[2] Abe has often been compared to Franz Kafka for his modernist sensibilities and his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society.

His favorite authors were Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Edgar Allan Poe.

[1] Specifically, Abe left the Tokyo University Medical School in October 1944, returning to his father's clinic in Mukden.

[2][8] In 1945 Abe married Machi Yamada, an artist and stage director, and the couple saw successes within their fields in similar time frames.

[9] As the postwar period progressed, Abe's stance as an intellectual pacifist led to his joining the Japanese Communist Party, with which he worked to organize laborers in poor parts of Tokyo.

Soon after receiving the Akutagawa Prize in 1951, Abe began to feel the constraints of the Communist Party's rules and regulations alongside doubts about what meaningful artistic works could be created in the genre of "socialist realism.

He visited Kafka's house in Prague, read Rilke and Karel Čapek, reflected on his idol Lu Xun, and was moved by a Mayakovsky play in Brno.

[13] His political activity came to an end in 1967 in the form of a statement published by himself, Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and Jun Ishikawa, protesting the treatment of writers, artists, and intellectuals in Communist China.

Further experiences with the swamp centered around its use as a staking ground for condemned criminals with "[their] heads—now food for crows—appearing suddenly out of the darkness and disappearing again, terrified and attracted to us."

[8] Though he did much work as an avant-garde novelist and playwright, it was not until the publication of The Woman in the Dunes in 1962 that Abe won widespread international acclaim.

[15] In the 1960s, he collaborated with Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara on the film adaptations of The Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, and The Man Without a Map.

Woman in the Dunes received widespread critical acclaim and was released only four months after Abe was expelled from the Japanese Communist Party.

He also published two novels, Box Man (1973) and Secret Rendezvous (1977), alongside a series of essays, musical scores, and photographic exhibits.

[8] The Abe Studio provided a foil for much of the contemporary scene in Japanese theater, contrasting with the Haiyuza's conventional productions, opting to focus on dramatic, as opposed to physical, expression.

It was a safe space for young performers, whom Abe would often recruit from the Toho Gakuen College in Chofu City, on the outskirts of Tokyo, where he taught.