The novel, available through SWAN, begins with a Japanese entomologist hoping to discover a new beetle species in the remote sand dunes outside of his city. After he misses the last bus out of the village, he is offered a room in a woman’s home at the bottom of a dune. After descending to the home on a rope ladder that is pulled up after him and spending the night shoveling sand into buckets that the villagers lift out of the pit, he realizes that he is doomed to fight the onslaught of sand for the rest of his days. As the characters develop a relationship amid the struggle, an existential question question comes to mind–are we all just shoveling sand?