when an entomologist takes a trip to the beach and misses his bus home, he takes refuge in a dwelling within a sand pit for the night. his only company is a woman who has lived there her entire life, constantly sweeping the sand away and working to keep the village functional. soon, our entomologist realizes he is not being allowed to leave and is intended to be kept indefinitely.

delightfully odd, existentially horrific, i truly enjoyed this novel. the more i learned about niki jumpei, the less i empathized with him. there is something to be said about small communities living in extreme climates that refuse to leave — that takes dedication and heart.

Wait… what did I just experience? n  Very minor spoilers ahead.n

Going into this book, I knew that 2021 was the Year of Japan (for me). For one reason or another, my aim has been to up the number of Japanese books that I read. This meant that, sooner or later, I was bound to yield to the Goodreads algorithm once again. It was time to tackle The Woman in the Dunes. It didn’t hurt that the cover looked unbelievably gorgeous. What I was not expecting was possibly the best fictional existential book I have read so far. I knew something was up, and so I looked at the back of the book: the author biography mentioned that Kōbō Abe studied medicine, alongside studying Poe, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Kafka. And just like that, it started to make sense.

This hit me like a train, which is a metaphor from Spirited Away that I used while reading this book to help me gather my thoughts, and it is one that I will come back to at the end of my review. The main character, Niki Jumpei, goes on an excursion to a sandy area of Japan in order to spend some time doing what he enjoys as a hobby: insect collection and inspection. The situation is slightly awkward, and he finds himself having to spend a night in a town that is surrounded by sand dunes. The hut of the eponymous “woman” is offered to him as a viable option, and he accepts, grateful for the opportunity. And that is where the fun begins.

I think I will stop there in terms of the plot. Our main character’s philosophical musings get dialled to 100. He is surrounded by menial labour and sand. Lots of sand. The sand is everywhere. It never stops. It is always blowing in, always pouring in, always finding a way in, always in nooks and crannies and crevices that he does not appreciate. I chose to look at the sand as a great symbol for the passing of time. Maybe this is why the presence of the sand irks him so. Our main character is 38. In the most basic way, then, he could be said to be having an early-ish midlife crisis. The signs are all there – wild hobbies, sudden desires, long rants on the relationship between the sexes, and the sand. The sand is constant.

Looking underneath the hood, however, reveals a deeper set of concepts: Death. Freedom. Isolation. Meaninglessness. Niki Jumpei is constantly outrunning death. The anxiety of finality is unbearable for him. To think of wasting time without working towards fulfillment is to have a panic attack. Freedom is an obvious key here – he is physically and mentally trapped. But is he able to use freedom as the land of milk and honey that it is often conceived as? He is also alone, but deeply lonely. He is not content in being solo. These all contribute to a deep sense of ennui and listless movements in his daily life – he is so afraid of monotony that he is willing to cause chaos in anything and with anyone. He is willing to pull apart the perfect latticed structure of millions of grains of sand, each 1/8th of a mm in diameter.



Where does the train come in? Well… it doesn’t. But Niki Jumpei does talk about tickets. I thought of them as train tickets. To you, they might be bus or plane tickets. I will let his words speak for themselves as we finish off:

“These days people caught in the clutches of the one-way ticket never sing it like that. The soles of those who have only a one-way ticket are so thin that they scream when they step on a pebble. They have had their fill of walking. “The Round-Trip Ticket Blues” is what they want to sing. A one-way ticket is a disjointed life that misses the links between yesterday and today, today and tomorrow. Only the man who obstinately hangs on to a round-trip ticket can hum with real sorrow a song of a one-way ticket. For this very reason he grows desperate lest the return half of his ticket be lost or stolen; he buys stocks, signs up for life insurance, and talks out of different sides of his mouth to his union pals and his superiors. He hums “The One-Way Ticket Blues” with all his might and, choosing a channel at random, turns the television up to full volume in an attempt to drown out the peevish voices of those who have only a one-way ticket and who keep asking for help, voices that come up through the bathtub drain or the toilet hole. It would not be strange at all if “Th e Round-Trip Ticket Blues” were the song of mankind imprisoned.”

Nightmare fuel for those who think there's a way out. 

A schoolteacher named Niki Jumpei interested in insects goes to the dunes to seek out beetles. Having spent longer there than he intended he needs a place to stay. One of the older villagers recommends a house owned by a woman but it's beneath a vast pit of sand, surrounded on all sides. What follows is a claustrophobic horror story of a man being unable to escape this house, the sand impenetrable, the villagers (and the woman) seemingly unmoved, having trapped him there deliberately for reasons unknown. He tries to climb up the sand but cannot, he threatens the woman but she seems either ignorant of what is happening or resigned to their circumstances; he screams at the villagers who laugh at him from above. Mostly, he plans his escape because there must be an escape. Surely, there has to be a way to escape. 

