"People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (2008, 449 pages)   





People of the Book is about the attempt by a skilled book conservator, Hanna Heath from Australia to preserve in as pristine a condition as possible a very famous mauscript which gives the history of people of the Jewish faith in Sarajevo during the middle ages. Sarajevo is under near war conditions at the time. Part of her job is  to trace the history of the illuminated book, to find out as much as she can about where the book has been in the last 500 years or so. In her examination of the book she notices an insect wing, a wine stain, a cat hair and a saltwater stain. From these clues she is able to reconstruct the paths the book has taken all over Europe. The story line then goes into a narrative about other people who have had the book. We go back to Sarajevo in 1940 and see the heroic efforts it required to keep the Nazis from burning the book   I confess I did not know that the Nazis had employed a large number of people lead by "art experts" to seek out and destroy Jewish artifacts. Thousands of amazing old books were burned. We go back to Vienna in 1894, portrayed as a period of decadence. Each "flash back" section of the book is interleaved with current events in Hanna's effort to conserve and understand the book. We also see her interactions with museum directors, other book conservators and her very brilliant neurosurgeon Mother. Her mother looks on Hanna's profession as a waste of brain power. We also get to know about and see some of Hanna's love live. We go to Vienna in 1609. We go inside a harem in Seville in 1480.

Along the way we learn a lot about the art of book conservation. We learn how illuminated books were made. I was fascinated by the account of how the hairs of Persian Cats had a role to play in the creation of the Sarajevo Haggadah. ( I do not know if these and other details are correct but they sounded plausible throughout.) She makes skillfull use of historical detail. The level of research goes way beyond simply watching a couple of History Channel programs.

Some of the "flash back" sections did seem to go on a bit long. At times I sort of wished the character of the mother could be deleted as it did not add much to the story and was kind of a distraction. At times I also felt Hanna's quarrel with her mother sort of humanized her a bit so it was not a big negative for me.

People of the Book tells us some things about the reading life of those who collect books as artifacts. People read to get historical information to help them appreciate books as art objects. They feel a continuity with other owners of old books.

When I read of Hanna's attempt to trace the previous owners of the book I could not help but recall when a few years ago I found in a second hand book store a large number of the early volumes of the Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence. A number of the books were over 50 years old. They had a lot of character. To me they were beautiful. On the inside cover of each of the twenty or so books was written, in what looked like a very old hand, the letter numbers that a previous owner of the book had liked most. I still wonder who that might have been. I imagine the person treasured those books for many years then one day somebody took them to a second hand book store. The book store clerk told me they had been on the shelve there for many years. As I left the store I saw her call the manager over to point out the person who for some clearly senseless reason had at last bought these books.

People of the Book is entertaining, makes good use of historical research and teaches us a lot of things we might not know too much about. The author has written two other historical novels, for one of which she got a Pulitzer prize.
Mel u

"Shame in the Blood" by Tetsuo Miura

Shame in the Blood by Tetsuo Miura (1964, translated by Andrew Driver, 2007 from Japanese, 216 pages)

I am reading this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 3

It seems to me that this book was published and marketed in a misleading fashion. It is marketed as a novel consisting of six interrelated stories about the same family. In fact it is five stories about the same married couple and a final forty five page story that has nothing at all to do with the first five stories. The first five stories are very interrelated and are in fact repetitious. It seems almost like the author went back and rewrote the stories so they could be marketed as a novel. The book was a great success when it was first published. It sold over a million copies and the author won the very prestigious Akutagawa Price for Literature, among other awards. Of course, that the book is collection of short stories published separately and then assembled as a novel does not take away from the literary merit of the work but it does seem a bit opportunistic.


