Kangaroo Notebook, by Kobo Abe. What we talk about when we talk about Nightmares.
Kobo Abe was one of the seminal writers of Post-World War II Japan. Born in Tokyo in 1924, and spending much of his childhood in Manchuria, Abe initially studied medicine at the prestigious Tokyo University, before dropping out to write fiction. His first real literary acknowledgement came in 1951, for his short novel, The Wall: The Crime of S. Karuma, for which he won the Akutagawa Prize, (a prize that comes with a one million yen cash prize and is considered to be Japan’s most sought after literary award).
Eleven years later, his novel Woman of the Dunes, (which won the Yomiuri Prize, another prestigious Japanese literary award, which also comes with a one million yen cash prize), would propel him into international fame. An author’s note from Kangaroo Notebook describes his work as thus: “The typical protagonist of Abe’s stories is an “outsider” who is haunted by a sense of alienation and by anxiety over the fragility of individual identity. He seeks freedom from the oppressiveness of communal reality, yet yearns futilely for emotional connection.”
Kobo Abe is often described as the Japanese Kafka, and he was also an important playwright and essayist who was nominated numerous times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 1993 at the age of 68. Later, when fellow Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe, (who will likely be a subject of one of my reviews in the near future), was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994, Oe said that Abe had deserved the award more than he himself had.