Name: The Woman in the Dunes
Rating: 4 (8 reviews)

安部公房

Kobo Abe

Kōbō Abe

David

In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where they are pressed into shovelling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village.

The Woman in the Dunes

Gustina Jaraite

"There wasn't a single item of importance. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes...And so everybody knowing the meaningless of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home". The novel isn't about sand anyway. "Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?” the man asks the woman, and who cannot ask the same question? "The Woman in the Dunes” felt like a modern version of the myth of Sisyphus, instead of a man condemned by the gods to spend eternity rolling a boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it roll back down, we have sand. Always the sand.

The Woman in the Dunes

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