The Man Who Turned Into A Stick (棒になった男 – Bō ni natta otoko) is a one-act play written in 1957 by Kōbō Abe.

The second, The Cliff of Time, represents life itself, or The Process and the third, The Man who Turned into a Stick, is death.

Hideo Kojima has referred to the play as thematic inspiration for the 2019 video game Death Stranding, alongside Abe's 1950 short story The Stick.

The play is set in June on a hot Sunday afternoon with a department store in the background and crowds of people passing by.

[2] It is a hot Sunday, when a stick falls from the sky and nearly strikes Hippie Boy in the Head.

[3] The Man who Turned into a Stick tries to explain that this child is not the culprit, but instead was a witness to his fall.

[2] The Man from Hell tells Hippie Boy that five dollars was a bad deal; it was not the stick that he sold, but himself in the process.

[2] Though she is not meant to, she feels compassion for the Man Who Turned into a Stick and calls him a "poor thing".

[3] The Man from Hell holds no feeling towards the deceased, as he remarks that after all, (he points to the crowd watching the play) there are a whole forest of sticks.

[2] The Man Who Turned into a Stick is a difficult play to understand, and many scholars have attempted to decipher its meaning.

[4] Thus, it has been argued by some that the Man Who Turned into a Stick transformed into a physical representation of his life as a worker: a tool used by others for the purpose of some task.

[4] It is important to note here that the Man from Hell commented on the rising number of sticks, which some scholars have argued that this implies that worker's lives are dehumanized and their working conditions are so deary that their entire life is akin to that of a stick.