The Woman in the Dunes

Woman in the Dunes (1964)

Kobo Abe

            Futility oppresses every man. That’s what this book is about. It’s about the futility of struggling against society’s current. If you try to fight they’ll grind you down with exhaustion and hunger. If you color outside the lines they’ll break your fingers. A disproportionate punishment for a exercising a privilege we all think we have--our “individuality”, our “freedoms”, our bourgeois dreams of self-fulfillment—things that we take for granted and so few of us ever utilize. If freedom can be stolen at someone else’s leisure then you didn’t have much freedom in the first place, you merely had a privilege that was allowed to you for as long as it was convenient.            

            
          I did some searching around on the internet and found information on Abe’s other books. I gather that they’re all some kind of kinky science fiction (plotline summaries: doctor melts his own face off in liquid nitrogen accident, invents artificial face so that he can seduce his own wife; doctor grafts well-endowed lower half of a dead man onto his back, transforming himself into some kind of super-sexual centaur so he can sexually please an adolescent girl patient who is slowly turning into a gelatinous blob as her bones dissolve from a mysterious disease; man invents artificially intelligent super-computer to predict the future and when the predictions become more and more uncomfortable for the guardians of the status quo the computer is banned from answering political questions, simultaneously the government is genetically engineering children with gills so that when the ice caps melt and the water level rises humankind can survive underwater) which is one of my favorite kinds of science fiction—I’d take Philip K. Dick’s urban loss-of-identity paranoia over Orson Scott Card’s crusade of heteronormative militarism and religiosity any day of the week, to say nothing of the dime-a-million trashy sci-fi and fantasy novels that pander to the saddest desires for wish-fulfillment—but The Woman in the Dunes isn’t science fiction or fantasy at all. It’s actually pretty normal. If not entirely plausible it isn’t totally impossible. It might be important to note that Kobo Abe, previous to being one of Japan’s most famous writers, attended medical school and graduated but only on the condition that he never practice medicine. He also spent a good portion of his childhood in Japanese Manchuria, where some of history’s most godawful atrocities were committed. Context is important!

             
           The book is really simple but not simplistic. A man, a poor schoolteacher and amateur entomologist takes a bus to the country for a weekend bug-collecting trip. He hopes to discover a new species of insect in the dunes near the ocean. It’s a mildly adventurous ambition, I mean, it’s not the Mercury Program or anything but about as adventurous as a person can hope to get on their own during a holiday weekend without zillions of dollars of funding from a global superpower, and really, how many people get to discover something new, classify it, have it documented in a journal? An insignificant fraction of our species gets to do that, that’s how many. Closer to zero than to one. When night begins to fall he goes to the local village and gets a bed at a widow’s house. Her house is unusual: a dilapidated shanty at the bottom of a funnel of sand. Other houses in the area, the ones on the side of the village closest to the beach, are arranged in a similar fashion. He soon discovers that he is trapped with the widow in the bottom of the quarry and is forced into laboring, digging up sand that the villagers sell for use in construction. The man tries several methods of escape but all are ultimately futile. The villagers control entrance and exit from the pit, and if he interrupts the work or doesn’t work, they withhold food and water. Eventually he gives up and accepts it. Nobody really misses him. The widow uses her body to ensnare him but she isn’t exactly a seductress, she’s just there and warm, and she’s more trapped than he is, she’s completely indoctrinated and has totally surrendered. The man clings on to his hope of escape—if only he could just think up something perfect he could get out of this pit—but all the woman wants is a radio and a mirror. What good would hearing the news or pop music do her, and who is she ever going to see? To the rest of the world she’s less than dead: she doesn’t exist and never existed. She doesn’t need amenities; she needs freedom and years of psychological counseling.

             
          The Woman in the Dunes was made into a movie in the 60s, and it is by all accounts a fantastic film, but I’ve only seen about half of it. Netflix sent me a few scratched copies and eventually I just moved on. What I did see I really liked though, but after reading this book I’m surprised that it could have been made into a great film. It’s a lot like Frankenstein (which has been attempted many times and never done well) or The Sound and the Fury (which as far as I know has never been filmed, probably for good reason) in that so much of it is psychological and internal, which doesn’t really make for the greatest or most viewable film experience, and always misses out on a good portion of whatever the point of the book was.

The other half of the book that isn’t about fruitlessly shaking the bars of our social construct prisons concerns sand and heat. That’s the first thing I really liked about this book. I loved how sensory it is without being purple. It’s even a little on the spartan side. Abe’s prose is fantastic, and he managed to make me feel, in a way that is almost very real, the throbbing sadism of the sun, the grit of sand on my skin, and the hopeless asphyxiating fog that rises at night to occlude the stars away. The second thing that I really liked about this book is how well Abe delves into the mental state of someone who is completely and utterly trapped. The trapped person retreats inward, his life becomes internal, he surrenders to pointless sad fantasies of escape and freedom. He’s totally isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, and eventually, when he’s exhausted enough, comes to accept his situation and the rules of conduct, as presented, become in his mind totally reasonable. The Woman in the Dunes reminded me a lot of Hubert Selby, Jr.’s The Room, another book about a trapped man deluding himself with fantasy.

This book is a bit surreal at points, but that’s okay. Unlike, say, Murakami, it’s not weird just to be weird, it’s a novel with a slightly fantastical bent that does what every book, and especially every fantastical book needs to do: engage the real world. I’m going to start digressing a little bit here, so, my apologies. Eventually on this blog I’d like to get around to writing about how I think that the fantasy genre is the genre that most specifically plays to our shared, unconscious, deep-rooted fascist tendencies, but for now I’m going to say that there are two major types of fiction books: the realistic (Grapes of Wrath, say) and the unrealistic (Gravity’s Rainbow) and that the unrealistic books can be further divided into two categories: those that use a device to make a point about the real world and those that don’t. The former includes some of the best books ever written (1984, for instance) and the latter are mostly trashy no good fantasy novels that your dumpy sister reads while drinking tea and petting the cat. The Lord of the Rings is a marginal case, but I’d definitely put, for instance, Game of Thrones in the latter category. I think there’s only really one thing that separates the two: that the author believes in something, and at this point, since I basically totally despair for humanity, I’m going to say that it doesn’t really matter what the author believes in, it could almost be anything at all, just as long as it isn’t about elves, wizards, dragons, and terribly pathetic anaesthetizing wish-fulfillment for a civilization that is totally devoid of real-world fulfillment for most everyone who has the misfortune of being alive.

I almost feel like I have less to say about this book than I did about Naked Lunch because unlike Naked Lunch I liked this book unambiguously, without reservation. I’m not conflicted about it at all. I don’t know if I’m going to rate these books with stars, or with numbers or what, or just talk about them because that’s really what I’d like to do, just talk about books, so I guess I’ll just say that I highly recommend The Woman in the Dunes on its literary merits and on my own belief that reading books, lots of them, that engage our internal and external worlds is a pretty simple way to alleviate a lifetime of slavery down in the pit.