This unsettling novel starts with this opening line: ONE day in August a man disappeared.

We, literary observers, put this Japanese literature along with Camus's Sisyphus or Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground for it has an existential crisis to deal with. When I first read it, I was surprised by Abe's character struggle like Sisyphus or Underground man, trapped in deep sand dunes, in some remote village.

The further you read, the more eerie it becomes:

The village, resembling the cross-section of a beehive, lay sprawled over the dunes. Or rather the dunes lay sprawled over the village. Either way, it was a disturbing and unsettling landscape—page 13.

This man's profession is entomologist. He searches for insects. He collects them. That's it. That is his profession. And ONE day in August a man disappeared, like how mist disappears.

Seven years had passed without anyone learning the truth, and so, in compliance with Section 30 of the civil code, the man had been pronounced dead.

Like this authority closes the case of that disappeared man. Abe's novel endures not because of its strangeness, but because it shows how captivity becomes normal once it is organized.

From here the actual crisis begins—man now been trapped in dunes with one woman and his job was to shovel sands day and night. That's all his job.

This Sisyphean nightmare—this eternal shoveling—becomes his entire existence. No escape. No ladder out of that pit. We scroll, we swipe all day long. Just sand, falling eternally, burying everything. And the woman? She's already resigned to this fate. She shovels. She survives. She doesn't question anymore. She's been absorbed into the dunes like a grain herself, indistinguishable from the landscape that imprisons her.

In the morning, ladder was gone, from where he descended first. He mentioned this to the woman, "Say, the ladder's gone! Where's the best place to climb out of here, for heaven's sake? You can't get out of a place like this without a ladder."

What makes Abe's vision so suffocating is how ordinary it all becomes. Abe's character was of course lured by his own ambition (collecting beetle juxtapose today's human ambition) to this absurd prison. The absurdity doesn't announce itself with theatrical flourishes like Kafka's castle or Dostoyevsky's underground rants. Instead, it creeps in quietly—routine by routine, shovelful by shovelful.

When the protagonist begins to yell, it reminded me of our human race, all seeming to shout in unison to get out of this fathomless absurdity. When man shows his rage for this imprisonment, she watches him with pity. Their relationship becomes a study in Stockholm syndrome played out in slow motion. She cooks. She shovels. She offers her body as comfort in this hell, and this intimacy becomes another chain. Abe shows us how captivity breeds its own ecosystem of dependencies.

The man's previous life, his collections, his freedom—all of it starts feeling like the dream, while this sand pit—becomes reality. The villagers above? They need the sand shoveled. It's practical. Necessary. They'll lower food and water. It's an arrangement, you see. A system. And isn't that the real horror? That even entrapment can be systematized, made to seem reasonable, even necessary for the collective good.

When Kobo Abe wrote this in 1964 and our time is not so different. We have learned to decorate our pit sacrificing freedom, and we call it 'lifestyle'. We Instagram them. We optimize them. We measure our shoveling in KPIs and call it progress. for example, the cubicle worker who spends forty years in the same office, shoveling emails instead of sand, I think we haven't been changed since Abe's time. This book shows us how pathetically we have trapped in mundane so called advancment. We realize, we are trapped in 30-year-mortage for shoveling freedom.

The entomologist who collected insects becomes the collected specimen. The observer becomes the observed. The free man becomes the trapped man. I just love how Abe describes the sand with forensic detail: its weight, its movement, its inexorable nature. it feels surreal when you read every words with careful weight in your eyes. Abe understood that to convey absurdity, you must make the reader feel it in the reading experience itself and he naturally succeeded.

One day in August. Any day, really. That's what makes it so unsettling—not that it could happen, but that it already has, in ways we've simply learned not to see but we are not yet late to understand the dune itself. Stop shoveling and take a time to understand the beauty of how we must shovel in the first place.

Ever since, this book is in my mind. Kobo Abe gave us something remarkable to digest.