The Woman in the Dunes

“How shall I put it…sand represents purity, cleanliness.”

The man is obsessed with sand for its near uniformity, unassailable power, and existence as flow. To him, that is a more pure or true mode of being than being stationary, pointing to the novel’s exploration of Stability Versus Movement. However, he has yet to learn about the oppressive nature of sand when it surrounds and invades one’s living space and body.

“He had been lured by the beetle into a desert from which there was no escape—like some famished mouse.”

The man’s interest in beetles springs from a particular beetle that lures its prey with an unusual flight pattern. His interest in beetles originally led him to the seaside village, and now, trapped in the sand pit, he sees the woman as the distracting beetle, luring him in by seduction.

“He had the feeling it would not be long before he would see himself as an executioner, torturing the woman, standing over her sand-spattered buttocks.”

The man’s understanding of his captive situation and the woman’s complicity in it enrage the man. Her vulnerability and meekness further irritate him, and he has no other target for his rage. His thoughts foreshadow two episodes of assault: one where he binds and gags the woman as a plot to get the villagers to set him free and another when he sexually assaults her at the villagers’ request so they’ll let him out to stroll.

“And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home.”

After reading the newspaper headlines and deeming them to be unimportant, the man realizes that much of life is a battle between a sense of Futility Versus Purpose. To counter the dread of futility, humans over-emphasize the meaning of things in their home and personal life to divine a sense of purpose.

“And he had long since cut his throat with his own hands.”

The man feels confident that his colleagues or employers will send out investigators when he doesn’t show up for work because everything he left behind suggests a man who plans to keep living, rather than dying by suicide or running away. Then he remembers that he wrote a letter to his lover, saying that he didn’t want people to know his whereabouts. The letter makes it seem that he wanted to disappear, so there may not be much of a search after all. The trajectory of the man’s thoughts mirrors his struggle to assert his own significance.

“‘Expression in the eyes’ is really only a figure of speech. How can expression exist in an eyeball that has no muscle?”

After attacking the woman, the man recognizes sorrow in her eyes instead of hatred or anger. In a gesture of self-protection against his own monstrous conduct, he creates a scientific-sounding dismissal of the idea to deflect his guilt.

“What he had taken to be downright nonsense had turned out in fact to be a surprisingly logical answer.”

Throughout much of the story, the man scoffs at what the woman says about sand, despite her extensive experience living in it. His surprise when he learns the validity of her assertions—that sand makes things rot and that paying attention to the visibility of the stars indicates how much mist there will be—indicates his arrogance and his attempts to devalue her in order to justify his oppression and imprisonment of her—just as the villagers have oppressed and imprisoned him.

“They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin.”

Japanese culture values skin cleanliness. Living in the sand pit without sufficient water to wash every day makes the man feel dirty and less civilized. Indeed, his compass of morality starts to shift the longer he is there.

“When a castaway collapses from hunger and thirst it is a fear of physical want rather than a real want, they say. Defeat begins with the fear that one has lost.”

The villagers are using the threat of thirst to parry the man’s attack on the woman. The man fails to take into account that they have more leverage because they control the resources. Even prior to needing the water they deny him, the man believes it is the fear of being thirsty that signals defeat.

“One can’t get involved every time someone else is on the point of starvation. Damn it! He wanted water. But no matter how much he wanted water, he still did not have enough bodies to go around to all the funeral services of people who were of no consequence to him.”

Though the man can sympathize with the villagers’ plight, he doesn’t understand why he should be forced to care for everyone who needs help. His posture highlights the tension of Futility Versus Purpose. There are so many people and villages in need that the man feels it is futile to help, dismissing the idea that doing so might provide a sense of purpose.

“Yet the average woman was firmly convinced, it seemed, that she could not make a man recognize her worth unless every time she opened her legs she did so as if it were a scene in a soap opera.”

