The Woman In The Dunes Av Kobo Abe

<p>Dazzlingly original, Kobo Abe''s <i>The Woman in the Dunes </i>is one of the premier Japanese novels in the twentieth century, and this Penguin Classics edition contains a new introduction by David Mitchell, author of <i>Cloud Atlas</i>.<br><br>Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist, searches the scorching desert for beetles. As night falls he is forced to seek shelter in an eerie village, half-buried by huge sand dunes. He awakes to the terrifying realisation that the villagers have imprisoned him with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit. Tricked into slavery and threatened with starvation if he does not work, Jumpei''s only chance is to shovel the ever-encroaching sand - or face an agonising death. Among the greatest Japanese novels of the twentieth century, <i>The Woman in the Dunes </i>combines the essence of myth, suspense, and the existential novel.<br><br>Kobo Abe (1924-93) was born in Tokyo, grew up in Manchuria, and returned to Japan in his early twenties. During h