari no tamago") ["The Egg of Pb"]
• 1958 使者 ("Shisha") "The Special Envoy"
• 1960 賭け ("Kake") "The Bet"
• 1961 無関係な死 ("Mukankei na shi") "An Irrelevant Death"
• 1964 時の崖 ("Toki no gake") "The Cliff of Time"

Short story collections

In Japanese

• 1951 壁 (Kabe) The Wall

In English

• Beyond the Curve

Plays

• ???? 時間の崖 (Jikan no gake) The Cliff of Time
• ???? スーツケース (Sūtsukēsu) Suitcase
• 1955 制服 (Seifuku) Uniforms
• 1955 どれい狩り (Dorei gari) Slave Hunting
• 1955 快速船 (Kaisoku sen) The Speedy Ship
• 1957 棒になった男 (Bou ni natta otoko) The Man Who Turned Into A Stick
• 1958 幽霊はここにいる (Yuurei wa koko ni iru) The Ghost Is Here
• 1965 おまえにも罪がある (Omae nimo tsumi ga aru) You, Too, Are Guilty
• 1967 友達 (Tomodachi) Friends
• 1967 榎本武揚 (Enomoto Takeaki) Takeaki Enomoto
• 1971 未必の故意 (Mihitsu no koi) Involuntary Homicide
• 1971 ガイド・ブック (Gaido bukku) Guide Book
• 1973 愛の眼鏡は色ガラス (Ai no megane wa iro garasu) Loving Glasses Are Colored Ones
• 1974 緑色のストッキング (Midori iro no sutokkingu) Green Stockings
• 1975 ウエー（新どれい狩り）Uē (Shin dorei gari) Ue (Slave Hunting, New Version), The Animal Hunter
• 1976 案内人 GUIDE BOOK II Annai nin The Guide Man, GUIDE BOOK II
• 1977 水中都市 GUIDE BOOK III Suichu toshi The Underwater City, GUIDE BOOK III
• 1978 S・カルマ氏の犯罪S・(Karuma shi no hanzai) The Crime of S. Karuma
• 1979 仔象は死んだ (Kozou wa shinda) An Elephant Calf Is Dead

External links

• Kobo Abe at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Kobo Abe at the Internet Book List
• Kobo Abe at the Internet Book Database of Fiction
• Kōbō Abe at IMDb
• Kōbō Abe at the Library of Congress, with 108 library catalogue records
• Abe Kobo at ibiblio.org
• LitWeb.net: Kobo Abe Biography at the Wayback Machine (archived September 22, 2007)
• The Modern Word: Kobo Abe at the Wayback Machine (archived October 9, 2014)
• Interview with Goro Masaki about Japanese Science Fiction, large part devoted to Kobo Abe's work at the Wayback Machine (archived March 10, 2007)
• Kōbō Abe's grave