The Woman in the Dunes

Rating:
Summary: Literary quicksand
Review: Near the ocean, somewhere southwest of northeast, a small, sleepy village is waiting. Like certain desert insects, cloaking their frightening reality with the shifty innocence of sand, the village seems totally harmless. And yet--there is something uncanny about it. A salty breeze blows by, a cool mist is in the air. A seagull cackles, harshly.... Abe's visceral journey into the (literal) depths of existentialism is so vivid you can feel the grains of sand in your throat, rubbing you raw. He plunges you into this world of sand and sun, a circle of hell just below your feet. You want to come up for air but he holds you down masterfully, until your only option is to continue turning pages with your trembling hands. Don't dare to hope, for hope is a trap even the crows ignore. And as you drown without a drop of water in sight, the shell of your past life scoured away by the sand the sand the everpresent sand, you may at last recall that even Sisyphus, or so it goes, was happy after all....

Rating:
Summary: Derivative
Review: Once upon a time it seemed that Kobo Abe was a shoe-in for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the first nine decades of its history there had been only one winner, there had been very few Asian laureates at all, and Abe seemed to be successful enough in the Western world to be the presumptive nominee. As it happened he did not win, the next Japanese laureate was the less well known Oe, and reading this book it is easy to see that this was no great injustice. Despite its fame, both as a book and as a movie, this is a surprisingly derivative book. That people should compare it to Kafka and Beckett is one thing. But this is basically a shorter, shallower version of "The Castle." Consider the similarities. K visits an otherwise unknown village in what could only be central Europe. Niki Jumpei visits an otherwise isolated village in what is Japan. Both find themselves trapped in Sisyphean tasks. K is trying to make contact with the rulers of the Castle. Jumpei is placed in a sand pit, in the guise of being given a place to spend the night, and forced to endlessly dig sand out of it that otherwise threatens the village. There is something disingenous about K, whose credentials look suspicious and may not be real. Jumpei, by contrast, is just not very interesting and somewhat pompous and fatuous, even before he is involuntarily trapped in a sand-pit. Both K and Jumpei find himself erotically involved with a woman in the village, and in each case there is no love or passion, just embarrassing lust. The most memorable quality of "The Castle" is how at each step in his attempts to reach the Castle he finds himself forced back to a preliminary step, and then backwards to a preliminary step towards that, and so on in an endless regression. Jumpei's progress is not as elegant and Abe does not possess the horrible serenity of Kafka's prose. But Jumpei in his attempts to argue with his captors, threaten his captors, or escape from his captors, still doesn't really make any progress. "The Castle" doesn't actually have an ending because Kafka died before he completed it, but his notes suggest that the authorities will allow K to stay in the village. Not to give anything away but the ending to this book is not especially original. Unlike "The Castle" there are basically only two characters in this book, and the Woman in the Dunes is considerably less interesting than K's paramour. She has already given up and there is something vacant about her whole existence. There is nothing here that you cannot find in "The Castle." But there is much in "The Castle" that you will not find in "The Woman in the Dunes." For a start Kafka is a comic writer of genius, while wit and humor are not really Abe's strong points. Whereas "The Castle" is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, "The Woman in the Dunes" strikes one as the kind of novel designed to generate high school essays about the struggle between society and the individual. And whereas the authority in "The Castle" is genuinely strange and mysterious, the out of the way tyrants of Abe's sand pit more resemble "Deliverance" without inbred psychopaths. "The Silent Cry" is a much better novel, and Tanizaki and "The Heart" are better still.

