Sand Woman

Author: Kōbō Abe
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: Currently, the most popular Japanese author in China is Haruki Murakami, and Murakami's revered predecessor is Kōbō Abe. Both are anomalies in Japanese literary circles. On the surface, their common traits seem to be disdain for tradition and a mastery of Western modernism. However, a revolutionary narrative form cannot entirely overturn centuries of aesthetic accumulation. What it can achieve is largely shifting the national sense of beauty into a global context. As for modernism in Japanese novels, it subtly conveys cultural sentiments from the past, reminiscent of lost samurai and melancholic townspeople.