Rare Book of the Day – Inter Ice Age 4, Kobo Abe. First American Edition.

Kobe Abe (1924-1993) was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor. With his modernist sensibilities, he's often compared with Franz Kafka for his surreal, existential and often nightmarish portrayal of individuals in modern society. He won the prestigious Yomiuri Prize in 1962 for his novel The Woman in the Dunes, and his name was tossed around many times for the Nobel Prize, but unfortunately his death precluded that possibility.

Inter Ice Age 4 is Abe's foray into science fiction, originally serialized in the journal Sekai from 1958-1959. John Clute, writing in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction does a much better job summarizing the plot than I could even attempt: "It is a complex story set in a near-future Japan threatened by the melting polar ice caps. The protagonist, Professor Katsumi, has been in charge of developing a computer/information system capable of predicting human behavior. Fatally for him, this system predicts his compulsive refusal to go along with his associates and his government in the creation of genetically engineered children, adapted for life in the rising seas. Most of the novel, narrated by Katsumi, deals with a philosophical confrontation between his deeply alienated refusal of the future and the computer's knowing representations of that refusal and the alternatives to it. The resulting psychodramas include a mysterious murder and the enlistment of his unborn child into the ranks of the mutated water-breathers."

Pretty cool stuff. There was even a script written for an unproduced film, with suggestions that Charles Bronson play Katsumi. This is the first American Edition:

Kobo Abe:

More info here:
http://www.rarebooksleuth.com/featured/inter-ice-age-4-kobe-abe-first-american-edition