Without the threat of punishment there is no joy in flight.

 

In Kobo Abe's fantasy world of The Woman in the Dunes, an amateur entomologist on vacation finds himself in a remote coastal village built amid deeply undulating dunes. There, he is tricked by a lonely widow and her neighboring villagers, trapped in deep pits shored by sand drift walls, to be charged with the task of shoveling back the ever-sliding banks, persistent and never-ending in its threat to entomb them.

 

Sand moves around like this all year long. Its flow is its life. It absolutely never stops— anywhere. Whether in water or air, it moves about free and unrestricted. So, usually, ordinary living things are unable to endure life in it.

 

The landscape of the dunes which Abe describes, of wood-rotted boxed dwellings built at the bottom of shifting sand hills, could not realistically exist, marking the novel as a science fiction/ fantasy thriller. In addition, its themes adopt surrealistic, dreamlike, metamorphosing features reminiscent of the works of Kafka, slowly shifting and deforming like the dunes themselves.

 

Sand...
Things with form were empty when placed beside sand. The only certain factor was its movement; sand was the antithesis of all form.

 

Abe's works are generically concerned with the human state of balance, whose fragility becomes evident in a life of pointlessness and insufferable futility. In The Woman in the Dunes, Abe presents the grotesque sadness borne from a man's oppressive, fruitless daily life; the image of a degraded human being who is isolated, trapped in the monotony of routine, unable to escape a meaningless existence.

 

What's hardest for me is not knowing what living like this will ever come to.
What was this "Hell of Loneliness"? he wondered. Perhaps they had misnamed it, he had thought then, but now he could understand it very well. Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.

 

To effectuate some meaningfulness to his situation, whether for the choice to stay or freedom of escape, the protagonist heroically attempts to alter his circumstance, significantly going through a metamorphosis of his own, but like the true kinetic nature of sand, its waves of ebbs and flows, his fate lays ambiguous.

 

The theory had been advanced that the man, tired of life, had committed suicide. One of his colleagues, who was an amateur psychoanalyst, held to this view. He claimed that in a grown man enthusiasm for such a useless pastime as collecting insects was evidence enough of a mental quirk.

 

The Woman in the Dunes has its share of vocabulary best fitted for the field of science, reflecting Abe's background in the profession; though his manipulation of such language effectively results in a poetic blend of logic and illogic, never off-putting for the reader, simply suspending reality for a thrilling period of time, meaningfully spent. I feel comfortably balanced in recommending this to readers of both sci-fi and Japanese literature.

 

Sand sucks.

The sand in this novel is so oppressive, invasive, and omnipresent, that after finishing the book, I felt like I needed to take a shower. Maybe two.

"His words were absorbed by the sand and blown by the wind, and there was no way of knowing how far they reached."

The book is the basis of one of my favorite Japanese movies, and it's story is so eccentric, I wanted to see how it worked as a novel. It's the tale of a man, who disappeared and was declared dead after he journeyed on his own to study some bugs at an isolated beach town, and found himself in a mysterious woman's house at the bottom of a sand pit. The novel details what happens to this man at the bottom of that hole.

"The whole surface of her body was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand."

The story is totally unique, bleak, and claustrophobic. It's filled with Sisyphean themes, and (as another reviewer put it) it focuses on the erosion of many different things: not just the earth but also the wearing away of boundaries as well as the wearing away of sanity. Aspects of the writing style were not to my taste though, drifting away from the narrative for numerous pages as the main character muses on a multitude of topics. Because of this, it probably deserves more like three or three and a half stars, but I'm always pretty generous with my stars. It's worth reading because this intriguing tale is truly an original.

"While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow."

kAFKA-esque allegory; man is trapped in a sand pit of seeming endlessness...

subject to numerous readings, many of which seem either stupid or absurd.

but then the book is absurd.

a good read!

Since I started reading both more avidly and more widely several years ago, I've spent more time analyzing different genres, different kinds of authors, and different kinds of literature. In Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, she makes a number of observations about how classic French novels differ from classic British novels, and how American novelists differ from either. I'm not well read enough in French and British literature to judge the validity of her points, other than to notice that yes, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas do have a tone that is noticeably different from, say, Charles Dickens and George Eliot.

All of which brings me to Japanese literature. Which I haven't read nearly enough of since taking a couple of courses in medieval Japanese literature as an undergrad. So far I have read several books by Haruki Murakami, Battle Royale, and now, The Woman in the Dunes. I've got several more in my queue.

Haruki Murakami, Kobo Abe, and Koushun Takami are very different authors (just as Charles Dickens and George Eliot are very different authors), but Japanese novels all have a very different feel from Western novels. That is not to say they are particularly hard to understand or that they don't have the same elements of English-language novels: plot, characters, theme, storytelling, etc. But Japanese literature seems to focus very much on the moment, and an individual's experience of it. Long, descriptive passages about mundane details in the character's environment, or his mental ruminations, often wandering off onto bizarre sidetracks, almost as if the author is trying to describe how a person's thoughts actually work (like, when you're focusing on the matter at hand, but somehow your mind makes a subconscious leap onto a completely unrelated topic).

And that is how The Woman in the Dunes reads. The story is of a Japanese schoolteacher and amateur entomology who takes a little weekend trip to the beach. He happens upon a small, very poor village that is being overwhelmed by the encroaching sands on all sides. Needing a place to stay for the night, the villagers offer to put him up in the home of one of the locals, who turns out to be a widow living alone. Her house is at the bottom of a sandpit and the only way in or out is by rope ladder. Our unfortunate schoolteacher doesn't think anything is odd or sinister about this until he has lowered himself into the trap.

The rest of the book is really more about Niki Jumpei's thoughts and experiences, and of course, sand. Sand is everywhere. Kobo Abe describes it - its porosity, its viscosity, its physical qualities, its omnipresence - the way gothic authors describe the brooding atmosphere and the dark manor. By the end of the book you're feeling sand crawling up all your crevices, rubbing your skin raw, getting in your hair, and threatening to bury you.

Jumpei's relationship with the widow, who is never named, is turbulent, sexual, ambiguous, and disturbing. She was the bait for the trap, and she is by turns apologetic, vulnerable, pathetic, and callous. One gets the impression she is the way Kobo Abe, as a Japanese man of a certain age, may see all women, as these opaque, unrelatable beings as prone to break into sudden charming laughter and offer you a massage as to turn out to be dangerous fairy tale creatures luring you into hell. Certainly our protagonist, Jumpei, never quite relates to the widow as a fellow human being, but he seems to be completely disconnected from people in general. The world he's been abducted from really wasn't much better than the world he is now trapped in, where he must forever shovel sand to keep it from burying the widow's hovel. This metaphor seemed one of the more obvious ones in the novel, but I'm sure there were many others I missed, and like the other Japanese novels I've read, I have the feeling that much imagery and symbolism is lost in translation.

I can't really say how I felt about this book, other than that it was an interesting reading experience and the story is definitely haunting and weird and memorable, like a slightly surreal movie. I definitely recommend it for anyone who is interested in sampling Japanese literature.

Oh, but speaking of surreal: come on, all your Goodreaders who labeled this "magical realism"! Kobo Abe is not Haruki Murakami. There are no talking cats or parallel worlds in this book. Okay, yes, parts of it are a little... strange, but there is nothing that is, strictly speaking, fantastical about it. It's not "magical realism" just because it's written in Spanish or Japanese, folks!