Biography of Kobo Abe

An important figure in contemporary Japanese literature, Kobo Abe (1924-1993) attracted an international audience for novels in which he explored the nihilism and loss of identity experienced by many in post-World War II Japanese society.

Abe's works were often linked to the writings of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett for their surreal settings, shifting perspectives, grotesque images, and themes of alienation. The labyrinthine structures of his novels accommodated both precisely detailed realism and bizarre fantasy, and his use of symbolic and allegorical elements resulted in various metaphysical implications. Scott L. Montgomery stated: "Abe's most powerful books ... displace reality in order to highlight the fragility of an identity we normally take for granted."

Many critics contended that Abe's recurring themes of social displacement and spiritual rootlessness derived from his childhood in Manchuria, a region in northern China seized by the Japanese Army in the early 1930s, and by his brief association during the late 1940s with a group of avant-garde writers whose works combined elements of existentialism and Marxism. In 1948, the year that he published his first novel, Owarishi michino shirubeni, Abe earned a medical degree from Tokyo University. Although Abe never practiced medicine, his background in the sciences figured prominently in his fiction. For example, Daiyon kampyok (1959) is a science fiction novel set in a futuristic Japan that is threatened by melting polar ice caps. The protagonist of this novel is a scientist who designs a computer capable of predicting human behavior. After the machine foretells that its creator will condemn government experiments on human fetuses that would insure Japan's survival in a subaqueous environment, the scientist's wife gives birth to a child with fish-like fins instead of arms. While a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement deemed the novel's plot "too phantasmagorical and implausible," several critics favorably noted Abe's accurate use of scientific terminology.

Abe garnered international acclaim following the publication of Suna no onn (1962; Woman in the Dune). This novel relates the nightmarish experiences of an alienated male teacher and amateur entomologist who is enslaved by a group of people living beneath a huge sand dune. Condemned to a life of shoveling the sand that constantly endangers this community, the man gradually finds meaning in his new existence and rejects an opportunity to escape. William Currie remarked: "Like Kafka and Beckett ..., Abe has created an image of alienated man which is disturbing and disquieting. But also like those two writers, Abe has shown a skill and depth in this novel which has made it a universal myth for our time." With Hiroshi Teshigahara, Abe wrote the screenplay for a film adaptation of Woman in the Dune which was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival.

Abe's next three novels further examined human estrangement and loss of identity. Tanin no ka (1964; The Face of Anothe) details a scientist's attempts to construct a mask that covers his disfiguring scars. Moetsukita chiz (1967; The Ruined Ma) follows a private detective who gradually assumes the identity of the person he has been hired to locate. Hakootok (1973; The Box Ma) focuses upon a man who withdraws from his community to live in a cardboard box in which he invents his own idyllic society. Jerome Charyn commented that The Box Ma "is a difficult, troubling book that undermines our secret wishes, our fantasies of becoming box men (and box women), our urge to walk away from a permanent address and manufacture landscapes from a vinyl curtain or some other filtering device." In Abe's succeeding novel, Mikka (1977; Secret Rendezvou), the wife of a shoe salesman is mysteriously admitted to a cavernous hospital even though she is not ill. While searching for her at the facility, the woman's husband discovers that the hospital is run by an assortment of psychopaths, sexual deviants, and grotesque beasts.

Abe's novel The Ark Sakur (1988) is a farcical version of the biblical story of Noah and the Flood. Mole, the protagonist, is an eccentric recluse who converts a huge cave into an "ark" equipped with water, food, and elaborate weapons to protect himself from an impending nuclear holocaust. Mole's vision of creating a post-apocalyptic society inside his ark is thwarted by a trio of confidence men whom he enlists as crew members and by the invasion of street gangs and cantankerous elderly people. Edmund White observed: The Ark Sakura may be a grim novel, but it is also a large, ambitious work about the lives of outcasts in modern Japan.... It is a wildly improbable fable when recalled, but it proceeds with fiendishly detailed verisimilitude when experienced from within."

