Beyond The Curve is a collection of short fictional stories by revered Japanese writer Kobu Abe. Although it is his first collection of short fiction it is widely considered to be his best. Each of the short stories included in the work tell the tale of seemingly ordinary people leading seemingly ordinary lives, but whose mundane existence takes a suddenly nightmarish turn which lead each of the protagonists to suddenly question everything that they have previously known, including their own identity, and the nature of life itself.
As is typical for a Abe story,each of the works is almost surreal in its style - as if Salvador Dali committed words onto paper in order to explain his artwork. The title story is the tragic tale of a man who has lost his memory, and is struggling to remember the details of his life, trying to return his memory to that place "beyond the curve." This story is more gentle in both its subject matter and its construction than much of the collection; in An Irrelevant Death, the protagonist goes home from work as usual one evening only to find a corpse in his apartment. While he tries to come up with a plan to dispose of the body he realizes that everything he thinks of makes him look guilty, and he worries that it will look as though he murdered the man himself.
Similarly bleak is Record of a Transformation which tells the story of a soldier who has been executed and who recounts his story graphically from the area between life and death. Although exceptionally gory in its imagery the story is a comment upon war and its ultimate futility.
Kobu Abe was one of Japan's most well-known writers, and was also respected in other areas of the arts too, particularly as a playwright. As a child he read voraciously and listed Dostoyevsky and Kafka among his favorites; he was later compared to Kafka himself by literary critics. Two years after the publication of Beyond the Curve, the title story was made into a movie.
As his body of work grew, Abe was mentioned in many conversations about the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he sadly passed away before such an honor was bestowed.
