A man misses the last bus and wakes up trapped at the bottom of a sand pit with a woman who has accepted her captivity. Abe's 1964 existentialist parable is Kafkaesque in the most precise sense, and entirely Japanese. The relentless sand as entropy, bureaucracy, and fate is among literature's great extended metaphors.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.