[In the following essay, Lamont-Brown reflects on Abé's life and work.]

Kobo Abe was born in Tokyo on March 7, 1924. He was taken by his family to Mukden when he was barely a year old and thus spent his early years in the Japanese puppet-state of Manchukuo. Abe's ancestral origins were in Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido, and his father, a doctor of medicine, taught at the medical school at Mukden. In Japan it is important to have identifiable roots in a furusato (hometown) setting. Abe never felt that he had this declaring, ‘I am a man without a hometown’. It was to be an emotion that coloured his writing from the start.

A voracious reader, Abe was to be influenced by such as Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Poe, and it was with extracts from the latter that he used to regale his school friends during lunch breaks. When he had exhausted Poe, Abe entertained with stories of his own device.

His early teenage years were lived within a traditional Japanese household, but against a background of hostile Chinese administration under the figurehead of the puppet emperor Henry Pu Yi. As a diversion from the alien culture around him Abe began painting abstract pictures and studied entomology.

By 1940 Abe had returned to Tokyo and entered the Seijo High School. A convalescent period from tuberculosis gave him time to study more Dostoevsky, and he embarked on a research into modern Japanese literature. He admitted that his search was to find something to substantiate his own feelings of antagonism towards the militaristic cabinets of such as General Hideki Tojo. It was a time when he absorbed the writings of Heidegger, Jaspers and Kafka.

Abe's searches did not produce what he needed and his own writings developed into a book of poems, published by himself in 1948, as Poems by an Unknown.

In 1943, following parental insistence, he entered the medical school at Tokyo Imperial University, but the stress was too much and for a while he voluntarily entered a mental hospital. By way of forged papers concerned with his health, he made his way back to Manchuria and lived out the rest of the war in what he described as ‘peaceful idleness’. He eventually qualified in medicine in 1948, but never practised. Abe had married Machi, an artist, while still a student.

On his father's death Abe considered himself ‘released’ from any gimu (duty) he had towards his family and began to see literature as his life's work. In 1948 his first book was published, The Road Sign at the End of the Road.

In 1951 Abe was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize for his novel The Crime of Mr. S. Karuma. The storyline was to be characteristic of Abe: the book's narrator loses the power of normal communication with other humans. He communicates though, through zoo animals and shop-window dummies. And throughout his writing career Abe's main theme was to be the alienation of modern people within an urban setting.

By this time, Abe was allying himself with such as Kiyateru Hamada, dedicating his work to merging surrealism with Marxism. For a while Abe was a member of the ineffective Kyosanto (Japanese Communist Party), but was expelled from membership in 1956 for writing a book scathing of Eastern European socialist regimes.

Abe now became an important ‘translatable’ writer. His Suna no Onna (1962: The Woman of the Dunes, 1964) was filmed by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1963. The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes and the Yomiuri Prize for Abe. This was to become Abe's best known work in the West and concerns a school teacher on an outing who is imprisoned by the local folk in a large sand pit with a recently widowed woman. The teacher's attempts at escape are unsuccessful and in true Abe fashion he ‘discovers’ himself, his purpose, his life and when he is able to, he refuses escape.

The first of Abe's novels to be translated into English was the 1964 Tanin No Kao (The Face of Another, 1966) published in the UK in 1969. It was filmed by Teshigahara, and concerns a scientist, hideously scarred by a laboratory accident; another search for identity.

Moetsukita Chizu (1967: The Ruined Map) appeared in English in 1969 to be followed by Dai Yon Kampyoki (Inter Ice Age) which had been first published in 1959. The storyline concerns a technologist, Professor Katsumi, whose computer can foretell the future. Eventually the computer takes over control of Katsumi and draws him into a nightmarish situation. Set in the next century, a group of scientists try to avert world disaster using stolen human foetuses which they try by biological mutation to make into mammalian life that can survive underwater. Katsumi has to make choices when the scientists' conspiracy threatens his own wife and unborn child. In the novel Abe formulated a new type of Japanese fictional theme by welding together the science-fiction novel with the philosophical thriller.

The English language edition of Hako Otoko (1973: The Box Man) followed in 1974 along with Mikkai (Secret Rendezvous) in 1979 to keep Abe's international reputation fresh.

Abe began to direct his own theatre company in Tokyo, for which he wrote several new plays each year. In 1979 he toured America with his play You Too Are Guilty in which he explored the theme of possible links between the living and the dead.

In Japan today Kobo Abe is given the definition of being the country's nominee to represent ‘Kafkaesque surrealism’. Scholars point out the short story ‘Bo ni natta otoko’—‘The Man Who Turned into a Stick’ (translated by John Nathan in Japan Quarterly, 1966 as ‘Stick’) as an early example of Abe's vision of life drawing co-extension with Kafka's Die Verwandlung (1916). Even so, although Abe was influenced by the ideas of Kafka, he gave the whole a Japanese philosophical overview. ‘Stick’, and other works, show that Abe cut himself off from traditional Japanese classical literature and tried to weave a place for himself in the literary fabric of Japan which was as hostile and alienating as had been the Manchukuo of his early youth. Abe, of course, spoke no language fluently but his own, and came to the writings of European authors in Japanese translation.

As well as his ‘twin themes’ of ‘alienation’ and ‘loss of identity’, Abe was obsessed with the impersonality, mind stifling claustrophobia and ugliness of modern urban agglomeration. The trend in Japan towards the futuristic mega-city filled him with horror.

Underlining this the word yawatanoyabu (labyrinth) appears a lot in Abe's literary thoughts and it signifies for him horrors of city life in which he found himself lost as in a maze. He felt overwhelmed by city life, emasculated by it even, and the isolation and loneliness of urbanisation meant danger and destruction. It was a theme which he was to work for in his play Tomodachi (1967: Friends, 1971) which tells the story of a young man who lives alone and who is joined (shinyu suruinvaded) by a large family intent on ‘rescuing’ him from loneliness. In the end he has but a greater depth of loneliness.

So Kobo Abe's popularity in translation was founded on the fact that he dealt with problems of modern life; his universal appeal being founded on the universality of his work. On a number of occasions he was a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but in his everyday being he avoided publicity and clubability.

Kobo Abe died in a Tokyo hospital on January 22, 1993.