Existential journey or buddy movie?: Abe's Beasts Head for Home

Halfway through Kobo Abe's 1957 novel, Beasts Head for Home, and I'm thinking it's best to just read this as an adventure story of two men trying to survive on a trek through horrible conditions, limited supplies, Arctic cold, poor navigation, threatened by wolves and other creatures, in time of war with dangerous armies of all factions, forced to keep clear of cities and even villages, vague about their destination, and in fact not sure if they can trust each other - whether this is a cinematic adventure story of suffering and near-death and constant danger or whether (like Abe's most famous novel) this is an existential commentary modern life and the struggle for existence and meaning, who knows? It's a powerful if often confusing narrative, especially for an American reader unfamiliar with the details of the Sino-Soviet war under way at the time of this trek. The central character, a 20-year-old man, Kyuzo, is trying to get to Japan - his ancestral home, though it seems he was born in occupied Manchuria; he meets an older man on a train headed in some way toward his destination, but the train is stopped by soldiers and wartime sabotage and the two, under the strict guidance of the older, more experienced man, who says his name is Ko (maybe it's a nom de guerre), and Kyozu is uncertain whether he can trust Ko to actually be leading him toward safety. This whole novel could probably be transposed to a contemporary setting and made into a successful, or at least accessible movie - though we'd need to no more about the motivation of the two characters, what draws them together and how or why each may be suspicious of the other. Does sound like a # of movies (e.g., The Defiant Ones), though - maybe too many others. Still worth a read; relatively short and pretty easy to follow if you just put the politics and military history aside.