The Woman in the Dunes as a novel of its own time and place

As foretold at the outset, the protagonist never returns to his home and is officially declared a missing person - spending, presumably, the rest of his life as a captive among the dunes, in Kobo Abe's 1963 novel, The Woman in the Dunes. Or is he a captive? In the past third of the novel the man does make a dangerous escape from the hollow in the sand dunes where he's been imprisoned - climbing a rope ladder he'd constructed, running toward the highway - but he'd become disoriented in the darkness and inadvertently circled back and was captured near the village atop the dunes and returned to his captivity. At that point he becomes oddly dispassionate; eventually, the woman he's been consigned to live (and to work at slave labor) w/ becomes pregnant, and when she miscarries the villagers hoist her up and take her to a hospital of clinic, leaving the rope ladder behind. The man has an obvious opportunity for escape, but he does not take advantage of the situation. He has either given up hope or come to enjoy or at least prefer his life in captivity. So again we readers (or viewers of the movie, which I will probably watch) ponder the significance of the tale: Does it remind us of The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus), in which all of human life is seen as a ceaseless struggle to complete an impossible task? Is Abe saying that all of human life amounts to nothing more than fighting the encroachment of inevitable decline and decay? I still think that there's something specific to the time and place of this novel, that the predicament of the people in the dunes - forever shoveling away sand that threatens to overwhelm and bury them - is an enactment of the fate of the nation, the dreary and ceaseless recovery from the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm not sure how to read this novel in contemporary context; perhaps it's also a novel about ecology, about climate change even, and in that sense well ahead of its time: We have built our entire civilization on the brink of ruin, and our fate is to fight back the rising tides. Abe's is also an astonishingly misanthropic novel; there is no love or attraction between the man and woman in the dunes - their sexual encounters are violent and spasmodic, and any physical contact between them is made harsh and grating by the sand that clings to their bodies and infects their every breath - a dark novel, of a world w/ neither redemption to alleviation of suffering, again a novel that seems mythic and timeless on on the literal level but that is also very much of its own time and place.