I've watched the movie after reading the novel, and my review below is for both of them.The story is about Niki Jumpei, a teacher who made a field trip to a desert near the sea. He collects insect specimens. As an amateur entomologist, he is determined to discover an unrecorded beetle that would make his name. Trying to find lodgings for the night, he is helped by men of the village to descend a sand pit leading to a hut using a rope ladder. A woman living below (the "woman in the dunes") will take him in for the night. When he wakes up in the morning, however, he finds the rope ladder is removed. He realizes that he is trapped. Against his will, he is held down there to help the woman clear away the accumulating sand that continually threatens to bury the village. Sand is the element that propels the novelist Abé Kobo's story. The 1964 film adaptation by Teshigahara Hiroshi captures its tactile physicality. In the film, the landscape is grainy, and the black and white photography enhances all the textures. Of sand on skin, sand on hair strand, sand mixed with beads of sweat, wind carving the face of sand cliffs, sand percolating in the air. The close ups of the two characters' perspiring faces and bodies show the gray grains of sand sticking on the open pores of their skin. Outside the hut, the landscape is suffused with flowing sand, falling sand, sliding sand. Sand is the very way of life.The effect of this textural treatment of sand in the film--together with the subtle imagery of light and shadows and the desert heat and a lack of moisture--is a sensual battle of desires and wills. There is an erotic component to Jumpei's seemingly futile attempts to escape the sand pit.As opposed to Kafka's portrait of a man seeking employment under an unavailing power structure in The Castle, Abé and Teshigahara's depiction of a man's imprisonment into work itself, into slavery, for the sole purpose of daily shoveling away sand, is seen as a predicament of modern man in capitalist society. The apparent conflict is between the meaninglessness of resistance and the discovery of meaning out of an extreme (environmental) situation. Both K. and Jumpei, however, do initially resist their fates and work toward changing their contrasting "employment status". If anything, Jumpei's extreme situation shares more with Josef K. in The Trial who one day finds himself guilty of an unknown and unknowable offense. This is apparent in a passage in the book where Jumpei reflected on his fate. This entire nightmare could not be happening. It was too outlandish. Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order? He could not believe it. Perhaps there was some mistake; it was bound to be a mistake. There was nothing to do but assume that it was a mistake.But as one character in Kafka's The Castle said with ironic certainty: No errors occur, and even if an error does occur, ... who can finally say that it is an error. As with any fertile allegorical story, The Woman in the Dunes dramatizes a situation that can be read in many ways. Jumpei's entrapment can be seen as a spiritual imprisonment. In context, the novel is published in 1962 and is set in 1955, ten years after the atomic bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events that led to the surrender of Japan in the world war.As signature work of this period, the novel is grounded in postwar anxiety. The threat of a destructive war and nuclear event still hangs in the air. This is not referenced verbally in the film, but in the novel it is directly alluded to. Apart from the titles of articles in a newspaper, such as "Ingredient in Onions Found Effective in Treatment of Radiation Injuries", a reference to the war is given in conversation between the two characters. "But I have taken walks," she said abruptly in her monotonous, withdrawn voice. "Really, they used to make me walk a lot. Until I came here. I used to carry a baby around for a long time. I was really tired out with all the walking.... Yes, he remembered, when everything was in ruins some ten years ago [1945], everybody desperately wanted not to have to walk. And now, were they glutted with this freedom from walking? he wondered.The woman here, who is unnamed throughout the novel, is presented as a victim of war. Homeless, she must have wandered around after escaping from air bombings until she finds this seaside community. When the character of the woman was introduced for the first time, she is called "Granny" by the village men but she is actually a young woman, about thirty years of age. Perhaps her wartime experiences has aged her. Maybe she has been living in that metaphorical cave for all eternity.Sand, its oppression, can be thought of as symbol of time or eternity (as in sands of time). Its dynamic processes are powerful, destructive, and beautiful. In the book, Jumpei equates unsympathetic sand with death, the "beauty of death", "a rejection of the stationary state",... a world where existence was a series of states. The beauty of sand ... belonged to death. It was the beauty of death that ran through the magnificence of its ruins and its great power of destruction.The imagery of the natural destruction wrought by sand is not that different from the destruction wrought by wars. Both lead to houses being buried, to peoples being left homeless and destitute. The sand pit, therefore, can also be seen as a bomb shelter where people take cover in order to survive the air raids. For all its stifling and suffocating set up, the hopeful ending of The Woman in the Dunes can be seen as a response to Rousseau's proposition of a social contract. Man is born free, and everywhere finds himself enchained. Living in an inhospitable environment, under parched conditions, sentenced into a lifetime of manual labor, man's resilience is tested to its outer limits. Jumpei is in denial of his "unchanging" reality. He is answerable to the general will of the people (the villagers) and his acknowledgement of it can lead to his redemption.Though Kafka's protagonists and Jumpei shared the seeming futility of life experience, the latter's slow acceptance of his absurd condition signal a renewal of life in the face of perpetual destruction. Through the repetition of activities, he has discovered new aspects of desert life that are robust for investigation. His curiosity