The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abé

I found this Japanese classic extremely difficult to read: so disturbing, so claustrophobic, so infuriating. And yet, I suspect all this is as the author intended. Literally, it is the story of a man unwillingly trapped in a disintegrating house in a sand pit with a woman who has been living there for some time, condemned to continually remove sand so it doesn't overpower the house and then the neighboring village. He struggles, attempts to escape, feels alternately anger at and compassion for the woman, and philosophizes about sand, sex and love, and the meaning of life. Metaphorically, it is an existential look at the lives we all live.

I also found it intriguing to think about why it is called "the woman in the dunes" when the woman is never fully developed as a character, and the male protagonist is the focus of the story. To me the woman was almost symbolic, as it is in a way the woman/the pit/the hole in the ground that traps the man, even though it was the male villagers who put him there. A little Freudian, no?

Finally, I found myself struggling to appreciate this book, and on some levels I could. The world the author creates is believable if bizarre, as are the changing moods, attitudes, and actions of the protagonist. The author's depiction of sand and its movement is fascinating and mind-stretching. The way he develops the plot and makes the reader feel as trapped as the protagonist is masterful. The line illustrations, by his wife, are charming and add to the tale. But overall it is so grim and, as I said, so claustrophobic, that reading it was, for me, an unpleasant experience.

I read this last year and it was one of my favourite books of the year. I saw it as an absurdist work in the manner of Camus - the protagonist through the book is only focused on himself, on escaping, the pointlessness of the work but gradually he begins to see situation more positively, he is able to think include the woman and, to a lesser extent, the village in his situation. Despite all that has happened to him he is a happier more contented man at the end of the novel than at the beginning.

That's an interesting perspective, and one I hadn't considered. I believe him to be more acquiescent, and more beaten down (psychologically as well as physically), but I had not thought of him as either happier or more content, although of course he has become absorbed in his potential invention. I think this is what interests him more than the woman, and that although he can see why the village does what it does, I don't know that he ever comes to believe it's the best option for them. What does it say if he is more contented when he has almost no freedom of action?

Another thing I found interesting that I didn't comment on in my review is the idea of having few ethical choices when struggling with nature (I'm thinking of the villagers here) because this was true, in a completely different story, of another Japanese novel I read, Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimua. For those of you who have read more Japanese novels, is this a theme that frequently appears in them?

My review:
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I loved this book! This is truly timeless, global, layered story that everyone should read. A man is trapped in a sand pit by villagers while he is out hunting for insects in the dunes. He is forced to shovel sand out day after day, as he plots to escape and forms an odd relationship with the woman who shares the pit. The role of the woman is intriguing. She is a sex object, his rational conscience, an imagined foe, an eventual partner/friend-- and at the same time, very one dimensional. The sand, the insects even, are more developed as characters than the woman is.

The real appeal of this novel is in the existentialist allegory. It's life, as experienced by most humans at the various stages of maturity. Anger, selfishness, rebellion. Then, reason, planning, strategic alliances. Lastly, acceptance, contentment, humanity. At the end, as he is close to achieving his purported goal, he chooses to delay. To delay death perhaps? Is the message here that life is the journey and not the destination? Is freedom all we imagine, or do we all harbor a hidden need to be enslaved?

I would love to spend some time with this book again-- perhaps with a class-- and study it closely. There is much to appreciate-- from the sand and insect imagery, to the enigmatic woman, to the man's psychological states. I can't take it all in with one read.
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It also just occurred to me that his excitement over his invention is a metaphor for his excitement at having discovered that the sand (time and hardship-- previously something to be resisted and battled) contains and channels water (hope, salvation.) It is his own personal redemption.

>3 rebeccanyc:: It is true that the villagers are not portrayed as being bad or evil. My western sensibilities tell me that sacrificing the few to save the village is not ethical. But I deceive myself-- we just like to hide that kind of sacrifice in the West, call it something else, blame the victims. In the East they just call it what it is and accept it as necessary. I have not run across this theme this year yet.

Also, I don't think he is contented until he has freedom of action. At the very end he can leave and only then is content not to. I have always myself felt that unhappiness results from not having options. Even options you would not necessarily exercise.

some of my favorite passages:

"No matter how sand flowed it was still different from water. One could swim in water, but sand could enfold a man and crush him to death."

"Yet the average woman was firmly convinced, it seemed, that she could not make a man recognize her worth unless every time she opened her legs she did so as if it were a scene in a soap opera. But this very pathetic and innocent illusion in fact made women the victims of a one-sided spiritual rape."

