MARKINGS IN THE SAND

ON SUNA NO ONNA

Suddenly his eyes soared upward like a bird, and he 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.

WRITING BEYOND THE SUBJECT

In Abe's most celebrated novel, the 1962 Suna no onna [The Woman in the Dunes], the protagonist Niki Junpei repeatedly attempts to escape from the sandpit in which he has been trapped. Having failed in his first attempt, he conceives of a plan to tie up the woman in whose house he is imprisoned and force the villagers to release him. In the course of executing this plan, however, he suddenly finds himself imagining a future moment when, having successfully escaped and returned to his former life, he meets with a friend to discuss the written record he intends to make of the traumatic experience. "Well, Niki, I am amazed," the friend remarks. "At last you have decided to write something. It all comes down to experience. A common earthworm won't attain full growth if its skin is not stimulated, they say." To this Niki replies, "It's meaningless, no matter how intense the experience, to trace only the surface of the event. The main characters of this tragedy are the local people there, and if you don't give some hint of the solution through your writing about them, then that rare experience will be lost." The conversation then briefly digresses only to directly return to this question of writing. Niki: "No matter how I try to write, I'm not fit to be a writer." Friend: "This unbecoming humility again. There's no need for you to think of writers as something special. If you write, you're a writer, aren't you? ... Isn't it good to be made to realize what sort of person one is?" Niki: "Thanks to this education, I have to be forcibly exposed to a new sensation in order to suffer new pain." Friend: "Yet there's hope." Niki: "But one is not responsible for whether that hope thereafter turns out to be genuine or not."

It seems important to ask why, in this novel about captivity and escape, Abe chooses to include this scene of imaginary dialogue about writing. Two possible interpretations might be considered. First, Niki Junpei is a teacher, and, as his friend suggests, "professionally they're pretty close to writers." In this sense, Suna no onna could be regarded as thematically linked to such other fictional works in Abe's corpus as the 1964 Tanin no kao [The Face of Another] and 1973 Hako otoko [The Box Man], as both of these texts center on protagonists who, although engaged in other professions, nevertheless maintain a keen interest in writing. In the case of Suna no onna, the stark contrast Abe draws between the city and the countryside might conceivably be reinforced through this theme of writing, given the traditional link between writing and the notion of civilization. Hence Niki's acute sense of estrangement from the villagers, and particularly from the woman with whom he is forced to live in the sandpit,