Kōbō Abe’s 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes (Sand Woman in Japanese) is an existential story of an amateur entomologist who goes on holiday to a seaside village. He winds up trapped in a sand pit with a woman engaged in a never-ending battle with the sand that threatens to overwhelm the village. It won the 1962 Yomiuri Prize for literature and the 1967 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France’s Prize for the Best Foreign Book). A 1964 film adaptation of the novel won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

This study guide refers to the 2011 Vintage International (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) Kindle edition.

Content Warning: This guide contains brief descriptions of and references to sexual assault throughout.

Plot Summary

The novel starts with the disappearance of a man who went on holiday to the seaside one August. Investigators know where he went and why (to hunt for beetles), but there are no other clues to his whereabouts, and a body was never found. After seven years, he is officially declared dead.

The narrative then jumps back to the man’s arrival at the seaside village. His interest in beetles has led to an interest in sand as well because of its seemingly endless movement and uniformity. An old man approaches him and, once he ascertains the man is not a government inspector, offers to find accommodation for him in the village since he has missed the last bus. The man finds the accommodations surprising: He is to stay in a woman’s shack-like house at the bottom of a sand pit. At first, he is somewhat scornful of the woman, especially her ideas about sand’s ability to rot wood and then about her acceptance of her pitiful existence centered around the nightly shoveling of sand from away from her house. In fact, the entire village seems to come alive at night, hauling sand away. The man is not, however, immune to the woman’s charms, and he tries to return her playfulness when she pokes him.

The man starts to become suspicious when the villagers lower a shovel and cans down for him. The woman also makes references to his being there for more than just the night. In the morning, he discovers that the rope ladder, the only way out, has been pulled up and that the woman knows about it. He feels that she has been trying to seduce him in order to pacify him or make him want to stay. Outraged, he starts to shovel away at the base of a sand wall in order to lessen the incline. After working in the hot sun, his progress is minimal, and he suffers sunstroke.

He recovers after five days in bed, but he pretends to have a spine injury in order to avoid contributing to the work and to devise his escape. He plans to keep the woman awake during the day, when she would be sleeping, with cries of pain. However, the noise of the sand-clearing activity at night keeps him awake, and he dozes off during the day. He requests a newspaper and is surprised when he receives a current issue. There is nothing interesting to him in the newspaper and no missing person notices. He finds an article about a construction worker who was killed while digging out the base of a sand hill, and the man instinctually knows the villagers intended for him to see it. He wonders when investigators will come to the village, but then he remembers a letter he wrote to a woman he was in a relationship with about going off alone and not wanting people to know his whereabouts. He left the letter on his desk in the boardinghouse, so it’s possible investigators will think his absence is intentional.

He develops a new strategy: attacking the woman and holding her hostage until the villagers let him out. The woman, surprised, does not resist being bound and gagged. When the villagers come around to collect the sand, however, the man tells them what he’s doing, and they respond by not sending down water. Later, however, they send sake and cigarettes, which he interprets as a step toward negotiation, until the woman explains that they send such packages to all working men. She tells him of a postcard dealer who was similarly trapped last year and died from illness. No one else has ever successfully escaped. They have a watcher with binoculars in the fire tower.

As the sand piles up around and in the house, the man takes a shovel to the wall to get material for a ladder. The woman jumps to stop him, and they thrash around together. The man recalls another woman he had a relationship with and how he always used a condom with her due to his venereal disease. He would experience impotence whenever he tried to make love without one, but with the woman in the sand, he feels a new stirring of passion. They make love, and he dozes off.

When he awakes, they begin clearing sand, and the old man lowers a bucket of water. The next day, there is another package of sake, cigarettes, water, and food. The man finds he doesn’t mind the work so much. He has a new plan for escape: He will climb onto the roof when the woman is sleeping and, using a pair of shears and a rope he made from random materials, climb to the top when the sand releases the mist just before nightfall. He’ll hide until dark and then run through the village and out the gates.

The plan goes as intended until a dog starts barking and he runs into two children, knocking all three of them into a ditch. An alarm sounds. He makes a run for it and at first thinks the pursuers are falling behind but then realizes they are pushing him toward the sea. He sinks into boggy sand, and the villagers have to rescue him. His will is broken, and he submits to their lowering him back into the sand pit with the woman.

In October, the man builds a trap for crows based on his knowledge of sand slides. He calls it “Hope,” as he plans to attach a letter to the leg of any crow he catches. He tries to blend into life there so that the villagers become less suspicious of him and lower their guard. The woman strings beads to bring in extra income. He stops reading newspapers because they upset him. One day, he’s given a cartoon magazine, which he knows is rather inane, but he laughs hysterically, as he identifies with the broken-legged horse. He worries that he’ll be so accustomed to life in the pit with its tedious repetition that he won’t be able to function in the outside world. After two weeks, the trap has failed to catch a crow and the fish bait is rotten. In a foul mood, the man scatters the woman’s beads. He declares that the villagers will leave and abandon them there, but the woman disagrees because some of them are making a bit of money by selling the sand to construction companies, even though it contains salt, which could make structures collapse. The man realizes that the villagers, whom he has seen as his persecutors, feel like they have been abandoned or punished by the outside world. The man asks the old man if he could just climb up and look at the sea. The old man tells him that the request is reasonable and they’ll allow it if the man and woman have sex for the rest of them to see. The man tries to force himself on the woman, but she fights back, and the crowd disperses.

Checking “Hope” one day, the man discovers that it has filled with water from the capillary action of sand. This discovery pleases him greatly, as it lessens his dependence on the villagers. They buy a radio in order for him to get weather reports to record scientific data about the water trap. In the spring, the woman becomes pregnant, but after two months, she miscarries and has to be taken to a hospital in the city. The rope ladder the villagers used to get down to her remains in place. The man touches it, but then he sees his water trap and realizes that escape can wait. He wants to talk to the villagers about his device.

The final pages are documents: an official judgment of Niki Jumpei as a missing person after seven years and a notification that Niki Shino, his mother, should receive notice if he is ever found.