The Japanese novelist Abe has often been compared to Kafka and this 1966 novel suggests an elegantly chilling postscript to "The Metamorphosis." Abe's narrator is a scientist who has been hideously deformed in a laboratory accident, a man who has lost his face in a society where "losing face" is a synonym for humiliation.

After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman,...

An amateur entomologist leaves Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert. When he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune.

When a miner leaves his employer and treks out with his young son to become a migrant worker, he finds himself moving from one eerie landscape to another, intermittently followed (and photographed) by an enigmatic man in a clean, white suit, and eventually coming face-to-face with his inescapable destiny.

Presents twenty-five contemporary stories by authors from countries and cultures around the world, including selections by Chinua Achebe, Isabel Allende, Wang Anyi, and others.