Japanese vanguard writer and playwright Kobo Abe (pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe) was born in 1924 in Tokyo (he died in 1993) but he grew up in Japanese occupied Manchuria. This latter fact distinguished himself from other post-war Japanese writers as he did not develop the deep ties to the image of Japan as an empire. Furthermore, Abe did not undergo formal training in literature as he studied medicine, (although did not excel in this field). In his works, surrealism coalesces with Marxism.

The central themes in Abe's works are the loss of identity, alienation, isolation of the individual and the difficulty people have in communicating with one another. He is compared to Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. In 1947, he published his first book, a poetry selection that he had written in 1943. K. Abe is best known for his novels “The Woman in the Dunes” (1962) and “The Face of Another” (1964). The first one, a Kafkaesque story about a contemporary teacher who turns into a modern Sisyphus, attracted the attention of film director Teshigahara Hiroshi, whose film based on the book gained huge success and won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Abe wrote plays and directed with his own theatre company. His plays “Friends” and “The Suitcase” recall the absurd plays of Beckett and Harold Pinter. In 1951, for his novel “The Crime of Mr S. Karuma”, K. Abe was awarded the most important Japanese literature prize – the Akutawaga award. In 1960, his novel “The Woman in the Dunes” won the Yomiuri Prize for literature.

In 2005, the publishing house “Versus aureus” published the novels by K. Abe Kengūros sąsiuvinis (The Kangaroo Notebook) and Moteris smėlynuose (The Woman in the Dunes).