Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Abé, Kōbō - Donald Keene (essay date 1993)

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Donald Keene (essay date 1993)

SOURCE: Keene, Donald. “The Plays of Kōbō Abé: An Introduction.” In Three Plays by Kōbō Abé, pp. ix-xiii. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

[In the following introduction, Keene traces the development of Abé's career as a dramatist and underscores the problems with translating the author's work.]

Kōbō Abe (1924-93) was a contemporary Japanese writer of world stature. Although he was best known as a novelist, especially for his Woman in the Dunes (1962), his achievements as a dramatist were almost equally important, and he published several outstanding volumes of criticism. He was frequently mentioned as a likely recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, but his death in his sixty-ninth year, when he was still at the height of his powers, prevented him from obtaining this honor.

Ironically, Abe's career as a dramatist began as a purely temporary expedient. Late in 1954 he...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Robert Garis (review date winter 1989)
   2. Wimal Dissanayake (essay date 1990)
   3. Raymond Lamont-Brown (essay date July 1993)
   4. Donald Keene (essay date 1993)
   5. Yoshio Iwamoto (review date summer 1994)
   6. Tony Dallas (review date fall 1994)
   7. Yoshio Iwamoto (review date winter 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright