Reviews for Three Plays by Kobo Abe

The average rating for Three Plays by Kobo Abe based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-09 00:00:00 James Rogers "The Green Stockings" was exactly what I had hoped to find by picking up some of Kobo Abe's dramatic work. It is as good as some of his best novels. Very much in line with The Box Man and Secret Rendezvous. "The Ghost is Here" was also quite a delight, plenty of Kobo Abe's typically sheepish protagonists running around and trying to swindle people with various Ghost-related scams. "Involuntary Homicide" was borderline skippable, but its inclusion makes this collection of plays much more representative of Kobo Abe's total body of work.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-11 00:00:00 Harlan Frolich Being a fan, I loved it. Involuntary Homicide was repetitious in nature, centered around a disturbing event, focused on moral conundrums and populated with characters you both identify with and are alternately disgusted with. That is to say - classic Kobo Abe. The physical setting and faux 'court room drama' style felt a bit rudimentary for Abe, but was quite easy to imagine on the stage. The Green Stockings was deliciously on the outer edge of weirdness in the Abe canon, which made it the most wild streak of his imagination and most compelling for me. The Ghost is Here seemed more like a film script than the other two, in that the setting wasn't so austere, nor the ground covered as erratic; so it fell into a complete narrative world one might expect from a film of his. The characters were by far the more developed and storyline the most intricately crafted. All in all, I was very happy to have read these three examples of what he accomplished with plays - and wish the rest of his work in that arena would be translated into English.