Everyone stand up: master Kobo Abe enters

Reading an author for the first time and finding echoes of others you have liked before is always stimulating, because there is something about this echo that reinforces both what you had read and what you have just discovered: after all, the act of reading consists, among other things, of connecting dots and establishing links between ideas and forms thanks to the words that explain them to us, and in some way it seems that the stronger and more illuminating these connections are, the more pleasurable the reading is.

Thus, the first English translation of these eight long, sinister, and hopeless, but also playful and combative stories, written by the Japanese author Kobo Abe (1924-1993) in the fifties and early sixties of the 20th century, immediately transports us to Kafka, but also to Beckett, Camus, Buzzati or, closer to home, even to the most absurd and existentialist Calders. This concerns his contemporaries, because, if we move towards the contemporary era, it seems to us that each story is the father or grandfather of stories by Stephen King or by George Saunders, to cite two completely different authors but capable of creating unreal or dreamlike atmospheres similar to those created by Abe. And, in an even more convoluted way but in reality entirely logical if one knows the trajectory of the publisher that publishes them, it is inevitable to connect the atmosphere of uncertainty and the absurd bureaucratic labyrinths with two books recovered by Males Herbes not so long ago: L’enquesta del canal 4 by Tísner and El martell by Sarsanedas. Something vibrates on the same wavelength.

Imbued with European readings

A contemporary of Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe, with whom he helped define modern Japanese literature during the years following the Second World War, Kobo Abe was the one most influenced by European literature, the one who most renounced the typical framework of a Japanese writer: in his stories, there are no white flowers or sweet bean cakes, but rather machines with huge, hard-to-press buttons, robots that rebel against the humans who programmed them, or home invaders who present themselves as a very kind family but end up being as dangerous as the worst of enemies.

A good part of the stories take place in large cities with skyscrapers and are starred by nameless individuals who could be anyone. They attempt to create worlds that leave behind collective rural traditions to lock themselves into the psychological asphyxia of the urban world. They are hallucinatory worlds, full of technological changes that are simultaneously attractive and threatening, not exempt from a thin layer of humor, and which could be illustrated with paintings by De Chirico. The other great axis around which they revolve is that of collective rebellion, revenge, and social protests against labor exploitation or social injustice. In the story that gives the collection its title, The Bet, an architect receives an almost impossible commission: he must design a company that looks like one of the imaginary prisons of Piranesi, with insurmountable slopes and doors that open to nowhere. After witnessing an injustice, the architect completes the commission, but in a way that will surely not satisfy the despotic client. Like an architect, Abe knew perfectly well that writing is also a form of revenge.