Abe Kōbō, pseudonym of 
Abe Kimifusa, Kōbō Abe, pen name of Kimifusa Abe,
(born March 7, 1924, Tokyo, Japan—
died Jan. 22, 1993, Tokyo), Japanese
novelist and playwright noted for his
use of bizarre and allegorical situations
to underline the isolation of the
individual.
Kōbō Abe was born in Tokyo and raised
in Manchuria, with roots to the island of
Hokkaido from his mother's side, he
never felt at home in either of the
places and made this sense of
rootlessness a major theme in his
writings. He became one of Japan's
highly acclaimed postwar authors by
masterfully portraying haunting visions
of people senselessly trapped by
modern urban life.
The Woman in the Dunes is a novel by
the Japanese writer Kōbō Abe,
published in 1962. It won the 1962
Yomiuri Prize for literature, and an
English translation and a film adaptation
appeared in 1964. The protagonist of
The Woman in the Dunes is Niki Jumpei,
an amateur entomologist who, on a
weekend trip from the city, discovers a
bizarre village in the dunes where
residents live in deep sand pits.
Imprisoned with a widow in one of the
pits, he must shovel the omnipresent
sand that threatens to bury the
community.
was a Japanese writer, playwright,
musician, photographer, and inventor.
He is best known for his 1962 novel The
Woman in the Dunes that was made into
an award-winning film by Hiroshi
Teshigahara in 1964.
An absurdist drama about the gradual
destruction of the individual. A family
enters the apartment of a young man
and announces that they will save him
from his loneliness by living with him.
Slowly, they destroy everything, in the
cheerful psychotic name of "brotherly
love".
I chose the representative text
because I appreciated the tension
created by the unjust captivity's
circumstances, but also because I
sensed the strangeness of the setting,
which gave the composition an alien feel.
The protagonist's character was
particularly peculiar since he appeared
to be both intelligent and inventive
while at the same time being clumsy and
inept. This contradiction was
frustrating, especially since it made it
difficult for him to escape. Overall,
despite a few bothersome aspects, I
like The Woman in the Dunes's plot.