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Title: The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe ISBN: 0-679-73378-7 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 16 April, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.41 (29 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Abe's Call for Patriotism: "love thy [existential] home"
Comment: The perfect existentialist novel. Man is alone; man exists with no necessary tie to anyone, anything (no family, no religion, not even a familiar face to get soaked up in the past with). Being thus alone in a vast, unfamiliar world, it is as if the main character is "reborn" into a new life. He is alone, but he is not without responsibility for his own existence, therefore he chooses "to live" (we know this is true since at all times he has the potassium cyanide tablets but chooses NOT to take them).
How does he choose to live? He experiments; he devises escape routes, all of which are physical defeats of the body. He cannot escape an imprisoned existence through physical displacement alone. BUT, what the main character does have is perserverance, and consciousness of his own plight--he creates an image of mankind for himself consciously, for himself and even for the woman and the villagers by whom he is held in detention.
What is important here above all is the mobility of mind; the man never relents in his journey to free himself, and it is through many-varied "experimentation" that he is able to come upon a "right" path, a "right" choice. Up until that point, the world is upside down, and he can't make heads or tails of it--but when he has this "mobility of consciousness", when he has the epiphany that he is not a prisoner at all he truly does "escape". He moves in the mind, he moves in consciousness, this is what allows him to discover the "correct" image of mankind for him is simply this: "Love thy own home."
This is an incredibly difficult book to understand unless you have some background in existentialist thought and also the geist of the time that Japan was in during the 1950s and 60's. Post-war Japan is undergoing major sociopolitical upheaval, long-standing institutions of bureaucratric governing merely give the illusion of social structure (a "sand city" that falls apart once you try scaling it), but the "sands of time" are shifting, people are discovering they've dug their own graves to an immense depth, and that unless they do something about it, they're lost. Abe's book is a call for social experimentation--the people can no longer rely on mere illusion to support them, they need to discover for themselves what is best for them. Thus we see the explosive growth of "experimentalist" methods in the arts & literature--neo-Dadaism is a good example of this--and we see this as the only "true" method of escape. Abe's message is biting and stern: YOU WILL NOT "ESCAPE" SOCIAL DESTRUCTION BY ADOPTING AN "EASY WAY OUT". You will not escape the "hole" in which you've dug yourself by simply running to another political system, i.e. capitalism, communism, etc. What Abe is vehemently trying to bring forth is the idea that one's people must come up with their own solutions, and NOT RUN to adopt an outside system that may or may not be what the country needs right now.
Yes, this is a patriotic book for Japan--one that believes in its own capacity for sociopolitical construction, for a "mobility of thought" that will eventually yield the right solution to a problem that has incarcerated everyone in a "prison" of illusion. But it is NOT without "Hope" (pun intended). The book is ultimately sanguine in its outlook for the possibility of a "way out" but it must come through a Heideggeran "evolution" of ideas which eventually end up in progress. This epistemological route is the ONLY way, according to Abe.
Fortunately, Abe has already done the hard part for us. He's given Japan an answer: "Love thy own home". The way you "free yourself" from physical imprisonment is by loving the prison itself and finding livelihood there--when the man discovers a new "essence" for himself in the harnessing of the suction pump, he has completely altered the vision of the prison into a land of opportunity, of great possibility, of "hope". The "altered consciousness" is what brings about the possibility of beneficial change--one that turns a bleak barrenness (a "desert" of intellectual and moral life) into a trove of hidden treasure, like suddenly discovering oil beneath a plot of wasteland. This conversion of consciousness to domestic love is the "solution"; it is the "way out". It is this thrust for patriotism that bleeds behind the schemata drawn up for this work, one which is deeply reflective of the time itself.
For those interested, Teshigahara Hiroshi directed a well-acclaimed film based on this book, Woman in the Dunes. It depicts beautifully the themes of this novel, and it perhaps does with images better justice to Abe's own intent than his own language (*Gasp*). For this reason, I feel the film will be a more lasting work than the book, although both are incredibly good at portraying what the atmosphere of the time was during the 50s and 60's, when Japan was just beginning to recover from the post-war aftermath. Both works are a monumental tribute to the post-war "reconstruction" period of Japan, and I dare say, of any country at all that has undergone a wholesale reconstruction period. A timeless masterpiece, it will endure for ages for its allegorical schematism of a nation in desperate need of a "way out".
Rating: 5
Summary: Bizarre, intimate, moving experience
Comment: Let me state at the outset that I think this is one of the best short novels I have read.
Presaging the narrative with a news-clipping style write-up about a person's disappearance, Abe introduces us to protagonist Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist who goes on a secret weekend trip to a remote coastal region to look for insects. Jumpei comes across a village that is increasingly encroached upon by the surrounding sand. Looking for a night's rest, he is led by a scatter of villagers to a hut that appears to lie in a sandpit. A woman, the owner of the hut, gives him dinner and board, before getting on to her job - shoveling the engulfing sand to be hauled away. It is the net morning when Jumpei realizes that he has been tricked into the sandpit by the villagers who expect him to pitch into the shoveling efforts; a neat analogy to the hunting style of the sand spider. Niki's annoyance with the situation grows into rage, then fear and desperation, trying to come to terms with his helpless situation while he devises ploys to escape from it.
Kobo writes brilliantly throughout linking bizarre and philosophical threads in a skilful yarn. But this is not just a technically good story; we are immersed in it on a very personal level, identifying completely with Jumpei, from his moment of initial shock over his bizarre predicament to a heart-gripping conclusion where...I think I'll leave you hanging on that, save to say that it makes for a wonderful sister companion to Vilas Sarang's mind-blowing 'In The Land of Enki'.
This book is a must-have.
Rating: 5
Summary: Man's fate
Comment: When an amateur entomologist is taken by the inhabitants of a small fishermen village for a governemental controller, he is dropped in a dune pit where a widow lives.
Her house is continuously threatened by infiltrating sand and his life is now limited to shovelling sand dust.
More, he is now also confronted directly with a member of the other gender and his sexual instinct.
He tries to escape by all means, but ultimately questions his fate: is shovelling sand more absurd than his former life between 'normal' people in 'normal' circumstances?
A compelling and penetrating exploration about the meaning of life. A real thriller about an essential existential problem, mingled with the battle of the sexes. A must read.
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Title: Snow Country by Edward G. Seidensticker, Yasunari Kawabata ISBN: 0679761047 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 January, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Box Man : A Novel by Kobo Abe ISBN: 0375726519 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 10 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, Edwin McClellan, Soseki Natsume ISBN: 0895267152 Publisher: Regnery Publishing Pub. Date: May, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: A Wild Sheep Chase : A Novel by Haruki Murakami ISBN: 037571894X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 09 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel (Vintage International) by Haruki Murakami ISBN: 0679743464 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 02 March, 1993 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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