The Woman in the Dunes

Kōbō Abe · 1962 CE · Novel · Japanese · Contemporary

An amateur entomologist takes a weekend on the coast hunting a beetle that lives in sand, misses the last bus, and accepts a village bed in a house at the bottom of a dune pit reached by rope ladder. In the morning the ladder is gone and the woman who lives there is already shovelling, because the sand must be dug out nightly or the house goes under. Winner of the Yomiuri Prize and the work that carried postwar Japanese writing to world readers.

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