Title: The Woman in the Dunes
Author: Kobo Abe
Year: 1962
Rating: 4/5
Thoughts: Extremely provocative, mind-bending, but most of all the uncomfortable. The story takes place in a remote town of Japan, a nonsensical place made of sand where the inhabitants spend their days toiling away under the wrath of the sun, digging their homes out of the sand. As such, the descriptions mostly consist of explaining what dehydration feels like, getting sand in your mouth, having your eyes crust over while sleeping–even the author’s choice of sexual expression is painful sodomy, as the main character (who has a name but is tellingly referred to only as “the man”) has given himself a psychological venereal disease.

This book isn’t like many Japanese “out there” books I’ve read–it’s just mundane enough so that it’s eerie, and the storytelling is quite frustrating as it follows the man’s attempts to escape the town. Although everything is told in a more or less “matter of fact” way, whether the facts are made up or not is hard to tell. Everything about sand, including the physics of it (1/8 mm in diameter) is consistently woven throughout the book. It was hard to read at times because of the repetition, but I did find myself wanting to know the ending quite badly.

Quote Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn’t unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop. [...] 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.

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