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Overall Summary
The Woman in the Dunes (Suna no Onna) is a novel written by Kōbō Abe. It’s about a schoolteacher who gets trapped in sand and has to dig for his survival. The book won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, was translated into English, and adapted into a film that won an award at Cannes Film Festival.
A schoolteacher named Niki Junpei is unhappy with his life. He wants to find a new kind of beetle in the dunes, which he hopes will give his life more purpose and value. On the way to the sea, he passes through a village where people are poor and struggling. In one part of the village, there are deep holes that look like they were dug by hand.
An old man comes to Junpei and asks who he is. After hearing the answer, he offers him a place to sleep for the night in one of the holes. Junpei goes down the rope ladder where an attractive woman about his age greets him. She cooks dinner for him and then starts shoveling sand into cans with help from another person at the top of the hole. However, when Junpei realizes that she will be doing this all night, he gives up and goes to bed instead.
When he wakes up, the rope ladder has been removed and it’s impossible to climb out of the hole. The walls are too smooth for him to get a grip on them. He rages at this predicament until he becomes dehydrated, falls down, hurts himself and passes out.
A man is captured by a group of villagers, who want to kill him. When he recovers from his injuries, he takes a woman hostage and threatens to kill her if the villagers don’t let him go. However, they ignore this threat and cut off their water supply in retaliation. The man then makes a rope out of vines so that he can escape from the hole where he was being held captive, but becomes disoriented when wandering in the desert due to dehydration. He collapses into another hole near the village and is found by some other men who return him to his original captors.
Junpei joins the woman in digging and they have sex. He reflects on his previous relationships, which were not as good as this one. In some ways, he prefers this desperate relationship to them. He builds a trap for crows with the hope that it will catch an SOS message on its foot so that someone can save them from their situation. They both work hard at making beads in order to buy a radio so they don’t lose contact with the outside world.
Junpei is delighted when a trap he set up to catch crows doesn’t capture any, but instead collects water. He records his daily water collection and plans to store enough for another digging stoppage.
The villagers offer him supervised walks outside the hole if he will let them watch him have sex with the woman. He agrees, but she tells him that they sell sand to builders even though it is too salty for construction.
The woman becomes pregnant, and the villagers try to take her to a hospital. Unfortunately, they leave the rope ladder in place, which Junpei uses to climb out of the hole. However, he realizes that his water-collection project is too important for him to just abandon it. He climbs back down into the hole again so he can continue working on it while waiting for the woman’s return.
The Woman in the Dunes explores themes of alienation and nihilism. The best known of Abe’s novels, it is the basis for his reputation as one of Japan’s most influential twentieth-century writers.
