While I enjoyed this novel passage-to-passage, I found the overall narrative a bit disjointed and at times hard to follow. I don't think it was the translation, as the translation was done by the same person that translated "Woman in the Dunes" which I didn't find disjointed at all. All that aside, Abe's writing is very enjoyable. His descriptive passages are works of art. There is an almost poetic quality to it at times.