A Trap Named Hope

...There he is tricked by the inhabitants of an unnamed village and imprisoned in a hut at the bottom of a deep pit in a sand dune, a hut already inhabited by an unnamed widow about his age...

...But it must also be to make us think...

...Abé's total effect, however, is less that of Kafka than that of William Golding...

...But of all this welter of meanings, what did Kobo Abé intend his fable to mean...

...When the villagers restore the rope ladder they had removed, Niki no longer wants to escape...

...The novel is not wholly a pleasant experience, but it is a fascinating, disturbing, and thought-provoking one...

...His novel is a symbolic fantasy, a fable, perhaps a parable, perhaps even an allegory...

...In one meaning, the story is a fable of marriage and domesticity...

...The woman's blotched complexion resembles "a cheap cutlet not cooked in batter," and when she is excited she exudes "a strong smell like boiled gristle...

...I think that Abé's parable has an infinitude of translations, ranging from the most homely to the most universal, and that all the reviewer can do is to name a few—soundings taken at random in the sand—to give some idea of their range...

...The same sand dune that is Sin to a Christian might be Imperialist Colonialism to a Marxist and Mother's Breast to a Freudian...

...Niki recalls being told "that there was nothing that tasted so good as one's own ear wax, that it was better than real cheese...

...if it imprisons and kills it is also useful for casting molds, indispensable for concrete, and has a great potential for modern chemical farming...

...Niki, that is), born like Abé in 1924, who goes to the seashore one August day in 1955 to collect insects...

...Some of the book's details are disgusting, and deliberately disgusting...

...The calm reasonable tone of these dubious explanations calls to mind Franz Kafka, as does a fable Niki recalls about a guard protecting a deserted castle...

...The people in the dunes go naked as much as possible because the contact of any clothing with perspiration produces a sand rash...

...Just before sunset the dunes are covered with mist because "the silicic acid in the sand, which had little capacity to retain heat, suddenly releases the warmth it had absorbed during the day...

...if they and a dozen other slave households in the dunes did not perform this task, the village would promptly be buried in the blowing sands...

...He invents conveniences, proposes to buy a potted plant, and eventually he is helping the woman with her extra piecework in order to earn a down payment on a radio...

...James Gould Cozzens set the same story in a department store as Castaway in 1934, and Golding on an ocean rock as Pincher Martin in 1956, and the vision of both is desolation and death...

...In more extreme metaphysical and Existential meanings, the sand is "nature's mercilessness," "the beauty of death," and Chaos itself, "the antithesis of all form...

...Sand dunes have "capillary action," as a result of surface evaporation, and suck up water like "an immense pump...

...In 1951 he was awarded what a note about the author calls "the most important Japanese literary prize, the Akutagawa," for his novel The Crime of Mr...

...thirsty, Niki feels "a thousand wounded centipedes" struggle under his skin...

...His prose neither has nor aspires to Kafka's chiseled objectivity...

...It is their task, he discovers, to spend the nights shoveling sand to be carted away by the villagers...

...When Niki first realizes that he has been trapped and turns on the woman, she crouches passively in "the posture of a sacrificial victim...

...In this perspective, attachments are meliorative, but bleakly: "They might as well lick each other's wounds...

...like Golding's, it is looser, more romantic, and often clumsier...

...Abé has a background in entomology and a medical degree, although he has never practiced...

...Niki is strongly ambivalent about the sand: it "represents purity, cleanliness" as well as rot and sensuality...

...Now Abé tries it again, with a protagonist cast away just 10 years after Hiroshima, and what is his image of man...

...Here is a seascape: "The leaden sea was overlaid with an aluminum sheet, gathered into wrinkles like the skin on boiled milk...

...What it means, of course...

...As Niki becomes reconciled to life in the dunes, he stops dwelling on his lost freedom, and he begins to feel "a certain gentle contentment...

...Abé's aim, then, is to make us feel: sand and flesh, horror and disgust...

...S. Karuma...

...The trouble with such a question is that you get the answer in whatever vocabulary you put the question...

...When Abé goes beyond his lukewarm similes to boldly surrealistic metaphors he is enormously effective...

...Along with his revulsion, the reader is made to feel the perverse sensuality of the woman in the sand...

...For all his awards, Abé is only now making his first appearance in English, with The Woman in the Dunes (translated by E. Dale Saunders, Knopf, 241 pp., $4.95...

