The Woman in the Dunes

by Kobo Abe

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Themes and Meanings

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Kb Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is like a glass box of sand that can be shaken and shifted into one form and then another, so clear yet so plastic are its possible interpretations. On one level, the novel is an existential parable of man’s plight: the trap in which all people live, the futility of all human efforts, the folly of individuality, the narrowness of group perception, the meaningless ritual of everyday existence. It can also be read as a Marxist critique of bourgeois life—the meaningless attempts to get ahead, to escape human destiny, which is a group destiny and not an individual one. Jumpei’s pretentions are as empty and futile as shoveling sand from the bottom of a sand pit. He represents the middle class; the woman represents nature and the natural “man,” one who cooperates and lives within a social context. The Woman in the Dunes also has its Freudian overtones: the watchtower or phallus representing male authority, the patriarchy hovering over both the man and the woman in the pit, keeping them in line; the ceaseless, mechanical action of the shovel in the sand (the penis in the vagina); the pit enclosing the man, threatening to suffocate him (the threat of woman to man, enclosing and suffocating him in the womb/vagina), his individuality smothered in the family and in society.

On a literary level, the novel can also be thought of as a satirical takeoff on the traditional Japanese confessional “I novel.” Written in the third person, it reveals, though not so sympathetically, the plight of the hero, his struggle for survival and identity in a hostile and foreign land. It can also be construed as lightly autobiographical (Kb Abe lived in the Manchurian desert as a boy), an artist’s coming-of-age novel. Abe also addresses the theme of deracination or rootlessness in twentieth century man: the man without a village, the man without an identity, wandering lost in the shifting, morally amorphous universe.

The Woman in the Dunes deals with all these themes and more. Like the sand, it is both solid in its meaning and fluid in its paradoxes. Like Franz Kafka, Abe demonstrates with satiric humor the futility of man’s plight in a hostile universe. He also reveals man’s own blundering inability to see his existence for what it really is: either a series of shared moments that can be filled with kindness and passion or routine menial servitude made bitter by mutual distrust. In the end, Jumpei is not foolish because he chooses to embrace the pit; he is foolish because he cannot admit his decision. He pretends that he does not choose the pit when in actuality he does. With a touch of Zen Buddhism, Abe shows that the only way to transcend the pit is to embrace it, the pit being life and all of its limitations, the pit being death, with all of its implications, the pit being sex and the instinctive animal in man, with all of its complications.

Themes

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Alienation

One of the overall themes in Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is that of alienation. The protagonist feels out of step with his society and is eventually cast into a situation that exemplifies his feelings. He is tossed into a hole and held captive in an environment that consists, for the most part, of only sand—a substance in which little if anything will grow. His surroundings consist of drab colors, stale air, and a lack of water. He remains totally dependent on outsiders to keep him alive. His attitude...

(This entire section contains 1522 words.)

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toward the woman with whom he shares a house is abrupt at best, but for most of the time it is caustic. He cannot relate to her acceptance of her dull life. While he is held captive, he recounts incidents from his former life as a schoolteacher. Although he is anxious for his freedom, his recollections of what his life was like outside the hole in the sand are not much more pleasant. He does not relate to his fellow teachers. He had been in some kind of relationship with a woman but it is unclear whether that relationship was as a lover and friend or if it were a relationship with a prostitute. Either way, the comments he makes about the “other” woman do not indicate that he enjoyed it. She always disagrees with him, he says, no matter what he tries to discuss with her. He is alienated from everyone, it seems, even from himself. He often refers to himself in an objective manner as if he were talking about someone else.

Loss of Identity

At the start of the novel, the protagonist searches for insects not so much to learn about them in any scientific way but rather so he might find an insect that has not yet been named. If he is successful, his name will be forever attached to the description of this bug. This will give him a sense of identity. As the readers find out later, the protagonist’s identity is very much in question. As the story develops, it becomes obvious that he is not only looking for insects to immortalize his name, he is also looking for a true sense of himself. He has no identity, readers learn, other than insurance papers, birth certificate, and other pieces of paper that have his name on them. When he thinks of reasons why it is wrong for him to be held captive, he does not state the obvious, but rather he says that he is “someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order.” He is so lacking in a concept of himself that he often laughs without knowing why he is laughing. He senses pain but only as if that pain belonged to someone else. And when he cries, it is described in this way: “He sobbed in a stifled voice. But he was not particularly sad. He felt quite as if someone else were crying.” But it is not only his emotions that he does not claim. There are moments when his body does not even seem to belong to him. For instance, at one point, as he goes to light a cigarette he is holding, and as he looks at his hand, he states: “The fingers that held it trembled.” A later section reads: “He felt that the hand he held to his face was floating free in the air.” This was his own hand he was talking about. Even in his description of having sex, it is said: “It was not he who had satisfied his desires, but apparently someone quite different, someone who had borrowed his body.”

