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, films are made based on them and performances are staged. A successor to the traditions of Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia, the forerunner of Haruki Murakami, in each of his novels he creates a surreal reality that reformats the reader’s picture of the world, distorts – or clarifies – the reader’s prisms of perception and each time completely stuns. It is not for nothing 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: having gone in search of other people or himself, a person loses shelter, loved ones, or himself. These novels are about beauty, ugliness and, in general, about the strangeness of the human soul and its collision with the alienness of an incomprehensible, infinitely complex and sometimes hostile world.