The Woman in the Dunes.

I’d never heard of The Woman in the Dunes, the 1962 novel by Japanese author Kobo Abe, before literature professor Daniel Burt included it in the expanded second edition of his book The Novel 100, which ranked the 125 greatest novels of all time. This slim, bleak, almost dystopian novel draws on the existentialist traditions of Camus and Kafka, thoroughly dehumanizing its main characters, and pushes its protagonist into a philosophical dilemma that causes him to question the meaning of his life.

The book opens by telling us that a man has been declared dead after going missing seven years earlier, so we know going into the novel at least some of how it ends. The man, Niki Jumpei, is an amateur entomologist, and arrives at a town with interesting specimens, only to find he needs to stay the night. The town is slowly losing ground to endlessly advancing sand dunes, and the home of the woman who hosts him is on the front line of the battle, so that she must work daily to clear some of the sand so that the entire village isn’t lost. The next morning, the man finds that the rope ladder he used to descend into the pit of the house is gone, and within a few days realizes that he’s a prisoner of the village, forced to work on the Sisyphean task of shoveling back the sand with the woman. He rages against her and his captors, and pleads with them, and attempts to bargain with them. He tries to escape once and fails. When the story ends, he’s on the verge of escaping again … but chooses to go back.

Abe rarely refers to Jumpei by name, and never names the woman; their identities are immaterial to their function in the story. The man, as Abe calls him, could be any man, feeling alienated from everything about his life – from other people, from his job, from his community – in an increasingly isolating, urbanized world. I think you can read this novel in multiple ways, but I couldn’t get away from the idea that the sand was time – like sands through the hourglass – and that the villagers’ struggle against it is man’s attempts to deny his own mortality. It’s replayed through the man’s own reactions to his understanding that he’s a hostage with no hope of rescue; even though the book predates Kübler-Ross’ five stages, the man goes through at least four of them once he realizes he’s trapped. While neither he nor the woman fully lose their humanity, Abe writes of them in a disconnected, impersonal way, and he does have them devolve in some ways, like sex, that emphasize our animal nature.

There’s another interpretation that’s a bit less grim, that the man’s decision at the end not to flee when he has the chance is a sign that he’s accepted reality and, given back some agency over his own life, is making a choice on his own terms. It’s a kind of enlightenment that I might associate with Buddhism or even some new age spiritualism, although I couldn’t get to the point where I’d view the man’s journey through the book as any sort of positive.

Abe’s style absolutely presages later Japanese authors, notably Haruki Murakami, whose prose and themes seem to be direct descendants of Abe’s work here. There’s no magical realism here, unless you consider some of the sand stuff to be such; I never could get a reasonable picture in my head of what was happening or what the woman’s house looked like. It probably doesn’t matter, since the point is that the man is trapped on one side by other people and on the other side by an inanimate force that will simply keep on coming and eventually kill him – and lots of other people – unless he starts to help the woman work to hold it back. Abe’s prose is brisk and sparse, presumably influenced by the existentialist masters in that regard as well, but there are passages where I could see a direct influence on Murakami (including the latter’s particular focus on cooking), especially in the dialogue. As bleak as The Woman in the Dunes is, it’s actually a fast read; Abe wastes little time on frivolities and keeps to the plot. I’m not sure why Burt included it in the top 125, but I wonder if it was more for its influence on modern Japanese literature than its own merits.

Next up: I just finished Caitlin PenzeyMoog’s On Spice this morning – and yes, she’s part of the Penzey’s Spices family, although she now works for The AV Club.