Having read a few pages of Abe's Box Man a long time ago and found them painfully dull, I was a little worried about reading this. But the first half of the book absolutely had me gripped. I was turning pages rapidly, fascinated by the man's dilemma, trying to work out if he was indeed being held against his will, or if there was just some huge misunderstanding that had not yet been revealed. I'm tempted to describe the book as Kafkaesque but that probably isn't accurate since Kafka dealt with the oppressive weight of bureaucracy (even in Metamorphosis, his change into an insect is not as important as how he will explain it to his employers, support the family, etc). I also don't think it's an accident that the main character here is interested in insects. But this book is more allegorical in nature, the themes focusing on the relentless struggle of existence, the inability of ever escaping the daily drudge of work and sexual instinct, the constant search for a literal way out. The book is saturated in oppressive heat, constant sand, and lack of water. I could almost taste it at times, the gritty texture in my mouth, until I had to swallow some saliva and clear my throat. The book is just relentless. 

And that's where my main criticism comes in; after the halfway point, I was slightly losing interest. It just goes around in circles and overwhelms you with more sand, more woman, more sand. Even when he momentarily escapes, the book had somewhat drained me by that point. I just wanted the nightmare to end. I knew what was happening. I knew where it was going and, worst of all, I knew how it would be resolved. Because there is always something to keep us attached to life, always some pointless thing which we imbue with meaning so that we can justify persevering with a delusional sense of hope. Work and sex. They both make life seem like it's worthwhile (though Abe's descriptions of sex were intensely abstract and vague, perhaps very Japanese, and I did need to reread a few sections just to confirm... yep, they're having sex). 

So not without its flaws but a fantastic entry into the existential nightmare genre. This one was as dense as the claggy sand itself and after a while, I wanted out. I wanted out of this book as much as he wanted out of that sandpit.

یه فضاسازی بکر و عجیب که یک تصویر منحصر به فرد رو تو ذهن موندگار میکنه. با تمام وجود طعم شن رو زیر زبونم حس کردم، هنوزم انگار تمام دهنم مزه‌ی شن میده.
داستان از خو گرفتن به عادت‌ها و مکان‌ها میگه، شرایطی که شاید در روزهای اول برامون فجیع و غیرقابل تحمل و دردناک بیان اما به مرور زمان عادی میشن و حتی گاهی وقت‌ها دوست داشتیو لذت‌بخش.. این هم تلخه هم عجیب، این سازگاری و عادت جبری وقتی کاری برای تغییر از دستت برنمیاد..
تصویر انتهایی کتاب درخشانه، و صد حیف که سانسور به یک دستی روایت لطمه زده. یک فیلم اقتباسی هم داره این کتاب که سال ۱۹۶۴ ساخته شده و البته چون ندیدمش فعلا نظری ندارم :))

Sayfalardan dökülür kum; 1/8mm çapında; her şeyi kaplayan bir altın örtü. Her şeye metalik ve tuzlu bir tat veren, mayalanmış su kokusuyla ve terle ve kaşıntıyla akla kazınan kum. Bu kitabı böyle özetleyebilirim;

Ya da, kuma hapsoluşun hikayesi.

Japon Edebiyatı, ülkemiz okurlarının son zamanlara kadar ilgisini çekmeyen fakat bünyesinde son derece güçlü kalemleri barındıran bir edebiyat. Kobo Abe ise savaş sonrası Japon Edebiyatı'nın belki de Batıda en çok bilinen isimlerinden birisi. Sinemaya da uyarlanan Kumların Kadını; Barış Bayıksel'in Japonca aslından çevirisiyle Monokl Edebiyat tarafından edebiyatımıza kazandırılmış. Yanlış bilmiyorsam daha önce de birkaç çevirisi yapılmıştı fakat bu çeviriyi beğendiğimi söyleyebilirim.

Kitabın en dikkat çekici özelliklerinden bahsetmek istiyorum. Özellikle yazarın tasvir yeteneği en çok duyusal tasvirlerde; bunlar arasında da koku tasvirlerinde kendini göstermiş. Kokuları kelimeye dökmek belki de en zorudur; bunu nasıl başarabilmiş bilmiyorum ama okurken o kokuları burnumda hissettim. Mayalanmış su kokusu, ter kokusu, ayak kokusu, metalik koku, havanın; insanın ve yalnızlığın kokusu... Bunu tensel dokunma hissinin ve cinsel iştihanın tasviri izlemiş. Cinsel iştiha da son derece başarılı anlatılmış.

