Kōbō Abe

Abe grew up in Japanese-occupied Mukden, Manchuria, and experienced the chaos of repatriation after 1945 firsthand: refugee columns, black markets, a homeland he had never actually lived in. He trained as a physician at Tokyo Imperial University but graduated on the understanding he would never practice, reportedly telling examiners he would have killed his patients.

That rootlessness became his subject: The Woman in the Dunes traps an insect collector in a sand-pit village he cannot escape and, eventually, does not want to; The Face of Another gives a disfigured scientist a lifelike mask and lets him seduce his own wife. He later founded his own theater troupe, staging avant-garde plays alongside his fiction.

His frequent collaborations with director Hiroshi Teshigahara brought his fables to the screen, including a Cannes-winning film of The Woman in the Dunes. He died in 1993, reportedly on shortlists for the Nobel Prize.