"Woman in the Dunes" by Kobo Abe

This short novel from Japan's Kobo Abe is about a teacher and amateur entomologist who travels to the seaside in order to collect some rare insects. His search causes him to miss the last bus back to civilization and he ends up accepting an old man's offer to spend the night in the sparsely populated village situated among the ever-shifting sand dunes. He stays the night in a small house at the bottom of a deep sand trough, the walls of which are so steep a rope ladder is required to get out. The woman who lives in the ramshackle house is a widow who lost her husband in child in typhoon sand storm. She is unusually quiet and submissive to the narrator, who discovers the next morning that the rope ladder is gone, and the villagers' intent is that he should help the woman remove the sand from accumulating in and around the house.

The protagonist resists his situation by threatening the woman, physically abusing her, and playing sick, all to no avail. Eventually he concocts a scheme and escapes, but he is disorientated during his midnight flight and is rescued from the sucking mud pits and placed back into captivity. Through another scheme to trap a crow and send a message to the outside world to rescue him, he inadvertently discovers a way to harvest water from the sand, thus liberating the couple from the need to wait for the villagers above ground to deliver water. The man becomes obsessed with perfecting his device and falls into a routine of helping clear the sand, improving his water trap, and having sex with the woman. She eventually becomes impregnated and suffers some difficulties; the villagers come to her aid and, in their haste, fail to retract the rope ladder before departing to the hospital. The narrator considers escaping, but rather turns back to his contraption and to await the return of the woman.

The novel has much in common with Kafka as the man's imprisonment against his will is never justified or explained, it simply has to be endured. The novel also reminded me of certain of Haruki Murakami's short fictions, such as "The Iceman" or "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes," where there is a certain allegorical feel to the work. The protagonist here is always considering the metaphor of the sand, how it is always shifting and moving with no purpose, and the job is to somehow make life livable in an uncertain world that is fundamentally devoid of meaning. Such stories with an overtly allegorical nature tend to interest me less than those that are more difficult to interpret, although to Abe's credit this metaphor is interesting and not simple, and there are intriguing ruminations about the nature of insects and birds that can easily be graphed onto questioning the nature of humanity.

Is this magical realism though? Nothing overtly "magical" happens, and only the absurdity of the situation challenges our notions of what could potentially happen in our "reality." The same questions can be asked of Kafka's The Trial; or rather than magical realism, are these works more broadly postmodern in McHale's sense, that they are attempts to explain the ontological nature of existence due to the fact that all epistemological options are shot down?