Here’s the basic setup for Kobe Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes: A teacher by profession and entomologist by passion plans a brief getaway from the daily routine to collect insects in a sandy region of Japan near the ocean. Only, after missing the bus home, he finds himself taken care of through the initial hospitality of a small outlying village, but only later to discover that he’s been placed at the bottom of an enormous sandpit, where awaits a 30 year old woman, a rotting hut and the necessary task of shoveling sand every night to avoid their burial from the constantly shifting and collapsing walls of the pit.

An unrealistic story but perfect for a philosophical allegory, one not unlike the Sisyphus myth. And in some respects, the less said the better because the joy in reading The Woman in the Dunes is the play in perspectives and concepts that work in and out of the text. An overall quality that’s permeable rather than definitive, so contradictory premises our quite at home in a person’s reading, which is what makes them all the more challenging. Who’s more ‘free’, the woman who accepts her fate or the man who never gives up on the dream of escaping? Is this a story that criticizes or is in support of domestic cohabitation? Does sexuality liberate individuals from their social contexts or does it only bind them? The questions and possibilities are meant to be expansive rather than reductive, whether it be with broader philosophical notions or examining the social structures that we, more often than not, willingly submit to as we live our lives.

How the book is written is worth noting as well. Initially, the events are largely factual and make this unrealistic tale believable. Abe works the narrative forward by giving step by step accounts as to the physical details of the story as well as the internal emotions of the trapped man as he begins to realize the situation he’s in and desparately wanting to get out of. In contrast though, as the book moves along, the writing falls into more abstract paragraphs that rely upon associative connections rather than the logical progression that is largely relied upon at the beginning of the book. And this is what works to open the book up for its myriad implications and repeated readings. Endless possibilities.