Zaten sürekli olarak artan bir libido duygusunun; zührevi hastalık korkusuyla bastırılışını kitap boyunca hissediyoruz. Kumların bir örtü işleviyle; adeta kadının ve erkeğin üzerini örten bir çarşaf işlevi gördüğünü düşünüyorum kitapta. Bütün anlamlarımızın üstünü örten; bilincin üstünü örten bir süperego adeta. Kumların altında ise saf libido, saf pişmanlık, saf korku, saf yalnızlık var.

Kendine özgü ve aynı zamanda sürükleyici bir konuya da sahip olan kitabın gerilimi son bölümüne kadar hat safhada. Kitap merak duygusunu da sürekli kamçılıyor. Edebi yönü her ne kadar fazla derin olmasa da; bunu söz sanatlarının yetersiz kalması ve duyusal tasvirler dışındaki doğa anlatımlarının kafamızda yeterince canlanmaması ile açıklayabilirim; kitabın okunmaya değer bir kitap olduğu açık.

M.Baran
10.10.2017
Mersin

Es ya un lugar común traer a Kafka a colación al comentar este tipo de novelas, pero quizás esta referencia, compartida por tantos, pueda orientar más y mejor que otros comentarios más elaborados.

Tres personajes sin nombre: el hombre, un Sísifo envuelto en una lucha absurda, interminable y abocada al fracaso; la arena, en su camino imparable hacia la destrucción; y una mujer, sumisa y entregada al que tenía que ser su compañero de fatigas en esa lucha a muerte con la arena y con la que el sexo es rabioso y resignado.

En medio, la infinita capacidad de adaptación del ser humano a cualesquier circunstancia y al absurdo de una vida para la que no hay explicación, para la que no hay respuestas. Como se puede leer por ahí, es una novela claustrofóbica, de escritura (no voy a decir árida que sería un chiste fácil y además no sería cierto) seca, sin florituras, muy sensual, en la que los sentidos, el olor, el gusto, el tacto, juegan un papel preponderante.

El final… no, mejor no digo nada sobre el final.

Un cuento bello, maravillosamente narrado. Un libro muy recomendable

با دوستی راجع به فیلم این کتاب صحبت کردم و با خودم گفتم شاید بد نباشه بعد از یک سال ریویوم رو تغییر بدم و درباره ی چرایی فوق العاده بودن این کتاب بنویسم.
داستان کتاب کاملا اگزیستانسیالیستیه و نمود زندگی کاملا از به دام افتادن شخصیت اصلی، توی یه خونه شنی همراه با زنی غریبه مشخصه. هرچقدر هم درگیر داستان بشید و این سمبل به ذهنتون نرسه، قطعا در پایان داستان به تنها چیزی که فکر می‌کنید زندگیه.
به جز ایده ی اصلی داستان، قلم “کوبو آبه” اونقدر توانا بوده، که هم ملال زیستن رو انتقال بده و هم در عین حال خواننده رو خسته نکنه.
در آخر، فیلم این کتاب هم به کارگردانی”تاشیگاهارا” ساخته شده، که به شدت فیلم خوش ساختیه و از اولین فیلم های مهم سینمای مدرن ژاپن محسوب می‌شه.

Kobo Abe's existential novel The Woman in the Dunes is an allegorical work about the journey to attain personal freedom.
The main character, an urban schoolteacher dreaming of discovering a new species of insects, disappears without a trace during his vacation. He becomes a prisoner in a strange village constantly engulfed by sand.
The novel abounds with symbols and metaphors — the woman, water, slavery, and perhaps the most significant of them all, the sand, which in its continuous movement transforms from an inconspicuous sixteenth of a millimeter into an overpowering force of nature.

One of the layers of the novel that attracted me is the exploration of human identity and the influence of existential conditions on it. Initially, the hero's meaning of life is quite, literally hunting flies in the desert. This may seem like a whim, but for the hero, his fascination with insects is more important than anything else; he works to take time off to pursue his passion. This is the psychology of the modern person who tries to earn money and carve out time for their hobbies, instead of directly engaging in what they love. But in the sands, where more basic needs are pressing, such a hobby becomes absurd, and eventually forgotten.

The space of personal freedom in the novel is an environment where a person's physical desires and beliefs enter an irresolvable conflict. In a situation where the protagonist begins to be manipulated through basic needs, he stoically retains the concept of personal freedom within himself. It's endearing, of course, the protagonist's firm conviction in the protection provided by the institutions of state law and order. But when the protagonist realizes that no one will investigate his disappearance, the past ceases to hold great significance for him. It's precisely in this position that there arises a need to take a different path, opening up unexplored territory of personal freedom.

There are these horrifying insects called antlions that dig holes and bury themselves at the bottom of them, just their jaws sticking out of the sand, and wait for ants to fall in so they can trap and devour them. They're scary monsters and it's all a nightmare. Niki Jumpei is an amateur entomologist so he probably knows about antlions, but he gets caught anyway.



