The Woman in the Dunes: writing, images, similes

1/ The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe was published in 1962. The film adaptation by Hiroshi Teshigahara came out in 1964. 

It’s no wonder. The Woman in the Dunes is a very cinematic novel. I mean it’s the kind of novel that a filmmaker reads and thinks “that’s a film right there”. 

Look at this passage for example: 

“The wind blew ceaselessly from the sea and, far below, turbulent white waves beat against the base of the sand dunes. Where the dunes fell away to the west a slight hill crowned with bare rock jutted out into the sea. On it the sunshine lay scattered in needle-points of light.” (Ch.3) 

Or this one, when the man tries to fall asleep:

“He tried thinking of something else. When he closed his eyes, a number of long lines, flowing like sighs, came floating toward him. They were ripples of sand moving over the dunes. The dunes were probably burned onto his retina because he had been gazing steadily at them for some twelve hours.” (Ch.6) 

Such a striking image. I remember this image from the film. The translator is E. L. Saunders (I almost wrote his name as Sanders). 

Or this one, when he wakes up after the first night: 

“The sand that had accumulated on his face, head, and chest fell away with a rustling sound. Around his nose and lips sand was encrusted, hardened by perspiration. He scraped it off with the back of his hand and cautiously blinked his eyes. Tears welled up uncontrollably under his gritty, feverish eyelids. But the tears alone were not enough to wash away the sand that had become lodged in the moist corners of his eyes.” (Ch.7)

We can see the sand. We can hear its rustling sound. We can feel it, hardened by sweat and lodged in the eyes. 

2/ Here’s the story: a schoolteacher and amateur entomologist travels to a remote area of sand dunes in search of beetles. He misses the last bus back to civilisation so the villagers offer him shelter in a house at the bottom of a sand dune, to which he gets down by rope ladder. The woman in the house is in her 30s, alone, and she spends all night shovelling sand into buckets to be raised and taken away by the villagers—as the man finds out, the sand doesn’t stop falling and she has to do it every day so that the entire village doesn’t get swallowed up by the sand. The next morning he gets ready to leave, only to realise the rope ladder is gone. He is trapped. 

Sand becomes a character on its own in the novel. 

“Because winds and water currents flow over the land, the formation of sand is unavoidable. As long as the winds blew, the rivers flowed, and the seas stirred, sand would be born grain by grain from the earth, and like a living being it would creep everywhere. The sands never rested. Gently but surely they invaded and destroyed the surface of the earth.” (Ch.2) 

Sand is fascinating. Sand is destructive. 

 “This house was already half dead. Its insides were half eaten away by tentacles of ceaselessly flowing sand. Sand, which didn’t even have a form of its own—other than the mean 1/8-mm. diameter. Yet not a single thing could stand against this shapeless, destructive power. The very fact that it had no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strength, was it not?” (Ch.5) 

That is an interesting image—“tentacles of ceaselessly flowing sand”. 

Here Kobo Abe contrasts sand with water: 

“Never before had he been so keenly aware of the marvel of water. Water was an inorganic substance like sand, simple, transparent, inorganic substance that adapted to the body more readily than any living thing. As he let the water trickle slowly down his throat, he imagined stone-eating animals.” (Ch.7)

3/ The man goes in search of insects, and finds a woman who lives like an insect.  

4/ Other people have written about the meaninglessness of the woman’s life and the existentialist themes in The Woman in the Dunes so I’m not going to write about them. I’m more interested in the visual writing and the surreal, nightmarish qualities of the novel. 

“… from one corner of the ceiling the sand began to pour out dizzily in numerous tapelike streams. The strange quietness was in eerie contrast to the violence of the flow of sand.” (Ch.10) 

Kobo Abe first introduces sand as an interesting, ever-flowing substance, then slowly builds up and makes sand become terrifying—violent, destructive, a trap. Look at the scene where the man desperately tries to escape, in vain. Then: 

“Suddenly the flow of sand grew violent. There was a muffled sound and then a pressure against his chest. He tried to look up to see what was happening, but he no longer had any sense of direction. He was only dimly aware of a faint milky light playing over him as he lay doubled up in the black splotch of his vomit.” (ibid.) 

I can see why Kobo Abe is compared to Kafka—everything is senseless and absurd; the main character gets thrown into a nightmarish situation where everyone and everything is against him and he doesn’t know why but there’s nothing he can do to get out of it. 

5/ James Wood notes that Edmund Wilson (if I remember correctly) generally doesn’t quote from the book he’s critiquing. But why not? When the writing is good, I want to point at it—look! 

The Woman in the Dunes has more interesting metaphors and similes than in Kawabata or Tanizaki, at least the ones I’ve read. This is the main character, Niki Jumpei (his name is not introduced until ch.11), contemplating whether people miss him or put out a missing notice for him in the papers after his several days at the bottom of the sand dune with the woman. 

“Rarely will you meet anyone so jealous as a teacher. Year after year students tumble along like the waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current.” (Ch.11) 

That’s good. 

“It was doubtful whether they were sincerely worried, but at least their meddling curiosity was as overripe as an unpicked persimmon.” (ibid.) 

That’s very interesting—comparing something abstract (curiosity) to something concrete (a fruit). 

This is another: 

“No sooner had the cooling blue light slipped down from the edge of the hole than everything was reversed, and he engaged in combat with sleep that sucked at him as a sponge sucks water. As long as this vicious circle was not broken somewhere, not only his watch but time itself would be immobilized, he feared, by the grains of sand.” (Ch.13) 

This one is not a simile, but it’s a good sentence where he mixes sight with smell. 

“The colors of drawn were beginning to mingle with the fragrance of cooking rice.” (Ch.11)  

Such a brilliant novel.