The Woman in the Dunes

Kōbō Abe (1924-1993) was a writer, playwright, and photographer best known for his novel The Woman in the Dunes. Much of his work reflects his own personal biography, especially this novel. Highly regarded in Japan, Abe’s name was mentioned as a possible Nobel Prize nominee, but he died before the nomination could be issued.

Abe spent most of his childhood in Manchuria, though the family also spent time in Tokyo, where his father did medical research, and Hokkaido, where his mother grew up. He attended high school in Tokyo, but poor health forced him to return to Manchuria. He went back to Tokyo to study medicine, during which time he started writing short fiction. Abe claimed that moving around so much deprived him of a sense of having a hometown and, consequently, gave him a “hometown phobia,” as he told interviewer Nancy Shields in 1978, adding, “All things that are valued for their stability offend me” (Shields, Nancy. Fake Fish: The Theater of Kobo Abe. Weatherhill, 1996). This theme of Stability Versus Movement arises in The Woman in the Dunes in several places as the man contemplates the nature of sand, giving voice to Abe’s own preoccupation when he says, “’I rather think the world is like sand. The fundamental nature of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state. Sand not only flows, but this very flow is the sand” (99). Moreover, as a youth, Abe enjoyed collecting insects, which is the hobby of the man in the story and the reason he goes to the seaside village.

In post-war Japan, Abe lived with his wife in barracks in a part of Tokyo that had been bombed during World War II. Though they were both artists involved in theater, they eked out an existence by selling random goods, such as charcoal and pickles. Having lived through the war and losing many friends to it, Abe became a pacifist and supported the Japanese Communist Party and its advocacy for the working poor. However, he eventually parted ways with the party when he felt stifled artistically by their dictates. Traveling in Eastern Europe increased his disillusionment with communism. Again, hints of this viewpoint show up in The Woman in the Dunes when the man recalls attending a lecture meeting with the Möbius man where the speaker declares, “The real value of work lies in the strength of self-denial” (158-59), which, though not stated explicitly, seems to turn the man away.

Abe examines the concept of self-denial on a subtle level in the novel, reflecting elements of both Western existentialism and a branch of Asian existentialism that arises from the concept of nothingness or “non-being” in Buddhism. Abe enjoyed the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger and the literary works of Franz Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe. The perspectivism of Nietzsche—the idea that an objective truth or reality is an irrational concept—also appears in Abe’s novel in the shifting perspectives the man has about the meaning of the villagers’ lives in the sand dunes. Nietzsche’s rejection of atomism—matter as something comprised of stable units—shows up in the man’s assessment of sand as a force, the sum of which becomes more than its individual units, which ties into Abe’s own rejection of stability.

In 1971, the author opened the Abe Studio in Tokyo as a place to perform his avant-garde plays and teach performers. His works are considered modernist, abstract, allegorical, and sometimes surreal. In 1977, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected Abe as a foreign honorary member.