Abe Kōbō: An Avant-Garde Writer for a Time of Turmoil

Gone but Not Forgotten

When he died in 1993, Abe Kōbō was said to be the Japanese author closest to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. His most famous work, the 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes, has been translated into more than 30 languages. Abe has continued to draw international interest after his death, and 13 studies concerning the author have been published in the twenty-first century in Germany, Italy, South Korea, the United States, Venezuela, China, and Canada.

In 2024, the centenary year of his birth, three new paperbacks of his works and a collection of his photographs have been published in Japan; there are also new studies and magazines themed around his literature. Cinema Vera Shibuya screened a series of films connected to Abe, while director Ishii Gakuryū’s new film adaptation of his 1973 The Box Man (2024) was favorably received. The Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature has an exhibition dedicated to the author, which will run until December 8. What is the secret of this popularity that crosses borders and endures after his death?

Adopting New Media

Abe Kōbō’s life began at the same time as the twentieth century’s media revolution. He was born in Tokyo on March 7, 1924, but moved with his family to Manchuria when he was just eight months old, spending his early years in Shenyang (then also known as Mukden), where his father worked as a doctor. Radio broadcasts started in the same year in Tokyo and Dalian, Manchuria; they reached Abe in Shenyang when he was nine.

He returned to Tokyo alone in 1940 to study at Seijō Gakuen High School, and began studying medicine at Tokyo Imperial University in 1943. Although he graduated in 1948, he chose to devote himself to creative activities rather than becoming a physician. After making his fiction debut, he began to write radio dramas and shingeki, Western-style plays for the stage. Television broadcasting began in 1953, and Abe was writing television dramas in 1958, expanding his range to directing and even acting in the medium in 1962.

Abe enthusiastically incorporated emerging technology into his new works during this time. After the tape recorder went on sale, he was quick to use it in his radio dramas, and he was inspired by the invention of the flexi disc—a flimsy variant on the vinyl record that was a popular extra in various publications—to talk about the idea of a similar device for video footage. After launching his Abe Kōbō Studio theater group in 1973, he set up synthesizers in his home, using them to compose music for his plays from 1976. Toshiba launched Japan’s first word processor in 1978, and Abe bought one in the early 1980s, using it to write his novels from then on.

In 1960, around five years before car ownership really took off in Japan, Abe had bought several vehicles in which he drove all around the country. He invented snow chains in 1985 that could be put on and removed from tires without using a jack, which were sold by Seibu Department Store. Thus, Abe was an inventor as well as an incorporator of new technologies.

Abe Kōbō at his studio in Shibuya, Tokyo. Taken in April 1978 by the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. (© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos/Aflo)

Erasing His Life

Abe did not write autobiographical “I-novels,” the mainstream form in modern Japanese literature. His 1948 debut Owarishi michi no shirube ni (Toward the Signpost for the Road’s End) was a complex philosophical novel heavily influenced by memories of a friend who had died in Manchuria. He then radically transformed his style, winning the Akutagawa Prize for his 1951 collection Kabe (The Wall), which includes plainly written stories about a man who loses his name and another who is transformed into a cocoon. His 1957 novel Beasts Head for Home depicts the adventures of a boy setting out for Japan after its Manchurian puppet state Manchukuo collapses with the entry of Soviet forces in 1945. Abe expresses the idea that a hometown is merely a fiction, with the main character described as having grown up in the invented city of Baharin.

In the bestselling 1962 work The Woman in the Dunes, a man who comes to a coastal village to hunt for insects is trapped in a hut in a sand pit, and has to live with the woman there. The 1964 film adaptation by Teshigahara Hiroshi won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, while the novel received an award as the best foreign book in France in 1967. Quite unlike an I-novel, based on incidents in the author’s life, the work was typical of Abe’s style in its balance of realistic description and the kind of imaginative power seen in science fiction. The praise it won as avant-garde literature helped pave the way for its translation into multiple languages.

