Dazzlingly original, Kobo Abe's "The Woman in the Dunes" is one of the premier Japanese novels in the twentieth century, and this "Penguin Classics" edition contains a new introduction by David Mitchell, author of "Cloud Atlas". Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist, searches the scorching desert for[...]

Kobo Abe, the internationally acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes, combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett.

In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his [...]

Like an elegantly chilling postscript to The Metamorphosis," " this classic of postwar Japanese literature describes a bizarre physical transformation that exposes the duplicities of an entire world. The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident-a man who has lost his face [...]

In the last novel written before his death in 1993, one of Japan's most distinguished novelists proffered a surreal vision of Japanese society that manages to be simultaneously fearful and jarringly funny. The narrator of Kangaroo Notebook wakes on morning to discover that his legs are growing radis[...]

En insektssamlare försvinner spårlöst och dödförklaras sju år senare. I själva verket lever han fortfarande i en liten by vid havet. Folket som bor där för en desperat kamp för överlevnad och håller insektssamlaren fången i en sandgrop tillsammans med en kvinna. Varje dag tvingas de sky[...]