Kōbō Abe

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Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor

title: "Kōbō Abe" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["japanese-fantasy-writers", "japanese-science-fiction-writers", "japanese-male-short-story-writers", "people-from-kita", "writers-from-tokyo", "1924-births", "1993-deaths", "university-of-tokyo-alumni", "magical-realism-writers", "akutagawa-prize-winners", "yomiuri-prize-winners", "fellows-of-the-american-academy-of-arts-and-sciences", "postmodern-writers", "20th-century-japanese-novelists", "20th-century-japanese-dramatists-and-playwrights", "20th-century-japanese-short-story-writers", "20th-century-japanese-male-writers", "20th-century-pseudonymous-writers", "weird-fiction-writers"] description: "Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor" topic_path: "geography/japan" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kōbō_Abe" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox writer"]

Field	Value
name	Kōbō Abe
native_name	安部公房
native_name_lang	ja
image	Kinema-Junpo-1967-January-Special-3.jpg
caption	Kōbō Abe in 1967
birth_name	Kimifusa Abe (安部公房 Abe Kimifusa)
birth_date
birth_place	Kita, Tokyo, Japan
death_date
death_place	Tokyo, Japan
genre	Absurdist fiction, surrealism
occupation	Writer
language	Japanese
education	Seijo High School
spouse	Machi Abe
children	Neri Abe
movement	Modernism
notable_works	The Woman in the Dunes
The Face of Another
The Box Man
awards	Akutagawa Prize
Yomiuri Prize
Tanizaki Prize
alma_mater	University of Tokyo
::

Kimifusa Abe, known by his pen name Kōbō Abe, was a Japanese writer, playwright and director. His 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes was made into an award-winning film by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1964. Abe has often been compared to Franz Kafka for his modernist sensibilities and his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society. He died aged 68 of heart failure in Tokyo after a brief illness.

Biography

Abe was born on March 7, 1924 in Kita, Tokyo, Japan and grew up in Mukden (now Shenyang) in Manchuria. His mother had been raised in Hokkaido, while he experienced childhood in Manchuria. This triplicate assignment of origin was influential to Abe, who told Nancy Shields in a 1978 interview, "I am essentially a man without a hometown. This may be what lies behind the 'hometown phobia' that runs in the depth of my feelings. All things that are valued for their stability offend me." 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.

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Abe_Kobo_cooks_jiaozi.JPG" caption="Abe prepares [[gyōza"] ::

Abe returned to Tokyo briefly in April 1940 to study at Seijo High School, but a lung condition forced his return to Mukden, where he read Jaspers, Heidegger, Dostoyevsky, and Edmund Husserl. Abe began to study medicine at Tokyo Imperial University in 1943, partially out of respect for his father, but also because "[t]hose students who specialized in medicine were exempted from becoming soldiers. My friends who chose the humanities were killed in the war." He returned to Manchuria around the end of World War II. Specifically, Abe left the Tokyo University Medical School in October 1944, returning to his father's clinic in Mukden. That winter, his father died of eruptive typhus. Returning to Tokyo with his father's ashes, Abe reentered the medical school. Abe started writing novellas and short stories during his last year in university. He graduated in 1948 with a medical degree, once joking that he was allowed to graduate only on the condition that he would not practice.

In 1945 Abe married Machi Yamada, an artist and stage director, and the couple saw successes within their fields in similar time frames.

As the postwar period progressed, Abe's stance as an intellectual pacifist led to his joining the Japanese Communist Party, with which he worked to organize laborers in poor parts of Tokyo. Soon after receiving the Akutagawa Prize in 1951, Abe began to feel the constraints of the Communist Party's rules and regulations alongside doubts about what meaningful artistic works could be created in the genre of "socialist realism."}} The next year, Abe traveled to Eastern Europe for the 20th Convention of the Soviet Communist Party. He saw little of interest there, but the arts gave him some solace. He visited Kafka's house in Prague, read Rilke and Karel Čapek, reflected on his idol Lu Xun, and was moved by a Mayakovsky play in Brno.

