Ruined Map

Kobo, Abe

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Jonathan Cape Ltd.

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

Columbia University Press

The Japanese novelist Kobo 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. Alienated from his fellows, sexually rejected by his wife, the injured man painstakingly sets out to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. Yet once he achieves his goal, he realizes that he has not fashioned a disguise, but an alternate self -- a self that is capable of anything. The Face of Another is an intellectual horror story of the highest order.

The face of another: A novel;

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Weidenfeld and Nicolson

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)

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)

Contemporary

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

Inter Ice Age 4

Inter Ice Age 4' is a chilling, futuristic novel by one of Japan's greatest living writers.It is the account of Professor Katsumi of Tokyo who has assembled and programmed a computer which, given all the available facts about a person or situation, can predict the future.Because a similar computer in Moscow is being use to make forecasts of a political nature, his institute's governing body decides to avoid politics and try to forsee the future of an individual.A man is picked, apparently at random, only to be murdered before he can be programmed, but the computer can still read his mind.The resulting involvements are complicated by a climactic shift--Inter Ice Age 4--which puts earth under water.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kobo, Abe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kobo, Abe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kobo, Abe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ruined Map

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

The face of another: A novel;

Inter Ice Age 4.

The Box Man (English and Japanese Edition)

Secret Rendezvous (English and Japanese Edition)

Ruined Map

The Box Man

Secret Rendezvous

Inter Ice Age 4