From ‘existentialism to surrealism to communism’ : making sense of The Woman in the Dunes
In Kobe Abe’s surreal literary worlds, you never quite have your footing. Strange transformations, feverish epiphanies and incongruous plot elements are to be expected in the Japanese post-war writer’s works, which explore individuals lost within modern society. The Woman in the Dunes, one of his more popular novels, presents us with a characteristically bizarre premise, leaving it up to the reader to excavate the meaning.
After being stranded in a remote fishing village on a bug collecting day trip, schoolteacher Jumpei Niki — who for the most part is simply ‘the man’ — is offered an unusual accommodation for the night: a crudely built house that can only be reached by descending a rope ladder into a deep hole in the dunes. There he receives an amicable welcome from a woman — although not, as it would first seem, out of hospitality. The inconveniently situated house, like many in the village, is under constant barrage from falling sand which must be shovelled into kerosene cans and hauled away by workers above. When the ladder is removed, and no escape possible, the man realises he has been tricked into contributing to this arduous labour, his only companion being the woman who dutifully accepts her lifelong captivity.
Now, it may seem as though the main character’s struggle is largely down to some very poor town planning. However, we learn that this arrangement is a result of poverty and political marginalisation, the villagers representing the working underclass of Japanese society. In some ways, the man’s struggle is the perpetual struggle of the village. He and the woman have to work like an organ in a body, flushing out the system and in turn receiving nourishment — as well as occasionally comforts such as whiskey, cigarettes and newspapers. Though this might be little consolation to the enslaved, Abe allows for the possibility that the man, disillusioned with modern society, may actually gain a sense of purpose from this lifestyle.
At first, the man naturally assumes that he is being kept there on false pretences. After all, if he rejects the ideology of the village, how can he contribute meaningfully to it? However, Abe reminds us that labour is, for the most part, not something you choose: ‘Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enable him to endure the aimless flight of time.’
The novel is partly influenced by Abe’s experience with the Japanese Communist Party. Quite separate from the authoritarian Soviet Union, this rootless movement represented an idealistic break from the old order, which was attractive to the disenchanted youth population and leftist writers like Abe. While revolutionary politics influenced his early writing, his expulsion from the party led to a shift in style, and The Woman in the Dunes was written immediately afterwards. Though Abe was led to communism via surrealism, it was his avant-garde desire for artistic freedom that ultimately put him at odds with the party. So, we see in this novel the tension between the individual and the collective. Too often in history the cruellest acts have been carried out with good intentions for society as a whole, and Abe seems to exploit this idea to maximum absurd effect.
True Grit
The inescapable symbol of the novel is the inescapable material that blights the protagonist’s existence. In the house the man and woman cannot even eat without an umbrella over their heads. They cannot keep the sand off of their bodies; one of the necessary rituals they perform is scrubbing themselves, and each other, with the precious little water they are given by the workers.
The Japanese critic Takeo Okuno believed the true protagonist of the novel is sand — something that failed to translate to Hiroshi Teshigahara’s film adaption. Films, of course, are a more literal medium, but even novels need to give us concrete perspectives. Perhaps Okuno is suggesting that the man is a manifestation of sand — a faceless individual with no autonomy, one grain of billions. And by this same token, maybe the woman is the dunes. Maybe.
There are echoes of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, whose heroine Winnie spends the play almost completely submerged in a giant mound of earth, which has been seen as a metaphor for time. For Abe, sand also represents stasis. While the advancing dunes are a reminder of mortality, the threat of nothing changing is an even worse prospect for our protagonist: ‘…not only his watch but time itself would be immobilised, he feared, by grains of sand.’
Sometimes sand escapes all meaning. Abe likes to give us absurd pontifications: ‘The barrenness of the sand, as it is usually pictured, was not caused by simple dryness, but was apparently due to the ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared to the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out.’