...The novel's physics of sand is equally suspicious...

...Niki rebels against his slavery and briefly escapes, but after he is recaptured he comes to accept the life, and at the novel's end the woman is pregnant, and Niki has been declared legally dead by Tokyo...

...But what precisely does the sand, or life in its dunes, symbolize in Abé's book...

...Abé's reliance on elaborate similes is a case in point...

...The Woman in the Dunes won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature in 1960, and in 1963 it was made into a Japanese film that won the Special Jury Prize at the latest Cannes Film Festival...

...In more abstract meanings, dune life is life itself, the human condition...

...Niki is a typical bourgeois, a taxpayer and "registered resident," and his noblest vision for the dune village is that it ought to be exploited as a tourist attraction...

...The great power of the book is its ability to make the reader experience life in a sand dune, to feel sand gritty in his teeth, sand inflaming the corners of his eyes and all his body orifices, sand blowing in his food and drink, his cigarettes so sandy that they will not draw...

...He has become "attached...

...If Niki has fallen into a life of manual labor, labor is "something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the endless flight of time...

...In The Woman in the Dunes there are desert beetles, with "the elegant Japanese name of 'letter-bearer'," that feed off small animals such as mice and lizards that they have lured into the desert to die...

...or Nazi Dehumanization (when Niki is recaptured, his spirit is broken and he loses all his shame, so that like a dehumanized camp inmate he is later willing to buy a minor privilege with a sexual exhibition...

...In another aspect, the novel describes the fall, celebrated in The Communist Manifesto, of elements of the bourgeoisie into the proletariat...

...Salty sand is nevertheless completely unsuitable for use in cement (the villagers sell it illegally and secretly at half price...

...This tale of The Castaway is one of the traditional subjects of allegorical fiction, and a useful index of social hopes...

...In other translations dune life is Communist Slavery (in exchange for their freedom, the nocturnal shovelers are assured of food and water, cigarettes and saké, even free eye medicine...

...Lying naked she seems "a statue gilded with sand," her body gives off "a stagnant smell of sunheated water," covered with soap and perspiration her body feels "like machine oil mixed with iron filings," and so on...

...But his bourgeois mistress is cold and hateful, whereas the woman in the dunes is warm and loving...

...The human posture, as Niki has learned in the course of the novel, is helpless victimage...

...Near the end of the book, when his public rape has failed and the woman turns on him, he assumes the same defenseless posture and she beats him bloody and unconscious...

...Daniel Defoe published it as Robinson Crusoe in 1719, a tale of triumph and resourcefulness proper to those optimistic days...

...Similarly, the spiders in this dune world do not build webs, but have adapted to use the oil lamps of the dune households to attract moths...

...When the village people bring him a newspaper, the news he gets of his former world is: Corporation Tax Bribery Spreads to City Officials...

...the crow trap baited with dried fish that Niki builds in the sand is named "Hope," and although no crow ever comes to it, it is there that he discovers fresh water...

...So much in The Woman in the Dunes is openly symbolic, like the beetles and spiders: the rope with which Niki temporarily escapes is made by tearing up his spare shirt and joining to it "the kimono sash of the woman's dead husband...

...But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away...

...A scene in which Niki tries to rape the woman before an audience of villagers is almost unbearably repulsive...

...When salty sand is full of fog, it gets hard like starch...

...Squeezed by a sandslide, the hut drips "gray blood...

...It tells of a Tokyo schoolteacher, Niki Jumpei (Mr...

...In this meaning, The Woman in the Dunes translates as The Bait in the Trap, the rotten fish that caught this crow...

...The cheap saké that the dune slaves are allotted smells "as if it had been squeezed from a compost heap...

...This unlikely series of events is fleshed out with scientific details of the most unreliable sort...

...or Oriental Backwardness (the village has found that perpetual shoveling is cheaper than building a hedge of trees against the sand...

...The sun, squeezed by clouds that resembled frogs' eggs, seemed to be stalling, unwilling to sink...

...Curiosity is "as overripe as an unpicked persimmon," fatigue spreads through the body "like India ink dropped in water— it was a jellyfish, a scent bag, a diagram of an atomic nucleus," an idea in a corner of consciousness is "like a sodden undergarment," joy is "as if his stomach were being tickled by a paper balloon filled with some special light gas...