Word: kobo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MANY CRITICS have claimed, Kobo Abe is the best living Japanese novelist, it may only be because so many others (most notably Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata) have committed suicide. The irony, however, is that for the leading literary figure in Japan, Abe's writing has a remarkably Western flavor. Except for place names and a few distinctly oriental metaphors ("his thoughts shrank like a piece of fat meat plunged into boiling water"), Secret Rendezvous. Abe's sixth and most recent book could pass, like his others, for a Western novel...
What do "those clever Japanese" industrialists and Japanese writers' numbers games have to do with Kobo Abe? Everything (and of course, on the edge of the technological abyss, nothing). Abe is a Nikon camera incarnate, and his transistorized prose--a mixture of journalese and clinical report--combines some of the worst elements of the simple Hesse, the technical Barth, the mundane Beckett, and the grotesque-for-the-sake-of-grotesqueness Barthelme. He is as throughly modern as Japan's prodigal-car, the high on fuel consumption and low on credit...
INTER ICE AGE 4 by Kobo Abe. 228 pages. Knopf...
Creator of a haunting Kafkaesque nightmare, The Woman in the Dunes, and an existential detective story, The Ruined Map, Author Kobo Abe has the traditional Japanese knack of taking familiar literary inputs and converting them into exotically fascinating readouts. His latest effort is a fictional foray into political science fiction...
...Novelist Yukio Mishima (Forbidden Colors) has formed his own private army of 100 men to help restore discipline, patriotism and pride in young Japanese. But many artists are exceptions to the growing preoccupation with Japanese identity. They consider their work to be their passports. Says Novelist (The Ruined Map) Kobo Abe: "We have nothing left to mark ourselves as particularly Japanese, and we tend to regard ourselves as people with the same aspi rations as our counterparts...