Rating:
Summary: Derivative
Review: Once upon a time it seemed that Kobo Abe was a shoe-in for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the first nine decades of its history there had been only one winner, there had been very few Asian laureates at all, and Abe seemed to be successful enough in the Western world to be the presumptive nominee. As it happened he did not win, the next Japanese laureate was the less well known Oe, and reading this book it is easy to see that this was no great injustice. Despite its fame, both as a book and as a movie, this is a surprisingly derivative book. That people should compare it to Kafka and Beckett is one thing. But this is basically a shorter, shallower version of "The Castle." Consider the similarities. K visits an otherwise unknown village in what could only be central Europe. Niki Jumpei visits an otherwise isolated village in what is Japan. Both find themselves trapped in Sisyphean tasks. K is trying to make contact with the rulers of the Castle. Jumpei is placed in a sand pit, in the guise of being given a place to spend the night, and forced to endlessly dig sand out of it that otherwise threatens the village. There is something disingenous about K, whose credentials look suspicious and may not be real. Jumpei, by contrast, is just not very interesting and somewhat pompous and fatuous, even before he is involuntarily trapped in a sand-pit. Both K and Jumpei find himself erotically involved with a woman in the village, and in each case there is no love or passion, just embarrassing lust. The most memorable quality of "The Castle" is how at each step in his attempts to reach the Castle he finds himself forced back to a preliminary step, and then backwards to a preliminary step towards that, and so on in an endless regression. Jumpei's progress is not as elegant and Abe does not possess the horrible serenity of Kafka's prose. But Jumpei in his attempts to argue with his captors, threaten his captors, or escape from his captors, still doesn't really make any progress. "The Castle" doesn't actually have an ending because Kafka died before he completed it, but his notes suggest that the authorities will allow K to stay in the village. Not to give anything away but the ending to this book is not especially original. Unlike "The Castle" there are basically only two characters in this book, and the Woman in the Dunes is considerably less interesting than K's paramour. She has already given up and there is something vacant about her whole existence. There is nothing here that you cannot find in "The Castle." But there is much in "The Castle" that you will not find in "The Woman in the Dunes." For a start Kafka is a comic writer of genius, while wit and humor are not really Abe's strong points. Whereas "The Castle" is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, "The Woman in the Dunes" strikes one as the kind of novel designed to generate high school essays about the struggle between society and the individual. And whereas the authority in "The Castle" is genuinely strange and mysterious, the out of the way tyrants of Abe's sand pit more resemble "Deliverance" without inbred psychopaths. "The Silent Cry" is a much better novel, and Tanizaki and "The Heart" are better still.

Rating:
Summary: What is freedom?
Review: Put into a cage (or a deep hole in the sand) the primary, animal instinct is to escape, and to escape at all costs. Before escaping the first time, Jumpei practically rapes the Woman, then forces her to drink sake and swallow pills. This behavior is worse than the "illegal detainment" that he himself is experiencing. But it's just a means to an end, he explains to himself. After his near escape, he tries to force the Woman to have sex with him where everyone can see, just to "negotiate" to leave his hole for short breaks. The Woman, who has lived in this hole for countless years, should be the more barbaric of the two, but instead, it's Jumpei. You can almost sympathize with her apathy towards outsiders who might get hurt by their village's sand-selling operations.

Forced to re-evaluate his stance, Jumpei realizes that the Woman, far from being his captor, is a victim like him. Furthermore, he comes to realize that there really isn't much to escape back to even if he does leave the village. This becomes clear before and during his escape as he thinks contemptiously of his dead-end career, his colleage "Mobius Man," and his wife, who he refers to in the Japanese version only as "aitsu"- "that damn woman".

As contradictory and cruel as Jumpei's actions may be, I couldn't help but wonder if I wouldn't do the same things in his situation. Down in the pit, Jumpei is reduced to little more than an animal in a cage. Abe describes the smells, emotions, and sights with a vivid honesty and realness. At the end of the novel, Jumpei has not resigned himself to his fate, at least not consciously. He'll think about escaping tomorrow he says. The missing persons documents suggest that he never does try to escape. But can you blame him? His lack of freedom in the outside world is more subtle, but is it any less present than the lack of freedom in the hole? Is his life with his wife any happier than his life with the Woman? Is his job as a teacher more fulfilling than his job shovelling sand? All answers appear to be a resounding "No." If so, other than pure animal instinct and "principle", what reason does he have to escape?

Rating:
Summary: Okay so it's a bit dreary-- but that's existentialism!
Review: Quite a book! This unfortunate guy gets stuck in a sand-pit, forced to do the most base work for his survival, wracked with painful emotions -- mostly frustration at his powerless predicament. Tortured by his physical needs, especially thirst, and unable to resist his sexual urges towards the woman he shares the sand-pit with.

What I appreciated about this book was the focus put on the Sisyphean struggle of keeping up one's house. ie. implying the immense amount of effort we invest in our shelters. Wasn't the dune community's law, above all others, "Love Thy House"?? And isn't that the law we unquestionably abide to today, here, now? Investing a large portion of not only our income, but our time outside the workday, into the upkeep: mowing the ever-growing lawn, vacuuming the dust & dirt (sand?) always encroaching from without to within, dusting the various pieces of furniture (fine sand particles here)--- along with dirty dishes, dirty clothes-- I mean, the author makes a good argument in that he causes us to consider the not-so-expansive gulf between our lives and the main character's life in the sand pit.

