An escape from the outside world is one of the goals for which many of Abe’s protagonists have aimed in his fiction, but in one particularly successful play Abe examined the consequences of that outside world’s invasion of an individual’s private space. The play is, of course, “Tomodachi,” (fi rst staged in 1967 by the Seinen-za, direction by Narise Atsuhiko) and the differences between it and the earlier incarnation of its basic story, as contained within the novella “Chinnyûsha” (1952, “The Intruders”) demonstrate clearly the possible variations of emphasis and perspective between dramatic works and those for the page. The story of either version is simply told: one evening a family of strangers bursts in to the apartment of a fellow who enjoys his solitude. The family has come to save him from his loneliness. The man resists their forced companionship but is unable to remove the intruders from his apartment. In the end, he dies, a victim to their aggressive communality.
Timothy Iles