Kōbō Abe
Author
Publisher
Vintage Books
Publication Date
1991.
Language
English
Description
In this famous postwar Japanese novel, the first of Abe's to be translated into English, Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist in pursuit of a rare specimen of beetle, wanders into a strange seaside village, whose residents all live in sandpits. He is taken prisoner, and, along with a widow cast out by the community, he is forced to move into her sandpit and continually shovel away the sand that threatens to take over the village. In Niki's struggles...
Author
Series
Publisher
Columbia University Press
Publication Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
"Set in Manchuria in the aftermath of the Asian Pacific War. The central character is Kuki Kyūzō, whose settler parents relocated from Japan to the Manchurian puppet-state as the Japanese empire expanded. Kyūzō's father, a factory technician, dies shortly after he is born. In the course of Japan's defeat and the Soviet Union's occupation of Manchuria, Kyūzō's mother is seriously wounded, forcing him to remain behind with her rather than evacuate...
Author
Publisher
Vintage Books
Publication Date
2003.
Language
English
Description
The Japanese novelist Abe has often been compared to Kafka and this 1966 novel suggests an elegantly chilling postscript to "The Metamorphosis." Abe's narrator is a scientist who has been hideously deformed in a laboratory accident, a man who has lost his face in a society where "losing face" is a synonym for humiliation.
Author
Series
Publisher
Penguin Books
Publication Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
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...
Series
Criterion collection volume 394
Publisher
The Criterion Collection
Publication Date
[2016]
Language
日本語
Description
An amateur entomologist is left in Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle found in a vast desert. When he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night with a young widow in her hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema's most unnerving and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of the Sisyphean struggle of everyday life.
Series
Criterion collection volume 395
Publisher
Criterion Collection
Publication Date
2007.
Language
日本語
Description
Okuyama, after being burned and disfigured in an industrial accident and estranged from his family and friends, agrees to his psychiatrist's radical experiment: a face transplant, created from the mold of a stranger. As Okuyama is thus further alienated from the world around him, he finds himself giving in to his darker temptations.
Series
Criterion collection volume 393
Publisher
Criterion Collection
Publication Date
2007.
Language
日本語
Description
When a miner leaves his employer and treks out with his young son to become a migrant worker, he finds himself moving from one eerie landscape to another, intermittently followed (and photographed) by an enigmatic man in a clean, white suit, and eventually coming face-to-face with his inescapable destiny.
Publisher
The Criterion Collection
Publication Date
[2013]
Language
日本語
Description
Thick-walled room. Among the first Japanese films to deal directly with the scars of World War II, this drama about a group of rank-and file Japanese soldiers jailed for crimes against humanity was adapted by Abe Kōbō from the diaries of real prisoners.
I will buy you. Masaki Kobayashi's pitiless take on Japan's professional baseball industry is unlike any other sports film ever made. A condemnation of the inhumanity bred by a mercenary, bribery-fueled...