The Woman in the Dunes

One of the premier Japanese novels in the twentieth century, "The Woman In The Dunes" combines the essence of myth, suspense, and the existential novel. In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where they are pressed into shovelling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village.

Literature & Fiction

Kobo, Abe

Contemporary

Penguin Group(CA)

Ruined Map

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Jonathan Cape Ltd.

The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kobo (Weatherhead Books on Asia)

Columbia University Press

The Ark Sakura (Japanese Classics)

Genre Fiction

Penguin Classics

Inter Ice Age 4.

Random House]

Kobo Abe, the internationally acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes, combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett. In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo and scribbling madly on the interior walls of his box, he describes the world outside as he sees or perhaps imagines it, a tenuous reality that seems to include a mysterious rifleman determined to shoot him, a seductive young nurse, and a doctor who wants to become a box man himself. The Box Man is a marvel of sheer originality and a bizarrely fascinating fable about the very nature of identity. Translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders.

The Box Man (English and Japanese Edition)

Literary

As a jump-shoe salesman searches for his wife in a sinister underground hospital, his fascination with the hospital's strange inhabitants, including a girl whose bones are gradually liquefying, causes him to barely notice his wife's unspeakable circumstances

Secret Rendezvous (English and Japanese Edition)

Alfred.A. Knopf

Of all the great Japanese novelists, Kobe Abe was indubitably the most versatile. With The Ruined Map, he crafted a mesmerizing literary crime novel that combines the narrative suspense of Chandler with the psychological depth of Dostoevsky. Mr. Nemuro, a respected salesman, disappeared over half a year ago, but only now does his alluring yet alcoholic wife hire a private eye. The nameless detective has but two clues: a photo and a matchbook. With these he embarks upon an ever more puzzling pursuit that leads him into the depths of Tokyo's dangerous underworld, where he begins to lose the boundaries of his own identity. Surreal, fast-paced, and hauntingly dreamlike, Abeâ€™s masterly novel delves into the unknowable mysteries of the human mind. Translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders.

Perigee Trade

Kobo Abe, the internationally acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes, combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett. In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo and scribbling madly on the interior walls of his box, he describes the world outside as he sees or perhaps imagines it, a tenuous reality that seems to include a mysterious rifleman determined to shoot him, a seductive young nurse, and a doctor who wants to become a box man himself. The Box Man is a marvel of sheer originality and a bizarrely fascinating fable about the very nature of identity. Translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders.

The Box Man

Perigee Books/Putnam Publishing Group

From the acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes comes Secret Rendezvous, the bizarrely erotic and comic adventures of a man searching for his missing wife in a mysteriously vast underground hospital.From the moment that an ambulance appears in the middle of the night to take his wife, who protests that she is perfectly healthy, her bewildered husband realizes that things are not as they should be. His covert explorations reveal that the enormous hospital she was taken to is home to a network of constant surveillance, outlandish sex experiments, and an array of very odd and even violent characters. Within a few days, though no closer to finding his wife, the unnamed narrator finds himself appointed the hospitalâ€™s chief of security, reporting to a man who thinks heâ€™s a horse. With its nightmarish vision of modern medicine and modern life, Secret Rendezvous is another masterpiece from Japanâ€™s most gifted and original writer of serious fiction.

Secret Rendezvous

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Books by Kobo, Abe