[1] This movement departed from Japanese traditional thinking and from established forms of narration, which focused on esthetic values and emotional states of mind (such as appear in the works of Junichiro Tanizaki and Ryunosuke Akutagawa); it also departed from modernist views, which continued to be popular in world literature and in Japan (Japanese modernist writers included Haruo Satō, Sei Ito, Tatsuo Hori, Riichi Yokomitsu and Yasunari Kawabata).
Abe's intellectual approach was incompatible with the socio-political atmosphere of Japan in the early Shōwa period (1925–1945), with rising fascism and militarism, and the crusade to preserve Japanese feudal traditions.
In 1921, while in high school, Abe took a one-year leave to recover from a lung illness, which proved to be non-threatening, and during this year began to write tanka poems under the guidance of Kōhei.
[3] In November 1925, while at university, he contributed his maiden work, Kasei (Metaplasia), and an essay, Kyoseisha no Tamashii (The Spirit of Rectifier) to Shumon (Red Gate), the Department of Literature's magazine.
He became acquainted with the editor of Shumon, writer Seiichi Funabashi, who in 1967 received the Noma Literary Prize for Suki na Onna no Munakazari (好きな女の胸飾り) (The Beloved Lady's Pectorals).
[2] In 1926, Abe associated himself with Aozora (Blue Skies), a coterie magazine published by the young writers Motojirō Kajii and Nakatani Takao, and the then-budding poet and literary critic Tatsuji Miyoshi.
In 1929, partly in response to Ryunosuke Akutagawa's suicide, Abe wrote Shuchi-teki Bungaku-ron (On Intellectualist Literature), which he published in Shi to Shiron (Poetry and Poetic Theory) magazine, founded in the previous year by Tatsuji Miyoshi and the writer Sakutarō Hagiwara.
Abe's professional debut was Nichi-Doku Taiko Kyōgi (The Japan-Germany Athletic Games); it appeared in the January 1930 issue of the avant-garde literary magazine Shinchō and was instantly welcomed as a promising young writer by the Shinkō Geijutsu (Modern Art) movement.
It is the story of a Japanese family split between the debauched, wasteful and cruel husband, Kamon Kirishima, and his devout Christian wife, Matsuko, sexually repressed, whose forbearance seems limitless.
[1] On another level, Fuyu no Yado is seen as Abe's attack on Japan's strengthening nationalistic fascism, which is represented by Masako's manipulations to convert others to Christianity, while the negative consequences of her efforts, her declining health, the disintegration of the family and its final destruction, predicts the country's future.
In July 1945, Abe removed to Mimasaka in Okayama to escape the intensive bombing of Tokyo and in November, three months after Japan's capitulation, he joined his family in Himeji.
In April 1950, Abe traveled to Hiroshima with other writers, among them Yasunari Kawabata) for a meeting of the Japan Pen Club and delivered a lecture on "War and Peace".
In March 1959, Abe and Kiyoshi Aono issued a written protest against the revision of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan.
In May 1965, Abe, Rokurō Hidaka, a prominent academic and author of The Price of Affluence: Dilemmas of Contemporary Japan, and Yoshio Nakano, editor of the left-wing journal Heiwa ("Peace") protested against the Vietnam War and called for a united anti-war movement.
Abe's other literary translations include: Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, 1935 and The Happy Prince, 1954; Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, 1936 and Tess, 1969; Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, 1952; Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, 1954; Jack London's Call of the Wild, 1955; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Silver Blaze, 1958; Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer, c. 1959; Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, 1961; Jane Austen's Emma, 1965 and Persuasion, 1968; Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling, 1965; Eleanor Farjeon's The Silver Curlew, 1968; Walter de la Mare's Stories from the Bible, 1970.