So Kōbō Abe (Kobo aBAY) has blown it up to human size for this brilliant, suffocating 1962 allegory, a classic in Japan. Jumpei stumbles into a town beset by sand. Its inhabitants, trying to keep their houses clear, have gradually dug themselves into deep pits in the sand. When Jumpei arrives, he's kidnapped and thrown into one of them as a mate for a widow. They spend their lives digging - not for ground, not for profit, just to keep from being buried. It's Stephen Kingish: dangerous predicament, increasingly desperate efforts to escape. It's exciting.



We're talking about class. David Mitchell points out that

A Japanese reader of The Woman in the Dunes is invited to assume that the villagers are burakumin, the little-discussed caste of untouchables historically obliged to work in “unclean” trades such as butchery, tanning or sewage removal and live where nobody else wanted to, and who were considered little better than animals. ...The man is trapped in a class war - or caste war - unacknowledged by society at large.

We're talking about sex too, and Jumpei's attitude toward it is baffling. He talks about spiritual rape and I have no idea what that means. The antlion is a woman and she initially lures him with nakedness, and you could certainly start to wonder if the whole setup isn't a bit misogynist. I don't have a conclusion on this. Abe never actually says "antlion," btw, that's my own extrapolation.

Obviously it's all very Kafka, and he would have loved this book (and maybe been a little jealous of Abe's ability to do both allegory and plot, which Kafka can only pull off in his short stories). It's one of those wonderful massive overbearing metaphors. I love books like this. Where did he dig this idea up? It's so out there, and it works so perfectly. Sand as the stuff of life, in all its meaninglessness and daily eternity. We dig and dig to keep our lives free of encroaching sand, and where do we end up? At the bottom of a hole in the sand. With the monster.

5 стадій прийняття, автор великий майстер візій. Треба колись кіно подивитися.

4.5 stars

Without the threat of punishment there is no joy in flight.

In Kobo Abe's fantasy world of The Woman in the Dunes, an amateur entomologist on vacation finds himself in a remote coastal village built amid deeply undulating dunes. There, he is tricked by a lonely widow and her neighboring villagers, trapped in deep pits shored by sand drift walls, to be charged with the task of shoveling back the ever-sliding banks, persistent and never-ending in its threat to entomb them.

Sand moves around like this all year long. Its flow is its life. It absolutely never stops— anywhere. Whether in water or air, it moves about free and unrestricted. So, usually, ordinary living things are unable to endure life in it.

The landscape of the dunes which Abe describes, of wood-rotted boxed dwellings built at the bottom of shifting sand hills, could not realistically exist, marking the novel as a science fiction/ fantasy thriller. In addition, its themes adopt surrealistic, dreamlike, metamorphosing features reminiscent of the works of Kafka, slowly shifting and deforming like the dunes themselves.

Sand...
Things with form were empty when placed beside sand. The only certain factor was its movement; sand was the antithesis of all form.

Abe's works are generically concerned with the human state of balance, whose fragility becomes evident in a life of pointlessness and insufferable futility. In The Woman in the Dunes, Abe presents the grotesque sadness borne from a man's oppressive, fruitless daily life; the image of a degraded human being who is isolated, trapped in the monotony of routine, unable to escape a meaningless existence.

What's hardest for me is not knowing what living like this will ever come to.
What was this "Hell of Loneliness"? he wondered. Perhaps they had misnamed it, he had thought then, but now he could understand it very well. Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.

To effectuate some meaningfulness to his situation, whether for the choice to stay or freedom of escape, the protagonist heroically attempts to alter his circumstance, significantly going through a metamorphosis of his own, but like the true kinetic nature of sand, its waves of ebbs and flows, his fate lays ambiguous.

The theory had been advanced that the man, tired of life, had committed suicide . One of his colleagues, who was an amateur psychoanalyst, held to this view. He claimed that in a grown man enthusiasm for such a useless pastime as collecting insects was evidence enough of a mental quirk.

The Woman in the Dunes has its share of vocabulary best fitted for the field of science, reflecting Abe's background in the profession; though his manipulation of such language effectively results in a poetic blend of logic and illogic, never off-putting for the reader, simply suspending reality for a thrilling period of time, meaningfully spent. I feel comfortably balanced in recommending this to readers of both sci-fi and Japanese literature.

یک نکته یک سوال
نکته: مرده (آقای نیکی) خیلی قد کوتاه بود . من از مرد کوتاه خوشم نمیاد حتی اگه حشره شناس باشه.
سوال: چرا " زن در ریگ روان " و نه "مرد در ریگ روان "؟
..
صوتیش رو گوش دادم از آوای بوف، اجرا وحشتناک بد بود