for scientific knowledge is rekindled. "Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion," he concluded at one point. Perhaps his happiness lies in attempting to satisfy his thirst for empirical knowledge.Teshigahara's film adaptation is faithful to Abé's science fiction. Human nature is presented with a savage precision, as with the scene where the masked villagers gathered round the sand pit to witness Jumpei's temptation and his consequent psychological undoing. The accompanying ritualistic beats of drum heighten the voyeurism.The technical aspect of Teshigahara's direction is excellent. But beyond the production values, the film is to be credited for bringing out through tactile images Abé's novelistic use of illusion and perspective. Perspective or point of view as a way of looking at the scheme of things, a way of recognizing one's place in the world. Illusion as the image we think we see. At the end of the film, after numerous failures to escape the sand pit, Jumpei has partly seen through the illusion and has gained a deeper perspective of his enchained state of being. This perspective is illustrated in the novel through the image of a Möbius strip, a continuous band of twisted paper where front and back is indistinguishable.He was still in the hole, but it seemed as if he were already outside. Turning around, he could see the whole scene. You can't really judge a mosaic if you don't look at it from a distance. If you really get close to it you don't get away from one detail only to get caught in another. Perhaps what he had been seeing up until now was not the sand but grains of sand.In the movie, the thinking gaze of Jumpei (played by Okada Eiji), his meditation on the immensity of the sand dunes, as if looking from a farther distance and within a bigger desert picture, gives him a perspective of his state of nature. He is both outside and inside the pit. He is both free and slave at the same time. His duty now is to live and rethink his own morbid diagnosis of his condition. He will study the emergent properties of sand. Sand is its own paradigm shift.(first posted in different form in my blog)
Kōbō Abe's The Woman in the Dunes is not only his most famous novel, but a classic of post-war Japanese literature and existential literature in general. Reviewers compared Abe to Sartre and Camus; it's been years since I've read both, so I'll do my best to judge the book on its own merit.On surface, The Woman in the Dunes is a deceptively simple story. The main character, Niki Jumpei, is an amateur entomologist who travels to a remote area of Japan in search for rare insects. Jumpei desires to find one from a new species, to which he would give his name as its discoverer. his search leads him through towns and villages towards the coast, where he ultimately ends up in a village among the dunes, a hamlet so small and remote that it was largely forgotten by the outside world. Realizing that he has missed the last bus home, Jumpei realizes that he has to spend the night in the village; there are no hotels, and the only home with an empty bed is a small hut at the bottom of a pit, inhabited by a lone woman who has to constantly shovel sand away to avoid being buried alive. Having no other options, Jumpei descends a rope ladder and sleeps; when he wakes up, he notices that the ladder is gone. His attempts at climbing out of the pit are futile, and the woman tells him that no one has successfully escaped from the pit; Jumpei realizes with horror that he's been trapped by the villagers to be her helper, and that they don't intend to let him out.In Abe's novel, sand is everywhere - it constantly drips down on everything, and is a constant threat to the safety of the entire settlement. Yet when it's shoveled away it's never removed, and only more of it falls right back down. Sand never sleeps and never rests, covering the narrator and the woman every time they rest, getting under their skin. The theme of erosion is prominent - physical erosion of sand dunes by and the threat it poses to the village, but also metaphorical erosion: sand has covered the woman for so long that it has apparently eroded her whole identity, as she doesn't seem to know another life or even be able to imagine one. She seems to be perfectly content shoveling away the sand, and does not find the prospect of life outside her pit desirable: even though her work is hard it is fairly rewarded, as the villagers provide her with food and water. She is neither happy, nor unhappy - unlike Jumpei this is the only life that she knows, and she has simply accepted it. Kōbō Abe has been a member of the Japanese Communist Party, but became disillusioned after visiting eastern Europe and attempted to quit after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. His request was refused, and he was ultimately expelled from the party in 1962 - the year when The Woman in the Dunes was published - and It's not difficult to see Abe's novel as a potential analogy for the communist regimes that he has seen firsthand. In the novel the woman's personal hopes, plans and dreams are completely disregarded by the villagers, who pay no attention to her personality at all and only value her contribution to the village. Sand is like an oppressive regime - surrounding the woman completely from all sides, taking away all of her hopes and desires that she might once have had.Niki Jumpei is also an interesting character, and elements of his personality make him not entirely sympathetic: he can be complained to the mythical Sisyphus, condemned to forever repeat the same, unending task. But I'd argue that there is more to his character: (view spoiler)[essentially, Jumpei begins his journey to find a unique insect not entirely motivated by pure scientific curiosity: he wants the insect to be named after himself, suggesting not only pursuit of self-worth but also signs of vanity. Although he rebels against his imprisonment at first, he eventually finds himself at peace in his new surrounding - he is given a chance to leave but doesn't take it. He has found a new water source, and chooses to focus on it instead - staying in the pit, where he can claim credit for it and receive appropriate acclaim from his audience, the woman. (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about The Woman In The Dunes (1991)?
