11/3/2023 0 Comments Kobo abe best booksDescent is possible only by means of a rope ladder. Night falls and the villagers offer him shelter in a ramshackle house at the bottom of a funnel-shaped pit of sand. An amateur entomologist arrives in a remote area of sand dunes with hopes of identifying a type of sand beetle. Its plot is devious, addictive yet straightforward. This makes The Woman in the Dunes something of an anomaly. In Abe’s novels, plot and character are usually subservient to idea and symbol. Abe’s literary name was established in 1951, when a collection of short stories won the 25th Akutagawa prize, Japan’s most prestigious award, though a further decade would pass before the publication of The Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna) ushered in some measure of that security which he so rarely extended to his fictional characters. Abe survived the anarchic collapse of the de facto Japanese colony and was repatriated in 1946.īack in the Tokyo of General MacArthur, Abe led a hand-to-mouth existence as a street vendor, selling vegetables and charcoal to support himself and his wife, Machiko, a fine line-artist whose drawings illustrate his novels. The ploy worked, and Abe was able to return to his child- hood home of Mukden (Shen-yang), Manchuria, in 1944, where an epidemic killed his father, a doctor, the following year. When poor grades at Tokyo University Medical School jeopardised his draft exemption, he forged a certificate stating he had tuberculosis to avoid an all-too-probable death at the front. That Kobo Abe had survived his early 20s to mature into one of his country’s most venerated writers was down to some lucky throws of the dice. Each of the seven subsequent novels that Abe wrote before his death, aged 68, in 1993 earned him plaudits as a writer of the avant-garde and sales of over 100,000 in Japan alone. Abe died in 1993.Kobo Abe’s novel The Woman in the Dunes appeared in 1962, to spontaneous acclaim, was translated into 20 languages and adapted for a Cannes festival award-winning film directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara and scored by Toru Takemitsu. The first of his short stories to appear in English were collected in Beyond the Curve, 1944-66. His plays include Friends, published in 1967. Among Abe's novels are Woman in the Dunes, published in 1962 and made into a film in 1964, and his best-known work, Secret Rendezvous. ![]() In 1951 he got the Akutagawa Award by his first masterpiece, Kabe (The Walls). Often compared to Kafka, he treated the contemporary human predicament in a realistic yet symbolic style. After graduation he began his writing career and became a member of a literary group led by Kiyoteru Hamada. He earned his medical degree in 1948, but never practiced. In 1944, Abe heard that Japan would lose the war before long and he forged a medical certificate to get home to Manchuria. He was later admitted to the faculty of medicine of Tokyo University. Abe went back to Tokyo and went to Sejo Koko High School, a famous private school. In elementary school, he was educated in the experimental way, in which a teacher trained children to debating and rapid reading. He was brought up in Manchuria where he lived with his father, a doctor of the hosipital attached to the Imperial Medical Colledge of Manchuria. ![]() Kobo Abe is the pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe, who was born in Tokyo, Japan on March 7 1924.
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