Introducing elements of a story such as the setting, characters, or conflict are important factors of writing a book. Different authors use different types of techniques to do this, such as being very descriptive or telling us just enough information that we need. In Abe Kobe’s book, The Woman In The Dunes, Abe is as vague as he can be about the main characters in the first six chapters. What we do know from the first six chapters is that the story follows a Japanese commonplace school teacher who has a hobby of collecting bugs. He leaves town for the weekend to search for a new type of beetle, but he never returns. He reaches a village in the dunes and meets a woman there, and seemingly gets trapped there for years. Abe’s introduction of…show more content… He keeps things about his life to himself, and does not tell much to others. This can be seen as when the man left on a holiday in one day August and was never heard of again. Seven years eventually past from then, and investigations proved to be worthless. The only clues they had was the information they had gotten from his “wife, or at least the woman he lived with” (p.4), which was his goal and location: that he was headed for the seashore to collect insects. From the information that the ‘wife’ gave the investigators, many people, such as his co-workers, came to strange conclusions about him, such as the ones on pages 4-6. At first they thought that a woman was involved but this was proved to be near impossible as they found out he was alone at the train station, while he looked like a mountain climber with his insect collecting tools. At this point we can also tell that he is different than from a common person, as he has a hobby of insect collecting. The next conclusion that was formed upon his disappearance was formed by an amatuer psychoanylst, who was one of the man’s colleages. His theory of the man’s disappearance was that he had committed suicide, because his hobby of collecting insects may have caused kelptomania, homesexualness, and an Oedipus complex, .“He claimed that in a grown man, enthusiasm for such a useless pastime as collecting insects was evidence enough of a mental quirk”(p. 4). Said colleague also mentioned his reclusiveness, such as not confiding his interests in anyone. Kobo’s technique of telling us rumors, instead of facts, can lead the reader to believe that the man had few or no friends, and was very kept to himself, maybe so far that he was a
