Kobo Abé’s The Woman in the Dunes is very rarely found on a list of the ten best Japanese novels of all time. The Tale of Genji is always going to top the list for as long history exists, but below that these various lists will almost usually includes something by Mishima, something by Murakami, Snow Country and will invariably try to slip Rashomon in there even though technically it is short story and not a novel. This is only interesting as it relates to Abé’s book because it is The Woman in the Dunes which managed managed to sneak in just below The Tale of Genji, Snow Country and Some Prefer Nettles in the revised edition of The Novel 100 which lists the hundred greatest novels of all time (actually, it is a list of the 125 greatest novels.)
The analysis accompanying that book as well as a great many others all point to what is likely the number one reason that Abé’s work does not usually show up among the listings of the best Japanese novels: it really only qualifies as such because the author is Japanese. Unlike The Tale of Genji for sure, much of Murakami’s work, and certainly the greatest of Mishima’s novels, there is actually very little that is distinctly Japanese about The Woman in the Dunes. Rather that reaching back into history to mind the fertile fields of samurai history or directly commenting upon post-war Japanese society following the detonation of two atomic bombs, the novel reaches for meaning through allegory which has the effect of giving it a feeling of both being out of time and out of place. It is a story which seems as it could happen anywhere there happens to be a beach.
That said, there is, however, a distinctly westernized mood and atmosphere in the book that seems to come straight out of the existential works of Sartre or—especially—Camus. At heart, this is a story about existential alienation and the search for meaning in one’s life. Not only does the novel make no attempt to connect its characters to the mythic qualities of Japan’s ancient past, at time it appears to make a concerted effort to reject that notion as delusion and filled with false hopes and ideals. Rather than revealing a world connectedness (such as Kurosawa’s samurai in the world of film, for instance) Abé creates a chilling mood expressing a complete collapse in the ability to connect. He is clearly no literary descendent of E. M. Forster.
He does at times seem to be the godchild of Kafka and perhaps the long-lost half-brother Camus. The Woman in the Dunes succeeds in creating a bare existential landscape not dissimilar from the beach on which Camus writers about shooting an Arab and into this of allegorical isolation he drops some grotesque Kafkaesque imagery. The result is a reading experience few will likely ever forget, rescued from being a completely depressing experience by healthy helpings of often almost absurdist irony, but not one that likely to stir up recollections of it being specifically a Japanese story.
