The story of an unprepossessing schoolteacher captured on an insect-hunting excursion and subjected to slavery would seem merely bizarre if it were not treated in a meaningful way [in The Woman in the Dunes]. Some of Kobo Abé's readers will recall Kafka's manipulation of a nightmarish tyranny of the unknown, others Beckett's selection of sites like the sandpit of this novel as a symbol of the undignified human predicament. Yet others will see that Abé remains wholly Japanese in rendering his abstract theme through particulars observed with such attention that they take on an almost perverse beauty…. [He] has created a myth of suffering humanity within the recognizably real frame of contemporary Japanese society.
He depicts the ease with which man loses civilized values while yet insisting upon a residual humanity. The unhappy schoolteacher is led skillfully from an initial realistic situation to his hovel in a sandpit where, like the other slave householders of the wretched seaside village, he is forced to keep back the encroaching sand. Throughout the novel he desperately plans escape. His single attempt is a failure, and when at last he might get free he has grown indifferent to release.
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