Kobo Abe is one of Japan's most brilliant writers, a star of the post-war Japanese avant-garde. His books are read all over the world, they make films and put on performances. Continuing the Dostoevsky Traditions , Edgar Allan Poe , Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia , Haruki Murakami 's In each of his novels, he creates a surreal reality. which reformats the reader's picture of the world, distorts or clarifies the reader's prisms of perception and every time completely stunning . No wonder another famous Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe called Abe the largest writer in the history of literature. Three novels included in this collection are stories of losses: going in search of other people or himself, a person loses refuge, loved ones or himself. These novels are about beauty, ugliness, and in general about the strangeness of the human soul and its collision with the strangeness of an incomprehensible, infinitely complex and sometimes hostile world.