Why a medical school graduate chose to become Japan's master of the surreal

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Kōbō Abe was a doctor who never practiced, a communist who broke with the party, and a writer who felt like a man without a home. His surreal, nightmarish fiction, often compared to Kafka, transformed the trauma of his Manchurian childhood into some of the most haunting literature of the twentieth century.

Born in Tokyo in 1924, Abe spent his formative years in Mukden, Manchuria. This upbringing left him with a lifelong aversion to stability and a sense of being an outsider. During World War II, he enrolled in Tokyo Imperial University's medical school, partly to avoid military conscription. He graduated in 1948 but famously joked that his degree came with the condition that he would never treat patients. Instead, he turned to literature, drawing on the existentialist philosophy of thinkers like Heidegger and Jaspers to craft his distinctively unsettling narratives.

Abe's political life was as turbulent as his prose. He joined the Japanese Communist Party in the postwar era, hoping to organize laborers, but soon grew disillusioned with the constraints of socialist realism. His public support for Polish protesters in 1956 and his disgust at the Soviet invasion of Hungary marked the beginning of his estrangement from the party. By 1962, he was forcibly expelled. This period of political friction coincided with his greatest artistic successes, including the 1962 publication of The Woman in the Dunes, which brought him international acclaim.

In his later years, Abe shifted his focus toward the stage. He founded the Abe Studio in 1971, seeking to move beyond the passive nature of traditional theater to materialize abstract concepts. For the remainder of the decade, he trained young performers and directed 14 of his own plays. His work remained deeply rooted in the surreal imagery of his youth, such as the thousands of crows he remembered rising from a swamp in Mukden. Though he was frequently discussed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, his sudden death from heart failure in 1993 at age 68 ended his career before that honor could be realized.

Abe's legacy is defined by his ability to capture the anxieties of contemporary society through a lens of dreamlike horror. Whether through novels like Box Man or his collaborative films with director Hiroshi Teshigahara, he challenged readers to confront the instability of identity. By the time he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977, he had firmly established himself as a central figure in modern literature, leaving behind a body of work that remains as provocative and enigmatic as the man himself.

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