Published in 1962, Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes offers a single image: a man trapped in a sandpit with a mysterious woman. Their survival depends upon shoveling the accumulating sand each night, a metaphor for the hard labor of existence. Does shoveling an endless pit of sand make him any less free than his former life of paperwork and obligations?
He contemplates the mind’s craving for routine: “It goes on, terrifyingly repetitive. One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.” But what else is there? This question becomes difficult to answer as he ponders the woman’s acceptance of their strange fate. Shoveling, she says, gives her life as much meaning as any other activity. Meanwhile, villagers peer into the pit to ensure his compliance. “More than iron doors, more than walls,” Abe writes, “it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in.”
Abe's fable reads like an epitaph for the digital age: “Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion. And so one bit one’s nails, unable to find contentment in the simple beating of one’s heart…one smoked, unable to be satisfied with the rhythm of one’s brain…one had the shakes, unable to find satisfaction in sex alone.”
This story has seeped into my dreams, grinding at my thoughts like sand in the teeth.
