28 Japan – The woman in the dunes – Kobo Abe – October 2015 (Score 5.3)

I was rather disappointed with this book, bearing in mind the author’s reputation as being one of Japan’s greatest 20th Century writers. I am afraid that I found it tedious despite the concept of the man trapped in a rather unusual situation.

The story is that a man has gone missing, with no evidence of anything suspicious. After seven years the case is closed.

We go back seven years and follow the man as he sets out for the seaside, complete with equipment to catch insects. Once he gets there he starts to wander over the huge dunes which threaten to cover the village which he has found.

At one point he is suspected of being a government inspector, but he manages to convince the villagers that he is not. One of them agrees to help him get accommodation for the night.

Eventually he is tricked into going into a deep pit in the sand. He finds a dilapidated house occupied by a single person, a woman whose purpose in life seems to be to shovel encroaching sand from one side of the pit into buckets at the opposite side. These are then lifted out by the villagers and disposed of somewhere.

The woman seems to have the task of saving the village from disappearing. He learns with horror that he has been enticed into the pit so that he can help the woman in her task. He discovers the hard way that he will only be fed and watered if he co-operates.

I liked the man’s notion of converting the village into spherical homes which could roll over the sand. The inner, stable, living quarters would rotate in the opposite mode to the outer, thus staying horizontal. This could be an ideal form of living for Arrakis, Frank Herbert’s desert planet.

Although the man is a teacher, he seems to have a totally different idea of teachers from ours. We value teachers for their work in bringing our young into the world as fully fledged humans, capable of thinking, reasoning and learning even if many of them do not take advantage of the opportunities available. His attitude is more that he is worthless since he, and other teachers are left behind as the pupils move on to the next year.

In his musings about how his colleagues might be setting up a police investigation to find him, we finally (page 81) learn that he is called Nikki Jumpei, and he is 31.

From page 111 to 113 there is a short section in which Nikki seems to be cogitating about writing a book about his experiences. Does this mean that he escapes at some future time?

I eventually didn’t care as I was getting more and more bored with the whole thing, though I stuck it out to the bitter end since I wanted to find out.

I could only give “The woman in the dunes a score of 5.5/10.