When first released, in 1964, Woman in the Dunes an independent production made on a limited budget (about $100,000) achieved a kind of cult status in the West. In the film, and in the novel by Abe Kôbô on which it was based, we can recognize an updated version of the myth of Sisyphus the man imprisoned in the Absurd and tormented by the need to find a meaning to his circumstances as an allegory of our time. The pit and the desert are represented as places of synthesis, based on a dynamism of opposition and of merging rules. These are the qualities that make this film both accessible and obscure, universal and specific.

Woman in the Dunes is a meditation on identity. This is made explicit by Teshigahara, the director, from the opening credit scene in which a mass of hanko (name-seals) fills the screen. The woman is never named and the man's proper name – Junpei Niki is given only at the end of the film. The entomologist is first introduced as a character tied to identity cards that are his social credentials. The novel, divided into two parts, opens with the statement “One day in August a man disappeared” and closes with the man's decision that “there was no particular need to hurry about escaping.”