Given the Haruki Murakami As the great Japanese writer who tops the current bestseller lists in any country in the world, we must not forget other greats such as kawabata or the puzzling kobo abe. The latter is, without a doubt, the most disruptive of the plethora of Japanese authors of the XNUMXth century, a source from which Murakami himself surely drank to end up synthesizing a narrative from the Far East full of new nuances ...
Many refer to this author as the Kafka of the rising sun, probably because of its surreal inspiration. But beyond the literary symbol of the surreal, Kobo Abe was able to provide a sociopolitical review from the prism of the individual.
Anything that is not fully participating in moral standards is a dangerous and alienating deviation. Except that Kobo Abe, a member of a society with much more marked patterns still to a formal extent, describes the individual as someone naturally alienated from that common line of traffic.
As a novelist, Kobo Abe greatly abounded in this idea through characters in transition between the corseted and the liberating, with an ultimately dreamlike reflection, an imaginative escape and full of color only that in turn distorting and finally even hopeless in the ultimate idea. of the human being as tending to the personal fulfillment.
But it is also that, moved by his natural restlessness, Kobo Abe wrote poetry and dared with the theater, new ways to probe that same idea of ​​the most existential estrangement.
Kobo Abe's Top 3 Recommended Books
The Sand Woman
Sensuality approached from the Japanese imagination acquires an aftertaste of exoticism and immortality, like a sequence of images between the histrionic of the idea and the hieratic of the expression.
In this novel we know love as a misfortune in which every attempt at immortality is lost once the ecstasy of that impossible beauty of the moment is reached. And yet there is something of immortality in the mere fact of touching it.
Sand is an extension of matter reduced to its minimum expression, perhaps a metaphor for the dust we become, yearning to reach a shore where the waves drag our desires with vigor.
A novel full of sensuality as the only horizon on which to see the transcendence of our limitations.
The alien face
There are certain and suggestive analogies between this novel and the film "The skin I live in", that strange and magnetic film by Almodovar.
The subterfuges of the identity of the current human being, the general masquerade from narrative hyperbole. Undeniable reminiscences in both cases to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of Robert Louis Stevenson.
In short, the perfect argument for the showcasing of an author convinced of alienation as the first consequence of the current lifestyle.
Okuyama submits to a plan to live under another face after his has been disfigured after an accident. The proposal of a psychiatrist already invites us to think about the most internal conception of the proposal, where the identity that forges the personality resides, and its possible twists and turns.
Secret Encounters
One of Abe's most unique novels, sometimes labyrinthine in its reading, disconcerting in its proposal and dystopian with a point of moral evolution at the service of science.
A woman is taken from her home and taken by ambulance under pressing and extravagant medical premises. The husband is dedicated to looking for her in delirious hospitals in which we discover scenes certainly taken from a strange dream but at the same time close, as read as soon as he wakes up ...
A novel that for me abounds in the idea of ​​hospitals as places where whoever seeks healing feels at times an animal cared for by emotionally aseptic beings, capable, made to wander, to abduct your soul while they sleep for that definitive intervention.