Kobo Abe's fiction bears little resemblance to the traditional literature of Abe's native country, Japan. With its existential themes and what Saturday Review contributor Thomas Fitzsimmons describes as its "bizarre situations loaded with metaphysical overtones," Abe's work has more in common with that of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka, to whom he is often compared. His preoccupation with modern man's sense of displacement originated during his childhood. Abe grew up in the ancient Manchurian city of Mukden, which was seized from China by the Japanese in 1931. According to the Washington Post's David Remnick, Abe "was fascinated by the Chinese quality of the town and was appalled by the behavior of the Japanese army during occupation. As a testament to his ambivalence about Japan, he changed his name from Kimfusa to the more Chinese rendering, Kobo. Abe was in high school during the war and though he once said, `I longed to be a little fascist,' he never accepted the extreme nationalism of his country in the 1940s. When he heard of Japan's imminent defeat in late 1944, he was `overjoyed.'" The author's strong feelings against nationalism remain with him to this day, and he told Remnick, "Place has no role for me. I am rootless." Many critics believe that Abe's alienation from his own country is also the key to his international popularity. As Hisaaki Yamanouchi says in his book The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature, "It enabled him to create a literary universe which transcends the author's nationality. He is probably the first Japanese writer whose works, having no distinctly Japanese qualities, are of interest to the Western audience because of their universal relevance."

Abe's first novel to be translated into English was Suna no onn (The Woman in the Dunes). In this story, a schoolteacher and amateur entomologist goes to the country for a weekend of insect-hunting. He stumbles upon a primitive tribe living in sand pits and becomes their prisoner. Escape is his obsession for a time, but when it is finally possible, he has lost the desire to return to his former identity. Critics praise Abe for both his metaphysical insights and his engrossing description of life in the sand pits. "The story can be taken at many levels," reports a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. "It is an allegory, it shares elements with Pincher Martin and Kafka; ... and it also has the suspense, the realism, and the obsessive regard for detail of a superb thriller.... It is a brilliantly original work, which cannot easily be fitted into any category or given any clear literary ancestors. The claustrophobic horror, the sense of physical degradation and bestiality, are conveyed in a prose as distinct and sharp as the sandgrains which dominate the book." Thomas Lask summarizes, "Mr. Abe put together a tale that combined a Crusoe-like fascination with survival with the larger issues of liberty and obligation."

The central theme of The Woman in the Dune--loss of identity--reoccurs in most of Abe's subsequent novels. Moetsukita chizu translated as The Ruined Map uses the conventions of detective novels as a framework. Flight and pursuit merge as a private investigator gradually takes on the persona of the very man he has been hired to track down. Earl Mine finds The Ruined Ma's "combination of the macabre and the realistic" similar to that of The Woman in the Dunes "Although less hallucinatory in its effect, The Ruined Ma is in the end more terrifying,..." finds Miner. "Abe has a remarkable talent for creating fables of contemporary experience that manage to be at once rooted in minute detail and expressive of man's plight; but in none of his previous work have the detail and the larger meaning combined so perfectly. The sheer force of accumulating realities is what drives man to madness, what leads him to abscond from himself since he cannot otherwise abscond from the modern world. It is astonishing how successfully Abe renders this effacing of human consciousness in the very mind that is lost." Shane Stevens also reserves high praise for The Ruined Map calling it in the New York Times Book Review "a brilliant display of pyrotechnics, a compelling tour de force that seems to have been built lovingly, word by word, sentence by sentence, by a master jeweler of polished prose."

Although Abe's attitudes and concerns are far from those of a typical Japanese writer, some reviewers point out that the author's work is not completely outside his cultural tradition. The Face of Another and Secret Rendezvou are both presented in the form of journals and letters, a style that dates back to the tenth century in Japan. Furthermore, points out William Currie in Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel, "Abe shows a meticulous care for concrete detail worthy of the most confirmed naturalist or realist. His precision and concreteness give the impression of reality to the dream or nightmare. In this regard, Abe, who is sometimes considered thoroughly Western in his approach to literature, is solidly in the Japanese tradition with his emphasis on the concrete and the particular."

A New Republic contributor refers to another aspect in which Abe's writing differs from most Western literature. "The Japanese seem to embrace the unspeakable openly, as a form of release, accepting the facets of the imagination Americans often skirt--even in the most lurid popular fiction," states the writer in his review of Abe's novel Mikkai translated as Secret Rendezvou relates the story of a man's search for his wife, who has been taken to the hospital although she was not sick. The man discovers that the hospital is run by an "incestuous circle of rapists, voyeurs, 13-year-old nymphomaniacs, test-tube babies and centaurs." Abe's graphic descriptions of their activities drew negative reactions from many Western critics. Sidney DeVere Brown declares in World Literature Today, "The novel would be pornography but for the sterile laboratory in which the explicit scenes are placed." D. J. Enright protests in the New York Review of Books: "The paths whether of pursuit or of flight lead through turds, urine, phlegm, vomit, the stench of dead animals.

