Book Review: "The Woman in the Dunes" by Kōbō Abe

“The Woman in the Dunes” by Kobo Abe is often described as one of the most important, moving and existential Japanese novels of its century and honestly, I have to agree. Not since Mary Shelley has man felt as powerless yet believes himself still to be powerful in the grander scale of things. And though this is not Sci-Fi, it tells a tale of a man forced to monster himself in order to survive. A man forced to exist rather than live and through this, we get the survival - which is absolutely shocking in some respects. From being enslaved and trapped to eating bugs and the sorts, Kobo Abe makes it clear that this man will refuse to perish in the dust. He simply refuses to die. This hits the very essence of man itself - someone who exists believing in their own existence as important or if more so, than everyone else’s on the planet. In reality, it is one person out of millions and would it really matter? In the narrative it does, but how do we know the same thing is not going on right now somewhere deep in the deserts? We never will.

Let us have a look at some of the quotations that I thought were especially important in order to understand the character and his narrative. And what better way to start than from the very beginning. An in media res style opening where we are thrown full force into the narrative without any background information to begin with. The opening line is so very raw:

“One day in August, a man disappeared. He had simply set out for the seashore on a holiday, scarcely half a day away by train and nothing more was ever heard of him. Investigation by the police and inquiries in the newspapers had both proved fruitless. Of course, missing persons are not really uncommon. According to statistics, several hundred disappearances are reported every year. Moreover, the proportion of those found again is unexpectedly small. Murder of accidents always leave some clear piece of evidence and the motives for kidnapping are normally ascertainable. But if the instance does not come under some such heading, clues - and this is especially true in the case of missing persons - are extremely difficult to come by. Many disappearances for example, may be described as simple escape. In the case of this man, also, the clues were negligible.”

Introducing the story to us, we have a roundabout idea what the book is going to be about but, we have no idea how we got here. We know that the book is about a missing man, we also know that there is no real clue as to where he is and finally, we know that many people are completely unaware of anywhere he could be or with anyone as the introduction seems to go over the problems with finding missing people who are missing without the assailant’s motive. Then we get the theories of what may have happened to him, speculations as in a real missing persons case can ultimately damage the true nature of the case. However, in a narrative it could make the reader more interested in what actually happened to him and how these people are speculating/what they are speculating upon.

“The theory had been advanced that the man, tired of life, had committed suicide. One of his colleagues who was an amateur psychoanalyst, held this to view. He claimed that in a grown man enthusiasm for such a useless pastime as collecting insects was evidence enough of a mental quirk. Even in children, unusual preoccupation with insects frequently indicates an Oedipus Complex. In order to compensate for his unsatisfied desires, a child enjoys sticking pins into insects, which he need never fear will escape…”

Honestly, this book just gets more and more messed up as you go through and when you get to the more climactic points there is definitely a sense of this man being ever so slightly mentally ‘quirky’. However, Kobo Abe’s intense writing keeps us focused on the existentialism of the whole situation of not whether it was worth it but whether this man will turn up and if he will ever be the same if he does.