[In the following review, Iwamoto views the dramas collected in Three Plays as influenced by the Theater of the Absurd.]

Known primarily as a novelist, especially in the West, Kobo Abe also wrote plays which have been produced in Japan to enormous critical acclaim. His death in early 1993 has inaugurated a reevaluation of his oeuvre, with the major literary journals devoting special issues to the subject. Donald Keene's fine translations into English of three of his plays [Three Plays] might be seen in this context.

Abe began his prolific career in the early 1950s when the twin ideologies of existentialism and absurdism were all the rage worldwide. Finding the tenets of these philosophies congenial to his own view of life in a Japan still reeling from the ravages of war, he constructed works that tended to put topics like freedom, choice, commitment, and identity at their center. His plays especially are often compared to the works of Beckett and Ionesco, what comprise the canon of the so-called Theater of the Absurd. A form that is renowned for its use, in the presentation of character and action, of dramatic techniques that defy rational analysis and explanation, the Theater of the Absurd thereby expresses, by implication rather than direct statement, the “absurdity” and inexplicability of the human condition.

Indeed, “absurd” situations which emphasize the sense of the artificial and theatrical dominate the three plays translated here, all first performed in the early 1970s They also share in common a fascination with crime in its many guises and a detective- or mystery-story aspect. Involuntary Homicide concerns the wild, incoherent behavior of the inhabitants of a small island who make an attempt at what appears to be a cover-up of the premeditated murder of Eguchi, a gangster who has come to monopolize through terror the island's entertainment business—a pachinko parlor, a movie house, a bar. The line that separates appearance and reality, however, is never made clear. Confusions and ambiguities proliferate, as time past and time present become indistinguishable, explanations of motives get entangled, and the roles of characters are reversed in midstream with, for instance, prosecutor turning accused, and so on. A host of ethical and moral issues ensue: to name but one example, the question of individual versus communal responsibility.

In Green Stockings a panty thief falls into the hands of a doctor who operates on the man's stomach in a grotesque experiment to convert him into the world's first human herbivore, which, the doctor believes, will bring relief to the impending shortage in the earth's food supply. Conflicting and sometimes misplaced motives or intentions embroil the characters in a succession of bizarre events. In The Ghost Is Here Oba, a swindler who had been run out of town eight years earlier, returns with a new scam to make money by exploiting the belief of his new acquaintance Fukugawa in the ghost of a wartime buddy for whose death he feels responsible. The scheme exposes the greed, corruption, and superstitions not just of Oba but of the whole town, including the pillars of the community, as past misdeeds are disclosed and people are engulfed in a spiraling comedy of unexpected turns.

There is a universality to Abe's works, and the translation of these plays into English can only enhance his already considerable reputation in the West.