The Woman in the Dunes

by Kōbō Abe

  If he were successful in this experiment he would no longer have to give in to the villagers if they cut off his water. But more important, he had found that the sand was an immense pump. It was just as if he were sitting on a suction pump. He had to sit down for a moment and control his breathing in order to quiet the wild beating of his heart. Of course, there was no need yet to tell anyone about this. It would be his trump card in case of emergency.

  But he could not suppress the natural laughter that welled up in him. Even if he were able to keep silent about “Hope,” it was hard to conceal the elation in his heart. He suddenly let out a cry and put his arms around the woman’s hips from behind as she was getting the bed ready. And when she dodged away he fell over on his back and lay kicking his legs and laughing all the while. It was as if his stomach were being tickled by a paper balloon filled with some special light gas. He felt that the hand he held to his face was floating free in the air.

  The woman laughed reluctantly, but it was probably only to be agreeable. He was thinking of the vast network of water veins creeping up through the sand, but the woman, on the contrary, was surely thinking that his actions were sexual advances. That was all right. Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe.

  The fact that he was still just as much at the bottom of the hole as ever had not changed, but he felt quite as if he had climbed to the top of a high tower. Perhaps the world had been turned upside down and its projections and depressions reversed. Anyway, he had discovered water in this sand. As long as he had his device the villagers would not be able to interfere with him so easily. No matter how much they cut off his supply, he would be able to get along very well. Again laughter welled up in him at the very thought of the outcry the villagers would make. He was still in the hole, but it seemed as if he were already outside. Turning around, he could see the whole scene. You can’t really judge a mosaic if you don’t look at it from a distance. If you really get close to it you get lost in detail. You get away from one detail only to get caught in another. Perhaps what he had been seeing up until now was not the sand but grains of sand.

  He could say precisely the same thing about the other woman and his former fellow teachers. He had been concerned up until now only with curiously exaggerated details: nostrils in a thick nose, wrinkled lips or smooth, thin lips, spatulate fingers or pointed fingers, flecked eyes, a string of warts under a collarbone, violet veins running over a breast. If he looked very closely at those parts alone he would feel like vomiting. But to eyes with magnifying lenses everything seemed tiny and insectlike. The little ones crawling around over there were his colleagues having a cup of tea in the faculty room. The one in this corner was the other woman, naked, on a dampish bed, her eyes half closed, motionless although the ash of her cigarette was about to fall. Moreover, he felt, without the slightest jealousy, that the little insects were like cookie molds. Cookie molds have only edges and no insides. Even so, there was no need to be such a dedicated cookie maker as to be unable to resist making unneeded cookies just to use the mold. If the chance occurred for him to renew his relationship with them, he would have to start all over again from the very beginning. The change in the sand corresponded to a change in himself. Perhaps, along with the water in the sand, he had found a new self.

  Thus, work on a water trap was added to his daily occupations. Figures and diagrams began to accumulate—the place to bury the bucket, the shape of the bucket, the relationship between daylight hours and the rate of water accumulation, the influence of temperature and barometric pressure on the efficiency of the apparatus. But it was incomprehensible to the woman why he could be so enthusiastic about anything so insignificant as a crow trap. She recognized that no man can get along without some sort of plaything, and if he was satisfied with that one, it suited her. Moreover, she did not know why, but he had begun to show more interest in her own craft work. It wasn’t at all a disagreeable feeling. The question of the crow trap aside, she had still benefited considerably. But he too had his own reasons and motives. His work on the device was unexpectedly troublesome, for it was necessary to combine many elements. The number of materials increased, but it was hard to find a law that would govern them all. If he wanted to make his data more precise, he needed a radio in order to tune in the weather reports. The radio had become their common objective.

  At the beginning of November he had recorded the daily intake of water at one gallon, but after that the quantity began to fall off every day. It was perhaps because of the temperature, and it appeared that he would have to await spring to try a full-scale experiment. The long, hard winter had at last come, and bits of ice were blown along with the sand. In the meantime, in order to get a somewhat better radio, he decided to give the woman a hand with her craft work. One good point was that the inside of the hole was protected from the wind, yet it was unbearable with the sun scarcely visible throughout the day. Even on days when the sand froze over, the amount that blew along in the wind did not decrease, and there was no respite from the work of shoveling. Many times the chilblains on his fingers broke and began to bleed.

  In some way, winter passed and spring came. At the beginning of March they got the radio. On the roof they erected a high antenna. The woman joyfully and repeatedly voiced her wonder, turning the dial left and right for half a day. At the end of that month, she found herself pregnant. Two more months went by. Large white birds kept flying over from east to west for three days in succession, and on the following day the lower part of her body was covered with blood and she complained of violent pain. One of the villagers, who was said to have a veterinarian among her relatives, diagnosed it as an extra-uterine pregnancy, and it was decided to take her to the hospital in the city in the three-wheeled truck. The man sat with her as they waited for the truck to come, letting her hold one of his hands, while with the other he kept rubbing her belly.

