'The Woman in the Dunes' by Kobo Abe

7 October 2026

My introduction to Japanese literature was via David Mitchell's 2001 novel 'Number9Dream' - his homage to Haruki Murakami. This led me to the novels of Murakami, four of which I have written about here (starting with my favourite 'Kafka on the Shore', reviewed here in October 2006). Murakami's books usually start in a contemporary real-world Japan into which magical realism starts to intrude, leading us into a parallel fantasy world. I'm also a fan of the Japanese-British novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro - who I was lucky to see in conversation with David Mitchell at the Royal Festival Hall in 2016 (reviewed here in February 2016). Several of Ishiguro's novels have a surreal. dreamlike quality that reminds me of Murakami, particularly 'When We Were Orphans' and 'The Unconsoled'. More recently I enjoyed ‘Tokyo Express’ - a Japanese detective novel by Seichō Matsumoto, first published in 1958, and translated by Jesse Kirkwood in 2022 (reviewed here in June 2024) - a gripping tale, beautifully told, with a gentle Japanese politeness. I am very grateful to Geoff Crossick for extending my knowledge of Japanese literature by giving me a copy of the classic Japanese novel 'The Woman in the Dunes' by Kōbō Abe, originally published in 1962, translated into English by E. Dale Saunders in 1964 and adapted into a Cannes Festival Award-winning film by Hiroshi Teshigahara. 'The Woman in the Dunes' is a deeply strange, existential novel. "The man" is a school teacher from Tokyo who visits a coastal fishing village to collect insects. The villagers, whose homes are constantly on the verge of being destroyed by the advancing sand dunes, trap him and force him to help them in the Sisyphean task of shovelling endless amounts of sand. The grim reality of his sandy prison, the physical demands of the labour, his increasingly desperate attempts to escape and the horrible effects of the constantly flowing sand on the human body are told in painstaking detail. The contrast between the bizarre surrealism of the situation and the practical, precise description of it reminded me of Yann Martel's 2001 novel 'Life of Pi'. In its surreal examination of human existence 'The Woman in the Dunes' also made me think of 'Waiting for Godot' by Samuel Beckett (published in 1952), though the occasional bantering dialogue here is all in the man's head: he has very little conversation with "the woman" with whom he is incarcerated. 'The Woman in the Dunes' is fascinating, peculiar and enthralling but it's also quite an uncomfortable read, particularly in the way the man treats the woman and the introduction of sex into their relationship. The sand-strewn, surreal nightmare is a lens through which to examine questions of human existence and particular issues to do with class. But I think I probably missed other references and analogies and I was grateful for the introduction written by David Mitchell for the 2006 Penguin Classics edition (which you can read at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/oct/07/featuresreviews.guardianreview26).