The Burned Map. A Secret Meeting. Those Who Entered the Ark

Kobo Abe is one of the most brilliant writers in Japan, a star of the post-war Japanese avant-garde. His books are read all over the world, and films and plays are made based on them. He is a continuator of the traditions of Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Alberto Moravia, and a precursor of Haruki Murakami. In each of his novels, he creates a surreal reality that reformats the reader's worldview, distorts—or clarifies—the reader's perceptual prisms, and each time completely astounds. It is no coincidence that another famous Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe, called Abe the greatest writer in the entire history of literature.
The three novels included in this collection are stories about losses: embarking on a search for other people or for themselves, a person loses sanctuary, loved ones, or even themselves. These novels are about the beauty, ugliness, and overall strangeness of the human soul and its collision with the alien, incomprehensibly complex, and sometimes hostile world.