“The Woman in the Dunes” by Kobo Abe: Why does author have nameless characters and other oddities? Did alternate personalities make him do it?

In my recent post on a published interview with the 2018 Booker Prize winner, I quote her reason that her characters are nameless. Others had called her novel “experimental,” but she disagreed, explaining, “The book just didn’t want names,” by which she probably meant that her muse, character, and/or narrative personalities had preferred anonymity.

In the first quarter of The Woman in the Dunes, a classic, prize-winning novel, I have been puzzled by the following:

First, I am puzzled by the title, which refers to the woman, in both original Japanese and English translation. She is a very important character, but the frame of the story and the point of view is the man’s.

[Added 9:25 pm: Since the literal translation of the Japanese title is "Sand Woman," I wonder if it alludes to E. T. A. Hoffmann's multiple personality story, "The Sandman."]

[Added 11:55 pm: And since the man had been hoping to find a new species of insect living in the dunes, was he now the giant new species of "insect," as in Kafka's "Metamorphosis"?]

Second, I am puzzled as to why a villager refers to the woman as “Granny,” since she appears to be around thirty (1, p. 22-23).

Third, I am puzzled as to why the man has visual “hallucinations,” both before (1, p. 15) and during (1, p. 56) his imprisonment in the dune.

Fourth, I am puzzled by the namelessness of the characters. Apparently, the man and woman, imprisoned together in the dune for years, will never ask each other their names. (The only place that the man is ever named is at the very end of the novel, in appended court documents, which attest to his having been a missing person, proving that the story is not a dream.)

As I read on, perhaps these puzzles will be solved.

1. Kobo Abe. The Woman in the Dunes [1962]. Translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders (1964). New York, Vintage International, 1991.