Kobo Abe, Author, Juliet Winters Carpenter, Translator Kodansha International (JPN) $18.95 (0p) ISBN 978-4-7700-1465-8
In this first collection of short fiction, Abe confirms his reputation as one of Japan's most significant modern writers. The tightly drawn, surrealistic tales proceed from the same premise: an ordinary individual is suddenly thrust into...
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Kobo Abe, Author, Juliet Winters Carpenter, Translator Knopf Publishing Group $18.95 (333p) ISBN 978-0-394-55836-3
Abe's first novel in eight yearsan allegorical fantasy at once Kafkaesque, funny and apocalpyticdazzles even when it may confuse. The principal character, nicknamed Mole, has converted a huge underground quarry into an ""ark'' capable of surviving...
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Kobo Abe, Author, Watson-Guptill, Author, Nat Henthoff, Introduction by Billboard Books $60 (280p) ISBN 978-0-8230-7536-2
This handsome oversize volume is an assemblage of 359 relatively unknown photographs (52 in color), compiled by a Japanese designer, mainly from the work of 14 photographers but including nearly 40 of his own pictures as well. Jazz instrumentalists,
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Kobo Abe, Author, Maryellen Toman Mori, Translator Vintage Books USA $15 (192p) ISBN 978-0-679-74663-8
In a starred review, PW praised the ""outlandish shenanigans"" and ""grisly surrealism"" of this last novel by one of Japan's greatest postwar novelists. (May)
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Kobo Abe, Author, Maryellen Toman Mori, Translator Alfred A. Knopf $22 (0p) ISBN 978-0-679-42412-3
In his last novel, Abe, who died in 1993, repeatedly swings with ease from outlandish shenanigans to grisly surrealism. The unnamed narrator is a low-level employee at an office-supply firm who, in jest, proposes a new product called a Kangaroo...
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Kobo Abe, trans. from the Japanese by Richard F. Calichman. Columbia Univ., $25 (208p) ISBN 978-0-231-17705-4
In this early novel from Japan’s master surrealist, Abe (The Box Man) casts a young man’s journey home as an agonizing exploration of the depths of human suffering. Three years after the surrender of Japan in World War II, Kyuzo escapes from his...
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