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.

The book is interesting in that you already know the outcome: the man never escapes the sand dunes, and begins a life with the woman he is trapped with–although it ends with him still scheming. Questions about the town are never answered and hardly explored. That void of explanation is probably the strongest point of the book, and differentiates it from other books in which the reader is meant to suspensefully wait until everything is “A-HA!” and explained.

The main character, in my opinion, is intentionally written as an asshole. He is self-centered and can only think of himself, and is constantly judging and calculating the actions of others. In his mind, he repeatedly reminds himself of facts, and then negates them and comes up with completely different theories (see quote below.) In this way he is certainly, but not annoyingly, used to represent the common man with his own selfish intentions.

The character of the woman who traps the man in her house is submissive, practically mute, and afraid. Is this a take on Japanese women? Probably, but in her case it is taken to such an extreme that I didn’t even make the connection until after I had finished the book. She is ugly, cut up and scabbed over by the sandy winds, and almost always naked–not in a beautiful way, but always with a rather crude description.

Overall, I wasn’t sure that I liked the book after I finished it. But I have to admit, it stuck with me and left me puzzling over it for a few days. In that regard, it earns my respect and I do not regret reading it at all. The translation was smooth and held subtleties very well. I highly recommend to those who aren’t afraid to feel uncomfortable, but not to those who like lighter reading.

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