A master of the seedy, Abe seems ambitious to erect it into a universal law." Concludes the New Republic reviewer: "Kobo Abe delights in the excessive and the perverse. With its surrealistic setting, its claustrophobic atmosphere, and its increasingly distressing scenes of sexual decadence and violence, Secret Rendezvou disturbs rather than titillates."

Doug Lang defends Secret Rendezvous however. His Washington Post Book World review calls the plot incoherent, but continues, "fortunately, the novel does not depend on plot for its momentum. It depends much more on the ever-expanding circles of [the protagonist's] nightmarish experience, as Abe propels his main character to the outer perimeters of his existence, where he is confronted with the terrifying absurdity of his life.... The hospital is a metaphor for modern Japanese life.... Secret Rendezvou is very convincing. There is passion in it and a great deal of very bleak humor. Abe's view of things is not a pretty one, but it is well worth our attention." Howard Hibbitt concludes in Saturday Review that Abe is the master of the "philosophical thriller" and summarizes the strengths of his novels: "Brilliant narrative, rich description and invention, [and] vital moral and intellectual concerns."

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Kobo Abe (1924-1993)
• At the time of Abe's birth:
• Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States
• The first effective chemical pesticides were introduced
• Albania proclaimed herself a republic December 24, 1924
• International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) was organized by Thomas J. Watson
• First year of the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade which turned into an annual event
• At the time of Abe's death:
• Bill Clinton was president of the United States
• Bomb exploded at the New York Trade Center February 26, 1993, killing 26 and injuring hundreds
• The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed into law
• Environmental Protection Agency announced that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer, killing an estimated 3,000 nonsmokers per year
• The Branch Davidian fundamentalist religious cult led by David Koresh stockpiled an arsenal outside Waco, Texas and a 51-day standoff ensued between the Branch Davidians and law enforcement officers
• The times:
• 1939-1945: World War II
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• 1991: Persian Gulf War
• Abe's contemporaries:
• Truman Capote (1924-1984) American writer
• James Baldwin (1924-1987) American writer
• Johnny Carson (1925-) American comedian; former host of the Tonight Show
• Margaret Thatcher (1925-) Former Prime Minister of Great Britain
• Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926-) American woman's rights activist
• Neil Simon (1927-) American playwright
• Mangosuthu Buthelezi (1928-) South African Zulu tribe leader
• H. Ross Perot (1930-) U.S. tycoon
• Barbara Walters (1931-) American news correspondent
• Joycelyn Elders (1933-) American former U.S. surgeon general
• Selected world events:
• 1924: Great Britain established diplomatic relations with the USSR
• 1925: Panama and the US signed a pact protecting the Canal in case of war
• 1929: Russia sent troops into Manchuria
• 1935: By formal decree, Persia changed its name to Iran
• 1945: The concentration camp at Dachau was liberated by U.S. troops; 30,000 survivors were found
• 1959: The Naked Lunch, written by William Burroughs, was released
• 1963: President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade through Dallas
• 1970: The Beatles disbanded
• 1982: In the first free elections in 50 years, Salvadorans elected a constituent assembly
• 1993: The Czech and Slovak republics became separate officially January 1, 1993, after 74 years as Czechoslovakia

Further Reading

• Chicago Tribune, January 24, 1993, section 2, p. 6.
• Los Angeles Times, January 23, 1993, p. A22.
• Times (London), January 25, 1993, p. 19.
• Washington Post, January 23, 1993, p. C4.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 22, 1982, Volume 53, 1989.
• Janiera, Armando Martins, Japanese and Western Literature, Tuttle, 1970.
• Tsurutu, Kinya, editor, Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel, Sophia University, 1976.
• Yamanouchi, Hisaaki, The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature, Cambridge University Press, 1978.
• Atlantic, October, 1979.
• Chicago Tribune Book World, October 7, 1979.
• Commonweal, December 21, 1979.