The Woman in the Dunes
Translated from the Japanese by
E. DALE SAUNDERS
With drawings by
MACHI ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
BY
KOBO ABE
VINTAGE BOOKS
A Division
of Random House, New York
Copyright © 1964 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc.,
New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1964.
Originally published in Japanese by Shinchosha as
Suna no Onna
.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Abe-, Kobo,
The woman in the dunes.
Translation of Suna no onna.
I. Title.
[PZ4.A13Wo5] [PL845.B4] ISBN 0-394-71814-
.6T5 72-
Manufactured in the United States of America Vintage Books Edition,
September
WITHOUT THE THREAT OF PUNISHMENT
THERE IS NO JOY IN FLIGHT
PART I
1
ONE day in August a man disappeared. He had simply set out for the
seashore on a holiday, scarcely half a day away by train, and nothing
more was ever heard of him. Investigation by the police and inquiries
in the newspapers had both proved fruitless.
Of course, missing persons are not really uncommon. According to the
statistics, several hundred disappearances are reported every year.
Moreover, the proportion of those found again is unexpectedly small.
Murders or accidents always leave some clear piece of evidence, and
the motives for kidnapping are normally ascertainable. But if the
instance does not come under some such heading, clues—and this is
especially true in the case of missing persons—are extremely difficult to
come by. Many disappearances, for example, may be described as
simple escape.
In the case of this man, also, the clues were negligible.
Though his general destination was known, there had been no report
from the area that a body had been discovered. By its very nature, it
was inconceivable that his work involved some secret for which he
might have been abducted. His quite normal behavior had not given
the slightest hint that he intended to vanish.
Naturally, everyone at first imagined that a woman was involved. But
his wife, or at least the woman he lived with, announced that the object
of his trip had been to collect insect specimens. The police investigators
and his colleagues felt vaguely disappointed. The insect bottle and net
were hardly a feint for a runaway trip with a girl.
Then, too, a station employee at S——
—had remembered a man getting off
the train who looked like a mountain
climber and carried slung across his
shoulders a canteen and a wooden
box, which he took to be a painting set
The man had been alone, quite alone,
the employee said, so speculation
about a girl was groundless.
The theory had been advanced that
the man, tired of life, had committed
suicide. One of his colleagues, who
was an amateur psychoanalyst, held to
this view. He claimed that in a grown
man enthusiasm for such a useless
pastime as collecting insects was
evidence enough of a mental quirk.
Even in children, unusual
preoccupation with insect collecting frequently indicates an Oedipus
complex. In order to compensate for his unsatisfied desires, the child
enjoys sticking pins into insects, which he need never fear will escape.
And the fact that he does not leave off once he has grown up is quite
definitely a sign that the condition has become worse. Thus it is far
from accidental that entomologists frequently have an acute desire for
acquisitions and that they are extremely reclusive, kleptomaniac,
homosexual. From this point to suicide out of weariness with the world
is but a step. As a matter of fact, there are even some collectors who are
attracted by the potassium cyanide in their bottles rather than by the
collecting itself, and no matter how they try they are quite incapable of
washing their hands of the business. Indeed, the man had not once
confided his interests to anyone, and this would seem to be proof that
he realized they were rather dubious.
Yet, since no body had actually been discovered, all of these ingenious
speculations were groundless.
Seven years had passed without anyone learning the truth, and so, in
compliance with Section 30 of the civil code, the man had been
pronounced dead.
2
ONE August afternoon a man stood in the railroad station at S———.
He wore a gray peaked hat, and the cuffs of his trousers were tucked
into his stockings. A canteen and a large wooden box were slung over
his shoulders. He seemed about to set out on a mountain-climbing
expedition.
Yet there were no mountains worth climbing in the immediate vicinity.
Indeed, the guard who took his ticket at the gate looked at him
quizzically after he passed through.
The man showed no hesitancy as he entered the bus standing in front
of the station and took a seat in the back. The bus route led away from
the mountains.
The man stayed on the bus to the end of the run. When he got off, the
landscape was a mixture of hillocks and hollows. The lowlands were
rice paddies that had been divided into narrow strips, while among
them slightly elevated fields planted with persimmon trees were
scattered about like islands. The man passed through a village and
continued walking in the direction of the seashore; the soil gradually
became whitish and dry.
After a time there were no more houses, only straggling clumps of pine.
Then the soil changed to a fine sand that clung to his feet. Now and
again clumps of dry grass cast shadows in hollows in the sand. As if by
mistake, there was occasionally a meager plot of eggplants, the size of a
straw mat. But of human shadows there was not a trace. The sea,
toward which he was headed, lay beyond.
For the first time the man stopped. He wiped the perspiration from his
face with his sleeve and gazed around. With deliberation, he opened
the wooden box and from the top drawer took out several pieces of pole
that had been bundled together. He assembled them into a handle and
attached an insect net to one end. Then he began to walk again,
striking the clumps of grass with the bottom of the shaft. The smell of
the sea enveloped the sands.
