I still have sand in the left boot that I wore to Culbin Forest in April, and I have decided to leave it there. It grits a little on the stairs. Each time it does, it reminds me that sand does not so much move as relocate, grain by grain, until what was a field is a dune and what was a dune is, at last, a wood.
Culbin lies on the Moray coast, and the story told about it is that in 1694 a single storm buried a barony: a great house, a church, orchards, thousands of acres. As The Scotsman reports the matter, on the strength of archive research, the truth was smaller and slower. There were probably about five farms and some 735 acres under cultivation, and the sand had been advancing for generations, helped along by a careless laird, poor harvests and the habit of pulling up marram grass for thatch. The grass was what held the dunes. The storm finished a process that the inhabitants had been assisting for years. Legend preferred a card game with the Devil, which says something about how much people would rather have a villain than a mechanism.
I brought the boot home, and the story with it, and found that I could not think about the one without the other. The book I had in mind was Abe Kōbō's The Woman in the Dunes, which appeared in Japan in 1962 as 砂の女, Suna no Onna. It won the Yomiuri Prize that year and became a bestseller, and Nippon.com says it has since been translated into more than thirty languages. E. Dale Saunders's English version followed in 1964, and by Britannica's account it was the first of Abe's novels to reach English readers. In Korean it is 모래의 여자, and the Minumsa edition of 2001, in Kim Nan-ju's translation, has sat on my shelf for a good while.
The premise can be given in two sentences, and it is the kind that fits on a cinema poster. Niki Jumpei, a schoolteacher from Tokyo and an amateur entomologist, goes to a seaside village to collect insects, misses the last bus, and is lodged for the night by the villagers in a house at the bottom of a sand pit, reached by a rope ladder. In the morning the ladder has gone.
What follows is not a thriller, whatever the premise suggests. The widow who lives in the pit must keep shovelling sand away, or the house, and in time the pit and the village, will be buried, and Niki is expected to help. The author delivers the point with great calm. If the shovelling stops, the people in the pit are lost, and so the labour is at once the prison and the only reason for living in it. Nobody in the book is a gaoler: the prison is a chore that has to be done and a courtesy that has to be accepted. The woman, as I read her, is no more free of the sand than he is.
It is worth asking who actually keeps Niki in the pit. Not the woman, and not any single villager. The people who remove the ladder are, so far as the premise shows, neighbours: practical people with a shortage of hands and a long habit of making the shortage someone else's problem. Abe gives them no speech of justification, and the omission is deliberate. A villain can be resisted, argued with or at least hated. A community that has quietly arranged its survival around your presence offers nothing to hate, only a very large number of small reasonable requests. The effect is to make the reader's own anger feel slightly foolish, which is exactly the position in which Niki finds himself.
Here Culbin earns its place in this essay. The village in the novel survives by doing something that looks absurd, which is to dig out the thing that will bury it, and the Scottish barony perished by failing to. Yet both are stories about a community whose existence depends on a standing negotiation with a substance that cannot be defeated, only delayed. Both also have a human hand in the mechanism: marram grass torn up for thatch on the Moray coast, a visitor conveniently detained in the dunes of the novel. Abe saw that the horror of the pit is not the sand but the arithmetic. Whoever stops shovelling is not killed on the spot. He is buried at the pace of the sand, which is slow enough to be argued with.
Britannica singles out the book's detailed descriptions of sand, and it is right to. Abe trained as a doctor, and he writes sand as a clinician writes a symptom, with a patience that is faintly sinister. Sand in this novel is never a metaphor first. It is a substance with habits, which creeps and settles and gets into things, and the reader learns its manners before being asked to consider its meaning. That order matters. A symbol that has not first been a fact is only decoration, and nobody is frightened of decoration.
The novel carries an epigraph, and I think it is the key to the whole: 'Without the threat of punishment there is no joy in flight.' An escape is worth wanting only if there is something to escape from. The book then sets about testing whether a man who has been handed a prison and, little by little, a household and a routine, still wants the flight. Few novels put so plainly the possibility that the walls might be the thing that makes freedom feel like freedom.
