Kobo Abe

One of the premier Japanese novels of the twentieth century, The Women in the Dunes combines the essence of myth, suspense, and the existential novel. In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where, Sisyphus-like, they are pressed into shoveling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village.

In Tokyo, in the middle of the night, an un-called for ambulance arrives to spirit away a man's wife, though she is perfectly healthy. He sets out on an epic journey to find her, around the labyrinthine corners of a strange and enormous hospital. Days into his search, having encountered countless strange characters, odd sexual experiments and the unmistakable feeling of being watched, he is suddenly appointed to be the hospital's chief of security, and his new boss is convinced that he is a horse.Throughout it all, he will never stop searching for his wife.

"This is the record of a box man." The streets of Tokyo have been seeing a strange phenomenon recently - people who have decided to live their lives in a box on the street. Behind their cut-out eyeholes, they sit and watch from behind their four cardboard walls. Our nameless narrator, at first repulsed by the box men, slowly becomes drawn in to the anonymity and voyeuristic life inside a box.As his identity slowly slips away and he becomes obsessed with watching an intriguing young nurse, we too become privy to the schizophrenic and seductive unreality of a box man's life.

Mr. Nemuro, a respected salesman, disappeared over half a year ago, but only now does his alluring yet alcoholic wife hire a private eye. The nameless detective has but two clues: a photo and a matchb

In anticipation of a coming nuclear apocalypse, Mole has converted a huge underground quarry into an 'ark'. While searching for his crew, he falls for the tricks of a wily insect dealer and his friends. In the surreal drama that ensues, the ark is invaded by first a gang of youths and then a sinister group of elderly people, before Mole himself becomes trapped in the ark's central piece of equipment - a giant toilet powerful enough to flush almost anything out to sea .. . A science-fiction classic from acclaimed Japanese novelist Kobe Abe, The Ark Sakura's Kafkaesque embrace of nuclear disaster and ecological catastrophe is at turns both hilarious and desperate.

A classic from the renowned Japanese novelist about isolation and the threat of a nuclear holocaust, The Ark Sakura is as timely today as it was at its original publication.In this Kafkaesque allegori

Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist, searches the scorching desert for beetles. As night falls he is forced to seek shelter in an eerie village, half-buried by huge sand dunes. He awakes to the terri

The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident - a man who has lost his face and, with it, connection to other people. Even his wife is now repulsed by him. His only entry bac

Like an elegantly chilling postscript to The Metamorphosis, this classic of postwar Japanese literature describes a bizarre physical transformation that exposes the duplicities of an entire world. The

Kobo Abe, the internationally acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes, combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett.In

Following his nation's defeat in the Pacific War, Kuki Kyuzo, a Japanese youth, struggles to return home to Japan from Manchuria. What follows is a wild journey involving drugs, smuggling, chases, and

"Set in Manchuria in the aftermath of the Asian Pacific War. The central character is Kuki Kyz, whose settler parents relocated from Japan to the Manchurian puppet-state as the Japanese empire expande

Abe Kobo (1924-1993) was one of Japan's greatest postwar writers, widely recognized for his imaginative science fiction and plays of the absurd. However, he also wrote theoretical criticism for which

Three plays by one of contemporary Japan's most prominent writers -- Involuntary Homicide, The Green Stockings, The Ghost is Here -- translated for this volume reveal Kobo Abe's deep love of absurdit

Abe Kobo (1924--1993) was one of Japan's greatest postwar writers, widely recognized for his imaginative science fiction and plays of the absurd. However, he also wrote theoretical criticism for which

From the acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes comes Secret Rendezvous, the bizarrely erotic and comic adventures of a man searching for his missing wife in a mysteriously vast underground hospital.F

Of all the great Japanese novelists, Kobe Abe was indubitably the most versatile. With The Ruined Map, he crafted a mesmerizing literary crime novel that combines the narrative suspense of Chandler wi

In the last novel written before his death in 1993, one of Japan's most distinguished novelists proffered a surreal vision of Japanese society that manages to be simultaneously fearful and jarringly f