Sand sucks. The sand in this novel is so oppressive, invasive, and omnipresent, that after finishing the book, I felt like I needed to take a shower. Maybe two. "His words were absorbed by the sand and blown by the wind, and there was no way of knowing how far they reached." The book is the basis of one of my favorite Japanese movies, and it's story is so eccentric, I wanted to see how it worked as a novel. It's the tale of a man, who disappeared and was declared dead after he journeyed on his own to study some bugs at an isolated beach town, and found himself in a mysterious woman's house at the bottom of a sand pit. The novel details what happens to this man at the bottom of that hole. "The whole surface of her body was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand." The story is totally unique, bleak, and claustrophobic. It's filled with Sisyphean themes, and (as another reviewer put it) it focuses on the erosion of many different things: not just the earth but also the wearing away of boundaries as well as the wearing away of sanity. Aspects of the writing style were not to my taste though, drifting away from the narrative for numerous pages as the main character muses on a multitude of topics. Because of this, it probably deserves more like three or three and a half stars, but I'm always pretty generous with my stars. It's worth reading because this intriguing tale is truly an original. "While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow."
—Richard Vialet
I don’t remember how I first came to read this book a few years ago, since I’m neither into Japanese authors nor into Existentialism. Anyway, being an e-book, I dropped it almost immediately, but (again, I don’t remember how) I ended up watching the film, about 3 years ago. And boy was it rewarding! The plot, the cinematography, the music, the resemblance to Fowles’ "The Collector", everything seemed to be perfectly bonded and hallucinating, I dare recommend it. But because I sort of hate leaving books unfinished, I gave it another chance, aaand:I’m more tempted to say I didn’t like the book. And I’m pretty much incapable of seeing why I would like it. Of course, it’s a matter of taste, or it might be me not getting into it. First of all, I hated Niki Jumpei. He didn’t actually give me any reason to, but he’s not a hero, nor is he an anti-hero. You don’t like him, because he’s not brave, he’s not a genius, he doesn’t have charisma or anything, but you can’t hate him either, because he didn’t do anything wrong, he’s held captive against his will, and he basically can’t do anything to save his ass. He’s dull, incapable of outdoing himself or even understand the situation he finds himself in. The only quality I could recognize in him was being human. That should suffice, I guess, but it didn’t. OK, he was also funny at one point, when he told the villagers that he really should be going, because otherwise he’d miss work! So, no family, no human rights, WORK! I so love these dutiful Japanese guys! :)As I said, I’m not much into Existentialism, and the little connection I have with it is basically recognizable in my film preferences (Bergman, Antonioni or Truffaut, for instance). But, of course, as many others before me have already observed, it’s quite impossible not to compare Abe with Kafka or Camus – the human condition, man’s futile search for meaning, the philosophy of the absurd, or the Sisyphean labor of shoveling off the sand and preventing the house from being eaten by it. Speaking of sand, which is a ubiquitous character in itself, you find it in every little hole, inside, outside, on the floor, on your body, in your mouth, in your eyes or mixed with all human fluids, leaving you with a dry sensation and a bad taste in your mouth.Some final thoughts: sometimes the geographical, entomological and geological details are a bit boring, the relationship with the woman (did I mention the woman?) is pretty much (well, a lot!) weird (there’s no love, and the sex is brutal, necessary and mechanic), the ending sucks but suits the existential side of the story and, though I normally don’t, this time I prefer the film.
—Lavinia
رواية مختلفة وفكرة مميزة كتبها كوبو آبي سنة 1962الإنسان عندما يصبح لا وجود حقيقي له, مجرد جسد لا رأي له في حياته, ولا يملك الاعتراض على إجباره على عمل لا يرضاهجومبي صائد الحشرات الذي يأمل في اكتشاف نوع جديد من الحشرات في الكثبان الرملية في قرية ساحلية بعيدةيتم استدراجه بالحيلة من ساكني القرية ليجد نفسه مع امرأة في دار أو حفرة عميقة وسط الرمال لا يستطيع الخروج منها وعليه أن يقوم بعمل على غير إرادته وبدون أي نفع مادي أو معنوي, وهو جمع الرمال وإزاحتها يوميا لصالح هذه القرية المهمشة الواقعة تحت خطر الانغمار الرمليالكاتب استطاع أن يصف ببراعة التغيرات في نفسية وتصرفات الرجل الذي يجد نفسه مع امرأة غريبة فاقد للحرية ومحاط بالرمال, على جسده وفي طعامه وشرابه بدءاً من الأسئلة والاستنكار والاحساس بالقهر والغضب والخوف, وبعدها التخطيط لمحاولات الهربالتفكير في حياته السابقة وما كان يضيق به في عمله ومن زملائه, فهل فقدان الحرية يجعلنا نرى حياتنا بصورة أوضح وندرك قيمة ما فقدناه؟ النهاية هي ما حيرتني, لماذا لم يهرب عندما أُتيحت له الفرصة أخيرا؟ هل هو الاعتياد أم الاستسلام؟الأسلوب بسيط والجميل في الرواية الأفكار والتفاصيل التي تغمرك أثناء قراءتها في الرمال
—Sawsan
