The Woman in the Dunes ***1/2

By Kobo Abe.
Published 1964 by Alfred A. Knopf.
264(est) pages

This is a book with a big idea.  It's full of metaphors and symbolism.  It about philosophy as opposed to the minutiae of a day.  The narrative could never happen in real life, so everything has to be thought of as an allegory, to understand the book properly.  If your looking for realism, one needs to look elsewhere.

So the story goes that a man, an everyman - a teacher, decides to take a retreat to pursue his favorite amateur hobby - entomology.  He hopes to find a rare insect so that it can be named after him in the field guides and be immortalized  in the world of entomology.  This insect lives in the sand, so off to the dunes he goes.  Meanwhile he has left no clue of his whereabouts back at home so as to not be bothered on the trip, or to escape or whatever reason.

The villagers of  the sand dunes invite him to stay over night and he sleeps in the home of a  woman who lives in a hole in the sand. So he climbs down, never to climb up again.  The villagers have imprisoned him, so that the young woman, a widow, would have help in her chores and so that she might have a family.  The man of course is outraged and tries to escape, but he can't.

There are many, many themes in the book to discuss, but it has been about a month since I read it and details are shaky, though I will try to tackle a few of the ideas.

The first symbol or theme is the sand.  The book starts out with a discussion of the properties of sand - how it's like water because it flows, but then it's a solid.  It marvels at the physics of the material.  Then, the sand becomes a trap for the man.  It is everywhere.  The characters are continuously covered in sand and protecting their food, possessions and selves from the sand.  It reminded me of a car ride coming home after a day at the beach.  One can never make that sand go away.  And it's always flowing into the widow's and man's living place.  They are constantly working to clean out the sand.  In fact their role in the community is to clear out and gather the sand.  (The villagers sell it in the black market - it's illegal because it doesn't have the proper composition to use for building materials).  This is a signal to how morally bankrupt the village is, as if keeping an innocent man prisoner, wasn't enough to signify that.

To me, this imprisonment is a symbol of how society tries to suppress man's free-will for the sake of the society.  When asked why the woman stayed in such a horrible situation, she replies (the gist anyway, I don't remember the exact words) that this is home and one stays where the home is.  Man(kind) is made to work in mind numbing and physically exhausting work, seemingly never ending and inconsequential as the couple's job of removing sand.  Wht is it that enslaves man to this lifestyle?  Home, family and the few trinkets that they can buy with the money.  The woman says herself that she is saving for a mirror or a radio.  These material items is what keeps her working harder.

Eventually after several attempts to escape, one of them particularly humiliating, the man resigns to his situation.  Now the people in the book club thought this was  positive ending, showing that man (kind) can tolerate and survive anything.  I beg to differ.  I think it is a demonstration on how easy it is for man (kind) to lose their free will and independent spirit.  How easy it is to conform to society with out thinking for one's self.  When the woman become pregnant, and is taken away because the baby's and mother's life are in jeopardy, he has a chance to escape.  The ladder has been left in the hole.  He chooses not to.  Perhaps he feels a responsibility to his home and family.  One might say that is a good thing, but one must remember, he was innocently ensnared into this trap and gradually had the will sucked right out of him.  Coincidentally, the radio arrives here at the conclusion of the book.