"Food exists only in the abstract sense for anybody dying of hunger....but once one's belly is full one begins to discern differences in taste and textures. Sexual desire was the same."

"Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the aimless flight of time."

>3 rebeccanyc: - if I can remember my Camus (and I'm not sure I can) the idea is that understanding and contentment can only come from within regardless of the situation. Hence Sisyphus pushing the rock cannot escape from his punishment but he can come to terms with his situation and find contentment. In Abe's book the digging of the sand seems to mirror the pushing of the rock (although in TWITD the work is not purposeless, as it seems to be important to the existence of the village).

I don't have a copy of the book at hand but I'm sure the introduction in my edition suggested that Abe's success in the west was due to him being one of the least 'Japanese' of authors, that his novels were more routed in an European tradition - Kafka, Camus, etc.

You both obviously enjoyed this book a lot more than I did and got a lot more out of it! While I could of course see it as an existential tale, it is a very long time since I read any of the European existentialists and, to be flippant, now I see why! As I said in my review, I was very impressed by what Abe did with the book; it just rubbed me the wrong way.

I agree with rebeccanyc; I didn't enjoy the book at all. I can see how talented Abe is because I rarely have such a physical reaction of repulsion to a book (I like how rebecca used the word "claustrophobic" - it perfectly describes how I felt reading it), but I didn't like it at all. And I felt like I was missing something - I still do - like most of the book went right over my head and if I was smarter or more literary or whatever, I would have understood that something and enjoyed it much more. Toward the end I was just turning pages and asking "why is this still happening? Why is this book not over yet?"

I did enjoy reading everyone else's much more coherent opinions, though. I got more out of them than I got out of the novel itself.

I liked the book for all the reasons that Jargoneer and Technodiabla have stated above, and they said it so much better than I ever could. I was intrigued all the way through with the acceptance of the situation by the woman, the actions of the villagers and mostly by the man in the dunes. I will never be able to go to the beach again without thinking about this book and the ever encroaching sand.

I've watched the movie after reading the novel, and my review below is for both of them.

The story is about Niki Jumpei, a teacher who made a field trip to a desert near the sea. He collects insect specimens. As an amateur entomologist, he is determined to discover an unrecorded beetle that would make his name. Trying to find lodgings for the night, he is helped by men of the village to descend a sand pit leading to a hut using a rope ladder. A woman living below (the "woman in the dunes") will take him in for the night. When he wakes up in the morning, however, he finds the rope ladder is removed. He realizes that he is trapped. Against his will, he is held down there to help the woman clear away the accumulating sand that continually threatens to bury the village.

Sand is the element that propels the novelist Abé Kobo's story. The 1964 film adaptation by Teshigahara Hiroshi captures its tactile physicality. In the film, the landscape is grainy, and the black and white photography enhances all the textures. Of sand on skin, sand on hair strand, sand mixed with beads of sweat, wind carving the face of sand cliffs, sand percolating in the air. The close ups of the two characters' perspiring faces and bodies show the gray grains of sand sticking on the open pores of their skin. Outside the hut, the landscape is suffused with flowing sand, falling sand, sliding sand. Sand is the very way of life.

The effect of this textural treatment of sand in the film--together with the subtle imagery of light and shadows and the desert heat and a lack of moisture--is a sensual battle of desires and wills. There is an erotic component to Jumpei's seemingly futile attempts to escape the sand pit.

As opposed to Kafka's portrait of a man seeking employment under an unavailing power structure in The Castle, Abé and Teshigahara's depiction of a man's imprisonment into work itself, into slavery, for the sole purpose of daily shoveling away sand, is seen as a predicament of modern man in capitalist society. The apparent conflict is between the meaninglessness of resistance and the discovery of meaning out of an extreme (environmental) situation. Both K. and Jumpei, however, do resist their fates and work toward changing their contrasting "employment status". If anything, Jumpei's extreme situation shares more with Josef K. in The Trial who one day finds himself guilty of an unknown and unknowable offense. This is apparent in a passage in the book where Jumpei reflected on his fate.

   This entire nightmare could not be happening. It was too outlandish. Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order? He could not believe it. Perhaps there was some mistake; it was bound to be a mistake. There was nothing to do but assume that it was a mistake.

But as one character in Kafka's The Castle said with ironic certainty: No errors occur, and even if an error does occur, ... who can finally say that it is an error.

