In the following essay, Dissanayake lists the reasons for the success of the cinematic adaptation of Abé's novel The Woman in the Dunes.

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 Japane...

[In The Woman in the Dunes, a man comes to a] village, each of whose houses is set in a deep pit in the dunes to protect it from the weather. He stays overnight in a house with a woman. In the morning no ladder is lowered for him. He is kept prisoner: to help shovel sand into buckets, to keep the house from being buried and, incited by proximity, to beget children with the woman. Thus he is impressed into the survival and continuity of the village. The plot, which is what it must be called, is designed as a...