Although he wrote many of the works that earned him the greatest recognition during the early years of his career, Abe continued writing fiction throughout his life. After winning an important literary prize for his 1950 story "Akai Mayu" (translated as "Red Cocoon," 1972), with its hallucinatory vision of a man without a home, Abe wrote an impressive number of novels. All three served as means for him to explore and explicate his sometimes gnomic vision of reality, yet Abe is best known, both in Japan and abroad, as a novelist and short-story writer. He soon became known as a fiction writer, a playwright and director, and a writer of film scenarios. By 1950 Abe had become an enthusiastic participant in the avant-garde movement of postwar Japan.įrom that time Abe's career moved in three directions. Hanada Kiyoteru, the intellectual leader of the group, encouraged Abe's interests in European surrealism, which led him in turn to develop Marxist sympathies. In the early postwar years he joined many important literary groups, one of which included writers who were associated with the journal Kindai Bungaku (Modern Literature) and were attempting to reassert the claims of art and humanism in the difficult years that followed defeat. Encouraged by his early literary successes, Abe soon abandoned any further interest in a medical career. His first works, some published at his own expense, appeared in 1948, the same year he graduated from Tokyo University with his M.D. Perhaps because of a new atmosphere of free expression that blossomed shortly after the war ended in 1945, Abe began to experiment in writing both poetry and fiction. Although their works read quite differently and are composed with aims at variance from those of Abe, these writers resemble each other in the cool dissection that characterizes their similar authorial stances. The objectivity of Abe's style resembles that of other writers-such as the Japanese Meiji writer and intellectual Mori Ōgai or the Russian playwright and writer Anton Chekhov-who were also trained in medicine. Yet Abe's medical training may have developed his abilities to describe with precision and detachment both his settings and the emotions of his characters. However, caught up in nihilistic attitudes that were beginning to spread among intellectuals as defeat and the end of the war seemed ever nearer, he took no pleasure in preparing for a medical career, for he had lost trust in society. Abe remained in Manchuria until 1942, when he returned to Tokyo at age eighteen to enter Tokyo University and study medicine. ![]() Although Abe was born in Tokyo, his father shortly thereafter took the family to Manchuria and served as a doctor in Mukden. In this sense he was perhaps in closer touch with a rapidly urbanizing society than were many authors whose writings were shaped by an implicit commitment to a bucolic vision of a Japan that had largely disappeared by the end of the American occupation in the early 1950s.Ībe's upbringing-especially that he was brought up outside Japan and was given early training as a physician-no doubt strongly shaped his attitudes. Japan as presented in his works is an urban, not a rural, landscape-one filled with buildings, not flowering trees. Abe's vision appeared to take nothing from the past. ![]() At first examination Abe's work seems removed from the kinds of aesthetic vision and strategies employed by older writers such as Kawabata Yasunari or Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, who were still active after the war and creatively and selectively used themes and attitudes familiar from more traditional literature.
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