Kobo Abe- Background Check

Kimifusa Abe was born on March 7, 1924 in the Kita district of Tokyo, Japan. He grew up in the province of Mukden, in Manchuria. His father was a practicing physician who taught at the nearby medical college. His father pushed him to study medicine, and Abe did so, returning to Japan in 1941 and graduationg from Tokyo Imperial University in 1948, but Abe only completed his degree under the condition that he would not practice. He had begun to publish with a collected work of poems in 1947, and his first novel was published a year later in 1948. Abe never garnered critical international acclaim, however, until Woman In the Dunes was published in 1962. Afterwards, Abe wrote many more novels and transferred severla of the to the movie screen, where Woman In the Dunes won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1964. His works were famous for their often nightmarish and surrealistic portrayals of the individual self in a modern society, comparable to Kafka's works. After a lifetime of writing and directing, Abe passed away on January 22, 1993.