The Woman in the Dunes
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 man in the pit strikes a number of readers as “quite unsympathetic,” and his acceptance of captivity reads less as philosophy than as a refusal to try. The heavier objection is a scene mid-book that many describe as “a rape scene, or a sexual assault scene at the very least,” and “terribly dehumanising,” say the readers who found it gratuitous rather than load-bearing. The 1960s gender politics date the book even for admirers. Readers who want the village’s scheme to hold together economically find it doesn’t, and complain that some chapters were “just too random or not well finished.” More than one leaves saying the film adaptation might be superior.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
