The Woman in the Dunes (Criticism)

Criticism

Joyce Hart

Hart is a freelance writer and author of several books. In the following essay, Hart examines the portrayal of the woman in Abe’s novel, comparing it to the essence of the geisha as presented in Japanese novels written before World War II.

The character referred to only as “woman” in Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is a far cry from the portrayal of “woman as geisha” that was often presented in Japanese novels written before the devastation of World War II. And the author seems to almost go out of his way to make a statement contrary to the qualities for which geisha were known. For example, geisha were trained in the arts, were known for their grace and beauty, and were engaging in conversation. Whereas the woman in Abe’s novel has a very limited scope of knowledge, and the narrator of the story mentions only her skill in shoveling sand. However, the aspects of geisha are not totally absent in Abe’s female character. There remain hints of the geisha woman despite Abe’s attempt to cast her aside.

The word geisha comes from two different Japanese characters. The first, gei stands for “the arts.” The second sha means “person.” Women who were chosen to become geisha were often raised in special schools, and these women sometimes began their studies as very early ages. The young girls were trained in many traditional Japanese arts including dancing, singing, enacting the ritual of the tea ceremony, creating artful flower arrangements, making calligraphy, writing poetry, and playing the shamisen (a stringed instrument). They were taught how to dress, how to walk, and how to maintain a stimulating conversation. They were known for the beautiful kimonos they wore and for the elegant hairstyles and formalized makeup, which featured a very white powder all over their faces, stylized, penciled-in eyebrows, and very bright red, painted lips. They were supposedly the epitome of feminine graces in their time. Their main purpose was to make men comfortable, to entertain them, and to provide them with an environment filled with beauty.

With this view of the geisha in mind, it is easy to see how Abe worked to create a woman in his novel who represented the exact opposite. Abe was raised amidst the ruins of war and westernized occupation. He was bitter about the changes he witnessed. So not only is the environment in which he throws his protagonist stark and hostile, so is his depiction of the female, at least up to a point.

When Jumpei, the protagonist in this story, first sets his eyes on the woman, he is less harsh. He had been expecting an older woman because the villagers had yelled to her, calling her granny. But when Jumpei sees her, one can hear just a tinge of the geisha in his description. She was a “nice sort of woman,” the narrator informs the reader. Then he adds the fact that “perhaps she was wearing powder” on her face, because her skin looked unnaturally white for a woman who lived at the edge of the sea. Then, through her actions, the woman, though not necessarily gracefully, serves Jumpei a meal. She cooks for him, makes sure he is comfortable, and honors him by offering him the best seat at the dinner table. There is even a small attempt, on her part, of offering to make conversation. Unfortunately, Jumpei is arrogant and challenges much of what the woman says. He believes she is ignorant when she tells him how damp the sand is and how it rots the wood. “Impossible,” he exclaims. Sand cannot rot wood. Of course, Jumpei will later find out that the woman is correct about this fact, but for now, he feels he has put the stupid countrywoman in her place. He is in no way in awe of her intelligence, which he finds to be simple and limited.

After dinner, the woman takes up the only instrument she owns. And Jumpei watches her, much as a man might have watched a geisha entertain him with music or dance. Except that Abe’s woman goes outside to dig sand, fill buckets, and carry them to the lift. The work is masculine, it is monotonous, and it is dirty. It makes the woman gritty, sweaty, and muscular (hard), whereas the geisha is soft and inspiring and stimulating. But despite the sweat and angularity, Abe’s woman is not totally unable to arouse Jumpei.

“He was not particularly interested in what she had to say,” the narrator states concerning Jumpei’s feelings, “but her words had a warmth in them that made him think of the body concealed beneath the coarse work trousers.” The woman, despite the fact that she has to do a man’s work, flirts with Jumpei, poking a finger in his ribs and smiling at him in a way that ignites a physical passion inside of him. But nothing comes of his feelings, at least not that first night. And in the next morning, there is a startling sight for Jumpei to behold. An image so startling, he does not know what to make of it. There is the woman, sleeping stark naked in front of him. But what a mixed image she represents. On one hand he is drawn to her nudity; but on the other hand, she has covered her face with a towel, stripping her of any semblance of a soul. She is also covered with sand, taking away much of Jumpei’s desire to touch her. But the sand does not totally distract him from her beauty. In fact, the sand “brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand” Here is the geisha beauty. A geisha was made up to look like a painting of a traditional beauty, much as Abe’s woman represents that same beauty, at that moment at least. But something is wrong with this picture. “Suddenly a viscid saliva rose from under his tongue. But he could not possibly swallow it.” The sand had gotten in the way, both in Jumpei’s mouth, which prohibited him from swallowing and in his desire for the woman’s body. “A sand-covered woman was perhaps attractive to look at but hardly to touch.”

Jumpei makes his first attempt at an escape and fails miserably. He crawls back to the hut and at first calls out gently to the woman. When she does not respond, he yells at her. And when she finally stirs, she appears “annoyed,” something a geisha should never do. Jumpei then tears the towel from her face and what he sees is far from a geisha image. “Her face was covered with blotches,” and it was “gruesomely raw.” Then the narrator adds: “Now the white stuff [powder on her face] had rubbed away, leaving bald patches that gave the impression of a cheap cutlet not cooked in batter.” How much more contrary to a geisha’s face can a description get?