So I conclude: Bravo! Thank you, Kobo Abe-- for throwing light on the degree to which we have acquiesced to our fate as humans in this relentless world we live in. It need not be a dreary acquiescence though, must it?

Rating:
Summary: The Shifting Sands of Modernity....
Review: Shortly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 narrative writing became heavily influenced by Western literature. Although there are many excellent early fiction writers and those who, like Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, tend to reflect more traditional aesthetics, or those of the "I-novel," Kobo Abe (1924-1993), a Marxist, is the first significantly modern Japanese novelist. His childhood in Manchuria helped him to look harder and more objectively than other writers at modern Japanese life, particularly in Tokyo, where Abe lived the rest of his life, while his growing up in Manchuria surely added to the sense of alienation that pervades his work. His early stories following World War II already express a profoundly existentialist angst and absurdity that has often led to his being compared to Kafka, Camus, Sartre, or Samuel Beckett. To my mind, though, it is precisely the fact that Abe is Japanese that is important and to view him as a mere imitator of the West would be a mistake. Rather than casting his experience into Kafkaesque terms, he is responding to his own experience of modern Japanese life. I believe Westerners need to think deeply about what that means for modern Japan, especially those dreamy Westerners who romantically idealize the traditional image of medieval Japan, as though it still exists.

In the short story "Magic Chalk" (1950), Abe tells the tale of "a poor artist named Argon." Flat broke and starving, Argon discovers in his shabby apartment a piece of red chalk with which he mindlessly draws pictures of food and dishes on the wall. Falling asleep, he groans, "I've got to eat!" Suddenly, he is awakened by the sound of food and crockery crashing to the floor: "The pictures he had chalked on the wall had vanished." Seeing food all around, he eats his fill and reflects, "the laws of the universe have changed." He then draws a bed, since he lacks one, as well as other furniture and food. The realization hits him that he can create an entirely new world and spends four weeks contemplating just how to do it. Driven to despair by the burdensome responsibility, he finally decides merely to draw a door to the new world, but upon opening it finds, "an awesome wasteland glaring in the noonday sun." He would have "to draw the world all over again" and begins with Eve, "stark naked," to whom he identifies himself as Adam and "also an artist, and a world planner." Eve, however, borrows his chalk, draws a gun, and shoots him. Other people in the building hear the gunshot: "By the time they ran in, Argon had been completely absorbed into the wall and had become a picture":

"After everyone left, there came a murmuring from the wall. 'it isn't chalk that will remake the world . . .' A single drop welled out of the wall. It fell from just below the eye of the pictorial Argon." (tr. Alison Kibrick)

Writing shortly after World War II, Abe understands modern Japan has lost something of immense value, and a mere artist can not replace it.

In Kobo Abe's masterpiece The Woman in the Dune (1962), the protagonist Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist, travels to the seaside to collect specimens. He happens on a village built in the midst of the dunes with houses at the bottom of huge craters or cavities of sand. Peering down into one of the cavities at a small house "submerged in silence," he muses, "no matter what they did . . . there was no escaping the law of the sand." This "law" soon becomes clear when village men trick him into going sixty feet down in a cavity to spend the night at an old woman's house. Before long, he realizes that there is probably no way to get back out. The "ceaselessly flowing sand," "this shapeless, destructive power," which "had no form" of its own, was continually pouring down on the little house threatening to destroy it and bury its occupants alive. Every night the woman shovels sand into baskets which the village men haul up by rope and carry away, just enough to prevent their suffocation. Watching her, Niki Jumpei remarks, "you'll never finish, no matter how long you work at it." Later, the narrator explains, "the only certain factor was its movement; sand was the antithesis of all form." Despite his many appeals for help from the village men, the village benefits from the sand being fought back and they refuse to permit him to leave.

The men, however, are careful to provide the woman and man with the necessities of life as long as they continue to perform the nightly work of clearing back the everdrifting sand of reality, for the sand is manifestly symbolic. Upon his request, they even give Jumpei a newspaper. Reading the usual headlines of political, business, and domestic crimes and intrigues, Jumpei thinks,

"There wasn't a single item of importance. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. . . . And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home."

This "illusion" is not the illusion of Buddhism, the floating world of Genji symbolizing a world of spiritual import. It is the illusion of everyday life through which the nihilist sees "the meaningless of existence," at last confronted, the real truth of human experience. "The world," Abe has Jumpei say in a simile, "is like sand." Modern Japanese writers have found the transition easy to make from the illusion of samsara to the illusion of nihilism which is quotidian reality. Similarly, the old woman turns out not to be so old after all, and Jumpei learns social customs are merely illusions too, as he rapes her brutally and repeatedly while she at times enjoys or submits to it. When the opportunity for escape finally comes, drained of all inner meaning, strength, and purpose, he no longer has the will to leave.