The narrator of Shame in the Blood has six siblings. Four them have already killed themselves and one of the survivors is nearly blind and his brother disappeared many years ago. The narrator's family is poor and he is a struggling writer without a real job. He meets a waitress, they are in their early twenties, they marry and she ends up as the main source of income for the family. We are not really provided any clear explanation for why four of his siblings committed suicide. His mother died when he was young and we do meet his elderly father when they go back for a visit. The father laments that he has no accomplishments in life and that he is a complete failure and disgrace as a father. We see nothing overtly wrong with him. He is just a very sad old man. When his son comes back for a visit the wife is pregnant. The father is so happy he begins to make in secret a list of names for the as of yet unborn child. In short sequence the father dies (the family lingering over the dying father is very well relayed and is a very well done account of a meaningless life coming to an end), the wife miscarries. The family finds the list of names the father was making along with a note saying he prays the birth of his first grandchild will redeem his life somehow and give him a new start.

The stories do show some temporal confusion until you realize it not really a novel. In one story we are somehow back in mid 1944 WWII Japan with the then 15 or so year old narrator. He regrets he is a year too young to join the military. When the bombs fall all around him he wishes he will be killed so he can die an honorable death. He suggests many put themselves intentionally in harms way when the bombing raids begin (they happen often enough so the residents know what to expect) as a form of suicide. The suggestion is made that Japan has made at that point the decision to commit suicide as a nation.
This a death obsessed work. A feeling of futile sadness permeates it. We do feel we know the narrator and his wife well.

We see what it was like to be poor in Japan in the 1950s and early 1960s. The stories are well told and each of the five stories about the couple give us some new information about them. There is a lot of repeated material in the book which is a by product of the fact that the chapters were first published as stand alone stories. The author is a talented story teller and clearly knows how family history effects individuals in ways deeper than they may know.

There is not a lot of information on Tetsuo Miura on the internet in English. He was born in Aomori, Japan in 1931. I could not confirm if he is still alive. Several of his own siblings did kill themselves.


As to my endorsement of the book, I would say read it after your have read twenty or so of the better known Japanese novelists first. This is his only work translated into English, though he does have a lot of other novels and stories. The stories are very well told in a straightforward fashion. A number of the Goodreads.com commentators on Shame in the Blood did dislike the put together collection of stories marketed as novel feel that this work for sure has. In spite of this, it is well written. I would say buy it used or better yet get a library copy of this work as it was marketed in a perhaps deceitful way. I think if it were published now by a living author it would be condemned as a dishonest marketing ploy.

Mel u

"Hardboiled" by Banana Yoshimoto

Hardboiled  by Banana Yoshimoto (89 pages, 1999 translated by Michael Emmerich) is the third of her works  which I have  read.   It is a beautifully told story of a woman who goes to a mountain inn on the one year anniversary of her lover's death in a fire, the only female one among a number of males.   It is a story of a  half love brought on by the fear of loneliness.   It is a great ghost story.    Any fan of ghost stories knows a strange isolated inn can have some surprises

I'm a woman.   Once, just once, I went out with another woman,   She could see things that other people couldn't.  Maybe it rubbed off on me, or maybe being with her sharpened an instinct that I had always had, I don't know.

One of the themes in  the works of Yoshimoto is what loneliness and the fear of being alone can drive women to do.  The protagonist of Hardboiled, about thirty years old, never felt deeply for her former lover and seems to have developed her relationship with her more out of boredom than anything else.   When the relationship ends the narrator soon returns to her normal routine of life.   She had been raised by her mother, a beautiful woman who works in a bar.    The mother is depicted by the narrator as a good mother, a woman with many lovers but she keeps them away from her daughter.  

While at the inn, a woman comes in from the room next door.  She says she has just had a terrible fight with her prone to violence male lover and needs to stay in the narrator's room for a while.    She acts strangely so the narrator goes down stairs to get the manager.   The manager tells her that there are no other guests at the inn that night.    It seems a couple long ago had made a mutual suicide pact.   They brought enough pills to kill each of them.   The woman took much more than half the pills in order to spare the life of her lover.   Women in the inn have often spoken of being approached by a distraught woman.   The female manager of the inn is depicted at the start of the story by the narrator as being totally unattractive in looks and personality.   Events change the narrator's perceptions enough, or at least that is her excuse, that she ends up spending the night on the mat with the inn manager.   We get little or no sense of passion from the narrator, only the sense that she does what she does to avoid loneliness.  

