The surprisingly cinematic style of Abe's Beasts Head for Home

The late Japanese novelist Kobo Abe, best known in America for The Woman in the Dunes, has a new translation out (2017 translation) of his 1957 novel, Beasts Head for Home, which I've started and read through the first (of 4 sections). As always, I did not read the introduction before starting to read the novel; I've found that "introductions" too often give you tons of info that will make no sense to you until you read the book or give too much away about the plot or provide a critical judgment that will inevitably color and shape your reading experience, so, no - but in this case I wonder: Maybe I should (have). This novel differs significantly from Dunes; in this one we follow a 20-year-old Japanese man who has been more or less held captive (though treated well) in Manchuria by occupying Russian soldiers, during the Sino-Soviet war ca 1947. The book begins w/ his plotting his escape from the Russians and though it's not entirely clear it seems he's headed for Japan, his ancestral home (though not clear if he ever lived there). The whole first section of the book is much like a thriller and told in a cinematic manner (though Dunes was in fact made into a fine movie, and Abe wrote the screenplay, that was more of a surprise success; reading it, the novel did not feel at all cinematic, in fact the opposite). There's the plotting of his escape, the challenge of boarding a train, the train he boards gets caught in some kind of crossfire and ordered to return to station, and so forth. The problem for me though arises from my complete lack of familiarity with the war and with its geography; I can't quite track who's after whom, which way the train is headed, how the man - Kyoko - plans to cross the Japan, and even if that's his intended destination. Maybe the intro would have helped me; I'm far enough in now, that, that I'll keep w/ the story, at least though section 2.