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 ...