The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 disgusted Abe. He attempted to leave the Communist Party, but resignations from the party were not accepted at the time. In 1960, he participated in the Anpo Protests against revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty as part of the pan-ideological Young Japan Society. He later wrote a play about the protests, The Day the Stones Speak, which was staged several times in Japan and China in 1960 and 1961. In the summer of 1961, Abe joined a group of other authors in criticizing the cultural policies of the Communist Party. He was forcibly expelled from the party the following year. His political activity came to an end in 1967 in the form of a statement published by himself, Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and Jun Ishikawa, protesting the treatment of writers, artists, and intellectuals in Communist China.

His experiences in Manchuria were also deeply influential on his writing, imprinting terrors and fever dreams that became surrealist hallmarks of his works. In his recollections of Mukden, these markers are evident: "The fact is, it may not have been trash in the center of the marsh at all; it may have been crows. I do have a memory of thousands of crows flying up from the swamp at dusk, as if the surface of the swamp were being lifted up into the air." The trash of the marsh was a truth of life, as were the crows, yet Abe's recollections of them tie them distinctively. Further experiences with the swamp centered around its use as a staking ground for condemned criminals with "[their] heads—now food for crows—appearing suddenly out of the darkness and disappearing again, terrified and attracted to us." These ideas are present in much of Abe's work.

Career

Abe was first published as a poet in 1947 with Mumei-shishū ("Poems of an unknown poet"), which he paid for himself,

In the 1960s, he collaborated with Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara on the film adaptations of The Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, and The Man Without a Map. Woman in the Dunes received widespread critical acclaim and was released only four months after Abe was expelled from the Japanese Communist Party.

In 1971, he founded the Abe Studio, an acting studio in Tokyo. Until the end of the decade, he trained performers and directed plays. The decision to found the studio came two years after he first directed his own work in 1969, a production of The Man Who Turned Into A Stick. The production's sets were designed by Abe's wife, and Hisashi Igawa starred. Abe had become dissatisfied with ability of the theatre to materialize the abstract, reducing it to a passive medium. Until 1979, he wrote, directed, and produced 14 plays at the Abe Studio. He also published two novels, Box Man (1973) and Secret Rendezvous (1977), alongside a series of essays, musical scores, and photographic exhibits. The Seibu Theater, an avant-garde theater in the new department store Parco, was allegedly established in 1973 specifically for Abe, though many other artists were given the chance to use it. The Abe Studio production of The Glasses of Love Are Rose Colored (1973) opened there. Later, the entirety of the Seibu Museum was used to present one of Abe's photographic works, An Exhibition of Images: I.

The Abe Studio provided a foil for much of the contemporary scene in Japanese theater, contrasting with the Haiyuza's conventional productions, opting to focus on dramatic, as opposed to physical, expression. It was a safe space for young performers, whom Abe would often recruit from the Toho Gakuen College in Chofu City, on the outskirts of Tokyo, where he taught. The average age of the performers in the studio was about 27 throughout the decade, as members left and fresh faces were brought in. Abe "deftly" handled issues arising from difference in stage experience.

In 1977 Abe was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Awards

Among the honors Abe received 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 credited Abe and other modern Japanese authors for "[creating] the way to the Nobel Prize", which he himself won. Abe was mentioned multiple times as a possible recipient, but his early death precluded that possibility.

Bibliography

Novels

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Year	Japanese Title	English Title	Translations available
1948
Owarishi michi no shirube ni	At the Guidepost at the End of the Road
1954
Kiga doumei	Starving Unions
1957
Kemono tachi wa kokyou wo mezasu	Beasts Head for Home	Richard F. Calichman
1959
Dai-Yon Kampyōki	Inter Ice Age 4	E. Dale Saunders	Illustrated by Abe Machi
1960
Ishi no me	Stony Eyes
1962
Suna no onna	The Woman in the Dunes	E. Dale Saunders	Adapted into an international film
1964
Tanin no kao	The Face of Another	E. Dale Saunders	Adapted into a film by the same title
1964
Enomoto Takeaki	The Traitor	Mark Gibeau	Commissioned conversion to a play by theatrical company Kumo and directed by Hiroshi Akutagawa
1966
Ningen sokkuri	The Double of Human Being
1967
Moetsukita chizu	The Ruined Map	E. Dale Saunders
1973
Hako otoko	The Box Man	E. Dale Saunders
1977
Mikkai	Secret Rendezvous	Juliet Winters Carpenter, 1979
1984
Hakobune sakura maru	The Ark Sakura	Juliet Winters Carpenter, 1988
1991
Kangaruu noto	Kangaroo Notebook	Maryellen Toman Mori
1994
Tobu otoko	The Flying Man		Incomplete
::

