Kobo Abe, 68; Japanese Novelist and Playwright

Kobo Abe, highly respected Japanese novelist and playwright whose often bizarre and allegorical themes chronicled isolation and survival in the post-World War II universe, has died in Tokyo. He was 68.

Abe died Friday of heart failure at a Tokyo hospital.

He was best known for his 1962 novel “The Woman in the Dunes,” which was his first work to be translated into English. It was made into a film of the same title in 1964, and won a special jury prize at the Cannes film festival.

The story focuses on a schoolteacher and amateur entomologist who goes on a weekend insect collecting trip in lonely sand dunes, echoing Abe’s childhood interest in insects and his lifelong study of identity. The hero stumbles onto a primitive tribe living in the sand pits and becomes their prisoner along with a previously imprisoned woman. He is first obsessed with the loss of his identity and with escape, but comes to realize that his sand prison gives him intellectual and spiritual freedom.

The novel was considered a contender for the Nobel Prize for literature, but was not nominated, partly because the very private Abe studiously avoided the literary spotlight.

Abe’s work was often compared to that of Franz Kafka, whom he greatly admired.

Born in Tokyo and reared in Manchuria where his father practiced medicine, Abe was somewhat alienated from his country and rejoiced when Japan lost World War II. Many critics believe that the secret of his international success was that he distanced himself from his homeland.

“He is probably the first Japanese writer whose works, having no distinctly Japanese qualities, are of interest to the Western audience because of their universal relevance,” noted Hisaaki Yamanouchi in the book “The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature.”

Abe’s plays were less known in the United States and less revered. A trio of his one-acts was produced at Los Angeles’ 5th Street Studio in 1980--”Suitcase,” “The Cliff of Time,” and “The Man Who Turned Into a Stick.” The third included program notes linking its meaning to Dante’s seventh circle of hell.

“Plays that send us scurrying for obscure references to clarify what they’re all about,” said Times drama critic Sylvie Drake, “fill me with the suspicion that it’s for lack of being able to tell us what they mean on their own terms.”

Neither was Abe overly impressed by American writers.

He made a rare U.S. appearance in 1986 at the 48th international congress of the PEN writers group in New York, which used the theme, “Is PEN Mightier in Imagination Than the State?” Abe told the Los Angeles Times through an interpreter:

“Generally speaking, I am not fond of attending congresses of this sort. But the theme of this congress . . . made me think that having come up with a title like this, American writers must be at a higher level than I had imagined.”

Born Kimifusa Abe on March 7, 1924, Abe changed his name to the more Chinese sounding Kobo partly because of his disillusionment with Japan. He graduated from the University of Tokyo with a degree in medicine, but never practiced.

He turned instead to writing poetry, and published his first volume, “Poems of an Unknown Poet,” in 1947 at his own expense. His literary reputation was established with the publication of his novel “The Road Sign at the End of the Street” in 1948.

Abe is survived by his wife, Michiko, and a daughter, Neri.