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

In the following essay, Dissanayake lists the reasons for the success of the cinematic adaptation of Abé's novel The Woman in the Dunes.

In the following essay, Goebel determines the influence of Franz Kafka on Abe's fiction.

In the following introduction, Keene traces the development of Abé's career as a dramatist and underscores the problems with translating the author's work.

In the following introduction, Keene traces the development of Abé's career as a dramatist and underscores the problems with translating the author's work.

[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…. Ab�...

In the following essay, Mitsutani applauds the broad range of Abe's stories in Beyond the Curve, maintaining that it gives readers “the opportunity for a fresh perspective on one of the most familiar of modern Japanese writers.”

In the following essay, Lamont-Brown reflects on Abé's life and work.

In the following essay, Lamont-Brown reflects on Abé's life and work.

In the following essay, Lamont-Brown traces Abe's literary development.

In the following unfavorable review, Garis derides The Ark Sakura as lacking in coherence and meaning.

In the following unfavorable review, Garis derides The Ark Sakura as lacking in coherence and meaning.

In the following review, Iwamoto offers a mixed assessment of Kangaroo Notebook.

In the following review, Iwamoto views the dramas collected in Three Plays as influenced by the Theater of the Absurd.

In the following essay, the reviewer provides a positive assessment of Beyond the Curve.

In the following mixed review of Beyond the Curve, Loose contends that although Abe “was first recognized for his short stories, this collection suggests that Abe's genius, which is for the detailed and eerily logical elaboration of an absurd or unthinkable situation, requires the larger scope of a novel or play.”

If one could imagine a Tom Stoppard "Jumpers" written by Lewis Carroll and Kafka, translated with a minimal sense of topography to a modern Japanese setting (with a touch of Borges, as it were), one might be somewhere near grasping what Abe has done [in "Secret Rendezvous"]. But the stockpile of influences or analogues doesn't weaken or invalidate the book, which is both original and edgily entertaining…. The story concerns the head of a jump-shoe sales team, jump-s...

While [Kobo Abe's] figurative language remains essentially Japanese ("His left shoulder made a sound like the splitting of chopsticks"), his themes are decidedly Western. Abe shares with writers like Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Robbe-Grillet an obsession for the hallucination vraie, the imaginary made "real" through an accumulation of precise detail. Abe's "visions" never fall apart upon a second reading, because the "science" in them is so so...

In the following review of Beyond the Curve, Lewis addresses the theme of identity in Abe's short stories.

Kobo Abe delights in the excessive and the perverse. With its surrealistic setting, its claustrophobic atmosphere, and its increasingly distressing scenes of sexual decadence and violence, Secret Rendezvous disturbs rather than titillates. To the Western mind at least, this book is maddeningly, perhaps pointlessly, abstruse…. [Abe's hero] sets off one morning to track down his wife, who has been carried off, inexplicably, by an ambulance. Once inside the labyrinthian underground hospital, the ...

In the following laudatory review of Three Plays, Dallas perceives “this witty, lyrical, eminently theatrical collection a welcome change from the confessional realism that pervades most contemporary American drama.”

In the following laudatory review of Three Plays, Dallas perceives “this witty, lyrical, eminently theatrical collection a welcome change from the confessional realism that pervades most contemporary American drama.”

Kobo Abe refuses to write a conventional novel. He gives us a series of "notebooks" (and epilogue); within the "notebooks" are charts, banks of information, and clues. The fictional structure is a labyrinth, a "secret rendezvous" of science and poetry…. [In Secret Rendezvous, Abe is] giving us a violent and night-marish work. He deliberately mingles fear and pleasure to force us toward a philosophical position…. The novel outmaneuvers us;… it is...

In the following essay, Woodhouse offers a favorable assessment of Beyond the Curve.