In the story "Beyond the Curve" (1966), Abe writes about a man who, while climbing up a hill, comes to a halt before a curve in the road:

"For the life of me, I couldn't visualize what lay beyond the curve. . . . I knew perfectly well that beyond the curve was the town on the hilltop where I lived. My temporary lapse of memory in no way altered the fact of its existence."

He stands there agonizing in his mind about what might or ought to be around the curve until he is overcome by anxiety, fearing "the town's very existence would fade away and then vanish." He considers, "I myself was no longer myself, but some mysterious other." Nausea overtakes him. He manages to turn around and walk back down the hill. His "old confidence was gone." Taking refuge in a coffee shop, he wonders, no longer sure, who he is since he has forgotten his name and where he works. Frantically fumbling with the contents of his wallet and pockets, looking for clues, he realizes, "I had mislaid . . . myself." Abe expresses here not only the universally modern sense of existential void but especially the Japanese fear of the loss of traditional identity under the onslaught of modernity. Abe's persona significantly and desperately says, "Until I found that town beyond the curve, there could be no resolution." And so it is for modern Japan. He takes a taxi up the hill, beyond the curve:

"Spatially, the town had a solid physical existence, but temporally, it was a vacuum. It existed--yet horribly, it had no existence whatever . . . the town I knew was gone."

Though seeking answers from others, he "alone was lost, uncomprehending." Physically, materially, like the West, Japan exists; in terms of social or psychological time, the "vacuum," quintessentially the same as in the West, has swallowed everything: "The town I knew was gone." What lies beyond the curve, if anything, remains to be seen.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliance
Review: The brilliance and relevance of this work is blinding. A multi-level allegory (see other reviews) that has truth for us all, or at least most of us. We (can) all fall into such pits. Either trapped by ourselves, or trapped by others, probably both, struggling against the unrelenting forces of nature, our nature. A brilliantly crafted story - observation - warning. But, who can resist what he desires? This is the first Kobo Abe book that I read. The crime is that I haven't read it again in the last 20 years. I should have done, for I might have recognised my danger and avoided the pit I am in. More gentle on my psyche than other Abe masterpieces, but none the less profound. After reading this book I was keen to undertake another Kobo Abe immediately, no recovery period needed.

Rating:
Summary: Mysterious, atmospheric and haunting
Review: The Kobo Abe novel "Woman in the Dunes" is a strangely evocative novel that sketches, with devastating accuracy, the feeling of being alienated from society.

Junpei is a typical salaryman in Tokyo, and typically as well, he has a hobby, collecting insects. Lest this sound esoteric, it's not--bug collecting is a hobby as popular as collecting baseball cards is here. In other words, Junpei is "everyman."

However, Junpei seems to be undergoing, subtly, some kind of personal dissolution. He heads for vacation on the coast to pick up more specimens and presumably clear his head so he can go back to work and act as he's expected to act. The reader is left to fill in much of Junpei's state of mind and even Americans, not tuned into Japanese culture, can imagine his struggle.

Somehow, Junpei finds himself trapped, physically trapped in a village that is constantly threatened by extinction under the shifting dunes. Each night, the entire village shovels sand to reclaim their tiny foothold. The village headman lodges Junpei with a widow and he is expected to take up the shovel with the other villagers.

Not to participate is not an option; Junpei at first struggles with his captivity. He goes on strike. Soon, however, like the bugs he once anaesthetized in a jar, he ceases to flutter and becomes a part of the village life--though constantly mindful he is an prisoner.

As in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" from which Abe clearly is drawing, Junpei becomes more and more distanced from his previous life in Tokyo. Shamefully, secretly, he becomes sexual entangled with the young widow, in a way that seems almost as if he is unaware of the impact this will have on their lives. He is finding a home and a purpose and he's needed. And wanted. Is he still a prisoner, if he needs the village in return?

The metaphor for Japanese society, where utter conformity is the ultimate value, and for the inevitable alienation individuals must feel, is magnificent. Even our own society, which allows for magnitudes more individuality and freedom, is reflected strangely in this masterpiece of a novel.

This book never gets old to me, and seems as timeless as the sands that Abe uses to stand for life's inhuman struggles and how we meet them together. A must-read.

