2/27/2024 0 Comments Box man kobo abe read![]() The shifting ground of The Woman in the Dunes takes different shapes in Abe’s other work. What I can tell you is that the past decade has seen the rupturing of so many perceived certainties, so many truths, and that Abe’s work of disorientation speaks so potently to these times we are living. ![]() As the author David Mitchell writes in the Guardian, perhaps this event spurred the writer to eschew moral absolutes and certainties, to suggest that ‘no dogma, interpretation and no authorial intention is immune to the transforming effects of the future’. As the narrator says about the sand: ‘The very fact that it had no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strength, was it not?’Īround the time he was writing The Woman in the Dunes, Abe was expelled from the Japanese Communist Party. There is a fundamental terror at the heart of the novel, something formless. Dale Saunders’ translation, the sand got into my mind. She says the bodies of her dead husband and child are buried somewhere in the sand but she cannot remember where. It wears away any understanding the captive has of the woman, any structure of meaning he can prop up about who she is and what she wants. It is when they are cleaning sand from each other’s bodies that sex first enters into the relationship. It is a source of rot, breaking clocks and machinery. In the house is a woman, and the captive must help her to shovel the ever-encroaching sand. The story is about a teacher and amateur entomologist who travels to an isolated community in search of a particular species of sand beetle, but instead finds himself imprisoned by the villagers in a house at the bottom of a vast sand dune. The Woman in the Dunes (1962) is probably Abe’s most famous book, a mystifying erotic nightmare that was made into a Cannes Festival award-winning film by Hiroshi Teshigahara. There’s an intimacy that comes from finding an author in this way, when a chain of moments brings you to a particular time and place, makes you susceptible to raise your hand and pull a book by its spine. I don’t recall the weather or the time of day, but I remember the distinct feeling of being watched by someone in the room. I’d never heard of the author but I was open to chance, the kind you find in bookshops. I’d gone to the old Foyles on Charing Cross Road, made it as far as the letter A, and plucked a book from the shelf because of the title: The Woman in the Dunes. He also found a medic’s eye in his writing, the ordeals of his characters drawn with the clinical precision of a surgeon dressing a wound. He never practised as a doctor but, after the war, did make a living as a street vendor, selling vegetables and coal. At one point he checked himself into a hospital from the stress, and poor grades meant he had to forge a certificate stating he had tuberculosis to avoid being drafted to the front. Following the family trade was encouraged, so at the height of the Second World War he studied medicine at Tokyo University. He grew up in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, his father a doctor in the city of Mukden, now the Chinese city of Shenyang. The job also gave plenty of time to read, and in those months I read a lot of Kōbō Abe.Ībe was born in 1924, died in 1993, and in between those years wrote a series of novels, plays and poems that are among the strangest and most ingenious ever written inside or outside of Japan. I remember finding a patent for a sex toy that looked like someone had fixed a dildo onto a railway pump trolley. The task was vague and endless, and the businessman would constantly smoke cigars inside the office, but he was pleasant enough to work for and some of the patents were memorable. He needed someone to research patents, the idea being that I was to categorise as many as possible ahead of the creation of some kind of online service. In 2010 I was working for a businessman on the Kings Road in London.
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