It is tempting to reach for Camus here, and I shall reach for him only to put him down again. Sisyphus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, pushes a stone that will always roll back, and Camus asks us to imagine him happy. Niki also repeats a task without end. The difference is that his labour is not futile. It keeps a house standing and a woman alive, and that usefulness is what makes it so hard to protest. A man forced to roll a stone for no reason can curse the gods. A man forced to shovel sand for a reason that he comes to share has nobody left to curse, and the novel is more disturbing for it.
The detail I find most pointed is Niki's trade. He is a classifier. He came to the coast to collect insects, which is to say to put small living things into labelled drawers, and he is promptly reclassified himself, as a labourer, a husband of sorts, a resident, an item in the village's accounts. The collector becomes the collection. It is a joke, but a pitiless one, and it is told without a smile.
When he tries to leave, the dunes themselves defeat him, and he is caught in quicksand. The last movement is the stranger one. He finds an occupation, the collecting of water, and with it a kind of purpose, and he settles into the life that was imposed on him. The ending is neither the escape that a thriller promises nor the despair that a fable of captivity might allow. It is a modest, practical, almost cheerful surrender that Abe will not let us call surrender, since the man has, after all, something to do. A closing document then records, seven years on, the official disposal of Niki Jumpei as a missing man, and the dryness of that last page is the book's final blow.
Korean readers will hear a cousin of this story in Yi Sang's Wings, published in 1936, whose narrator is also kept in a back room, in his wife's house, and which also ends with a wish to fly. I have written about that story here before, and I am conscious that setting the two side by side risks a tidy symmetry. The differences are as instructive as the likeness. Yi Sang's prisoner is shut in by a private arrangement, and Abe's is shut in by a village, which is to say by an economy. The first is a case history. The second is a social fact.
Abe himself said that he was essentially a man without a hometown. Born in Tokyo in 1924, he grew up in Mukden, in Manchuria, and took a medical degree at Tokyo Imperial University in 1948. I do not like to explain a novel by the man who wrote it, but it is hard not to notice that the author of the best-known account of a man who loses his place had never been allowed to settle in one. Western critics have compared him to Kafka, as Britannica notes, and the comparison is true and slightly lazy. Kafka's clerks are charged without knowing the offence, and Abe's schoolteacher is not charged at all. He is merely needed.
Hiroshi Teshigahara filmed the novel in 1964 from a screenplay by Abe himself, with a score by Tōru Takemitsu and Eiji Okada and Kyōko Kishida in the leads. It won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes that year and was nominated for Academy Awards for best director and best foreign-language film. The best thing I can say for the film is that it does not make the book unnecessary. Cinema can show sand to magnificent effect. It cannot easily show a man deciding to wait, and the book is, in the end, about that decision.
The reading that has kept the novel in print is the office reading, and I do not think it wrong. A schoolteacher on a short holiday, a missed bus, a roof and a meal: the pit does not need locks. A reader in Seoul or Tokyo, or Edinburgh for that matter, who has spent a decade in a post whose original reason has been forgotten will recognise a pit that has been made comfortable. What I would add is that Abe does not say the comfort is a lie. That is what makes the book harder to dismiss than a plain parable of the salaried life.
My objection concerns the woman. The title calls her only that, and the novel is less curious about her than it might be. As in many mid-century books by men, she is built to be useful to the hero's education, and the gaze does not stay on her as long as her situation deserves. I note this and do not hold it against the book, which is of its period and, within that, unusually alert to the question of who gets to be free and who gets to be needed.
The dunes at Culbin were pinned in the end by plantations of pine, begun by the Forestry Commission in the 1920s and continued for some forty years, so that what the visitor now walks through is not a wilderness but a rescue. The sand in my boot is therefore a small act of disobedience, a piece of the old Culbin that came out of the wood with me. I have not shaken it out. It grits on the stairs, and each time I am reminded that a prison, like a dune, is largely a question of what is allowed to pile up.
Recommended Resources
☞ English Edition: The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe (translated by E. Dale Saunders), Amazon
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Morae-ui Yeoja (모래의 여자), Abe Kobo, Aladin Bookstore
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Woman in the Dunes (novel by Abe Kōbō).
- Wikipedia, The Woman in the Dunes (plot, publication, the 1962 Yomiuri Prize, E. Dale Saunders's translation).
- The Scotsman, "The community that vanished in a sandstorm" (the Culbin estate and the sand of 1694).
- Wikipedia, Woman in the Dunes (Teshigahara's 1964 film: credits, Cannes and Academy Award recognition).