This work is perhaps the most beautifully told of her works that I have read so far.   The production qualities of the book, published by Faber and Faber are very high.   Included in the same book is Hard Luck.    It appears that the two stories were originally published together.   Hard Luck is about a woman keeping vigil over her sister who is in a coma.   I will post on it soon also.   Some people see Banana Yoshimoto as kind of a "light weight" writer.  I do not.  Her works are short and the main characters are relatively young women.   She for sure is fun to read.    She evokes Buddhist  and Shinto themes in her stories.   She might not be the Japanese Dostoevsky but she is very smart, very knowing , she tells a great story and I have added her to  my read all they have written list along with Tanizaki and Oe.  I think I would start reading her works with Goodbye Tsugumi  and if you like than I think you would probably like any thing she has written.  

November Novella Challenge-a beautiful perfectly developed novella-this is my second work for this challenge-I committed to read one novella but may try for four, the second level.

The Japanese Literature Challenge 3-

Woman Unbound Challenge -I think there is a special kind of loneliness that women are prey to that men are not.   I know not every one or maybe most people will not agree with this but I think Yoshimoto sees it.   That is ok but Hardboiled shows us why a woman made the choices she did, what she did to avoid being alone.   Her mother was mostly alone also and we see the second generation effects of this.   

Mel u

"The Makioka Sisters" by Junichiro Tanizaki

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki (1948, 530 pages, translated by Edward Seidensticker) is the

longest work I have read so far for The Japanese Literature 3 Challenge.  It is the fifth book by Tanizaki  that I have read.   Vintage press has twelve of his works in translation in print and I will read them all.  

The Makioka Sisters gives us a very intimate look at the lives of four sisters living in Osaka Japan.   It is set from 1936 to 1940.   Tanizaki is said to have written it during WWII to distract himself from the war.   The book is considered his master work.    The basic plot is simple.   It is the story of a merchant family whose fortunes are not quite what they once were.   They decide to remedy the problem by finding a wealthy husband for the second youngest sister, thirty year old Yukiko.
She has  two older sisters.  Tsurko the eldest has traditionally authority over her sisters now that their parents have passed away.   Her husband took her last name when he was adopted by her family and he is, in theory, the head of the family.   Sachiko is the second oldest and is considered to have the most gentle and warmest nature.   Her two younger sisters live with her most of the time.   Yukiko also has  younger sister who is portrayed as distinctly more modern than her very traditional older sisters.   She has a man in her life that she very much wants to marry, and everyone in the family likes the match as he is from a very good family.   The problem is she is not allowed to marry until all of her older sisters have married.   The fun of the plot turns on a husband hunt for Yukiko.   Yukiko acts like the totally obedient sister she is supposed to be but some how every suitor presented ends up being rejected.   One is simply way to old, one has six children, one has a mentally ill mother and one is simply too ugly.   Along the way we get a very detailed look at life in an upper class family in Osaka.   One sees in the work that there was a lot of regional conflict in Japan.   People from Osaka looked at those from Tokyo as very ill mannered and money driven, people from the Nagasaki area were simply too country and so on.  Of course people from Tokyo looked at those from Osaka as living in the past.   One of the saddest moments in the book is when the older sister and her husband most move to Tokyo to pursue a business opportunity.   We see what the sisters eat, how they feel about their husbands and how they exert control over their families.  A very fun part of  the book for me was when the sisters became friends with a White Russian Family who fled to Japan after the Czar was displaced.   The sisters are amazed by the vitality of the grandmother of the family.   When the Russia family invites them all over for dinner I could not help but laugh as we see them trying to cope with the food.   I was happy to see the sisters said they had all read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.   When the Russian family expressed surprise at this they said that all educated Japanese had read them.  The sisters also become friends with some German neighbors.   One of the best moments in the book was when the Germans, who returned because of political events in 1939, sent them a letter.   There are several letters in the novel and each is marvelously done.   One oddity, to me at least, was the pride of the sisters in their ability to drink alcohol, mostly sake.    In fact it was sort of agreed that if a man was not a drinker at all he would not be considered an acceptable husband as he would simply be too dull.   The sisters hire private investigators to check out the back grounds of possible spouses.   A big issue seems to be how much time the men had spent in the pleasure quarters.   Too much and he was considered a reprobate but no visits there also was a point to ponder.   The sisters father was a habitual frequenter of gieshas after their mother died at an early age.   This seems to be a sort of socially acceptable as long as you do not talk about it.   We really are shown a lot about day to day life.    Each sister has her own  well defined personality and we really feel we know them.   I liked all the sisters.  One of the most suspenseful elements in the book concerned a dark spot that would come and go over the eye of Yukiko.   We get a good look at child rearing practices.   We hear a lot of gossip.   There is conflict among the sisters,  of course.   It was interesting that the husbands of the older sisters had both taken the family name.   Marriages were mostly arranged at the time and we get to see how that business works and meet the marriage broker.  (She knows the in the closet secrets of every well off family in Osaka.   Of course she is very discrete and only tells these secrets to the clients of her beauty parlor!)