And in case these concepts of a lack of self were not clear enough, the protagonist mentions a mirror that is hung in the house in the sand pit. The paint on the back of the mirror has chipped away, and when anyone looks into it, they see only disjointed parts of themselves. And when the woman mentions that she wants to buy a new mirror, the protagonists says a new mirror would be just as useless. “What use would a mirror be to someone who no longer could be seen?” This loss of oneself builds up in the novel until the very last section. In the last pages, after he realizes that the sand contains drinkable water, the narrator states: “The change in the sand corresponded to a change in himself. Perhaps, along with the water in the sand, he had found a new self.” And thus, the ending of the story is a new beginning, one in which the protagonist begins to create a true image of himself.

Impotency

The protagonist fights to retain some kind of power throughout most of the story. He threatens his captors, but his threats are weak and have no effect. He tries to escape several times but his plans are thwarted by the sand. He tries to catch a crow in his trap, but the crow is too smart to fall for it. Only at the end of the story, when he discovers water in his crow trap does the protagonist finally taste success. It is an accidental success, but the thought of it fills him with joy. He finally has something that works in his favor. He has water, the basis of life. It is at this point, when the feeling of impotency is finally lifted from his shoulders, that he finds a purpose and meaning to life.

Submission

The woman who lives in the sand dunes represents, in many ways, submission. She does not totally lack a will, but she often submits to her circumstances. She does not question why she cannot leave her house. She believes her endless digging of the sand is done in the name of the community. Whereas the man has lost his identity in the shuffling of paperwork in the modern society, the woman has acquiesced her identity in the name of her fellow villagers. She does what she is told. She lives according to the rules set upon her by others. She seldom talks back to the man even though what he says is often wrong. When he demands that she stop working, she obeys him. When he feigns illness and injury, she waits on him. When he talks about escaping, she ignores him.

Through most of the story, the man, on the other hand, fights against his circumstances. He constantly looks for an escape. It is not until the end of the story that he begins to understand the other side of submission. In the end it did not matter that he was stuck in a hole. After a failed escape attempt, the narrator recalls: “He was still in the hole, but it seemed as if he were already outside.” The protagonist begins to realize that he had been lost in the details of life, much like a viewer might be lost in a mosaic by trying to see it by standing too close to it. In his new revelations, he felt as if “perhaps the world had been turned upside down and its projections and depressions reversed.” What he once saw as submission, in other words, he now saw as tranquility.

Misunderstanding

As much as the protagonist believes he knows about life, the environment, and the people around him, he is constantly off the mark. This begins with his statement, at the beginning of the novel, that sand is dry. He later learns, to the contrary, that sand, in fact, is very wet. It is so wet that he can extract water from it. But this is not the only concept that is mixed up inside his head. He also believes, in the first section of the story, that the woman’s submissiveness is wrong. “In every way that position [of submission] of hers was exceedingly dangerous.” And once again, he is proven wrong. By the end of the story, it is the protagonist’s submission that brings him peace. Again and again, the protagonist misjudges situations. He asks for a newspaper and expects to find an article about himself, but there is no such story. He threatens his captors by telling them: “You’re going to be the ones in trouble if we’re buried by the sand.” Of course, this is ridiculous. He will be the one who is buried, and the villagers will find someone else to dig the sand. And when the villagers do not respond to him, the protagonist tells himself that “he was the one who held the fuse to the time bomb.” He says this as if he truly believes he is the one with the power. His concepts of reality and psychology are almost always wrong. He often thinks the woman is backwards or stupid such as when she tells him that the sand rots the wood. And when he tries to wrestle the shovel out of her hands, a task which he believes will be a simple one, he is caught off guard by her strength.

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