But it does not take long for this vision of her to change. A short while later, after Jumpei has settled down and the woman has dressed in a “kimono,” he looks at her with different eyes. “The color of her matching bluish-green kimono and work trousers gave him a sense of mintlike freshness.” The woman is a hybrid, a mixture of both the geisha and the countrywoman. Jumpei also notices the naturalness with which she waits on him. “Her solicitous manner was so natural that one would have thought she had spent her whole life with such an expression on her face.” She is there to care for him, in other words. She helps him adjust to the sand environment, tells him how to dress, and then washes his clothes.

Jumpei listens to the woman sing as she cleans around the house. He watches her shadow dance in the flicker of the candlelight as she works at night. But he also recounts the foul smell of her body and her breath. And when he finally allows free reign to his sexual passion, it begins, not as a courtship or intriguing enticement. Rather, it begins as a physical fight. And it is the woman who starts it. Jumpei is caught off guard. He puts his arms up to protect himself. At first his sole role is that of defense. But he is surprised by her strength, and when he thinks he has pinned her down, she flips him over, and it is she who is on top. And he finds that “he no longer cared that his opponent was a woman.” He would now treat her as if she were a man. And he takes the offensive. At this moment, with Jumpei back on top of the situation, he sees and feels her feminine sensuality. But they disengage before having sex, and the woman stands up and blows “her nose with her fingers” and rubs “her hands with sand.” Not a pretty geisha sight.

But it is not over yet. Despite the fact that Jumpei thinks of the woman in terms of having rabbit eyes (rimmed in red) and having “a strong smell like boiled gristle,” he confesses that he “inwardly rubbed his hands in expectation” when he watched her go into her room and begin to undress. He then exclaims: “Such a woman was a real woman.” Jumpei appears to be so confused. Much like the shedding of his old self for a new one, he is also shedding his images of what a woman is for him. Is she the artificial but artful beauty of the geisha? Or is she this simple, natural but base woman? Or is the perfect woman a combination of the two? And who is really base? During the moment before they share a sexual engagement, Jumpei is not thinking of love but rather he is considering rape. “The stage at which he could bargain for her body had long passed. Now, force had decided the situation,” the narrator tells the reader. And while they join together sexually, there is nothing geisha-like, nothing delicate here. In the course of the encounter, the woman laughs “in a husky voice,” and when the man brushes his hand against her hair, he finds it “hard and rough to the touch.”

Eventually though, a change comes over the man, not all at once, but in pieces. He has failed to escape again, and the woman nurses him back to health. She has taken up the art of beaded jewelry, and she opens up more of her more personal thoughts to him, making him feel as if she has dropped the mask that she had been wearing. And when she fights him off when he attempts to rape her for the sake of a village audience, he abandons himself to her fists. “It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body.” Soon after, the woman becomes pregnant. New life, a joint project between them, seems about to take root. But the woman miscarries. And as they wait for the truck to take her to the doctor, Jumpei rubs her “belly.” This is the first sign of tenderness between them. It is with her departure that Jumpei finds a key to his release. The men have forgotten to take the rope ladder away. However, by this time, Jumpei discovers that rather than being repulsed by the woman and her environment, he quite likes it there. This woman, whatever her image, is growing on him. He looks down into the hole where the house sits and thinks he sees someone. But it is only his shadow. And when he climbs down, he hears a voice singing on the radio, and he has “to stifle the sobbing that seemed about to burst from him.” In finding himself, he has dropped all presuppositions about femininity — geisha and countrywoman alike. The woman had entered inside of him, and they became one.

Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on The Woman in the Dunes, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

What Do I Read Next?

• Abe’s The Box Man, published in 1975 in English, tells the story of an unnamed protagonist who goes around the city wearing a box over his head and constantly describing the world through his scribblings inside the box. This is a fable-like story of the loss of identity, its wonders, and its worries.
• In his novel Ruined Map (first published in English in 1969), Abe creates a mystery of a missing person. Mr. Nemuro disappeared more than six months ago, and his wife finally hires a detective to find him. The reader follows the detective in his search as Abe delves into the psychology of this man.
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1998), by Haruki Murakami, is a fascinating journey as the reader follows the protagonist in search of his wife and his cat who have gone missing. There is a lot of comedy mixed in with the morbidity of some of its characters, which include a prostitute, an ex-soldier, and a nasty politician.
• Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country (first published in English in 1957) is about wasted love. It stands in stark contrast to Abe’s style, giving the reader a deeper understanding of how revolutionary Abe’s style was.
• Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter (1964) relates the tension and concern of a father as he deals with a son whose brain is damaged at birth. This is considered Oe’s best writing. The protagonist leads a rather shiftless life until he must face the responsibilities of fatherhood.
• Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) is a nightmarish tale of a young man who awakens one morning to discover the horrific fact that he has been turned into a beetle-like bug. Kafka’s effect on Abe was significant, and this story might shed some light on that influence.
• Geisha: The Life, the Voices, the Art (1995), by Jodi Cobb, provides an interesting look into the history of this ancient tradition in Japan. Cobb details everything from the intricate hair styles and makeup requirements to the intense training in the arts that these young women undergo. She also provides information on how demanding this profession can be despite the large amounts of money that the women are capable of making. This will provide the reader with a contrasted view of Japanese women that Abe only hints at.