Most goodreads commentators on this book have given it four or five stars.   I gave it five.   Some did say it was simply to dry and that it was boring. Those who disliked the novel seemed to feel it was too detailed in its treatment of the conversations and interior lives of  the sisters and their friends.  To me it was a wonderful book that took me into another world very much unlike my own.  Only a few passing references are made in  the novel to political events (the novel period is 1936 to 1940).   I wanted to believe the family would some how survive World War II without terrible suffering.  

This is my 3rd post for the Women Unbound Challenge.    The Makioka Sisters is a very closely observed look at four Japanese women, their families and their relationships with their husbands and how they raised their children.   We see how an unwanted pregnancy is dealt with.  We see the sisters having a great time just being sisters.   I could not help but smile when we slowly began to realize that maybe Yukiko did not want a husband to be picked for her by her older sisters or maybe she does not want one at all.  

The Makioka Sisters is to me a great joy and a master novel.   Readers of Jane Austin will at once relate to the themes of the book.   I would suggest that those wanting to get to know Tanizaki first read The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot, if you like that read Quicksand, then Some Prefer Nettles. if you like these three works then read The Makioka Sisters.   Tanizaki had an interesting life.   For a brief period he was a dramatist in silent films.   I could not help but think when I read this that if were with us now (1886 to 1965) he would be an ultra rich novelist whose every work is sold to Hollywood for millions.  

A WOMAN in the Dunes-by Kobo Abe-a second look

In my post on A Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe I talked almost exclusively about what the novel seems to be saying or manifesting about the man.   We know the man's name, we know his job and we know a lot about his life passion entomology.   The man has a place in society,  he fits in and is valued for what he does and what he knows.   In most posts on the novel on Goodreads and elsewhere the focus is entirely on the man.   Then I started to rethink the book a bit.   It is not called Man in the Dunes.  