This passage includes a key example of the third-person limited point of view of Abe’s narrative. Because Abe reveals the woman only via the man’s point of view, the intentions and motivations ascribed to her are entirely invented by the man. When a tussle between the man and woman turns sexual, the man thinks that she (like, he believes, all women) feigns resistance, wanting to be wooed like a character in a soap opera—a performance he views as making herself a victim of a “spiritual rape.” The man ultimately sexually assaults the woman, rendering his perspective spurious.

“No man or woman is wooed by theory alone.”

In his life outside the sand pit, the man had a theory that sex existed as either general or particular desire—an abstraction for those who haven’t had it in a while, with more particular tastes developing as frequency increases. No one offered to help him test the theory.

“A man has the obligation to make full use of the abilities he has.”

The argument the man makes to the old man for why he should be let up instead of being kept in the pit to shovel sand reflects his desire to assert his own value. Anyone can shovel sand, his argument goes, so he—a schoolteacher—has valuable skills that should be put to better use, highlighting the concepts of purpose and meaning that form a key part of the man’s theory of existence.

“The real value of work lies in the strength of self-denial.”

This platitude, spoken by the lecturer at a union meeting the man attended with the Möbius man, resonates more deeply with him in the sand pit when confronted with the concepts of Freedom and Imprisonment. As he grows accustomed to the monotonous work of shoveling sand every day, he finds he can lose himself in the repetitions of the work, ignoring his yearning for freedom.

“In some places no rope ladders were looped around the bags, but more places had them than not. Not a few of the slaves, he supposed, and already lost all will to escape.”

As the man runs for freedom, he sees that the onus of sand-clearing work is done by a fraction of the houses in the village. What is worse to him is that the people there could leave if they wanted to, but their will is broken, blurring the line between Freedom and Imprisonment and foreshadowing the man’s own condition at the end of the story.

“What use would a mirror be to someone who no longer could be seen?”

The man reflects on the woman’s plan to get either a radio or a mirror with her extra earnings. Since he doesn’t plan to be there forever, he feels that the mirror will be useless when the woman is alone again—he believes one’s appearance is for others to behold.

“When farmers increase their workable land they have that much more to do. In the final analysis, there’s no end to their labor, and they only wind up with more to do.”

When the man tries to explain the phenomenon of young people moving away, he reasons it is because middle-class success often comes with an increase in property; thus, there’s also an increase in work. He equates this to the villagers’ habit of shoveling sand every night with no end in sight.

“Love of Home and obligation have meaning only if one stands to lose something by throwing them away. What in the world did she have to lose?”

The man cannot understand the woman’s attachment to the village and her shack within it. He feels she could easily walk away from it all and actually gain something in life instead of feeling a net loss, underscoring the man’s conflicted perspective on Futility Versus Purpose.

“His dreams, desperation, shame, concern with appearances—all were buried under the sand.”

When the man’s escape fails and he needs the villagers to rescue him from the boggy sand, he is completely demoralized. He feels entirely at their mercy with no will of his own.

“What’s hardest for me is not knowing what living like this will ever come to. But obviously you can never know, no matter what sort of life you live.”

After the villagers return the man to the pit, his spirit is broken, but he hasn’t entirely assumed their mentality. He still views existence in terms of its Purpose—life in the sand pit is about shoveling sand without any expectation that they will ever finish or fix the problem.

“Repetition of the same patterns, they say, provides an effective form of protective coloring.”

Once back in the sand pit, the man “blends in” by going along with the expected work routine. He hopes this will lure the villagers into a false sense of security about him, encouraging them to let down their guard so that he may try to escape once again. This idea of a repetition of patterns reflects a quality he observes in the insect world.

“Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.”

The man recalls an engraving he once saw called “Hell of Loneliness.” He didn’t understand it at the time, but now he does. Illusions can obscure a person’s reality so that they are not aware of how bad their situation is, how empty or lonely their lives are.

“It was possible to conceive of simply becoming accustomed to waiting, with no particular goal in mind, and when his hibernation was at last over, he would be dazzled by the light, unable to come out.”

In his attempts to blend in by dutifully doing his work, the man senses his goal becoming obscured. He fears becoming so accustomed to life in the sand pit that life outside will seem foreign and disorienting to him, distorting his perspective on Futility Versus Purpose.