Analysis Of Kobo Abe's The Woman In The Dunes

Kobo Abe’s novel The Woman in the Dunes tells the story of an entomologist named Niki Jumpei who goes to the dunes to discover a new type of insect and finds himself trapped in a village in the dunes in which all the houses are located in large holes in the sand. Niki spends the majority of the novel trying to escape and fight the sand that surrounds him until he has a moment of enlightenment towards the end of the book in which he comes to understand how sand functions and subsequently how society functions, leading him to stay in the village when he had the opportunity to escape. In the book, Kobo Abe expresses society’s composition of and dependency on human relationships through the imagery of sand in his book. To do so, Abe demonstrates that sand represents society by forming a parallel between the two. Additionally, he describes sand using the imagery of a pump to represent the need of multiple connections, or relationships, for sand to be and function. Kobo Abe’s third mean by which he demonstrates his point is through the presence of sand in the village and the villagers’ state of working with and surrounded by sand.

In The Woman in the Dunes, sand is paralleled with society through their similar descriptions. For the most part of the book, Niki approaches both with a factual approach. At one point in the novel, when Niki is reading the newspaper to find out if there is any mention of him, he reads out several different headlines, including one mentioning “280