We first meet the woman when the male protagonist of the novel seeks a place to stay for a night and gets trapped in a giant hole in  the ground.   The hole in the ground is the home of a woman.   We find out that her husband and child were killed in a typhoon.   We only have a vague idea how she got there.   She has sex with the man or more bluntly said she allows the man to mate with her.   She shows herself naked to the man but it is not clear if this part of a seductive routine or if she like an insect without self consciousness at all.   We are given no insights into her thoughts other than that she has a foreknowledge of the fate of  man and that her life goal is to have a radio.   She does not wish to escape her circumstances.   She seems to see her existence as natural to her species.   Her essence is to be a woman used as bait to keep a man in a hole in the ground shoveling out sand that forever comes back.   In my initial comments on Woman in The Dunes   I went into existentialist interpretations of the novel,   focusing on the man trapped in an absurd meaningless situation.  Now, thanks to the stimulus of the Woman Unbound Reading Challenge I want to talk about the woman in the dunes.  The woman is the existential anti-heroine.   She, with no sense of doing it, is  utterly trapped by an essence, an essential nature that she is no more is aware of than a fish is aware of water.   She is used by the micro society  of the dune who,  not by conscious design, have fashioned her consciousness in such a way that she is useful mainly as bait for a man.   She does not question it.   If she was reflective enough to ponder the issue she would probably say something along the lines of "this what was meant to be" or see it as part of a supernatural design.   The woman maybe seen as evoking the fate of women in rural Japanese society.    Just as in Japanese society prior to the end of World War II, women and men were taught that there role in life, the essence of  their being, was to serve their overlords and their Imperial God, so the woman in the dunes sees no alternative to her life in a hole in the ground.   Expanded beyond this, the  WOMAN in the Dunes, is any woman (or man) bound by what she things is her essence when that essence is just a choice made for her by some one else to impose this on her.   Of course it regresses back.   

Four Stories of The Atomic Aftermath

Noted added September 16, 2014.

To the many readers of this and related posts from U C L A, please let my 100,000 monthly readers know of your feelings on this story and the others in the collection.  I am assuming this book is being read in a class at U C L A and I am very glad to see that.  These stories are world class treasures. 

I have already posted on four stories from Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (edited and introduced by Kenzaburo Oe, 1985)-     Here are the final four stories in the collection.

"Human Ashes" (22 pages)  by Katsuzo Oda.   Katsuzo was exposed to the atomic blast at Hiroshima while working as a student recruit in a factory.   His story was first published in a journal published by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in 1966.   He was never a professional writer.   "Human Ashes"  appears to be his only work in print in English.   Wikipedia has no article on him and all google searches lead back to this story.   "Human Ashes" tells of Katsuzo immediate reaction to the bomb.   He wanders through scenes of horrible destruction.   Katsuzo had just felt the first sexual urges that came with young age and he cannot help but notice many of the female victims have lost much of their clothes.   He begins to wander through the city.   Everywhere he sees the dead and the soon to be dead.   In one very sad moment of terror a black rain begins to fall.   The people of Hiroshima at once assume the Americans are dropping gasoline on them and are terrified as then expect to be set on fire. The rain is radioactive.  The Japanese had received constant reports on the horrible cruelty of the Americans.   We see the Bushido code begin to erode when a young officer (maybe 19 and only an officer in a youth corp) orders the young boy factory workers he was in charge of to line up at his instructions.   He is so shocked when his charges (mostly 13 to 15 years old) run from him.   Just yesterday they obeyed everything he said.   The primary heroes of the boys were kamikaze pilots.   Oe says Odo is the only writer included in the collection who did not go on after the war to become a professional writer.    "Human Ashes"  was written 21 years after the day of the bomb.   Oda was born in 1931, the year Japan invaded Manchuria.   I could not find any images of him nor could I find out if  he is still alive.   "Human Ashes" is a simple completely honest attempt by a thirty five year old man to describe how August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima felt to him.


"Fire Flies" by Yoko Ota (27 pages first published in 1953)  Yoko Ota was already a well known author prior to experiencing the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima.  Her writings focus closely on individual victims of the blast.   It is the first story in the collection that expresses extreme bitterness about the use of the bomb and in which its use is treated as an immoral decision, in the remarks of a doctor treating victims and by the narrator of the story.   I am not sure exactly when the U S Army began to stop censoring the publication of information that could be construed  as anti-American but I think it was around 1953 or so.   (It should be noted that the Japanese public were never informed in any way concerning the terrible actions of their own soldiers.)   The narrator goes to visit a friend she has not seen since August 6, 1945.   As she enters the modest house she notices a young girl disappear into a room.   It turns out she wants to put on her best clothes to meet the visitors.   She comes back into the room.