Collected short stories

::data[format=table]

Year	Japanese Title	English Title	Translations available	Notes
1949
Oshimusume	"The Deaf Girl"	Andrew Horvat	Collected in Four Stories by Kobo Abe
1949
Dendorokakariya	"Dendrocacalia"	Juliet Winters Carpenter	Collected in Beyond the Curve
1949
Yume no toubou	"The Dream Escape"
1950
Akai mayu	"The Red Cocoon"	Lane Dunlop	Collected in A Late chrysanthemum: Twenty-One Stories from the Japanese
1950
Kouzui	"The Flood"	Lane Dunlop	Collected in A Late chrysanthemum: Twenty-One Stories from the Japanese
1950
Bou	"The Stick"	Lane Dunlop	Collected in A Late chrysanthemum: Twenty-One Stories from the Japanese
1951
Mahou no chouku	"The Magic Chalk"	Alison Kibrick	Collected in The Showa Anthology: Modern Japanese Short Stories
1951
Kabe―S・Karuma shi no hanzai	The Wall ― The Crime of S. Karma	Juliet Winters Carpenter	Winner of the Akutagawa Prize
1951
Te	"Hand"	Ted Mack	Appears in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, No. 27 (Winter 1996–97), pp. 50–57
1951
Chinnyusha	"Intruders"	Juliet Winters Carpenter	Collected in Beyond the Curve
1951
Shijin no Shougai	"The Life of a Poet"	Juliet Winters Carpenter	Collected in Beyond the Curve
1951
Ueta hihu	"The Starving Skin"
1952
Noa no hakobune	"Noah's Ark"	Juliet Winters Carpenter	Collected in Beyond the Curve
1952
Suichu toshi	"The Underwater City"
1954
Inu	"The Dog"	Andrew Horvat	Collected in Four Stories by Kobo Abe
1954
Henkei no kiroku	"Record of a Transformation"	Juliet Winters Carpenter	Collected in Beyond the Curve
1954	Shinda musume ga utatta	"Song of a Dead Girl"	Stuart A. Harrington	Collected in The Mother of Dreams and Other Short Stories: Portrayals of Women in Modern Japanese Fiction
1956
R62 gou no hatumei	"Inventions by No. R62"
1957
Yuwakusha	"Beguiled"	Juliet Winters Carpenter	Collected in Beyond the Curve
1957
Yume no heishi	"The Dream Soldier"	First translation, 1973 by Andrew Horvat
Second translation, 1991 by Juliet Winters Carpenter	First translation collected in Four Stories by Kobo Abe
Second translation collected in Beyond the Curve
1957
Namari no tamago	"The Egg of Pb"
1958
Shisha	"The Special Envoy"	Juliet Winters Carpenter	Collected in Beyond the Curve
1960
Kake	"The Bet"	Juliet Winters Carpenter	Collected in Beyond the Curve
1961
Mukankei na shi	"An Irrelevant Death"	Juliet Winters Carpenter	Collected in Beyond the Curve
1964
Toki no gake	"The Cliff of Time"	Andrew Horvat	Collected in Four Stories by Kobo Abe.
1966
Kabu no mukou	"Beyond the Curve"	Juliet Winters Carpenter	First collection published in English
::

Plays

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Year	Japanese Title	English Title	Translations available

Jikan no gake	The Cliff of Time	Donald Keene	Collected in The Man Who Turned Into A Stick: Three Related Plays

Sūtsukēsu	Suitcase	Donald Keene	Collected in The Man Who Turned Into A Stick: Three Related Plays
1955
Seifuku	Uniforms
1955
Dorei gari	Slave Hunting
1955
Kaisoku sen	The Speedy Ship
1957
Bou ni natta otoko	The Man Who Turned Into A Stick	Donald Keene	Collected in The Man Who Turned Into A Stick: Three Related Plays
1958
Yuurei wa koko ni iru	The Ghost Is Here	Donald Keene	Collected in Three Plays by Kōbō Abe
1965
Omae nimo tsumi ga aru	You, Too, Are Guilty	Ted T. Takaya	Collected in Modern Japanese Drama: An Anthology
1967
Tomodachi	Friends	Donald Keene	Performed in English in Honolulu
Akutagawa Award winner 1967

