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labingiThe back cover of the Vintage edition of Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes calls it "one of the premier Japanese novels of the twentieth century." This may well be true--if an exemplar of mid-20th century literature is, by definition, high postmodern. This is a high postmodern novel; it does that shtick well, and it is limited by that shtick's limitations.
The story concerns a man (whose name is Junpei, but that scarcely matters), who goes on vacation to the seaside and ends up imprisoned in a remote village half-buried by sand dunes, where the residents must spend every night shoveling sand to prevent the destruction of their houses.
There is also a woman (nameless), the owner of the house where he's imprisoned. However, be forewarned that the book's title smacks of marketing ploy. The book is not, in fact, about this "woman in the dunes," neither as subject nor as primary object. The book is about the relationship between the man and the sand (and the various existential questions the sand represents), and the woman is really just one aspect, albeit a significant one, of life amid the sand.
Abe describes life in the sand meticulously and plausibly. This realism within surrealism is the book's greatest strength. Particularly early on, it is easy to feel the man's mounting shock and disillusion at his surprisingly intractable predicament. The woman is also a well-drawn character, very traditionally Japanese (to my Western mind) in her layering of extreme, non-confrontational deference over fundamental intransigence. (And she beats him up at one point, which I love.)
The back cover likens the book to the works of Beckett, and, indeed, I found it has much the flavor of a somewhat more realist Waiting for Godot. But it also reminds me of the more recent high postmodern of Chuck Palahniuk in that it is much concerned with presenting life as absurd, grotesque, base, disgusting, pointless, unwinnable, etc.--though, on occasion, these impressions are relieved by more positive ones.
This would be an excellent book for ecocritical discussion. Its presentation of the ridiculousness of a lifestyle at constant war with the forces of nature is a deep lesson for the 20th and 21st centuries both, on a very literal level.
Overall, I enjoyed the beginning more than the end. Much of the book is an evocative page-turner with excellent "world building" of the dune village. However, toward the end, the story becomes a study in existential despair in way I find unhelpful, unrevealing, and unuplifting in general, and despite Abe's brilliant prose and poetic flights of metaphor, this novel is no exception.
The story concerns a man (whose name is Junpei, but that scarcely matters), who goes on vacation to the seaside and ends up imprisoned in a remote village half-buried by sand dunes, where the residents must spend every night shoveling sand to prevent the destruction of their houses.
There is also a woman (nameless), the owner of the house where he's imprisoned. However, be forewarned that the book's title smacks of marketing ploy. The book is not, in fact, about this "woman in the dunes," neither as subject nor as primary object. The book is about the relationship between the man and the sand (and the various existential questions the sand represents), and the woman is really just one aspect, albeit a significant one, of life amid the sand.
Abe describes life in the sand meticulously and plausibly. This realism within surrealism is the book's greatest strength. Particularly early on, it is easy to feel the man's mounting shock and disillusion at his surprisingly intractable predicament. The woman is also a well-drawn character, very traditionally Japanese (to my Western mind) in her layering of extreme, non-confrontational deference over fundamental intransigence. (And she beats him up at one point, which I love.)
The back cover likens the book to the works of Beckett, and, indeed, I found it has much the flavor of a somewhat more realist Waiting for Godot. But it also reminds me of the more recent high postmodern of Chuck Palahniuk in that it is much concerned with presenting life as absurd, grotesque, base, disgusting, pointless, unwinnable, etc.--though, on occasion, these impressions are relieved by more positive ones.
This would be an excellent book for ecocritical discussion. Its presentation of the ridiculousness of a lifestyle at constant war with the forces of nature is a deep lesson for the 20th and 21st centuries both, on a very literal level.
Overall, I enjoyed the beginning more than the end. Much of the book is an evocative page-turner with excellent "world building" of the dune village. However, toward the end, the story becomes a study in existential despair in way I find unhelpful, unrevealing, and unuplifting in general, and despite Abe's brilliant prose and poetic flights of metaphor, this novel is no exception.