It was not a girl but a monstrosity.   Her deformed face and hands stood out even more grotesquely because she had put on her best clothes..her face was expressionless.  I broke down weeping  slumped on the wooden board, shuddering but unable to stop my tears.  I wished I could stand up, reach out to the monstrous body of the young woman and embrace it.   However, Japanese people, and I especially, are not accustomed to expressing emotion in this way.

The narrator begins to speak with the young girl.   We find when she goes out people sometimes think she is part of an exhibit.   She says people thing of her as a zoo animal allowed out and will sometimes slip twenty yen in her hand.   Her eyes have a permanent glow.   She cannot eat without spilling food as her mouth and lips were reshaped by the blast. 


"The House of Mirth" by Mitsuhara Inoue (1960, 25 pages) deals with the fate of female orphans, now grown to marriageable age, who lived in a rural orphanage near Nagasaki.   The girls have been there since 1945, most came at ages from infants to ten years.   A few of the girls have married and attempted to have children.   Many have miscarried and none has had a child live past four.   A suitor (in an arrangement made by relatives) is coming to meet  one of the girls.   Everyone wants to keep as a secret from the suitor the fact that the woman in question was at Nagasaki when the bomb went exploded.    Some villagers see the inability of the women to have healthy children as curse brought on my their adoption of Catholicism in place of their old religions.   The became Catholics because the catholic priests helped the orphaned bomb victims.   In this well told story we see the bond between the orphaned women and the shunned status of bomb victims  Discrimination against bomb victims was evidently worse in rural areas around Nagasaki than elsewhere.   Bomb survivors were almost like a class of untouchables.  (In a footnote Inoue describes for us the existence of an untouchable type cast of people in the rural areas.).    I could find almost no information on Inoue.  I could find no images.   Oe tells us he was active in the communist party after the war.   He was born in 1926.

"The Rite" by Hiroko Takenishi (31 pages) was first published in 1963.   Takenishi was born in Hiroshima but was not there on the day of the atomic bomb explosion.   She and a friend are their for the erection ceremony for a monument to Tamiki Hara.   I have already posted on "Summer Flowers, his story in the collection.  Takenishi established a reputation as a critic of modern literature with a profound knowledge of classical literature.   "The Rite" appears to be her only work in print in English.   This story is the most self consciously artistic of the stories in the collection.   It centers around rites of death and rites of mourning interleaved with accounts of the day the bomb dropped.    It is perhaps the most beautifully written of the stories.   I could find no images of her or really no information at all on her via google.

The stories in The Crazy Iris and other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath all are deeply moving.   When I began my blog July 7, 2009 I never thought I would do a series of posts like the ones I have attempted on the stories in this collection.   At first I thought no one will read them.   I have done google searchs on each of the writers.   A few are quite famous but some have little or no information on them  on the web and no pages dedicated to them.   Somehow it made me feel good when I began to see that people from all over the world were coming to my posts on these figures.   In several cases there is nothing else on the web (at least in English) on the writers in this collection.   I thank those who have read my posts on this topic and really hope others will read these stories and Mr Oe's deeply felt introduction to the collection.   It is also a way to read eight stories chosen by a master writer.

"The Woman in the Dunes" by Kobo Abe

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe (1964, translated from Japanese by E. Dale Saunders)

I was some how a little nervous as I began to read The Woman of the Dunes as my expectations for the book were so high.    My fears were misfounded.  It is, to me, a masterpiece.    Like other post WWII Japanese novelists, Abe was influenced by French Existential thinkers and writers like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.  (Side note, has anyone ever read The Plague by Camus who was not required to read it for a class?).   One of the basic tenants of existentialism is that there is no intrinsic meaning to life.  All the codes people are taught to live by are simply not true.   Some saw this as plunging us into a meaningless universe, some saw it as bringing man the freedom to create their own meanings.   It is easy to see why post WWII Japanese intellectuals would be attracted to this.   Much more so than the Germans, the world view of the Japanese people was destroyed by their defeat in WWII and the announcement of the Emperor that he was not divine.   (This theme is treated in Kenzaburo Oe's marvelous When He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears.)    The Bushido code by which the Japanese lived was reduced to a mockery and seemed something imposed on the people to make them slaves to their once master, the Emperor, now a figure of mockery.   A great sense of shame was felt by nearly all and everyone was quick to deny they have believed in the old ways anyway.   They only acted like they did out of fear of their overlords.

