While [Kobo Abe's] figurative language remains essentially Japanese ("His left shoulder made a sound like the splitting of chopsticks"), his themes are decidedly Western. Abe shares with writers like Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Robbe-Grillet an obsession for the hallucination vraie, the imaginary made "real" through an accumulation of precise detail. Abe's "visions" never fall apart upon a second reading, because the "science" in them is so solidly based.

But the key to understanding any Abe novel lies in the reader's ability to decipher the various levels of sexuality. All of Abe's protagonists are elitist mole-men, characters who resemble Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Kafka's K., and Robbe-Grillet's Wallas in that they are hypersensitive, fragile creatures with strong intellects and weak egos. They are all scientists, whose analytic and self-reflective powers have reached full maturity, but whose emotional capacities have either atrophied or become fixated in late adolescence. Pathetically isolated and introverted, they prefer data over people, because figures are empirical, while people are unpredictable. As narrators, they are both trustworthy (because of their ability to observe) and unreliable (because of their inability to interpret correctly what they observe).

Real confrontation almost always comes in the form of a woman, fragmented as a sexual object through voyeuristic camera-like close-ups and associated with insect- or animal-imagery. But Abe's women possess superior intellects, which enable them to manipulate the male narrators into sexual confrontations. When sex occurs, it is always described at the level of animal instinct: a sex that resolves the narrator's divided tendencies toward aggression (as a man) and withdrawal (as a scientist), a sex which forges new identity by obliterating rational intellect. (p. 129)

The Woman in the Dunes stands apart from Abe's other novels in that its conclusion allows for life beyond the sex of pure feeling with the woman. That novel's narrator triumphs both on the intellectual plane (the discovery of water preservation in sand) and on the emotional plane (the pregnancy). In The Face of Another and The Ruined Map the sexual confrontations which lead to a new identity also lead to psychic terrorism, because they eradicate intellect, leaving the weak ego to fend for itself. (p. 132)