|
, pseudonym of , was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor. Abe has been often compared to Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia for his modernist sensibilities and his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society.〔(''New York Times''. )〕〔Timothy Iles, ''Abe Kobo: an Exploration of his Prose, Drama, and Theatre'', EPAP, 2000.〕 ==Biography== Abe was born in Kita, Tokyo, Japan and grew up in Mukden (now Shenyang) in Manchuria.〔 Abe's family was in Tokyo at the time due to his father's year of medical research in Tokyo. His mother had been raised in Hokkaido, while he experienced childhood in Manchuria. This triplicate assignment of origin was influential to Abe, who told Nancy Shields in a 1978 interview, "I am essentially a man without a hometown. This may be what lies behind the 'hometown phobia' that runs in the depth of my feelings. All things that are valued for their stability offend me."〔 As a child, Abe was interested in insect-collecting, mathematics, and reading. His favorite authors were Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Edgar Allan Poe.〔 Abe returned to Japan briefly in April 1940 to study at Seijo High School, but a lung condition forced his return to Mukden, where he read Jaspers, Heidegger, Dostoyevsky, and Edmund Husserl. Abe began his studies at Tokyo Imperial University in 1943 to study medicine, partially out of respect for his father, but also because "()hose students who specialized in medicine were exempted from becoming soldiers. My friends who chose the humanities were killed in the war."〔 He returned to Manchuria around the end of World War II.〔 Specifically, Abe left the Tokyo University Medical School in October 1944, returning to his father's clinic in Mukden.〔 That winter, his father died of eruptive typhus. Returning to Tokyo with his father's ashes, Abe reentered the medical school. Abe started writing novellas and short stories during his last year in university. He graduated in 1948 with a medical degree, joking once that he was allowed to graduate only on the condition that he would not practice.〔 Abe had married in 1945 to Machi Yamada, an art student who led a career as artist and stage director, and the couple saw successes within their fields in similar time frames.〔 Initially, however, they had lived in an old barracks within a bombed-out area of the city center. Abe sold pickles and charcoal on the street to pay their bills. The couple joined a number of artistic study groups, such as ''Yoru no Kai'' (Group of the Night or The Night Society) and ''Nihon Bungaku Gakko'' (Japanese Literary School)'. As the post-war period progressed, Abe's stance as an intellectual pacifist led to him joining the Japanese Communist Party, with whom he worked to organize laborers in poor parts of Tokyo. Soon after his reception of the Akutagawa Prize in 1951, Abe began to feel the constraints of the Communist Party's rules and regulations alongside doubts about what meaningful artistic works could be created under the title of "socialist realism."〔 By 1956, Abe began writing in solidarity with the Polish rebels and their freedom movement, drawing the ire of the Japanese Communist Party. The Party's criticism reaffirmed his stance: "The Communist Party put pressure on me to change the content of the article and apologize. But I refused. I said I would never change my opinion on the matter. This was my first break with the Party."〔 The next year, Abe traveled to Eastern Europe for the Twentieth Convention of the Soviet Communist Party. Here, confronted by the realities of communist society, Abe saw little of interest, but the arts gave him some solace. He visited Kafka's house in Prague, read Rilke and Čapek, reflected on his idol Lu Xun, and was moved by a Mayakovsky play in Brno.〔 The invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union in 1956 disgusted Abe, who attempted to split from the Communist Party. At the time, however, resignations from the party were not accepted. Four years later, in 1962, he was forcibly expelled from the party. His political activity came to an end in 1967 in the form of a statement published by himself, his wife, Yasunari Kawabata, and Kenzaburō Ōe protesting the treatment of writers, artists, and intellectuals in Communist China.〔 His experiences in Manchuria were also deeply influential on his writing, imprinting terrors and fever dreams which are now surrealist hallmarks of his works. In his recollections of Mukden, these markers are evident: "The fact is, it may not have been trash in the center of the marsh at all; it may have been crows. I do have a memory of thousands of crows flying up from the swamp at dusk, as if the surface of the swamp were being lifted up into the air."〔 The trash of the marsh was a truth of life, as were the crows, yet Abe's recollections of them tie them distinctly. Further experiences with the swamp centered around its use as a staking ground for condemned criminals with "() heads--now food for crows-- appearing suddenly out of the darkness and disappearing again, terrified and attracted to us." These ideas are present in much of Abe's work. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Kōbō Abe」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|