SOURCE: Iwamoto, Yoshio. Review of Three Plays, by Kōbō Abé. World Literature Today 68, no. 3 (summer 1994): 637.

In the following review, Iwamoto views the dramas collected in Three Plays as influenced by the Theater of the Absurd.

Known primarily as a novelist, especially in the West, Kobo Abe also wrote plays which have been produced in Japan to enormous critical acclaim. His death in early 1993 has inaugurated a reevaluation of his oeuvre, with the major literary journals devoting special issues to the subject. Donald Keene's fine translations into English of three of his plays [Three Plays] might be seen in this context.

Abe began his prolific career in the early 1950s when the twin ideologies of existentialism and absurdism were all the rage worldwide. Finding the tenets of these philosophies congenial to his own view of life in a Japan still reeling from the ravages of war, he constructed...