![]() Karuma, the Yomiuri Prize in 1962 for The Woman in the Dunes, and the Tanizaki Prize in 1967 for the play Friends. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977.Īmong the honours bestowed on him were the Akutagawa Prize in 1951 for The Crime of S. Then, in the early 1970s, he set up an acting studio in Tokyo, where he trained performers and directed plays. ![]() In the 1960s, he worked with the Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara on the film adaptations of The Face of Another, plus The Pitfall, The Woman in the Dunes and The Ruined Map. There’s even a love story aspect to The Face of Another. Kobo Abe manages to do this within the realms of genres that would be recognised by most : if you fancy a detective novel, there's The Ruined Map for Science Fiction, Inter Ice Age 4 for Fantasy, Kangaroo Notebook. Often described as an avant-garde playwright and novelist, he shared the same literary map as the likes of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Eugene Ionesco through a shared sense of the absurd and the central theme of an alienated and isolated individual at a loss in the world. Although his first novel Owarishi michi no shirube ni("The Road Sign at the End of the Street") was published in 1948, which helped to establish his reputation, it wasn’t until the publication of The Woman in the Dunes in 1962 that he won widespread international acclaim. As well as being a prose writer, he was also a poet ( Mumei shishu - "Poems of an unknown poet" - 1947), playwright, photographer and inventor. In 1948, he received a medical degree from the Tokyo Imperial University, yet never practised medicine. Kōbō Abe (安部 公房 Abe Kōbō), pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe (安部 公房 ), was born on March the 7th 1924 in Kita, Tokyo, but he grew up in Mukden (now Shen-yang) in Manchuria during the second world war. It's Wednesday - and that means it must be time for another J-Lit Giant! Gary, of The Parrish Lantern, is back again to introduce us to another great of Japanese literature - and after visiting the world of poetry in his last post, he is back to prose this time :)
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