Possible themes in Abe's The Woman in the Dunes

Kobo Abe's 1962 novel, The Woman in the Dunes, was an art-house sensation when it came to the US in the '60s - I've never seen it but will probably do so after I finish reading the novel - and it's easy to see why: tightly structured, full of angst and dread, mysteriously elusive, and "exoti" - exactly the qualities we used to seek and expect when we (or our parent) went to see a show at the old Ormont in east orange. The novel itself doesn't feel cinematic in the traditional sense - there's not a lot of action in fact it's mostly inaction through part 1 and not much dialog either - but you can also see how a faithful adaptation would really work. In short on the surface it's much like a novel of suspense: a middle aged Japanese man goes of for a day or maybe two to pursue his hobby as an amateur entomology in search of new species of sand-dwelling insects. He never returns , as we learn at the outset. Then we follow him to see what caused his disappearance. What happens: he wander to a remote stretch of dune on the coast and when he realizes he'll have to fInd a place to stay for the night he asks some villagers who find him accommodations, which turn out to be a frail house deep in a gully among the dunes, inhabited by a 30-something woman.  Her full time job seems to be shoveling away the sand that constantly threatens her home w engulfment. It soon becomes clear that he's being held captive.  Ok so on one level this is like a very subdued thriller - the ancestor in a way of books/movies like The Room or Misery. On another level - and here the art-house elements come in - he and the woman are engaged in an existential struggle, fighting to save themselves from oblivion - a metaphor for life itself in a way. We sense the man's hubris in his attempts to capture insects and seek to discover new species that live in the sand - he is so focused on the minute that he is oblivious to the forces that threaten annihilation. It's impossible as well to fail to see a connection w the atomic attack that destroyed much of Japan: is the constant threat of engulfment by shifting sand a counterpart to man-made destruction?