Microsoft Word KoboAbe-WomanInTheDunes doc

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How in heaven's name had the woman managed to get her hands on 
this paper? Could it be true that the villagers were beginning to feel 
they owed him something? Even so, judging from how things had gone 
till now, all contact with the outside ceased after breakfast. Did the 
woman have some special way of communicating with the outside that 
he did not yet know of? Or, failing that, did she herself get out and buy 
the paper? It must certainly be one or the other. 
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But just a minute. Supposing the woman had gone out—it was 
inconceivable that she could have done it without the rope ladder. He 
didn't know how she had managed it, but one thing was certain—a 
rope ladder had been used. A prisoner dreaming of escape was one 
thing, but how could the woman, a resident of the village, put up with 

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losing her freedom of movement? The removal of the rope ladder must 
be a temporary measure to keep him imprisoned. If that were so, and if 
he could keep them off guard, someday the same opportunity would 
occur again. 
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His strategy of pretended illness seemed to have produced an 
unexpected return. Everything comes in time to him who waits—they 
put it well in the old days. But somehow he did not react to the idea. 
Something in him was still unsatisfied. Perhaps it was the fault of that 
weird, terribly upsetting dream. He felt strangely uneasy about the 
dangerous letter. But was it dangerous? Whatever could it mean? 
However, there was no use worrying every time he dreamt something. 
In any event, he had to carry through what he had begun. 
The woman was asleep beside the sill of the raised portion of the floor 
around the hearth. She was breathing gently and lay curled in a ball, 
holding her knees as she always did; she had thrown an unironed 
summer kimono over herself. After that first day she had stopped 
appear ing naked before him, but under the summer kimono she was 
probably as bare as ever. 
He glanced quickly at the society page and the local columns. Of 
course, there was no article on his disappearance, no missing-person 
notice. But he had expected as much and so was not particularly 
discouraged. He quietly arose and stepped down on the earthen floor. 
He was wearing only baggy, half-length drawers made of synthetic silk, 
and the upper half of his body was completely bare. It was definitely 
the most comfortable way to be. Sand had accumulated around his 
waist where he had tied the drawstring and the skin there was inflamed 
and itchy. 
He stood in the doorway and looked up at the walls of sand. The light 
thrust into his eyes, and the surroundings began to burn yellow. There 
was not a sign of man or rope ladder: that seemed natural. He checked, 
nonetheless, just to make sure. There was not even a sign that the rope 
ladder had been let down. Of course, with a wind like this, it wouldn't 
have taken five minutes for any trace to disappear. Just outside the 

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doorway the surface of the sand was continually being turned under as 
though there were some current. 
He came back in and lay down. A fly was flitting about. It was a tiny 
light-pink fruit fly. Perhaps something was spoiling somewhere. After he 
had moistened his throat with water in the plastic-wrapped kettle by his 
pillow, he addressed the woman: "Would you mind getting up a 
minute?" 
She jumped up trembling, letting the summer kimono fall open to her 
waist. The veins stood out blue in the sagging, but still full, breasts. 
Flustered, she adjusted her kimono. There was a vague look in her 
eyes, and she did not seem fully awake yet. He hesitated. Should he 
question her now about the ladder? Should he raise his voice in anger? 
Or should he adopt a mild, inquiring tone, at the same time thanking 
her for the newspaper? If his goal were simply to prevent her from 
sleeping, then it would be best to go at it rather aggressively. He had 
missed the mark with his feigned illness, for his behavior was scarcely 
that of a man who had dislocated his spine. What he had to do was 
make them recognize that he was no longer of any use for work—at all 
events, get them to relax their vigilance. They had softened to the 
extent of giving him a newspaper; he had to break down their 
resistance even more. 
But he was summarily disappointed in his expectations. 
"No, of course I don't go out. The men from the farm coop happened to 
deliver some wood preservative I ordered a while back, and I had a 
chance to ask them. Only about four or five houses take newspapers in 
the village. They had to go all the way to the store in town to buy it." 
It was not impossible that things had happened so. It was rather like 
being shut up in a cell with a lock that had no key. If even the people of 
the region themselves had to put up with imprisonment, then the 
precipitous wall of sand was no laughing matter for him. He became 
desperate and insistent. 
'This is amazing! This is your house, isn't it? You're not a dog. It should 
be nothing for you to come and go freely, should it? Or have you done 
something so bad you don't dare show your face to the villagers?" 

