SOURCE: Lamont-Brown, Raymond. “Kōbō Abé: Japan's Novelist of Alienation.” Contemporary Review 263, no. 1530 (July 1993): 31-4.

In the following essay, Lamont-Brown reflects on Abé's life and work.

Kobo Abe was born in Tokyo on March 7, 1924. He was taken by his family to Mukden when he was barely a year old and thus spent his early years in the Japanese puppet-state of Manchukuo. Abe's ancestral origins were in Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido, and his father, a doctor of medicine, taught at the medical school at Mukden. In Japan it is important to have identifiable roots in a furusato (hometown) setting. Abe never felt that he had this declaring, ‘I am a man without a hometown’. It was to be an emotion that coloured his writing from the start.

A voracious reader, Abe was to be influenced by such as Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Poe, and it was with...