La femme des sables

by Harold Bloom

Like Abe's protagonist trapped in the sand pit, Kafka's Gregor Samsa finds himself imprisoned by a transformation he cannot escape or fully understand. Both authors excel at that particular kind of existential horror where the nightmare isn't violent—it's the slow, methodical erasure of identity through circumstances that feel almost mundane once you accept them.

by Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño shares Abe's fascination with how people become lost—not just physically, but in the labyrinth of their own choices and obsessions. The novel's fragmented structure mirrors the disorientation you feel reading *Woman in the Dunes*, where meaning keeps shifting beneath your feet, and you're never quite sure if you're reading a mystery, a love story, or a philosophical inquiry.

by Gallix/François

This is my surprise pick for you: where *Woman in the Dunes* traps a man physically, Ishiguro traps his narrator in the amber of his own self-deception. Both novels are studies in how people rationalize their captivity—whether to sand or to duty—and the devastating moment when that rationalization cracks. The restraint of Ishiguro's prose echoes Abe's clinical precision.

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Published in 1846, this novella predates Abe by over a century, but it shares his obsession with identity fragmentation and social alienation. Dostoevsky's protagonist watches his sense of self dissolve as his doppelgänger steals his life—it's the same vertigo you feel watching Abe's man lose his grip on who he was before the sand.

by Leonora Carrington

Carrington's elderly protagonist finds herself institutionalized and must navigate an increasingly surreal world with deadpan acceptance—much like Abe's man adapting to his sandy prison. But where Abe is austere and philosophical, Carrington is playful and hallucinatory, turning confinement into a kind of dark comedy. If you want to revisit that theme of inescapable circumstance but through a completely different temperament, this is it.