The Woman in the Dunes (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

I have always been interested in all things Japanese but this was my first exposure to more serious literature. I initially thought it would be way over my head, pretentious and hollow. Luckily I was was wrong on all three counts.
The prose moves in a slow and menacing way like the dunes of the title, I also felt a constant undertone of threatening excitement which kept me hooked into the plot. The real enjoyment of the book comes from the author's ability to describe sensations and emotions relating to the protagonist who finds himself in a Kafka type scenario. He takes you so far into the dunes that you feel like washing sand from yourself after reading it. I was plagued by constant introspection and reflection during and after reading this book, especially because it becomes so ambiguous towards the end.
I would recommend this book to anybody looking for something slightly different or anybody who likes to think about things on a deeper level. After reading it you may think about your current path in life and you may never want to go near sand again.

The Kobo Abe novel "Woman in the Dunes is a Japanese novel written in the 1960s and made in the same person. It traces, in a small book of less then 300 pages, the implications of being alienated and the contradictions of conformity freedom if that conformity has a purpose.
Niki Junpei a teacher trapped in a empty teaching job, a failed relationship and a life mapped up to retirement and death goes a secret 3 day trip- done to wind up his work colleagues. He is an amateur entomologist (bug collector!) which in Japan of the period is an equally conforming hobby. (The imagery of trapping, collecting, recording and pinning is an important an important motif.

Junpei is interested in sand bugs so goes to area of sand dunes. When he misses the last bus back, a group of locals suggest he stays the night in their village. They send him down a rope-ladder to a house at the bottom of a sandpit, where a young widow lives alone. She has been tasked along with a handful of other households by the village with preventing the sands from destroying the house (if their houses succumbs to the dunes then the other houses in the village will be threatened).

When Junpei tries to leave the next morning he finds the ladder removed. The villagers inform him that he must help the widow in her endless task of digging sand. Junpei initially tries to escape, upon failing he takes the widow captive, but is forced to release her when the house almost collapses after several days of sand build up outside. At one point he does escape only to be captured and gradually Junpei eventually becomes the widow's lover but still continues to plot his escape. Through his persistent effort on trapping a crow for messenger, he discovers a way to draw water from the damp sand at night. He thus is able to choose his when he can escape.

At the end of the book Junpei gets his chance to escape, as he discovers what the sand is being used for and that assumption of who bad-good guys are is less clear. He refuses to take it as he now has the power to leave when he chooses and a purposeful if bleak life with a community that depends on him. We at the end of the novel know what the meaning of his official declaration of death that is reported at the beginning of the novel.

The book raised powerful questions on what is our purpose and what we sacrifice if that life is to have any meaning. Its central "character "is the ever changing sand dunes described and struggled with in writing that is evocative, mythical and deeply psychological... the silences, gestures and actions all revealing more in the spaces between. But, and this is important it also suspenseful! Highly recommended.

I bought this book as a result of my recent discovery of the pleasures of existentialist literature. I've rather enjoyed a few Dostoyevsky novels, a couple of Sarte and a bit of Camus (yes I know that Camus proclaimed himself to be an absurdist, not an existentialist, but you know what I mean). In all cases I've found the books a delight to read, though generally a little on the "heavy" side (for want of a better word), particularly "The Brothers Karamazov" which has ended up being one my all time favourite books. Woman in the Dunes surprised me by having a much lighter touch than the others, whilst being just as engaging as all the others. I completed it in one sitting and read it again straight away.

What an amazing book!