L'œuvre littéraire de Kōbō Abe plonge dans des explorations surréalistes et souvent cauchemardesques de l'individu au sein de la société contemporaine. Sa sensibilité moderniste et son style narratif unique, souvent comparés à Franz Kafka et Alberto Moravia, créent des analyses captivantes de la condition humaine. L'approche avant-gardiste d'Abe du roman et du drame explore des questions existentielles et la recherche d'identité. Sa voix distinctive offre aux lecteurs des perspectives profondes, oniriques mais critiques sur l'expérience humaine.
In the aftermath of World War II, a Japanese youth raised in the puppet state of Manchuria struggles to return home to Japan. What follows is a wild journey involving drugs, smuggling, chases, and capture. Beasts Head for Home is an acute novel of identity, belonging, and the vagaries of human behavior from an exceptional modern Japanese author.
Three plays by one of contemporary Japan's most prominent writers-Involuntary Homicide, The Green Stockings, The Ghost is Here-translated for this volume reveal Kobo Abe's deep love of absurdity in the face of universal concerns.
"Abe Kobo tackled contemporary social issues and literary theory with the depth and facility of a visionary thinker."--Jacket cover.
One of the premier Japanese novels of the twentieth century, The Women in the Dunes combines the essence of myth, suspense, and the existential novel. In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where, Sisyphus-like, they are pressed into shoveling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village.
The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident - a man who has lost his face and, with it, connection to other people. Even his wife is now repulsed by him. His only entry back into the world is to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. But soon he finds that such mask is more than a disguise.
'This is the record of a box man' The streets of Tokyo have been seeing a strange phenomenon recently - people who have decided to live their lives in a box on the street. Behind their cut-out eyeholes, they sit and watch from behind their four cardboard walls. Our nameless narrator, at first repulsed by the box men, slowly becomes drawn in to the anonymity and voyeuristic life inside a box. As his identity slowly slips away and he becomes obsessed with watching an intriguing young nurse, we too become privy to the schizophrenic and seductive unreality of a box man's life.
Of all the great Japanese novelists, Kobe Abe was indubitably the most versatile. With The Ruined Map, he crafted a mesmerizing literary crime novel that combines the narrative suspense of Chandler with the psychological depth of Dostoevsky.Mr. Nemuro, a respected salesman, disappeared over half a year ago, but only now does his alluring yet alcoholic wife hire a private eye. The nameless detective has but two clues: a photo and a matchbook. With these he embarks upon an ever more puzzling pursuit that leads him into the depths of Tokyo’s dangerous underworld, where he begins to lose the boundaries of his own identity. Surreal, fast-paced, and hauntingly dreamlike, Abe’s masterly novel delves into the unknowable mysteries of the human mind.Translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders.
From the acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes comes Secret Rendezvous, the bizarrely erotic and comic adventures of a man searching for his missing wife in a mysteriously vast underground hospital.From the moment that an ambulance appears in the middle of the night to take his wife, who protests that she is perfectly healthy, her bewildered husband realizes that things are not as they should be. His covert explorations reveal that the enormous hospital she was taken to is home to a network of constant surveillance, outlandish sex experiments, and an array of very odd and even violent characters. Within a few days, though no closer to finding his wife, the unnamed narrator finds himself appointed the hospital’s chief of security, reporting to a man who thinks he’s a horse. With its nightmarish vision of modern medicine and modern life, Secret Rendezvous is another masterpiece from Japan’s most gifted and original writer of serious fiction.
A recluse who, convinced that the world will end soon, takes up residence in an abandoned mine and then attempts to sell tickets to his 'ark' to people he deems worthy of saving from the apocalypse
'A gorgeously entertaining, provocative book' Chicago Tribune It is 4am when the ambulance comes to take the man's wife away - although no-one has called it, and there is nothing wrong with her. As he sets out to find her, he finds himself in the corridors of a vast underground hospital, where he encounters sinister medics, freakish sexual experiments and the unmistakable feeling of being watched. Even when he is suddenly appointed as the hospital's chief of security, reporting to a man who thinks he is a horse, he will not give up his search. Secret Rendezvous is a nightmarish satire of bureaucracy, medicine and modern life. 'Reads as if it were the collaborative effort of Hieronymus Bosch, Franz Kafka and Mel Brooks' Chicago Sun Times
