Booky Ooky!

The Woman in the Dunes / Kobo Abé
Vintage International, 1991 (paperback) [orig. 1964]
239 p. — translated by E. Dale Saunders

I have this goal–more of a hope really–that 2008 will be a better reading year than 2007. “Better,” in this case, is not a measurement of quantity of books, reading focus, or really anything having to do with me. It’s more an issue of the quality of books I read. There was a lot of disappointment in 2008, so much so that when everybody was saying how hard it was to narrow down a Top 10 of 2007, I couldn’t find 10 books that deserved to be on such a list. The Murakami, the Card, the… well I don’t remember now. The point is, we (royal) have to do better.

So far, so good. The Woman in the Dunes, which I finished almost a week ago, is a fantastic novel.

Niki Jumpei is an amateur entomologist. A bug collector. Yeah, it’s an odd sort of hobby, but it probably keeps him from murdering young girls or setting cats on fire, so just go with it. He’s also fascinated by sand, on which he has done much research, in part with hopes of finding a heretofore undiscovered species of sand-dwelling insect. Again my sociopathy-sense is tingling, but I have to admit it was these obsessions of the character that provided Abe the opportunity to, within the first 20 pages, convince me this would be a favorite book of mine with his lyrical, heady, and insightful style. On sand:

Because winds and water currents flow over the land, the formation of sand is unavoidable. As long as the winds blew, the rivers flowed, and the seas stirred, sand would be born grain by grain from the earth, and like a living being it would creep everywhere. The sands never rested. Gently but surely they invaded and destroyed the surface of the earth. […] While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.

The part omitted with the ellipses make this excerpt come together even better, but it was kinda long.

Anyway, Niki takes a couple days off work to visit some dunes and look for bugs. He needs to stay the night in the village there, so–and bear with me here–I guess they lowered him into a sort of pit in the dunes where a woman lived alone in her house. The physical layout of this house and the surrounding dunes was never clear in my mind, though this was the setting for 90% of the novel. This was actually a minor drawback, as I had to take it on faith that things happened the way they did. Though I suppose it’s fiction, so taking it on faith is the only way…

The point is, this was all a trick. The sand enters this house constantly, and it is the woman’s full-time job to shovel the sand into buckets that will be lifted out and discarded. She must do this because if the sand builds up in her house–her pit–too much, it will upset some sort of balance and the entire village below will be destroyed by sand. Again, I have no idea why this was or what this village looked like. The physics of the thing are totally beyond my grasp, so just go with it. Anyway, now Niki’s trapped in there with her to help her out because the townspeople took the rope ladder away. Ha ha.

I’ve rambled already. Basically, the book’s about a guy trapped in a sand pit with a woman. The entire book. A sand pit. Excited yet? It’s a hard sell, I’ll admit, but Abe manages to transform this strange plot into a deeply moving, intensely psychological, and non-stop page-turning study on this man and both his relationship with the woman and how he deals with his entrapment. It touches on identity, acceptance, adaptation, sexual politics, and most of all Niki’s struggle with himself.

And by “sexual politics,” yes, I mean sex in a sand pit. As if he wasn’t chafed already.

The point is, this book is exceptional. Had I read it a week sooner, I may have been able to eke out a Top 10 list with this at the top. As it is, Mr. Abe will have to wait until December for this illustrious honor.