Kōbō Abe

Kōbō Abe 安部 公房
Born	Abe Kimifusa (安部 公房) (1924-03-07)March 7, 1924[1] Kita, Tokyo, Japan
Died	January 22, 1993(1993-01-22) (aged 68) Tokyo, Japan Cause of Death acute heart failure
Occupation	Writer

Kōbō Abe (安部 公房, Abe Kōbō), pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe (安部 公房, Abe Kimifusa, March 7, 1924^[1][2] – January 22, 1993), was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor. Abe has been often compared to Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia for his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society and his modernist sensibilities.^[3][4]

Early life

Abe was born in Kita, Tokyo, Tokyo and grew up in Mukden (now Shenyang) in Manchuria.^[1] His father was a physician who taught at a local medical college. As a child, Abe was interested in insect-collecting, mathematics, and reading. His favorite authors were Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Edgar Allan Poe.^[1] Abe returned to Japan in 1941 and began studies at Tokyo Imperial University in 1943. He returned to Manchuria around the end of World War II.^[1] He graduated in 1948 with a medical degree, on the condition that he would not practice. Having failed his exam several times, and already a successful author, this was attached to cultural notions of "saving face."

Career

He was first published as a poet in 1947 with Mumei-shishū ("Poems of an unknown poet"), which he paid for himself,^[1] 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.^[1] 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 he won widespread international acclaim.

In the 1960s, he collaborated with Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara in the film adaptations of The Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another and The Ruined Map. In 1973, he founded an acting studio in Tokyo, where he trained performers and directed plays.^[1] He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977.^[5]

Awards

Among the honors bestowed on him 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 stated that Abe deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he himself had won (Abe was nominated multiple times).

Bibliography

Novels

Collected short stories

Plays

Essays

Poetry

References

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 the Internet Movie Database
• 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