Tomoji Abe

Who was Tomoji Abe?

Tomoji Abe was a Japanese novelist, social critic, humanist and translator of English and American literature. Although he began writing as a modernist, in his later works he represented the intellectual movement in Japanese literature. This movement departed from Japanese traditional thinking and from established forms of narration, which focused on esthetic values and emotional states of mind; it also departed from modernist views, which continued to be popular in world literature and in Japan. Abe's intellectual approach was incompatible with the socio-political atmosphere of Japan in the early Showa period, with rising fascism and militarism, and the crusade to preserve Japanese feudal traditions.