Kōbō Abe
1) The box man
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"The author 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...
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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...
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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.
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Pitfall: 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.
Woman in the dunes: An amateur entomologist leaves Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert....
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"Brings together critical historical documents, many of which are translated into English for the first time, in Japanese arts from the end of World War II through the next four and a half decades."--Page 14.
"A trove of primary source materials, From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945-1989 is an invaluable scholarly resource for readers who wish to explore the fascinating subject of avant-garde art in postwar Japan. In this comprehensive anthology,...