[Abé is] concerned with the solitude of men and women alienated from contemporary society and suffering from a loss of identity…. [Abé has deliberately deviated] from the dominant trend of the prewar Japanese novels. [He is] … completely free from the sentimentality of self-commiseration characteristic of the I-novelists…. [His prose style is also a mark of his] deviation from the Japanese tradition. Abé's style is objective, logical and lucid…. Abé's literary world has a closer kinship with that of Kafka and some contemporary European writers than that of his countrymen. (pp. 153-54)
From the point of view of literary technique Abé explored a new and unique possibility for prose fiction in his 'The Wall: The Crime of Mr S. Karuma' ('Kabe—S. Karuma shi no Hanzai', 1951)…. This story is concerned with the metamorphosis of human beings…. [His work bears] a resemblance to Kafka's Metamorphosis, where the technique is far removed from realism. From the thematic point of view, however, the author is still concerned with the problem of lost identity. The alternatives for Abé were whether to employ a realistic method or a method which one may call allegorical, symbolic and even surrealistic. The difficulty of the latter alternative lies in the extent to which the use of the irrational and absurd can be plausible in rationalistic terms. There was in this sense a limitation to the highly allegorical stories of metamorphosis. It was natural enough that instead of the purely surrealistic or absurd, Abé came to deal with the realistic situation while still charging it with implications that are above mere realism. (pp. 154-55)
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