Some time went by, but the sea still could not be seen. Perhaps the
hilly terrain obstructed the view. The unchanging landscape stretched
endlessly on. Then, suddenly, the perspective broadened and a hamlet
came into sight. It was a commonplace, rather poor village, whose
roofs, weighted down with stones, lay clustered around a high fire
tower. Some of the roofs were shingled with black tile; others were of
zinc, painted red. A zinc-roofed building at the hamlet's single
crossroad seemed to be the meeting house of a fishermen's cooperative.
Beyond, there were probably more dunes, and the sea. Still, the hamlet
was spread out to an unexpected extent. There were some fertile
patches, but the soil consisted mostly of dry white sand. There were
fields of potatoes and peanuts, and the odor of domestic animals
mingled with that of the sea. A pile of broken shells formed a white
mound at the side of the clay-and-sand road, which was as hard as
cement. As the man passed down the street, children were playing in
the empty lot in front of the cooperative, some old men were sitting on
the sagging veranda repairing their nets, and thin-haired women were
gathered in front of the single general store. All movement ceased for a
moment as they looked curiously at him. But the man paid no
attention. Sand and insects were all that concerned him.
However, the size of the village was not the only surprising thing.
Contrary to what one would expect, the road was gradually rising.
Since it led toward the sea, it would be more natural for it to descend.
Could he have misread the map? He tried questioning a young village
girl who was passing by just then. But she lowered her eyes and, acting
as if she had not heard a thing, hurried on. Yet the pile of shells, the
fishing nets, and the color of the sand told him that certainly the sea
lay nearby. There was really nothing yet that foretold danger.
The road began to rise more and more abruptly; more and more it
became just sand.
But, curiously enough, the areas where houses stood were not the
slightest bit higher. The road alone rose, while the hamlet itself
continued to remain level. No, it was not only the road; the areas
between the buildings were rising at the same rate. In a sense, then, the
whole village seemed to have become a rising slope with only the
buildings left on their original level. This impression became more
striking as he went along. At length, all the houses seemed to be sunk
into hollows scooped in the sand. The surface of the sand stood higher
than the rooftops. The successive rows of houses sank deeper and
deeper into the depressions.
The slope suddenly steepened. It must have been at least sixty-five feet
down to the tops of the houses. What in heaven's name could it be like
to live there? he thought in amazement, peering down into one of the
holes. As he circled around the edge he was suddenly struck by a biting
wind that choked his breath in his throat. The view abruptly opened
up, and the turbid, foaming sea licked at the shore below. He was
standing on the crest of the dunes that had been his objective!
The side of the dunes that faced the sea and received the monsoon
winds rose abruptly, but straggling clumps of scrub grass grew in places
where the incline was not as steep. The man looked back over his
shoulder at the village, and he could see that the great holes, which
grew deeper as they approached the crest of the ridge, extended in
several ranks toward the center. The village, resembling the cross-
section of a beehive, lay sprawled over the dunes. Or rather the dunes
lay sprawled over the village. Either way, it was a disturbing and
unsettling landscape.
But it was enough that he had reached his destination, the dunes. The
man drank some water from his canteen and filled his lungs with air—
and the air which had seemed so clear felt rough in his throat.
The man intended to collect insects that lived in the dunes.
Of course, dune insects are small and soberly colored. But he was a
dedicated collector, and his eye was not tempted by anything like
butterflies or dragonflies. Such collectors do not aspire to decking out
their specimen boxes with gaudy samples, nor are they particularly
interested in classification or in raw materials for Chinese medicines.
The true entomologist's pleasure is much simpler, more direct: that of
discovering a new type. When this happens, the discovers name
appears in the illustrated encyclopedias of entomology appended to the
technical Latin name of the newly found insect; and there, perhaps, it is
preserved for something less than eternity. His efforts are crowned with
success if his name is perpetuated in the memory of his fellow men by
being associated with an insect.
The smaller, unobtrusive insects, with their innumerable strains, offer
many opportunities for new discoveries. For a long time the man had
also been on the lookout for double winged flies, especially common
house flies, which people find so repulsive. Of course, the various types
of flies are unbelievably numerous, and since all entomologists seem to
think pretty much alike, they have pursued their investigations into the
eighth rare mutant found in Japan almost to completion. Perhaps
mutants are so abundant because the fly's environment is too close to
man's.
He had best begin by observing environment. That there were many
environmental variations simply indicated a high degree of adaptability
among flies, didn't it? At this discovery he jumped with joy. His concept
might not be altogether bad. The fact that the fly showed great
adaptability meant that it could be at home even in unfavorable
environments in which other insects could not live—for example, a
desert where all other living things perished.
From then on he began to manifest an interest in sand. And soon this
interest bore fruit. One day in the dry river bed near his house he
discovered a smallish light-pink insect which resembled a double-
winged garden beetle (
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