Essays

::data[format=table]

Year	Japanese Title	English Title	Translations available	Notes
1944
Shi to shijin [Ishiki to muishiki]	Poetry and Poets (Consciousness and the Unconscious)	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1954
Bungaku ni okeru riron to jissen	Theory and Practice in Literature	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1955
Mōjū no kokoro ni keisanki no te wo: Bungaku to ha nanika	The Hand of a Calculator with the Heart of a Beast: What Is Literature?	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1957
Amerika hakken	Discovering America	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1960
Eizō ha gengo no kabe wo hakai suru ka	Does the Visual Image Destroy the Walls of Language?	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1960
Geijutsu no kakumei: Geijutsu undō no riron	Artistic Revolution: Theory of the Art Movement	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1965
Gendai ni okeru kyōiku no kanōsei: Ningen sonzai no honshitsu ni furete	Possibilities for Education Today: On the Essence of Human Existence	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1966
Rinjin wo koeru mono	Beyond the Neighbor	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1968
Miritarī rukku	The Military Look	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1968
Itan no pasupōto	Passport of Heresy	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1968
Uchi naru henkyō	The Frontier Within	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1969
Zoku: Uchi naru henkyō	The Frontier Within, Part II	Richard F. Calichman	Collected in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
1975
Warau tsuki	The Laughing Moon
1981	桜は異端諮問間の紋章	The Dark Side of the Cherry Blossoms	Donald Keene	Published in The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Asahi Shinbun
::

Poetry

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Year	Japanese Title	English Title	Translations available	Notes
1947
Mumei shishu	Poems of an Unknown Poet
1978
Hito sarai	Kidnap
::

References

(April 2022). ["Abe Kobo"](https://archive.org/details/newencyclopaedia2009ency/page/23 }}{{irrelevant citation). Encyclopædia Britannica Inc..
Allinson, Gary D.. (1999). "The Columbia guide to modern Japanese history". New York : Columbia University Press.
Bolton, Christopher. (2009). "Sublime voices : the fictional science and scientific fiction of Abe Kōbō". Harvard University Asia Center.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20121104044308/http://movies.nytimes.com/person/171702/Kobo-Abe ''New York Times''.]
Timothy Iles, ''Abe Kobo: an Exploration of his Prose, Drama, and Theatre'', EPAP, 2000.
[https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/23/obituaries/kobo-abe-68-the-skeptical-poet-of-an-uprooted-society-is-dead.html] Sterngold, James. ''Kobo Abe, 68, the Skeptical Poet Of an Uprooted Society, Is Dead''. The New York Times, 1993
(1996). "Who Was Who in America, 1993–1996, vol. 11". Marquis Who's Who.
"HORAGAI: Abe Kobo".
Kapur, Nick, 1980-. (2018). "Japan at the crossroads : conflict and compromise after Anpo".
Kapur, Nick, 1980-. (2018). "Japan at the crossroads : conflict and compromise after Anpo".
Kapur, Nick, 1980-. (2018). "Japan at the crossroads : conflict and compromise after Anpo".
"Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter A". American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
(2003). "The Bedford Anthology of World Literature: The Twentieth Century, 1900-The Present". Bedford/St. Martin's.
(14 October 1994). "Nobel in Literature Goes to Kenzaburo Oe of Japan". The New York Times.
(14 October 1994). "Japanese Writer Oe Wins Nobel". The Washington Post.
(1996). "Hand". Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.
Abe, Kôbô. (1971-07-02). "Toki no gake".
"The Cliff of Time (1971) {{!}} MUBI".
Hochman, Stanley. (1984). "McGraw-Hill encyclopedia of world drama: an international reference work in 5 vol, Volume 1". VNR AG.
Abe, Kôbô. "Kozô wa shinda". Abe Kôbô Studio.
Abe, Kobo. (November 1981). "The Dark Side of the Cherry Blossoms". The Washington Post.

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