Current Playwright: Kōbō Abe
Kōbō Abe
Born in Tokyo, Abe was a critically acclaimed writer, playwright, photographer, and inventor. He received a degree in medicine, but never practiced, having published his first novel in 1943, and joining in 1948 the avant-garde group Night Group (Yoru no Kai), a loose confederation of writers, philosophers, and intelligentsia led by the writer Kiyoteru Hamada. The group was committed to the goal of fusing the techniques of Surrealism with Marxist ideology, and in the 1950s, Abe joined the Japanese Communist Party. His membership, however, was brief, as Abe traveled to Hungary in 1956 prior to the uprising and publicly supported their fight for independence from the Soviet Union. In 1961, Abe and twenty-seven other literary figures declared their opposition to the party's Stalinist policies, and he published articles critical of the party. In 1962 he was expelled from Japan's communist party.
Nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Abe's novels and plays are characterized by calm observations and avant-garde techniques. Artistic influences included Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Central themes in Abe's work include loss of identity, alienation, isolation of the individual in a bizarre world, and the difficulty people have in communicating with one another. In the West, Abe is best known for his novels, such as The Woman in the Dunes (1962), one of the premier Japanese novels of the 20th century that garnered Abe the Yomiuri Prize in 1962, and The Face of Another (1964). He received prizes for three stories, 'Akai mayu' (1950, Red Cocoon), 'Kabe' (1951), and 'S. Karuma-shi no hanzai' (1951). A broadcast of Bo Ni Natta (The Man Who Turned into a Stick) won the Geijutsusai Shorei Prize. Yurei Wa Koko Ni Iru (1958, The Ghost Is Here) won Abe Japan's highest drama award, the Kishida Kunio Drama Prize.
In the 1960s, Abe adapted several of his novels to film including Woman in the Dunes (Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film), The Face of Another, The Pitfall, and The Ruined Map. In the 1970s, Abe wrote several plays, and directed his own theater company in Tokyo, the Abe Kōbō Studio, which toured in the U.S. and performed in New York City in 1979. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. With the death of Yukio Mishima, Abe was internationally recognized as the major dramatist of Japan. Abe died of heart failure on January 22, 1993, while writing his final novel, The Flying Man, which was published posthumously in 1993.
Donald Keene
Donald Keene (translator) received his B.A. (1942), M.A. (1947), and Ph.D. (1949) degrees from Columbia University, and his Litt. D. from Cambridge University in 1978. He is the recipient of the Kikuchi Kan Prize of the Society for the Advancement of Japanese Culture (1962); the Order of the Rising Sun, Second Class (1993) and Third Class (1975); the Japan Foundation Prize (1983); the Tokyo Metropolitan Prize (1987); the Radio and Television Culture Prize (1993); and the Asahi Prize (1998). He has received honorary degrees from St. Andrew's College (1990), Middlebury College (1995), Columbia University (1997), Tohoku University (1997), Waseda University (1998), Tokyo Gaikokugo Daigaku (1999), and Keiwa University (2000). In 1985, he became the first non-Japanese to receive the Yomiuri Literary Prize, honoring the best book of literary criticism in Japanese, for the original Japanese version of Travellers of a Hundred Ages, and he was awarded the Nihon Bungaku Taisho (Grand Prize of Japanese Literature) for the same work. In 2002, Professor Keene was presented with one of Japan's highest honors, the title "Person of Cultural Merit" (Bunka Koro-sha), for his distinguished service in the promotion of Japanese literature and culture. In 2008, Professor Keene was the first foreign national to receive another high honor, the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunsho), which the Japanese Government presents to those who have greatly contributed to Japanese art, literature, or culture. Professor Keene began teaching at Columbia University in 1955, and was named Columbia University Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature in 1986 and University Professor in 1989; he is currently a University Professor Emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus. Professor Keene has published approximately 25 books in English, consisting of studies of Japanese literature and culture, translations of Japanese works of both classical and modern literature, a four-volume history of Japanese literature, and edited works including two anthologies of Japanese literature and the collection Twenty Plays of the No Theatre. Professor Keene's Japanese publications include approximately 30 books, some written originally in Japanese, others translated from English. In 2002, Professor Keene's Meiji Tenno (Shinchosha, 2001; translation by Yukio Kakuchi), a biography of the Meiji Emperor, won the 56th Mainichi Shuppan Culture Prize in the Humanities and Social Sciences division. The English text, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912, was published by Columbia University Press in the same year, and, among many enthusiastic reviews, was named one of the Best Books of 2002 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
