The Woman in the Dunes (18 page)
A Note About the Author
Kōbō Abe was born in Tokyo in 1924 but grew up in Mukden, Manchuria, where his father, a doctor, was on the staff of the medical school. As a young man Mr. Abe was interested in mathematics and insect collecting as well as the works of Poe, Dostoevski, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Kafka. He received a medical degree from Tokyo University in 1948, but he has never practiced medicine. In that same year he published his first book,
The Road Sign at the End of the Street
.
In 1951 he was awarded the most important Japanese literary prize, the Akutagawa, for his novel
The Crime of Mr. S. Karuma
. In 1960 his novel
The Woman in the Dunes
won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. It was made into a film by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1963 and won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the first of Mr. Abe’s novels to be published in translation in the United States, in 1964.
The Face of Another
(1966) was also made into a film by Mr. Teshigahara. Other novels in translation include
The Ruined Map
(1969),
Friends
(1969),
The Box Man
(1974), and
The Man Who Turned Into a Stick
(1976).
A Note About the Translator
E. Dale Saunders, translator of Kōbō Abe’s
The Woman in the Dunes
(1964),
The Face of Another
(1966), and
The Ruined Map
(1969), received his A.B. from Western Reserve University (1941), his M.A. from Harvard (1948), and his Ph.D. from the University of Paris (1952). He is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, having previously taught at International Christian University, Tokyo, and at Harvard University.
Among his publications are
Mudra: A Study of Symbolic Gestures in Japanese Buddhist Sculpture
(1960) and
Buddhism in Japan
(1964).