As with any fertile allegorical story, The Woman in the Dunes dramatizes a situation that can be read in many ways. Jumpei's entrapment can be seen as a spiritual imprisonment. In context, the novel is published in 1962 and is set in 1955, ten years after the atomic bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events that led to the surrender of Japan in the world war.

As signature work of this period, the novel is grounded in postwar anxiety. The threat of a destructive war and nuclear event still hangs in the air. This is not referenced verbally in the film, but in the novel it is directly alluded to. Apart from the titles of articles in a newspaper, such as "Ingredient in Onions Found Effective in Treatment of Radiation Injuries", a reference to the war is given in conversation between the two characters.

   "But I have taken walks," she said abruptly in her monotonous, withdrawn voice. "Really, they used to make me walk a lot. Until I came here. I used to carry a baby around for a long time. I was really tired out with all the walking.
...
   Yes, he remembered, when everything was in ruins some ten years ago {1945}, everybody desperately wanted not to have to walk. And now, were they glutted with this freedom from walking? he wondered.

The woman here, who is unnamed throughout the novel, is presented as a victim of war. Homeless, she must have wandered around after escaping from air bombings until she finds this seaside community. When the character of the woman was introduced for the first time, she is called "Granny" by the village men but she is actually a young woman, about thirty years of age. Perhaps her wartime experiences has aged her. Maybe she has been living in that metaphorical cave for all eternity.

Sand, its oppression, can be thought of as symbol of time or eternity (as in sands of time). Its dynamic processes are powerful, destructive, and beautiful. In the book, Jumpei equates unsympathetic sand with death, the "beauty of death", "a rejection of the stationary state",

... a world where existence was a series of states. The beauty of sand ... belonged to death. It was the beauty of death that ran through the magnificence of its ruins and its great power of destruction.

The imagery of the natural destruction wrought by sand is not that different from the destruction wrought by wars. Both lead to houses being buried, to peoples being left homeless and destitute. The sand pit, therefore, can also be seen as a bomb shelter where people take cover in order to survive the air raids.

For all its stifling and suffocating set up, the hopeful ending of The Woman in the Dunes can be seen as a response to Rousseau's proposition of a social contract. Man is born free, and everywhere finds himself enchained. Living in an inhospitable environment, under parched conditions, sentenced into a lifetime of manual labor, man's resilience is tested to its outer limits. Jumpei is in denial of his "unchanging" reality. He is answerable to the general will of the people (the villagers) and his acknowledgement of it can lead to his redemption.

Though Kafka's protagonists and Jumpei shared the seeming futility of life experience, the latter's slow acceptance of his absurd condition signal a renewal of life in the face of perpetual destruction. Through the repetition of activities, he has discovered new aspects of desert life that are robust for investigation. His curiosity for scientific knowledge is rekindled. "Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion," he concluded at one point. Perhaps his happiness lies in attempting to satisfy his thirst for empirical knowledge.

Teshigahara's film adaptation is faithful to Abé's science fiction. Human nature is presented with a savage precision, as with the scene where the masked villagers gathered round the sand pit to witness Jumpei's temptation and his consequent psychological undoing. The accompanying ritualistic beats of drum heighten the voyeurism.

The technical aspect of Teshigahara's direction is excellent. But beyond the production values, the film is to be credited for bringing out through tactile images Abé's novelistic use of illusion and perspective. Perspective or point of view as a way of looking at the scheme of things, a way of recognizing one's place in the world. Illusion as the image we think we see. At the end of the film, after numerous failures to escape the sand pit, Jumpei has partly seen through the illusion and has gained a deeper perspective of his enchained state of being. This perspective is illustrated in the novel through the image of a Möbius strip, a continuous band of twisted paper where front and back is indistinguishable.

He was still in the hole, but it seemed as if he were already outside. Turning around, he could see the whole scene. You can't really judge a mosaic if you don't look at it from a distance. If you really get close to it you don't get away from one detail only to get caught in another. Perhaps what he had been seeing up until now was not the sand but grains of sand.

In the movie, the thinking gaze of Jumpei (played by Okada Eiji), his meditation on the immensity of the sand dunes, as if looking from a farther distance and within a bigger desert picture, gives him a perspective of his state of nature. He is both outside and inside the pit. He is both free and slave at the same time. His duty now is to live and rethink his own morbid diagnosis of his condition. He will study the emergent properties of sand. Sand is its own paradigm shift.

(cross-posted)