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.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 28 Summary
Content Warning: This section contains a description of a sexual assault.
It is October. The man builds a trap out of sand slides to catch crows and calls the trap “Hope.” He plans to attach a letter to the crow’s leg. He tries to blend into life there, so the villagers stop noticing him and let down their guard. The woman strings beads for extra income. The man avoids reading the newspaper so as not to upset himself. He recalls an engraving he’d seen called “Hell of Loneliness,” which at the time he didn’t understand, but he does now. He starts to find contentment with the repetition of work and life in the pit. One morning, a cartoon magazine is delivered to him. Oddly, he finds it hilarious despite its stupidity because he identifies with the plight of a cartoon horse with broken legs. He worries that he’ll become so accustomed to his situation and to waiting for rescue that he won’t be able to stand being free once he’s on the outside. He goes out to admire the mist and speaks to it as if it were a judge, asking to be told the reason for his sentence. A voice in the mist answers that 1% of the people in Japan have schizophrenia or kleptomania, are gay, are arsonists, have alcoholism, etc. The voice claims that enough people are “abnormal” to warrant a random person like the man to be kept away from society. He argues with the voice about illegal detention versus being a valued commodity to the villagers. The voice disappears, and he hears a crow, so he checks his trap. It’s been two weeks, so the fish he put in as bait is rotten. Nothing else has happened. He decides to be patient with “Hope.”
Part 3, Chapter 29 Summary
The man strikes the box of bead from the woman’s knees, groaning about the pointlessness of their lifestyle. He thinks that one day the villagers will all have left them behind. She says they sell the sand to construction companies, even though it has salt in it, which makes it dangerous for buildings. They sell it secretly with discounted hauling charges. When the man points out that selling such sand will cause dams and bridges to collapse, she coldly asks why the villagers should worry about other people on the outside. The villagers see themselves as abandoned, so it’s natural that they do not care for the outside world. The union does the buying and selling, as anyone with money left the area long ago. The man feels that his sense of who the enemy is has been blurred. He suddenly suggests they get a plant in a pot for their house. The woman suggests a pine, but the man doesn’t like those. He feels like crying but instead attempts to pick up the spilled beads. The woman stops him and does it herself.
Part 3, Chapter 30 Summary
One night while urinating and looking at the moon, the man feels a chill in his bones. Through associations he makes with the moon’s appearance, he remembers the poison tablets (potassium cyanide) at the bottom of his insect bottles. He feels a jealous longing for things from the outside. He wants to breathe fresh air, climb up the sand cliffs, and look out at the sea. He asks to do so, and a while later, the old man says the request is reasonable enough if the man and woman have sex while they all watch. The woman is vehemently against it, but the man displaces his own guilt by rationalizing that there’s as much wrong with the watchers as the watched. He jumps the woman and pulls her outside. A crowd has gathered at the rim with flashlights. He pulls off the woman’s pants, but she fights him—a shoulder in the belly and many blows to his face. The crowd’s excitement wanes, and they leave. He lets the woman go, realizing the situation went as it should have.
Part 3, Chapter 31 Summary
Checking his trap, “Hope,” the man discovers that water has collected in the bucket. The capillary action of hot sand pulls sub-surface water up. He realizes that this side benefit of Hope lessens his dependence on the villagers. He feels it is a shift in perspective, that he’d been looking just at details until then. The woman doesn’t understand his enthusiasm for a crow trap but doesn’t mind since he seems happy. He decides they need a radio in order to get weather reports so that he can analyze his water trap more scientifically. He helps her with work through winter and into spring when they get a radio with an antenna for the roof. At the end of March, she realizes she’s pregnant. Two months later, the woman finds herself bloody below the waist and in pain. A villager diagnoses it as an extra-uterine pregnancy and says she needs to go to the hospital in the city. The rope ladder that brought her up is left in place. The man climbs up. He sees below that the water trap was damaged, so he goes down to fix it. It’s not bad, though, as there’s still water in it. He stifles a sob and sinks to his knees. He decides to put off escaping until he can tell the villagers about the water trap, as they would be the most interested to hear about it.
The chapter ends with two documents: Judgment and Notification of Missing Persons. The Judgment states that Niki Jumpei went missing on August 18, 1955. Seven years later, a court declares him officially missing on October 5, 1962. The Notification of Missing Persons states that Niki Shino, the man’s mother, will receive any notice of Jumpei if he is found.
Part 3 Analysis
This final part completes the man’s transition from outsider to insider, further nuancing his view of Futility and Purpose. At the end of the second section, he felt defeated and resigned. Now, though he still has escape on his mind, he finds himself settling into regular life in the community. His attempts to build a trap to catch a crow to use as a messenger to the outside world indicate that escape is still his goal, but the name he gives the trap— “Hope”—suggests a more patient and measured approach to his strategy. He tells himself that if he keeps his head down and does his work, he will blend in and the villagers will fail to pay attention to him. He muses, “Patience itself was not necessarily defeat. Rather, defeat really began when patience was thought to be defeat” (221). Adjusting his approach affects both his actions and his perspective. He is accustomed to striving for his freedom, yet he has become attuned to the repetition of life in the sand pit and even finds “a certain gentle contentment” in the work (215).
As the man’s transition to insider progresses, his former understanding of the world creates conflict as he tries to reconcile his past assumptions with his new experiences. After bemoaning the pointlessness of life in the pit and knocking the beads from the woman’s lap, the man learns about the community’s business dealings selling salty sand to construction companies that want to cut corners. When he decries the danger that such sand would pose in construction, he finally sees the first flash of anger and coldness in the woman. When she asks why they should be concerned with the lives of people outside their village, the man experiences a paradigm shift: “Until then the village was supposed to be on the side of the executioner […] and he was supposed to be a pitiful victim who happened to be in their clutches. But from the standpoint of the villagers, they themselves were the ones who had been abandoned” (223). With this realization, his alignment with the community is almost complete.
To truly assimilate into the community of the village, the man must prove himself fully subordinate to their control—emphasizing the novel’s theme of Freedom and Imprisonment. He still yearns for fresh air and the freedom of mobility, so he asks the old man if he can climb out of the pit just for a moment. The answer becomes his final test: He must have sex with the woman and let the villagers watch. The man immediately agrees, reverting fully back to his original myopic perspective, but rather than limited to his own worldview, his perspective now mirrors that of the villagers—so much so that he doesn’t hesitate to sexually assault the woman. The woman, however, is not under his control, so she fights back, injuring him. Abe doesn’t detail the gap between this assault and the domestic life the man and the woman eventually adopt together. The final proof of the man’s transition from defiance to acceptance of his life in the sand pit comes when the villagers take the woman away to the hospital and leave the rope ladder in place. The man touches the ladder but then goes back to his water trap, which he plans to discuss with the villagers. He “might as well put off his escape until sometime after that” (239). As this occurs less than a year into his captivity and the final documents reveal that he is presumed dead after seven years, it’s clear he has “put off” that escape indefinitely. This ending recalls the novel’s epigraph: “Without the threat of punishment there is no joy in flight.” The man is free to fly, but to what would he fly, and why? The villagers may no longer punish him because he no longer sees the point in life outside the sand.
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