Reading : The Woman in the Dunes

by Kobo Abe

In place of a long-winded examination of my conflicted opinion of existentialism, I instead offer this: Kobo Abe hides a grain of warmth in the bleakness of his novel and somehow manages to give lushness to desperation.

From p. 160

"He sat down on the shovel and lit a cigarette. The flame caught at last with the third match. His fatigue spread out into a sluggish circle, like India ink dropped in water - it was a jellyfish, a scent bag, a diagram of an atomic nucleus. Some night bird had found a field mouse and was calling to its mate with a weird cry. An uneasy dog bayed deeply. High in the night sky there was a continuous, discordant sound of wind blowing at a different velocity. And on the ground the wind was a knife continually shaving off thin layers of sand. He wiped away the perspiration, blew his nose with his fingers, and brushed the sand from his head. The ripples of sand at his feet suddenly looked like the motionless crests of waves.

Supposing they were sound waves, what kind of music would they give? he wondered. Maybe even a human being could sing such a song... if tongs were driven into his nose and slimy blood stopped up his ears... if his teeth were broken one by one with hammer blows, and splinters jammed into his urethra... if a vulva were cut away and sewn onto his eyelids. It might resemble cruelty, and then again it might be a little different. Suddenly his eyes soared upward like a bird, and felt as if he were looking down on himself. Certainly he must be the strangest of all... he who was musing on the strangeness of things here."