The first edition of Kobo Abe’s Akutagawa prize-winning collection of short stories, with the author’s distinctive signature.
The stories draw on Western fables and, in Abe’s characteristics style, comment on contemporary society through absurdist and dystopian narratives. Yasunari Kawabata was the lead judge of the Akutagawa prize in that year, and, despite his criticisms of the stories as being too loose in parts, he highly commended Abe for signalling a new direction in literature and writing stories that invite curiosity. The introduction to this book was written by the eminent writer Jun Ishikawa, who was somewhat of a mentor to Abe.
The book is illustrated by his close friend Hiroshi Katsuragawa, who was also an active member of Tokyo’s avant-garde art scene. The original artworks can be found in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Both Abe and Katsuragawa were members of the Seiki no Kai [the Century Society], a group of intellectuals who gathered to discuss and critique arts and politics of the post-war Japan they were experiencing.
