48 pages • 1 hour read
Kōbō AbeThe Woman in the Dunes
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Niki Jumpei (“The Man”)
Niki Jumpei is a schoolteacher and amateur entomologist who goes on holiday to look for a new species of beetle he can name after himself. As discussed in the Background section, both the author and the main character share an interest in entomology and yearn for unbound freedom from a fixed, stable reality. This character serves not so much as a stand-in for the author but more as a familiar entity through whom the author can view the situation and reflect on existence. To that end, the name Niki Jumpei is only used twice in the entire story, with the first occurrence being several chapters in and the final being in the official declaration of his disappearance at the end of the novel. His actual name and identity are not as important to the story as his actions, echoing the Nietzschean idea of stability being illusory while forces, or motion, are what shape the world.
The man represents a type of rationality, which he attempts to impose on the world to make sense of his reality. His interest in beetles leads to his fascination with sand, particularly its elusive form and surprising power. He is at once strictly scientific about it—“The size of the grains shows very little variation and follows a Gaussian distribution curve with a true mean of 1/8 mm” (13)—and poetic about it:
As long as the winds blew, the rivers flowed, and the seas stirred, sand would be born grain by grain from the earth, and like a living being it would creep everywhere. The sands never rested. Gently but surely they invaded and destroyed the surface of the earth (14).
His impression of the woman’s existence in the sand dune, then, defies the logic he tries to impose on it. It makes no sense to him why she would resign herself to such a life and why the villagers would want to work so hard to maintain the sad little village. When he learns that the villagers spend every night shoveling away sand, he is dumbfounded and says to the woman, “But this means you exist only for the purpose of clearing away the sand, doesn’t it?” (39), engaging the novel’s discussion of Futility Versus Purpose. He cannot grasp that a person would merely exist without a purpose, or at least without a purpose that he would deem meaningful. Yet part of what draws the man to the insect world is its order and the lack of a defined purpose beyond existence. His view of the sand village at the start of the story is that of an outsider.
The man’s initial attitudes and beliefs present a stark contrast to those of the villagers in the seaside community, especially the woman, suggesting mores rendered pointless or irrelevant in that unusual society. The man’s attitudes reflect, in part, the era in which the book was written (published in 1962 in Japan), which also explains some of the sexism the man evinces. However, the lens of the novel on the man’s thoughts and actions suggests that his perspective is his alone, rather than reflecting the author’s own viewpoint. For instance, the man’s unquestioning acceptance of the woman’s servitude, such as preparing him meals and holding the umbrella over him while he eats, could simply be an example of the host-guest dynamic. However, his arguing with her, a lifelong resident of a sand-consumed village, about the properties of sand shows a misogynistic disregard of experience and understanding. In modern parlance, he is “mansplaining” the forces that have shaped her entire life. When the woman tries to tell the man of sand’s ability to rot materials, he gets upset and argues, feeling “that his own personal concept of sand ha[s] been defiled by her ignorance” (27). He goes on to tell her that “sand represents purity, cleanliness. […] there is certainly no question of its rotting anything. And, what’s more, dear lady, to begin with, sand is a respectable mineral. It couldn’t possibly rot away!” (27-28). Despite the fact that the woman is proven right, the man’s entitlement continues to assert itself. He believes that as a teacher, a respected profession in Japan, and a taxpayer, he deserves better treatment. His objection to his entrapment seems based on his specific merit as a person rather than on a general sense of wrongness. He feels a sense of superiority over the villagers, applying the words “simple” and “stupid” to both them and the woman several times. However, it is his own blindness and simplistic perception of the forces at work in the village that set him up to be outwitted at every turn.
Over the course of the novel, Niki Jumpei’s entire sense of self alters. He discovers he does not need to escape because escape is an illusion; his life before he was trapped in the sand dunes was just as limited and futile as life shoveling sand. He gives in to the concept of work as an exercise of “self-denial” and finds freedom (159)—in the form of decreased dependence on others—in his ability to draw up water from the sand with his crow trap and purpose in the form of the daily repetition of clearing sand.
