SOURCE: Iles, Timothy. “The Fiction of Abe Kôbô.” In Abe Kôbô: An Exploration of His Prose, Drama and Theatre, pp. 33-105. Fucecchio, Italy: European Press Academic Publishing, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Iles offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Abe's short fiction.

However fantastic the stories that Abe writes may become in the course of their development, they all begin in seemingly benign ways. Abe takes simple, daily occurrences, as innocuous as waking up, as the entranceway to his dystopic, absurdist vision. He first presents a smooth, mundane surface, and proceeds to dismantle it. Underneath the tangible surface of the mundane world of “Baberu no tô no tanuki” (“The Badger from the Tower of Babel,” 1951), for example, lurks a completely different world populated by transparent people whose shadows non-existent creatures have stolen and eaten, a world wherein mannequins and business cards come to life to usurp...