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Her eyes opened wide in surprise. The glare was so strong that they 
were bloodshot and red. 
"Certainly not! It's nonsense to think I don't dare show my face!" 
"Well, there's no reason for you to be so timid." 
"But there isn't any reason to go out!" 
"You can at least take a walk." 
"A walk?" 
"Yes. A walk. Wouldn't it be enough just to walk around a little? I 
mean, you used to take walks when you wanted to, before I came, 
didn't you?" 
"Yes, but I get all tired out, walking for no particular reason." 
"I'm not joking. Ask yourself. You ought to understand. Even a dog'll go 
mad if you keep it shut up in a cage." 
"But I have taken walks," she said abruptly in her monotonous, 
withdrawn voice. "Really, they used to make me walk a lot. Until I 
came here. I used to carry a baby around for a long time. I was really 
tired out with all the walking." 
The man was taken by surprise. Indeed, what a strange way of 
speaking! He was unable to answer when she turned on him like that. 
Yes, he remembered, when everything was in ruins some ten years ago, 
everybody desperately wanted not to have to walk. And now, were they 
glutted with this freedom from walking? he wondered. And yet, even the 
child who wanted so desperately to go picnicking cried when it got lost. 
The woman suddenly changed her tone and said: "Do you feel all 
right?" 
Stop looking so stupidl He was angry; he wanted to make her admit her 
guilt even if he had to force it out of her. At the very thought his hair 
bristled and his skin felt scratchy like dry paper. "Skin" seemed to 

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establish an association of ideas with the word "force." Suddenly she 
became a silhouette cut out from its background. A man of twenty is 
sexually aroused by a thought. A man of forty is sexually aroused on 
the surface of his skin. But for a man of thirty a woman who is only a 
silhouette is the most dangerous. He could embrace it as easily as 
embracing himself, couldn't he? But behind her there were a million 
eyes. She was only a puppet controlled by threads of vision. If he were 
to embrace her, he would be the next to be controlled. The big lie that 
he had dislocated his spine would at once be revealed in its true light. 
He could not stand to have his life stop even in a place like this. 
The woman sidled up to him. Her knees pressed against his hips. A 
stagnant smell of sun-heated water, coming from her mouth, nose, ears, 
armpits, her whole body, began to pervade the room around him. 
Slowly, hesitantly, she began to run her searing fingers up and down his 
spine. His body stiffened. 
Suddenly the fingers circled around to his side. The man let out a 
shriek. 
"You're tickling!" 
The woman laughed. She seemed to be teasing him, or else she was 
shy. It was too sudden; he could not pass judgment on the spur of the 
moment, What, really, was her intention? Had she done it on purpose 
or had her fingers slipped unintentionally? Until just a few minutes ago 
she had been blinking her eyes with all her might, trying to wake up. 
On the first night too, he recalled, she had laughed in that strange voice 
when she had jabbed him in the side as she passed by. He wondered 
whether she meant anything in particular by such conduct. 
Perhaps she did not really believe in his pretended illness and was 
testing her suspicions. That was a possibility. He couldn't relax his 
guard. Her charms were like some meat-eating plant, purposely 
equipped with the smell of sweet honey. First she would sow the seeds 
of scandal by bringing him to an act of passion, and then the chains of 
blackmail would bind him hand and foot. 
13

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HE was melting away like wax. His pores were gorged with 
perspiration. Since his watch had stopped running, he was not sure of 
the hour. Outside this sixty-foot hole it might still be full daylight, but at 
the bottom it was already twilight. 
The woman was still lost in sleep. Perhaps she was dreaming, for her 
arms and legs twitched nervously. He had tried to disturb her sleep, but 
he had failed. As for himself, he had slept enough. 
He stood up and let the air strike his skin. The towel over his face had 
apparently fallen off when he turned in his sleep; so much sand had 
clung behind his ears, around his nostrils, and in the corners of his lips 
that he could scrape it off. He put some medicine in his eyes and 
covered them with the end of the towel; he repeated this several times 
and at length he was able to open them normally. But the eye medicine 
would be gone in two or three days. For that reason alone he wanted to 
bring things to a conclusion quickly. His body was as heavy as if he 
were lying on a magnetized bed in garments of iron. He made an effort 
to focus his eyes, and by the thin light that came through the door he 
Wearily made out the newspaper print, like the legs of a dead fly. 
Actually, he should have got the woman to read the paper to him in the 
daytime. That also would have disturbed her sleep: two birds with one 
stone. Too bad he had fallen asleep first. He had tried, but instead he 
had made a mess of things. 
And tonight again he would curse that unbearable insomnia. He tried 
counting backwards from a hundred in rhythm with his breathing. 
Painstakingly he traced the road he was accustomed to walk from his 
boardinghouse to the school. He tried enumerating the names of all the 
insects he knew, grouping them by family and order. He was in far 
worse straits when he realized that all these devices had no effect at all. 
He could hear the sound of the wind sweeping over the edge of the 
hole… the lisp of the shovel cutting into the bed of wet sand… the 
distant barking of dogs… the faraway hum of voices, trembling like the 
flame of a candle. The ceaselessly pouring sand was like a file on the 
tips of his nerves. And yet, he must have the patience to endure it. 
Well, somehow he would stand it. No sooner had the cooling blue light 
slipped down from the edge of the hole than everything was reversed, 

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and he engaged in combat with sleep that sucked at him as a sponge 
sucks water. As long as this vicious circle was not broken somewhere, 
not only his watch but time itself would be immobilized, he feared, by 
the grains of sand. 
The newspaper was the same as usual. He wondered if there had been 
a gap of a week, for there was almost nothing new to be found. If this 
was a window on the world outside, the glass was frosted.