[In the following essay, the reviewer provides a positive assessment of Beyond the Curve.]

“This is the story of how Common became a dendrocacalia.” So runs the opening line of a short story in which Kobo Abe, perhaps Japan's most renowned novelist, turns a man who is tired of city life into a plant. It can now be read in English in a collection of Mr Abe's short stories, Beyond the Curve, published by Kodansha International. The collection shows Mr Abe at his best, full of wry humour and images of self-defeat, and obsessed with the idea that alienation is the natural condition of contemporary man.

“Dendrocacalia” was written in 1949, when Mr Abe was 25. In these early stories and in many of the novels that were to follow, human relations are a minefield of treachery, humiliation, and love avoided. Man is better off alone, or turned into something else: even a company car, as happens in another tale. An admirer of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mr Abe believes himself to have similar universal appeal; and he too makes use of the devices of science fiction, detective novels and dream sequences, as well as inventing rules of his own as he goes along.

In “Dendrocacalia” Common tries hard to resist his transformation. Cleverer than many of Mr Abe's characters, he realises what is happening to him. He tries to fight the earthward pull, and turns for consolation to Dante's “Divine Comedy” and to Greek myths, in which the gods turned men into trees or flowers. He also tries to find a girl who seems to have sent him a love note; but the note has come from the director of the Botanical Gardens, who offers him a large pot in a hothouse.

Although he was born in Tokyo, Mr Abe grew up in Manchuria, where his father was a doctor in what was then a Japanese colony. “I was forced to live as a coloniser,” he says. “Living on the side of the rulers had an abstract evil. The sensitive individual still feels guilt, remorse, shame.”

In 1948 he received a medical degree from the University of Tokyo, “only because I promised never to practise.” His first novel came out that year, but it was not until The Woman in the Dunes (1960), which sold 1.5m copies in Japan and was turned into a film that won the Cannes jury prize, that Mr Abe's reputation was made. For that novel, he says, “I read millions of books on sand and dunes.” He explains that the central images of his tales—in this case, of a woman trapped in a dune—come to him first; he then constructs the story round them, “like weaving a cocoon.”

An active communist from 1950-56, Mr Abe was formally expelled from the party in 1962. He says he has always liked “those people at the very bottom,” and hated the elite; but he also has a strong dislike of what he calls “the communal conscience.” His writing is done in seclusion in the Hakone mountains south-west of Tokyo. “Where I live in the mountains,” he says, “there are no neighbours, no human contact. I draw the curtains even in the daytime.”