The central character of the novel, Niki Jumpei, is teacher.   This was just something he did to make money.  He has a girl friend but does not give her much thought.   His true passion in life was his work as an amateur entomologist.   One of the common characteristics novels by Japanese authors who were influenced by French post WWII novelists (I do not like the term "existential novelist" at all) is their narratives in passing will assert something as an obvious fact when it really may be a baseless absurdity.   Here is what we informed concerning the mental state of entomologists

Even in children, unusual preoccupation with insect collecting frequently indicates and Oedipus complex.   In order to compensate for his unsatisfied desires, the child enjoys sticking pins into insects, which he need never fear will escape.   And the fact that he does not leave off once he has grown up is quite definitely a sign that the condition has become worse.   Thus it far from accidental that entomologists frequently have an acute desire for acquisitions and that they are extremely reclusive, kleptomaniac, homosexual.   From this point to suicide our of weariness with the world is but a step.

The plot action is pretty simple.   (The back of the book in the edition I have gives it away and I really think most potential readers of the book  would know the basic plot before they read it any way so I do not see this as a spoiler).   Niki is on a holiday from his teaching job.   He goes to an area with a lot of sand dunes in the hope of discovering a never before cataloged beetle of some kind.   If does this, he will be famous among other entomologists.    He walks into a village of simple country people, in the sand dune area.   Sand is everywhere and in everything.   The shifting sand is constantly encroaching on the houses.   Niki  needs a place to stay for the night and ends up in the underground dwelling of a 30 or so year old widow.   The dwelling is a sixty foot deep in the ground hole which can be exited only by a rope ladder.   The woman's entire existence revolves around excavating sand.   Everyday what ever she excavates can be blown back by the shifting winds.  (The Myth of Sisyphus is one of the dominant themes in the work of Camus.)    The man finds himself unable to get out of the hole in the ground.   He eventually has sex with the woman (she may be a trap for him like the bait one would put out for an insect might be scent from a female of his species.).  Their mating is described quite clinically just as an entomologist from a far superior planet might detail in a report on  human mating customs.   Niki's life comes to resemble that of a beetle that lives in a hole in the ground and preforms an absurd act over and over again to live.   He slowly tries to find or create a meaning to his existence and always hopes he will escape.   The villagers reasons for keeping him trapped are totally without logic.   He comes to feel a kind of fondness for he woman while at the same time hating her and using her body for sex.   The woman's only goal in life is to somehow earn enough money to buy a radio.   Years go by.   The man loses interest in reading, forgets many of the details of his old life.  

I  know my account of the book makes it seem rather bleak.   One can take it as either a tale of an absurd universe where any adherence to a faith or creed is but groundless or you can take it as suggesting  that meaning can be created anywhere under the harshness of circumstances even after all the trappings of  your acculturation have been removed.    The themes in this work have ancient roots.   There has always been a few who laughed at the Gods and went their own way.   For some readers the dunes and the hole in the ground house will be society.   Niki is partially trapped by his desire to have sex with then woman in the underground house, trapped by his physical nature to perform an absurd action for a moment of transcendence.   In time, he makes as his  dominant goal in life to help the woman get a radio.  We never learn her name.   Woman in the Dunes  also be viewed as a comment on the life of women in post world war II Japan.

Woman in the Dunes is beautifully told.   We really feel we are in the world the novel creates.   We can feel the sand creeping into everything.   The story does not impose a meaning on us.   In one sense, if there is a meaning it maybe just that there is not one.   I endorse this work without reservations.   It is not a hard to read work at all.   After I read two or three more books by Kobo Abe, I think he will probably be among the Japanese novelists on my "read everything they have written TBR List".