Start with The Woman in the dunes. An entomologist misses the last bus, accepts a night's lodging in a house at the bottom of a sand pit, and finds in the morning that the rope ladder is gone. It is the most controlled thing Abe wrote, it is under three hundred pages, and it converts more readers than anything else in his catalogue. The alternative people reach for is The Box Man, because it is the famous strange one, but its fractured notebook structure makes far more sense once you have seen Abe execute a single premise cleanly first.
Set expectations before you begin: this is closer to Kafka than to realism. A situation is posited, it is not explained, and it is then followed with complete logical rigour. Nobody wakes up. There is no allegorical key at the back. Abe was a trained physician who never practised, and the books read like experiments — a condition is introduced, and the novel is the write-up.
The identity sequence
The Woman in the dunes, The Face of Another and The ruined map were written in close succession in the 1960s and are often read as a loose trilogy, though Abe did not label them one. The linking question is what remains of a person when the social scaffolding is removed. A man trapped in sand; a man whose burnt face is replaced by a mask that begins to acquire its own intentions; a detective looking for a missing man who slowly stops being findable himself. Read them in that order — the detective novel is the hardest of the three and the most rewarding once the pattern is visible.
The Box Man is the endpoint of that line and the most formally extreme: a man living inside a cardboard box, writing, watching, and possibly being impersonated. Take it fourth, not first.
The later novels
Secret Rendezvous is his most grotesque book by a distance — a hospital that has become a surveillance labyrinth, with a great deal of clinical sexual material. Many admirers of the earlier work dislike it, and that is a reasonable response rather than a failure of nerve. The Ark Sakura is more comic than it first appears: an apocalypse survivalist has built a shelter in a quarry and cannot decide who deserves a ticket. Kangaroo Notebook, his last novel, is a hallucinatory hospital-bed journey with radish sprouts growing from the narrator's legs, and it is the least anchored thing he wrote. Save it.
Early work and the odd corners
Inter Ice Age 4. is early science fiction and shows the machinery before he had hidden it — worth reading for that reason, but it is the clunkiest of the novels. Beasts head for home is an early novel of the Manchurian repatriation and is closer to conventional narrative than anything else here. Beyond the Curve collects short fiction and is a good sampler of the premises he tried and abandoned. The Frontier Within gathers essays and is where Abe explains, in his own words, what he thought he was doing.
Where to stop
The identity sequence plus The Box Man is the whole argument. Everything after that is variation, and the variation gets stranger rather than deeper. If Abe's method appeals, the nearest neighbour on this site is Samuel Beckett, who arrives at similar conclusions from the opposite direction.
One practical note: Abe is read in English through a small number of translations, several of them decades old, and a few of the later books have only ever had one. There is no meaningful edition choice to make — take what is in print.
Follow the full ordered path here: Kobo Abe Reading Order: Where to Start.
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