The Woman
The character of the woman is viewed through the lens of the man. The readers never learn her name, as she represents an enigma that the man tries to figure out. He vacillates between seeing her as an ignorant village woman, imbued with “female stupidity” (39), and a complicit seductress who lures him into a trap. For the majority of the story, he views her as an “animal-like woman…thinking only in terms of today…no yesterday, no tomorrow…with a dot for a heart” (67). To unravel her truth, the novel suggests that the reader must compare what the man thinks versus what the story later reveals to be true.
In the man’s first encounter with the woman, he is surprised by her appearance. The old men call her “Granny,” but she is “a smallish, nice sort of woman around 30. Perhaps she [is] wearing powder; for someone who live[s] by the sea, she [is] amazingly white” (23). He learns later that she put white flour on her face to cover up the red blotches from the sand and appear more attractive. This white face powder, combined with her holding an umbrella over the dinner table, points to traditional elements of geisha culture. A geisha wears white face powder and, aside from talents in music and the arts, is expected to act as the consummate hostess—the implied role of the woman’s role in the story when the man arrives in the village. However, seeing her in this light fails to take her motivation into account. She tells the man that she had a husband and daughter who were both killed in a sand avalanche. Instead of empathizing with her and recognizing her underlying loneliness, the man mistakes her conduct as seductive, horrified that she smiles as she turns out the lamp, “doubtless deliberately done to show off her dimple,” and thinks her behavior is “especially indecent […] just after she had been speaking of her loved ones’ death” (30). That she might not want to reveal the extent of her sorrow or unduly upset her guest, whom she hopes will stay and relieve her loneliness, does not occur to him. Similarly, when he discovers her sleeping in the nude in her private area of the hut, he assumes it’s another part of her seduction. Only later, when she starts covering herself with a light kimono, does he acknowledge his error in judgment: “Though he could not rule out some secret wish on her part to seduce him, perhaps this nakedness was a very ordinary habit, made necessary by the life she led” (55).
When the woman refers to the man staying longer than just the one night, he again reads it as evidence of her desire for him as a lover rather than a clue of the villagers’ intention to entrap him. When she turns “her face away with a drawn-up expression,” he believes she is disappointed by his rebuff since “with country folk there is no attempt at pretense” (25). He deems her a known quantity, something like an insect or dog—to which he compares her multiple times—revealing more about his projections onto her than about her actual character.
The novel suggests a certain passivity about the woman’s character that makes her at once confounding and pathetic. She does not resist being bound and gagged when the man attacks her, as though “his unexpected violence ha[s] apparently had the effect of taking all resistance out of her” (103). When he looks into her eyes after setting her bound body on the mat, he sees “infinite sorrow, in which there [is] neither bitterness nor hatred” (104). She has treated him with kindness, so his anger at her stems from his own interpretation of her thoughts and feelings, as opposed to the reality. Though she does not reveal to him exactly what is going on in the village, neither does she lie. Her sorrow perhaps springs from her dashed hopes that she would have a kind companion to share her home and work in the dunes. Yet the woman is not without a self-protective impulse. When the man agrees to the old man’s offer that he can climb up to see the sea if he has sex with the woman where they can all watch, she resists, fighting back and knocking her shoulder into his belly, “which [bears] the weight and anger of her whole body” (231). That she fights against the man’s sexual assault and asserts her own will and autonomy challenges the man’s assumptions that she is just a puppet for him to use as he wants; she has agency, even if he doesn’t acknowledge it or understand her choices.
Throughout the man’s time with her, the woman helps him by informing him of the nature of sand, demonstrating how to shovel in a less tiring way and how to use the stars to determine the condition of their surroundings despite the fact that the man consistently misreads and abuses her. The novel reveals small elements of her character through the gaps in the man’s perspective created when she acts in ways that surprise him. After revealing that villagers sell salt-laden sand to construction companies that will inevitably result in unstable buildings that could cause catastrophic accidents, she surprises the man by saying, “Why should we worry what happens to others?” (223), revealing her deep allegiance and connection to her community and her sense of belonging to the village despite suffering its abuse. Despite the fact that the man eventually shows fondness for the woman when he thinks of living on the outside without her and resigns himself to building a semblance of a life with her in the dunes, the lens of the novel—limited to the man’s perspective—fails to fully acknowledge her personhood or interiority beyond these tiny gaps in his perspective.
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By Kōbō Abe
