In this famous postwar Japanese novel, the first of Abe's to be translated into English, Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist in pursuit of a rare specimen of beetle, wanders into a strange seaside village, whose residents all live in sandpits. He is taken prisoner, and, along with a widow cast out by the community, he is forced to move into her sandpit and continually shovel away the sand that threatens to take over the village. In Niki's struggles...

"Set in Manchuria in the aftermath of the Asian Pacific War. The central character is Kuki Kyūzō, whose settler parents relocated from Japan to the Manchurian puppet-state as the Japanese empire expanded. Kyūzō's father, a factory technician, dies shortly after he is born. In the course of Japan's defeat and the Soviet Union's occupation of Manchuria, Kyūzō's mother is seriously wounded, forcing him to remain behind with her rather than evacuate...

"The author combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett." --

An amateur entomologist is left in Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle found in sandy locations. When he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night with a young widow in her hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema's most unnerving and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of the Sisyphean struggle of everyday life.