Abe Kobo's masterpiece, woven using allegorical techniques

Kobo Abe's masterpiece, "The Woman in the Sand," was published in 1962 and brought him instant worldwide fame. It was translated into English in 1964, and has since been translated into over 20 languages, including French, Czech, Finnish, Danish, and Russian.

The work is based on the disappearance of a man.
The protagonist sets out to collect insects in the sandy land to escape from his gray daily life.
A strange village has formed on the sand dunes along the coast he visited.
The houses are built into sand pits dug nearly 20 meters deep, like a crumbling honeycomb.

The man is trapped in a sand pit where a woman lives alone due to a plot by the villagers, and is forced to dig every day like the mythical Sisyphus, who must roll a boulder without rest to prevent the house from being buried by the flowing sand.
The woman explains to him, who is dumbfounded, that it is difficult for her to endure life there alone.
They said they couldn't stop the work because if one house collapsed, the entire village built on the dunes would collapse.

A man who tries to escape several times, screaming that even a monkey could do something like digging up sand if he were trained, and that he must have a more plausible reason for existing.
The author's voice inserted in the scene where the woman comforts the man after he escapes from the hole under a meticulous plan but is eventually sent back by the villagers, [It would be good to lick each other's wounds.
But if you keep licking a wound that will never heal, won't your tongue eventually wear out?] This part strongly stimulates readers who are enduring the daily repetition of daily life.

But the work doesn't end here.
After accidentally inventing a device to draw water from the sand, which the villagers had to distribute to the man to intimidate him as he attempted to escape, the man postpones his escape even though he is now in a position to do so.
Because of a desire to tell someone in the village about the water pump.
This abrupt ending leaves the reader hesitant and forced to question the very basis of everyday existence from various angles.

The world inside and outside the sand, connected like a Möbius strip

In his collection of essays, “Desert Thoughts,” Abe Kobo writes, “Deserts, or things that are desert-like, always have an indescribable charm.
It could be said that it is a longing for something that is not available in Japan, but I spent my childhood in Manchuria, which was almost like a desert.
It could be explained as nostalgia for the landscapes I saw and grew up in as a child, but in my memory, I think I longed for the desert even though I was surrounded by such a desert-like environment.
On a day when the sky is dyed dark brown and dust rises in the air, making it suffocating, sand that cannot be wiped away no matter how much you wipe it digs into your parched eyelids.
“Behind that irritated feeling was not a feeling of discomfort, but a kind of excited anticipation,” he confessed.
A longing for such a desert-like thing permeates the entire work.

The protagonist in the work is fascinated by the image of constantly flowing sand, which is different from the stifling reality that forces him to hang around all year round, and sets off for the sandy land, eventually acquiring the perspective of “seeing things through the eyes of sand.”
Seeing things through the eyes of sand is symbolized by the worldview that the protagonist acquires, that the world inside the sand pit and the world outside are ultimately connected like a Möbius strip.

After discovering water, he begins to feel “as if he were on top of a tower, even though he is still in a hole,” and he even comes to think of his coworkers outside the sandpit as “like cookie cutters, with no envy, just outlines and no substance.”

An excellent novel that you won't be able to put down once you start reading it.

A house built in a constantly shifting sand pit.
The setting itself is so fictional.
However, the author vividly and sensually portrays the characters in the sand based on his own experience living in the desert-like Manchuria and his detailed imagination.
Yukio Mishima said of this work: [An introduction full of poetry and suspense, several thrilling escape scenes, and an ending as concise, dry, and abrupt as sand.
All of this demonstrates the happy combination of Abe Kobo's talents as a playwright and as a novelist.
The author's creation of a widespread fear of Japan's reality is entirely fabricated, but the fiction is sustained by a persistent, keen sense of urgency.
He praised it as “an excellent novel that you can’t put down once you start reading.”
On the other hand, there is an evaluation that the protagonist's anxiety and sense of futility after falling into a sand pit appealed to the sensibilities of the post-war Japan, which led to its spectacular success.

This work, which won the Yomiuri Literary Award in 1963 and the French Prize for Best Foreign Literature in 1968, was made into a film by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1964, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film.