The Woman in the Dunes
What is the main conflict in The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe?
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The novel follows an isolated schoolteacher, Niki Junpei, tired of living the same routine with no purpose in his life, who leaves for a vacation and never returns. He intends to find an undiscovered beetle by the sea and earn himself a place in encyclopedias by its discovery and thus justify the significance of his life. However, after he passes through a small, poor village and sees a number of deep holes with houses at the bottom, an old man comes up to him and asks him what he is doing.