Success, fruition, and fulfillment constantly evade his protagonists, who are usually depicted as well-educated people, deserving to reap the rewards of their prudence and perseverance. Conversation and human intercourse are fragmented and interrupted, contributing to a sense of incompleteness. Except for the case of The Woman in the Dunes, which is set in a remote seaside hamlet, the main action in his narratives typically takes place against the urban landscape and amid the impersonalized locations and institutions with which modern city dwellers are most familiar-hospitals, offices, laboratories, department stores, movie theaters, waiting rooms, and apartments. In Abe’s novels, human relationships are shown to be in disorder, partly reflecting the particular quality of his artistic imagination and partly reflecting his own youthful experiences. Ironically, such assertion leads to alienation, creating a Catch-22 situation and a sense of absurdity. Abe’s characters’ resistance to such pressures (or perhaps their unconscious wish to suffer) results in their desire to assert their individuality. Abe recognized, on one hand, that without cohesive units of interdependent people, human life could scarcely exist on the other hand, he also observed that people everywhere suffer under the pressure to model their behavior on conventionally accepted manners and mores. Gradually, from the underlying absurdity and irrationality of the imaginary situations about which he wrote, a kind of gallows humor emerged, giving a sense of situation comedy, albeit black comedy. At first, Abe treated such matters mostly in a serious way. Human loss, disappearance, allocation of responsibility, anguish, and futility stand out as the main issues that figure in Kōbō Abe’s (Ma– January 22, 1993) writings.
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