Kishida Kyōko starred in Teshigahara Hiroshi’s 1964 Woman in the Dunes. (© Sōgetsukai)

From the time of his revised edition of Toward the Signpost for the Road’s End in 1965, Abe tried further to eradicate traces of his life from his work. He changed the original dedication, “For my late friend, Kanayama Tokio,” to read, “For my late friend,” declaring that dedicating such memorials to the deceased was akin to killing old friends again and again. This was an erasure of memories of Manchuria, where he spent his adolescence. In Yume no tōbō (The Dream Escape), a 1968 collection of his early works, he removed motifs from the Bible and existential philosophy, as well as extensive use of the second-person pronoun kimi (you) before publication. In the postscript, he wrote that it was fortunate that he got his start as a writer after experiencing the war, concluding that “If all youth is destined to be a false promise, then there is no better way to present that youth than as one already in ruins.” Through the explicit action of erasing the falseness of youth, Abe successfully presented it as ephemeral.

Urban Observer

Here I would like to return to the question of Abe’s literature’s universality, and particularly its contemporary nature. Ishii Gakuryū’s The Box Man provides us with an approach to this issue. The film begins by describing the box man, born in 1973, as the chrysalis from whom a new form of human was born. These are people who observe others without themselves being seen, as we find in surveillance cameras that have proliferated in urban environments, or anonymous internet users. While he was particular about shooting with analog film, and seeking out retro locations like Takasaki, Gunma, Ishii remade The Box Man as a contemporary work. Abe’s photographs, including shots of homeless people, appear in the film opening, contributing to Ishii’s revival of the box man’s gaze for today’s audiences.

The Box Man, released in 2024. (© The Box Man Film Partners/Happinet Phantom Studios)

Abe had a strong interest in photography and served on the selection committee of the Kimura Ihei Award for up-and-coming photographers. He took and developed his own black-and-white shots of homeless people living in urban areas like Tokyo’s Shinjuku and Shibuya, as well as New York, and also of garbage heaps with toppled refrigerators and arcade games, with a level of high quality beyond that of amateur artists. Many of these photographs have been compiled in Photoworks by Kōbō Abe, a collection published in 2024.

Attacking Nationalism and Racism

In Abe’s childhood, Shenyang was divided into the Japanese district, developed by the South Manchurian Railway, on the one hand, and on the other, the Chinese neighborhoods, which he enjoyed exploring along with the wilderness outside. Throughout his life, he was interested in views of the periphery and other ethnic groups.

In his 1968 essay “The Frontier Within,” Abe expresses a sense of empathy with Franz Kafka and other Jewish writers. He sees antisemitism as setting “false” citizens against “true” ones, and Jews as a symbol of heresy against orthodoxy. Abe writes that “the heretical notion of the Jew appears to have been introduced as an artificial illumination of consciousness in order to highlight more clearly the contours of the notion of legitimacy.” At the same time, he raises the problem that just 20 years after the founding of Israel, there was already a distinction between “true” citizens, and “false” ones who were late to naturalize. This problem still applies in Israel today, and there are similar issues concerning the relations of Russia and Ukraine, and ethnic Koreans living in Japan.

In his 1964 novel The Face of Another, Abe presents a scene in which the main character, who has taken on a new identity by wearing a mask, adventurously enters a Korean restaurant, which at the time had few Japanese customers. During another scene at home, he tries to distract himself by turning on the television, only to see a news report on black people rioting in Harlem. In his Abe study Beyond Nation, Richard F. Calichman, a professor at the City College of New York, writes of moments dealing with prejudice in The Face of Another that “the community’s attempt to form itself requires that the minority be actively created as the community’s own negative image.” He goes on to say that “Abe’s references in the novel to Korean residents of Japan and blacks in the United States [are] part of his attack against the complicity between nationalism and racism.” Thus, half a century ago Abe was already considering problems that continue today in ongoing racism in Japan and issues addressed by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Having lived through the twentieth century media revolution, Abe Kōbō died on January 22, 1993. Although he did not live to see the online age, he produced a kaleidoscope of highly prophetic and universal works, and he is an avant-garde author fitting to be read in a time of turmoil.

• Works in English translation mentioned in the text: Suna no onna (The Woman in the Dunes), Hako otoko (The Box Man), and Tanin no kao (The Face of Another), all translated by E. Dale Saunders. Kemonotachi wa kokyō o mezasu (Beasts Head for Home) and “Uchi naru henkyō” (“The Frontier Within”), both translated by Richard F. Calichman. The latter is included in the collection The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō.

(Originally published in Japanese on November 26, 2024. Banner photo adapted from the portrait by Henri Cartier-Bresson. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos/Aflo.)