In this famous postwar Japanese novel, the first of Abe's to be translated into English, Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist in pursuit of a rare specimen of beetle, wanders into a strange seaside village, whose residents all live in sandpits. He is taken prisoner, and, along with a widow cast out by the community, he is forced to move into her sandpit and continually shovel away the sand that threatens to take over the village. In Niki's struggles...

"Explores an adolescent's response to his mother's love affair with a handsome visitor to Yokohama." --

A Japanese woman's struggle to regain her memory. She is Saku-chan, a barmaid who suffered a head injury in a fall. She meets her dead sister's lover and the two have an affair which helps her recover. By the author of Lizard.

In Tokyo, a patient tells his psychiatrist that he murdered a woman. The doctor checks and finds the victim very much alive, but in the process of his probe he is drawn into a world of sexual deviance. By a Japanese woman writer, author of 20 novels, among them A Kiss of Fire.