The Woman in the Dunes (1962)

By Abe Kobo

Translated by E. Dale Saunders

1960, translated 1964

Vintage International

(Novel)

The deeply unsettling story is set in 1955. Mr. Abe’s protagonist is a vacationing teacher, Jumpei Niki, a socially isolated and emotionally stunted man who disappears while on vacation. An avid entomologist with a desire to gain fame and immortality by identifying a new insect, he heads to the sea in the hopes of capturing sand beetles. Though he can see the sea and discovers ample evidence of a maritime economy, after wandering for hours in dunes, he finds himself exhausted and lost. Coming across a group of idlers in a shabby village where each home seems to be at the point of being swallowed up by sand, he asks if there is an inn where he might stay the night. They direct him to a woman at the edge of the village who lives in a home at the base of a large, open pit. She agrees to take him in for the night, and he happily descends a rope ladder to a refuge from the heat and sun. The next morning he wakes to discover that the rope ladder is gone. When he frantically tries to scale the sand walls, they collapse beneath him, and he can make no progress. He interrogates the woman, who explains that she has never left the pit. Like other people defending the village from the encroaching sands, she devotes her days to shoveling sand into buckets that are hauled up by men at the top of the pit. Jumpei attempts a variety of strategies to convince the men of the village to release him while also coming to grips with his growing desire to possess the woman. The story is, of course, very much influenced by Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, but whereas Kafka hints at the causes of Gregor Samsa’s transformation and obliquely signals the anxiety he suffers because of sexual desire, Abe’s hero speaks openly of the woman as a kind of insect that he fantasizes about dominating while also fearing her uncanny methods of entrapping him. He spends hours ruminating on his desire for sexual intimacy as well as his visceral disgust with the human body and women. Abe’s narrator also engages in philosophical monologues and dialogues, recalling conversations with the mysterious “Mr. Moebius,” appropriating African-American culture while introducing his philosophy of “The One-Way Ticket Blues,” and calling into question a culture of “house love.”

“When he came within reach of the bucket he pushed the woman aside, trampling her with his  feet, and took hold of it with both hands. He could hardly take off the rope before he impatiently thrust his face into the bucket, his body heaving like a pump. He raised his face and took a breath. The third time he raised his  head water spurted from his nose and his lips, and he choked painfully. His knees buckled limply under him and he closed his eyes. Now it was the woman’s turn. She was not to be outdone, and, sounding as if her whole body had turned into a rubber plunger, in no time at all she had drained half the contents.”