It might seem ridiculous, but Abe really gets the most out of his sand. He explores all of its properties: in a mound, it tumbles; it falls through cracks; it can be dug up and piled; it can be blown as a fine mist; it can contain moisture, and rot wood (somehow). It is everywhere, constantly shifting for maximum inconvenience. Sand is the ‘anthesis of all form’, but it isn’t water. There is a bothersome solidity to it. Each grain is only 1/8 mm wide, but in its totality it is a force of nature. As we gear up for a Hothouse Earth, the symbolic futility of sand feels particularly latent, but in essence it serves as a reminder that we have no control over the forces of nature.
Holey matrimony
Not much is said of the man’s actual marriage, but Abe gives us enough to set up a telling parallel with the woman. His wife is ironically referred to as ‘the other woman’. Though they aren’t without love, the man ‘can never be totally sure of her’. Their passion has been, if not lost, then ‘frozen… by over-idealising’. And it is his mother, not his wife, who files the missing persons report. With this sense of disconnection and unfulfillment, we can see why the man retreats into his rather reclusive hobby of insect collecting, and why he would take a bus ride to such a remote location to begin with.
It’s not insignificant that one of the man’s colleagues theorises he has an Oedipus complex. We can’t avoid seeing the deep hole in the dunes as a womb, and his willing descent into it as a subconscious desire to return to a state of prebirth, as a solution to his dissatisfaction. Seen like this, the woman he finds there (who herself has lost her husband and son to a typhoon) can fulfil the necessary role of mother and wife, embodying the Oedipal fantasy. His attempts to escape, and abuse of the woman, could suggest an internal, as well as social, discord.
However, the novel presents a nuanced exploration of gender, even if the woman’s role seems limited at first. What begins as an amicable, if forced, acquaintance becomes a dysfunctional symbiosis. When their water ration is cut off, the pain of the man and the woman become indistinguishable: ‘Her suffering was transmitted directly to him as if they had been connected by electrical wires.’ But his empathy is not so much out of concern for another human being as a survival instinct.
It gets stranger. Abe describes sex as something ‘buried under a mantle of certifications’, with a need to verify ‘…contracts, licenses, I.D. cards, permits, certificates of title, authorizations, registrations, carrying permits, certificates of membership, letters of recommendation, notes, leases, temporary permits, agreements, income declarations, receipts, even certificates of ancestry…’ –, according to this nightmarish prospect, certificates have to be generated ad infimum. This pointless formalisation of relationships creates a culture where ‘Both men and women are captives of an oppressive jealousy, always suspicious that the other party has purposely left something out.’ Maybe this is a uniquely modern issue; if we have too many personal freedoms might we go out of the way to impose restrictions on ourselves and how we interact with others? Did Abe feel that post-war Japanese society encouraged a sort of internalised bureaucracy? Or is this veiled reference to Communism, and the intrinsic sexlessness of comradery?
You might also wonder where the woman stands in this process. Is she subservient or stoic? A modern or traditional woman? Does she exercise power in their relationship? I can’t answer these questions. You will have to read the book yourself.
The trap of Hope
The man tries to escape using various methods, from coercion to threatening, to begging. He does manage to get out of the pit with a pair of sheers and rope, but ultimately falls victim to quicksand and is taken back. So much for innovation.
One of the more memorable images of the book is a trap he creates to catch crows. He calls it ‘Hope’, because, having caught the bird, he would be able to attach a letter to its leg calling for help. It might sound like a farfetched plan, but a small chance of escape is better than none. Of course, not a single crow touches it. Are you surprised? In this world, hope is a counterfeit currency. But maybe it’s unhealthy to pin our hopes on dubious saviours.
When the man is finally offered freedom it’s not because of his bravery or cunning, but factors that have nothing to do with him. Just as the village is a victim of nature and political forces, the man’s fate is ultimately out of his hands. Like sand, his luck is formless, totally dictated by higher powers.
However, there is usually something beneath the surface in Abe’s stories, and so it is fitting that a surprise appears in the crow trap at the end of the novel. Hope can take surprising forms. Although sometimes it requires adjusting expectations.
You might find the ending hilarious, baffling or infuriating, but at least it’s tonally consistent with the rest of the book — that is to say, non-prescriptive. Abe might dangle a fish in front of us, but we have to decide ourselves whether it’s worth taking. The true meaning of the book, then, is for you to find out, little literary excavator. Get digging.
