Friends

Fülszöveg

Friends
a play by Kobo Abe
Translated by Donald Keene
Friends is a tense drama about the destruction of an individual. The play opens to a popular romantic song—"Poor broken necklace . . . Little lost beads, little lost beads." A family then enters the apartment of a young man. Without invitation or introduction, they announce that they will save him from his loneliness by living with him and being his friends. This is their life, restringing all the "little lost beads."
Shocked by this strange invasion, the young man at first tries to reason with them to persuade them to leave; but reason proves as useless against their cheerful madness as it is with the policemen he then calls. Slowly and effectively, the family deprives the young man of his reasons for living— his fiancée, his self-esteem, and his interest in his work. They struggle to convince him, in the name of brotherhood and love, that his desire for privacy and the choice of companions is an aberration.
An unusual... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Friends
a play by Kobo Abe
Translated by Donald Keene
Friends is a tense drama about the destruction of an individual. The play opens to a popular romantic song—"Poor broken necklace . . . Little lost beads, little lost beads." A family then enters the apartment of a young man. Without invitation or introduction, they announce that they will save him from his loneliness by living with him and being his friends. This is their life, restringing all the "little lost beads."
Shocked by this strange invasion, the young man at first tries to reason with them to persuade them to leave; but reason proves as useless against their cheerful madness as it is with the policemen he then calls. Slowly and effectively, the family deprives the young man of his reasons for living— his fiancée, his self-esteem, and his interest in his work. They struggle to convince him, in the name of brotherhood and love, that his desire for privacy and the choice of companions is an aberration.
An unusual variation on the Theater of the Absurd, Friends is more formal than its Western counterparts.
Kobo Abe, one of the outstanding contemporary writers in Japan, is best known in the United States for his novels. Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another.
Donald Keene is one of the foremost translators of Japanese works into English. He is Professor of Japanese at Columbia University.
The title and author's name are presented on the cover in Japanese characters. Vissza