In what is presumably late 1965, as Indonesia is racked by violence in the wake of a failed coup blamed on Communists, a gravedigger named Kamino hits upon a novel method of seduction: He allows himself to be possessed by the spirit of a recently murdered Communist so that the Communist’s daughter can speak with her father one last time. In gratitude, she cooks Kamino dinner. A week later, after Kamino has buried 1,232 Communists in one mass grave, she accepts his marriage proposal. By the time the newlyweds return from their honeymoon, Eka Kurniawan’s fictional Javanese city of Halimunda is “filled with corpses sprawled out in the irrigation channels and on the outskirts of the city, in the foothills and on the riverbanks, in the middle of bridges and under bushes. Most of them had been killed as they tried to escape.”

The violence in Halimunda has its roots in reality: Paramilitary groups strangled, beheaded, shot, garroted, bludgeoned and hacked up at least a half-million people (the killings are the subject of two extraordinary recent documentary films by Joshua Oppenheimer). But in “Beauty Is a Wound,” Kurniawan approaches these events obliquely. His characters live on history’s edges. In “Beauty Is a Wound” and “Man Tiger” — a slimmer work — his real subject is unruly, untameable and often unquenchable desires.

Two years ago, the scholar Benedict Anderson published an essay in New Left Review pointing out that Southeast Asia is the only region in the world never to have produced a Nobel laureate in literature. He posited several possible reasons for this, chief among them the region’s sheer diversity. Southeast Asia is home to the better part of a billion people belonging to hundreds of ethnic groups, speaking scores of languages, practicing dozens of religions and living in countries with radically different histories and governments. Such diversity precludes a synecdochic award: Nobody can represent the entire region in the same way that, say, Gabriel García Márquez represented Latin America, or Naguib Mahfouz represented Muslim life in the Arab world.

The region’s nearest Nobel miss was probably Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an Indonesian novelist and essayist who fell afoul of the repressive Suharto regime for his left-wing views. Pramoedya’s best-known works are the four novels collectively known as the Buru Quartet, a sprawling account of a young Indonesian’s political awakening under Dutch colonial rule. Pramoedya wrote these novels while imprisoned on Buru, a remote island in east Indonesia, and the actual writing came quite late. For much of his decade and a half in prison, during the late 1960s and the ’70s, he was denied writing materials, and he narrated the stories in daily installments to his fellow prisoners.