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.
Abe's upbringing--especially that he was brought up outside Japan and was given early training as a physician--no doubt strongly shaped his attitudes. Although Abe was born in Tokyo, his father shortly thereafter took the family to Manchuria and served as a doctor in Mukden. Abe remained in Manchuria until 1942, when he returned to Tokyo at age eighteen to enter Tokyo University and study medicine. 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.
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. The objectivity of Abe's style resembles that of other writers--such as the Japanese Meiji writer and intellectual Mori gai or the Russian playwright and writer Anton Chekhov--who were also trained in medicine.
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