Abe Kobo: An Exploration of His Prose, Drama and Theatre

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This work provides a comprehensive, English-langauge study of the literature, plays and theatre work of the important contemporary Japanese writer Abe Kobo, best known for his novel, Suna no onna ( The Woman in the Dunes ), and his play, Tomodachi ( Friends ). The work is in six chapters, including an introduction, biographical sketch, and conclusion. One chapter each is devoted to Abe’s prose, drama, and methods of actor-training. The study situates Abe within modern Japanese and world literature and theatre, and explores such central themes as the function of existentialism and the absurd within Abe’s work, the relationship between the individual and society, the relationship between the actor, the role, and the troupe, and Abe’s constant drive towards a restructuring of the human community into a form capable of dealing with the daily realities of urbanization, alienation, and social fragmentation. It presents Abe as a fundamentally modernist writer whose satire and vision of a possible human society prefigured much of the social theories of the postmodern, through his fiction and work in the theatre.