Further thouhgts on the themes of Woman in the Dunes

The only way to engage w/ Kobo Abe's novel The Woman in the Dunes (1963) is to recognize and accept that it works on two levels: On the surface, it's an adventure/thriller/horror story about a man who finds himself entrapped in a small house deep in a swale surrounded by ever-encroaching sand dunes and forced by the woman who lives in the house and the strange residents of the village who live atop the dunes to engage in the endless, Sysephus-like task of shoveling the sand shifting sand away from the endangered structure. This story of captivity - made all the more grotesque by Abe's many descriptions of the repulsive quality of the sand, the bouts with nausea and dehydration, futile and dangerous attempts at escape - is in the tradition of, say, Room and Misery (as noted in a previous post), a nightmare-quality story with not a lot of action but with a lot of angst. The other and more intriguing level is the metaphoric or allegoric: man struggling against and ineradicable force and trying to maintain at least a vestige of his individuality and humanity while under constant assault. Abe's protagonist has many thoughts about his world, particularly about his attraction to the woman holding him captive (or sharing his captivity) and his repulsion about sex, STDs - he has a cynical, or perhaps clinical, view of sex as an animal-drive that we are subject to only because we are destined to strive for preservation of the species; he gets no real pleasure from sex, not does he seem to have any attachment to other people - friends, family, love interest - and we learn little about his background or career: He's a teacher in a technical high school and a devout amateur entymologist, but an isolated soul. I can't help but read this novel as a cri de coeur from postwar Japan - the constant struggle against encroaching sand seems to be representative of the recovery from the war and in particular from the atomic attacks on Hisoshima and Nagasaki: the shame, the devastation, the seemingly endless and lonely task of reconstruction, the sense of isolation from the world; we'll see how the last third of then novel plays out, whether Abe introduces new themes and how he navigates his way to the end of this narrative.