Cobo Abe The Woman in the Dunes

Kobo Abe (1924–1993) is a Japanese writer who has been compared to German writer Franz Kafka. Abe's The Women in the Dunes is one of the premier Japanese novels of the twentieth century. It combines the essence of myth, suspense, and the existential novel. The main character, schoolteacher Niki Jumpei, travels to a remote seaside village to collect insects for his research. In the evening, he misses the bus back to the nearest city, however. The villages then find a place for him to stay with a young woman in a shack at the bottom of a vast sand pit. The walls of the pit are so steep that Jumpei must climb down a rope ladder to enter the home. The mysterious woman spends each night shoveling the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten her shack and the village. She places the sand in buckets which the villages retrieve using ropes. The villages then sell the sand to construction companies for concrete production. In return, the villages provide food and water for the woman. J...

Author: Abe Cobo
ISBN: 679733787
Year of publication: 1991
Translator: Saunders E. Dale
Genre: Modern prose
Number of pages: 197
Reading time: 3 h. 17 min.
Formats: FB2, EPUB, PDF
Language: english
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