ABE, KOBO – THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES 1964 - - 1991 edition. Vintage International. Translated by E Dale Saunders. Illustrated by Machi Abe. A surreal, creepy, claustrophobic Kafkaesque allegory. It begins with the sudden disappearance of an etymologist who has gone off to look for
sand flies and hasn’t returned seven years later. It shows how quickly his family and friends abandon the search, and dismiss him as of any importance in their lives. The story then quickly moves on to show what happened to him. Niki Jumpie has not run off with another woman. His obsession with getting his name mentioned in the insect collector’s hall of fame for discovering a new species has led him into great trouble. He has gone to an obscure stretch of coastline where the vast sand dunes are slowly burying the dilapidated fishing villages. He develops a theory that some sand flies help to kill their desert prey by flying in haphazard ways to lure them into a desert where they will get lost and die of thirst, so that the flies can then feast on the rotting carcasses. He is oblivious that his own
fate parallels this. He
finds the village not deserted but still inhabited. Men approach him, fearful that he is some kind of government inspector. He assures them that he is just a mild mannered schoolteacher who likes collecting insects. They offer him hospitality and invite him to stay with a woman at her house for the night. He finds that her house is actually inside a deep square sandpit. He is lowered in to join her, and shocked to discover that the rope ladder
used to lower him is then quickly removed again. The woman is young and attractive, but the hero is shocked to witness her struggling to keep the pit from clogging with the sand that spills in constantly. She fills buckets with the sand, using a shovel, and the men come to move the buckets, giving her fresh ones. She works like this all night long. (It is too hot to do so during daylight hours). It slowly dawns on the etymologist that he is expected to work with her at this backbreaking and ultimately doomed activity. The sand must inevitably win the battle sooner or later. He learns that many other such pits are being used throughout the village. His efforts to plea for release, and threaten to bring in the authorities if he is not allowed to go, fall on deaf ears. He makes a token gesture of working, but he now spends most of the book trying to
escape his fate. The villagers, and more frequently, the sand itself thwart his best efforts. He tries to climb the sand wall but falls off. He tries pulling the sand down from the steep walls from the base hoping to climb up and almost buries himself alive when the overhanging sand collapses on him. He
gets desperate enough to take the woman hostage and refuses to work. The
villagers just cut off his water supply until he is maddened by thirst and gives up his campaign. He is both bemused and appalled by the woman, who often removes her clothes to prevent them from rotting in the sand. He has sex with her, but it proves that he is weak and impotent before the forces around him, rather than any kind of erotic release from his fate. The woman watches his efforts at defiance and escape with bemusement. He makes a more successful escape attempt than most, by bundling his clothes and spare things together to make a grappling line. He gets out of fhe pit and runs for freedom. His bearings are lost and he finds that he runs back towards the village, and viscous dogs chase him. He runs back towards the seashore and blunders into quicksand, where he is dependent on the villagers for his rescue. He is cast back into the pit with the woman, and the brink of mental collapse. He makes a last desperate bid for freedom, by building a bird trap, hoping to use crows to carry messages calling for help on their legs. No birds come near, but the bucket used for the trap begins to capture fresh water moisture. He has accidentally stumbled on an experiment, which fascinates him. He believes that the sand is unusually adept here at retaining moisture. He wants to study the phenomena more. It obsesses him, despite its trivial nature besides his real predicament. When the woman gets pregnant, the men of the village bring her an ambulance to take her away. They also invite the teacher to go free too, but he is now so obsessed with his experiment that he volunteers to stay, postponing his escape plans for a later date. The finale is an existentialist one – finally offered what we want, we make the wrong choices. We become fixated on the little things and fail to see the bigger picture. We are insignificant insects. We are trapped in our fates and destinies. We are playthings for the powers that be around us. Abe’s story is creepy and unsettlingly claustrophobic. It is hard to see what category or genre is best for it. My thoughts would be to class it under horror. An affecting tale that will haunt the mind long after reading.
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