Kobo Abe

Kōbō Abe is the pen name of Kimifusa Abe (1924–1993), a Japanese writer, playwright and director. He is best known for The Woman in the Dunes, a 1962 novel about a schoolteacher held in a house among shifting sand, and Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1964 film of it won an award. Critics have often set his surreal, nightmarish fiction beside Franz Kafka's, and he also wrote Ruined Map, Beyond the Curve and Secret Rendezvous. He died of heart failure in Tokyo in 1993, aged 68.