The Road Sign at the End of the Street (終りし道の標に Owarishi michi no shirube ni, 1948) is the debut novel by Japanese writer Kōbō Abe, originally serialized in the literary journal Kosei, though apparently only the first installment was published.

The work is written using the first-person narrative voice and is divided into three "notebooks," entitled “The Road Sign at the End of the Street,” “The Unwriteable Words,” and "The Unknowable God,” along with a brief coda. The work has yet to be translated into English.

The work has been described as a "highly abstract difficult spiritual autobiography," and it contains many of the same themes that Abe would return to his later works, such as alienation, loss of freedom, and lost identity.

Background and composition

At the time of the novel's composition in 1947, Abe was in the process of completing his medical training at Tokyo Imperial University, but ended up spending more of his time writing poetry than attending to his studies (he earned a degree the following year, but never practiced medicine). Abe shared the manuscript of the novel with his former high school German teacher, Haniya Yutaka, an avant-garde novelist and literary critic, on whose recommendation the novel was first serialized.

Plot summary

The story concerns a man known only as "T," an opium addict suffering from tuberculosis, who lives in Manchuria at the end of World War II.