The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

Suddenly a horrible sound interrupted him.  As the woman had predicted the night before, the brow of sand on the north side had lost its moisture and collapsed.  The whole house seemed to let out a soulful shriek, as if mortally wounded, and a gray blood began to drop down with a rustling sound from the new gap between the eaves and the wall.  The man began to tremble, the mouth full of saliva.  It was as if his own body had been crushed.

This entire nightmare could not be happening.  It was too outlandish.  Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order?  He could not believe it.  Perhaps there was some mistake; it was bound to be a mistake. There was nothing to do but assume that it was a mistake.

An entomologist named Jumpei travels from the city to the Japanese coast, looking for rare insects that live among the sand.  He stumbles upon a strange village that seems almost half-buried in the dunes: houses lie at the bottom of great pits of sand.  The villagers kindly let him stay the night at one of these houses, where he's lowered into the pit by means of a great rope ladder, and hosted by a beautiful but distant woman who seems to live alone there.  Soon, he realizes that he hasn't been hosted, but kidnapped, and the villagers expect him, like the woman, to spend his life scooping up the shifting sand around the house and placing it into buckets, keeping not only the house safe from the moving dunes but also the village, for which houses like these are the first line of defense.

Most of the narrative of The Woman in the Dunes concerns Jumpei's various attempts to escape.  He's clever, and approaches the task from a scientific angle, but sand is unpredictable and the villagers watchful.  At the same time he finds himself drawn to the strange woman, who is never given a name, and who seems to accept her lot blithely.  (Among other things, The Woman in the Dunes gives a frightening picture of what it's like to have sex in a place where you can never get the sand off of your body.)  If he escapes, what will happen to her?  Does he have an obligation to her, or is she part of the same forces that have trapped him?

Sand, as Jumpei thinks of it, is a strange and dangerous thing.  It is a collection of small stones, about an eighth of a millimeter, but it emerges when the forces of wind and water separate these small stones from larger ones.  It is forever moving, and in fact, it may be more appropriate to think of sand as the movement rather than the stones that are moved--an action, rather than an object.  The shifting sands will never stop threatening the house or the village; Jumpei's story is a variation of Sisyphus'.

The sand is a symbol for--what?  Death and life, at least, and maybe the natural passage of time that scares the shit out of everyone who's old enough to figure out what it means.  Set against these forces are the pathetic systems of bourgeois society: when Jumpei cleverly advises planting a hedge of trees to keep the sand at bay, the woman notes that it's just cheaper to keep up a system of forced labor.  Jumpei, in the passage above, can't believe that the rewards of civilized society have failed to protect him: the medical insurance, the tax bill.  But medical insurance can't stop deterioration and disease, and being a good citizen can't fend of realities that shift like the sand.  What he fails to realize is that the things he hopes will keep him safe are of the same order as the things the village will hope keep them safe: bureaucratic, short-sighted, systematic, unequal.

Spoiler alert: ultimately, Jumpei escapes, only to be caught and brought back to his sand-prison.  He throws himself into scientific experiments with the sand he thinks will help him escape, but when luck arrives--a rope ladder is thoughtlessly left by the house--he chooses to put off his escape, to better go on with his experiments.  At a subconscious level he acknowledges that there he has no more control over his life out there than he does at the bottom of the sand pit; who can blame him for choosing to go on with his experiments--the small things he can control--a little bit longer?

The Woman in the Dunes recalls classic dystopias like 1984 in that the forces that dominate are always outside the individual's understanding.  But it also has one foot in the world of fantasy and allegory; it reminds me of a book like Tlooth.  The sand landscape is as terrifying as any horror novel, and you can totally see how it was turned into a classic of Japanese new wave cinema.