The Sands of Time: Kobo Abe's Nightmare of Complacency
Theme: International Thrillers
Her suffering was transmitted directly to him as if they had been connected by electrical wires. He took the plastic cover off the kettle and jammed the spout into his mouth. He tried rinsing with the first mouthful, but it was impossible to clear his mouth with so little water. Only lumps of sand came out. Them, not caring, he let the sand run down his throat along with the water. It was if he were drinking pebbles.
When it comes to reviewing, there are times when a reviewer doesn't know if their abilities can do justice to the book. This exactly the feeling I have after reading Kobo Abe's allegorical thriller,The Woman in the Dunes. This is a creeping vine of a novel. With each page the tension is turned up another tick on the dial so that it builds slowly and insidiously till the reader feels that she must also escape. And that is what this novel is about - escape. Niki Jumpei, a professor who studies entomology as a hobby, heads to a seaside town in search of a yet to be discovered species of bugs. In hopes of finding the species so that it will bear his name in perpetuity, he loses track of time and misses the last bus back to his town. He encounters an old man from the small town who asks if Niki is with the government. After the old man is convinced that Niki is not, he offers to find him a place to stay for the evening. This place, located in the depths of the dune town, is a dilapidated shack at the bottom of a dune that Niki must be lowered into by a rope. A woman in her thirties resides there and welcomes Niki. And thus begin his descent into a hell filled only with heat, sand and questions. He is not allowed to leave nor can he escape. He thinks at first that he will leave the following day, but this becomes a cruel joke that haunts him. The woman, whose name we never know, is beyond passive. She appears completely inured to life in a sand pit, destined to have water shimmied down to her once a day by the town workers as long as she continues to shovel sand. Niki can't understand why she doesn't desire to leave, or try for a better life, or at least realize that there is a better life that looms thirty feet above her house in the dune. She sees no point in leaving for a better life. With each passing day, Niki grows hostile towards her complacency, the fact that she refuses to help him escape, and with the ubiquitous sand that blankets their lives. When he first spies a rope ladder that he realizes had been lowered down from above, Niki unearths the depths of the woman's passivity:
The woman's actions and her silence took on an unexpected and terrible meaning. He refused to believe it, yet in his heart he knew his worst fears had come true. The ladder had probably been removed with her knowledge, and doubtless with her full consent. Unmistakably she was an accomplice. Of course her posture had nothing to do with embarrassment; it was the posture of a sacrificial victim, of a criminal willing to accept any punishment. He had been lured by the beetle into a desert from which there is no escape--like some famished mouse.Once he recovers from the shock of his circumstances and plans an attempt at escape, he ponders the sheer atrocity of this existence:
Suddenly he felt as though he was melting away from his feet upward into a landscape of flame. But something like a perpetual shaft of ice remained in the center of his body. He felt ashamed in some way. An animal-like woman...thinking only in terms of today...no yesterday, no tomorrow...with a dot for a heart. A world where people were convinced that men could be erased like chalk marks from a blackboard. In his wildest dreams he could not have imagined that such barbarism still existed anywhere in the world. Well, anyway...if this was a sign that he was beginning to regain his composure and recover from his initial shock, his qualms of conscience were not a bad thing.As Niki obsesses over the woman's psychological motivations, his own self-perception is challenged by the situation. At the beginning of the novel, Abe presents Niki as a cold, somewhat judgmental, informed man of intellect in search of solidifying his own legacy through discovery of a bug. But when faced with the predicament he soon finds himself in, he realizes his own weakness and mortality, his own emptiness. This is one of the reasons that Abe is compared to Kafka--the depth of the allegory within this novel matches the pathos of George Samsa albeit less overtly. The individual trapped by modern society, eventually lulled into a sense of satisfaction and renders paralytic the ability to recognize much less challenge its confines. And Abe delivers this allegory in a never-ending stream of sand and heat. This is the kind of thriller that is oppressive, suffocating, maddening, creepy and utterly compelling. The themes of alienation, submission, and individuality play out expertly alongside the developing physical relationship between the village woman and Niki. Their relationship is so complex it confounds. He relies on her for survival but also recognizes her as a willing captor. He alternates between surrendering to her by using her to sate his need for sex and using her as a release for all his hostility and rage. He kidnaps her at one point but then realizes he must let her go in order to get more water from the townsmen. He is not attracted to her as one would be if functioning in the normal world and Abe describes his sex with her in a detached form, describing his orgasm but making no mention of anything he feels towards the village woman. The irony becomes apparent that he is a man making do with his surroundings as she has done.
Niki does manage an escape only to be returned to the woman by the townspeople. With this defeat, he is no longer able to remain concentrated on escape because he is so fatigued from all the illnesses that have befallen him from his various attempts at escape. He then turns indifferent towards the idea of escape by simply convincing himself that the idea will be there tomorrow so why do it today?
A terrifying, provocative existential novel that deserves to be honored for its greatness. A wonderful representation of Japanese literature as well as an unusual thriller, The Woman in the Dunes is a great novel and Abe is an author we should know for his examination of the individual in modern society.
The Woman in the Dunes
By Kobo Abe
Translated by E. Dale Saunders
Vintage International
Paperback,
ISBN: 9780679733782
$14.95
Here is a trailer for the movie of the same name that Abe wrote the screenplay for. This is a superb trailer that indicates that this movie is actually as good as the novel.
Other Abe titles to read:
Posted by Monica at 10/27/2010 1:07 PM 
Categories: Japan, Existentialism, International Thrillers
Tags: Japan The Woman in the Dunes Kobo Abe International Thrillers Existentialism
Categories: Japan, Existentialism, International Thrillers
Tags: Japan The Woman in the Dunes Kobo Abe International Thrillers Existentialism
Good stuff: I loved The Woman in the Dunes, and you're right, the film is really rather good.
Have you read The Face of Another? It's also excellent (and has a similarly good film based on it too - if I recall, Abe wrote the screenplay for that too). Amongst other things, a superb study of identity/self.
Reply to this