Rating:
Summary: Abe's Call for Patriotism: "love thy [existential] home"
Review: The perfect existentialist novel. Man is alone; man exists with no necessary tie to anyone, anything (no family, no religion, not even a familiar face to get soaked up in the past with). Being thus alone in a vast, unfamiliar world, it is as if the main character is "reborn" into a new life. He is alone, but he is not without responsibility for his own existence, therefore he chooses "to live" (we know this is true since at all times he has the potassium cyanide tablets but chooses NOT to take them).

How does he choose to live? He experiments; he devises escape routes, all of which are physical defeats of the body. He cannot escape an imprisoned existence through physical displacement alone. BUT, what the main character does have is perserverance, and consciousness of his own plight--he creates an image of mankind for himself consciously, for himself and even for the woman and the villagers by whom he is held in detention.

What is important here above all is the mobility of mind; the man never relents in his journey to free himself, and it is through many-varied "experimentation" that he is able to come upon a "right" path, a "right" choice. Up until that point, the world is upside down, and he can't make heads or tails of it--but when he has this "mobility of consciousness", when he has the epiphany that he is not a prisoner at all he truly does "escape". He moves in the mind, he moves in consciousness, this is what allows him to discover the "correct" image of mankind for him is simply this: "Love thy own home."

This is an incredibly difficult book to understand unless you have some background in existentialist thought and also the geist of the time that Japan was in during the 1950s and 60's. Post-war Japan is undergoing major sociopolitical upheaval, long-standing institutions of bureaucratric governing merely give the illusion of social structure (a "sand city" that falls apart once you try scaling it), but the "sands of time" are shifting, people are discovering they've dug their own graves to an immense depth, and that unless they do something about it, they're lost. Abe's book is a call for social experimentation--the people can no longer rely on mere illusion to support them, they need to discover for themselves what is best for them. Thus we see the explosive growth of "experimentalist" methods in the arts & literature--neo-Dadaism is a good example of this--and we see this as the only "true" method of escape. Abe's message is biting and stern: YOU WILL NOT "ESCAPE" SOCIAL DESTRUCTION BY ADOPTING AN "EASY WAY OUT". You will not escape the "hole" in which you've dug yourself by simply running to another political system, i.e. capitalism, communism, etc. What Abe is vehemently trying to bring forth is the idea that one's people must come up with their own solutions, and NOT RUN to adopt an outside system that may or may not be what the country needs right now.

Yes, this is a patriotic book for Japan--one that believes in its own capacity for sociopolitical construction, for a "mobility of thought" that will eventually yield the right solution to a problem that has incarcerated everyone in a "prison" of illusion. But it is NOT without "Hope" (pun intended). The book is ultimately sanguine in its outlook for the possibility of a "way out" but it must come through a Heideggeran "evolution" of ideas which eventually end up in progress. This epistemological route is the ONLY way, according to Abe.

Fortunately, Abe has already done the hard part for us. He's given Japan an answer: "Love thy own home". The way you "free yourself" from physical imprisonment is by loving the prison itself and finding livelihood there--when the man discovers a new "essence" for himself in the harnessing of the suction pump, he has completely altered the vision of the prison into a land of opportunity, of great possibility, of "hope". The "altered consciousness" is what brings about the possibility of beneficial change--one that turns a bleak barrenness (a "desert" of intellectual and moral life) into a trove of hidden treasure, like suddenly discovering oil beneath a plot of wasteland. This conversion of consciousness to domestic love is the "solution"; it is the "way out". It is this thrust for patriotism that bleeds behind the schemata drawn up for this work, one which is deeply reflective of the time itself.

For those interested, Teshigahara Hiroshi directed a well-acclaimed film based on this book, Woman in the Dunes. It depicts beautifully the themes of this novel, and it perhaps does with images better justice to Abe's own intent than his own language (*Gasp*). For this reason, I feel the film will be a more lasting work than the book, although both are incredibly good at portraying what the atmosphere of the time was during the 50s and 60's, when Japan was just beginning to recover from the post-war aftermath. Both works are a monumental tribute to the post-war "reconstruction" period of Japan, and I dare say, of any country at all that has undergone a wholesale reconstruction period. A timeless masterpiece, it will endure for ages for its allegorical schematism of a nation in desperate need of a "way out".

Rating:
Summary: One track book to nowhere
Review: This book was as flat as a day-old can of opened soda. The beginning was intriguing, but the moment the lead character ended up in his sandy prison, the book ended. Or at least should have. Everything was painfully predictable and I ended up skimming through most of the book. The relentless morbidity of the book made it impossible for me to even remotely relate to the characters, which in the end (finally!) made me leave it behind when I returned from vacation.