  Finally the three-wheeler stopped at the top of the cliff. A rope ladder was let down for the first time in a half year, and the woman, wrapped in her blankets as in a cocoon, was hauled up by rope. She looked at him beseechingly with eyes almost blinded by tears and mucus, until she could see him no longer. The man looked away as if he did not see her.

  Even though she had been taken away, the rope ladder remained as it was. He hesitantly reached out and touched it with his fingertips. After making sure it would not vanish, he slowly began to climb up. The sky was a dirty yellow. His arms and legs felt heavy, as if he had just come out of water. This was the long-awaited rope ladder.

  The wind seemed to snatch the breath from his mouth. Circling around the edge of the hole, he climbed to a spot where he could view the sea. The sea too was a dirty yellow. He breathed deeply, but the air only irritated his throat, and it did not taste as he had expected. He turned around. A cloud of sand rose on the outskirts of the village. It was probably the three-wheeler with the woman, he thought. Oh, yes… maybe he should have told her the real significance of the trap.

  Something moved at the bottom of the hole. It was his own shadow. Just near it stood the water trap. One part of the framework had come loose. Perhaps someone had accidentally stepped on it when they had come to take the woman out. He hastened back down the ladder to repair it The water, as his calculations had led him to expect, had risen to the fourth mark. The damage did not appear to be too great. In the house, someone was singing in a rasping voice on the radio. He tried to stifle the sobbing that seemed about to burst from him; he plunged his hands into the bucket. The water was piercingly cold. He sank down on his knees and remained inert, his hands still in the water.

  There was no particular need to hurry about escaping. On the two-way ticket he held in his hand now, the destination and time of departure were blanks for him to fill in as he wished. In addition, he realized that he was bursting with a desire to talk to someone about the water trap. And if he wanted to talk about it, t
here wouldn’t be better listeners than the villagers. He would end by telling someone—if not today, then tomorrow.

  He might as well put off his escape until sometime after that.

  NOTIFICATION OF MISSING PERSONS

  NAME OF PERSON: Niki Jumpei

  DATE OF BIRTH: March 7

  In view of the fact that a notice of missing person (s) has been filed by Niki Shino (mother), notification of the existence of the missing party should be made to this court by September 21, 1962. In the event of no further report, the said person will be pronounced missing. Anyone knowing anything about the person in question is requested to report to this court by the above date.

  February 18,1962

  COURT OF DOMESTIC RELATIONS

  JUDGMENT

  CLAIMANT: Niki Shino

  MISSING PERSON: Niki Jumpei

  DATE OF BIRTH: March 7

  A declaration of disappearance concerning the abovementioned party having been filed, the procedure of public notice having been fulfilled, and the unascertainability of either the existence or the death of the person in question from August 18, 1955, for seven years hence, having been recognized, the following decision has been handed down.

  DECISION

  Niki Jumpei is hereby declared missing.

  October 5,1962

  COURT OF DOMESTIC RELATIONS

  SIGNATURE OF JUDGE

  The End

  A Note About the Author

  Kōbō Abe was born in Tokyo in 1924 but grew up in Mukden, Manchuria, where his father, a doctor, was on the staff of the medical school. As a young man Mr. Abe was interested in mathematics and insect collecting as well as the works of Poe, Dostoevski, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Kafka. He received a medical degree from Tokyo University in 1948, but he has never practiced medicine. In that same year he published his first book, The Road Sign at the End of the Street.

  In 1951 he was awarded the most important Japanese literary prize, the Akutagawa, for his novel The Crime of Mr. S. Karuma. In 1960 his novel The Woman in the Dunes won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. It was made into a film by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1963 and won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the first of Mr. Abe’s novels to be published in translation in the United States, in 1964. The Face of Another (1966) was also made into a film by Mr. Teshigahara. Other novels in translation include The Ruined Map (1969), Friends (1969), The Box Man (1974), and The Man Who Turned Into a Stick (1976).

  A Note About the Translator

  E. Dale Saunders, translator of Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes (1964), The Face of Another (1966), and The Ruined Map (1969), received his A.B. from Western Reserve University (1941), his M.A. from Harvard (1948), and his Ph.D. from the University of Paris (1952). He is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, having previously taught at International Christian University, Tokyo, and at Harvard University.

  Among his publications are Mudra: A Study of Symbolic Gestures in Japanese Buddhist Sculpture (1960) and Buddhism in Japan (1964).

  Table of Contents

  The Woman in the Dunes

  by

  Kōbō Abe

  The Woman in the Dunes

  PART I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  PART II

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  PART III

  28

  29

  30

  31

  The End

  A Note About the Author

  A Note About the Translator