ABSTRACT
Abe Kōbō’s 1962 novel Suna no onna—the story of a vacationing schoolteacher kept captive in a sand pit—created a literary sensation in Japan, earning its author not just that year’s Yomiuri Prize but a secure place among the half-dozen most critically noted novelists to appear there since 1945. Ōe Kenzaburō, the Japanese writer with whom he is most often paired, has lauded Abe as “the most important postwar writer.” Mishima Yukio, who never allowed his politics to interfere with his recognition of talent, praised Abe just as highly. Abe attracted attention outside of Japan with the 1964 translation of this novel, The Woman in the Dunes , and he briefly enjoyed near-celebrity status when the film version was awarded the Special Jury Prize at Cannes that same year. The Woman in the Dunes, like the six other of his novels subsequently translated, was reviewed widely, especially in the American press. Abe was enthusiastically welcomed as a Japanese novelist recognizably avant-garde and thus, perhaps somewhat oddly, readily fathomable. Abe was interested in such issues as freedom and existence, appropriating an idiom that seemed no more peculiarly Japanese than that of Poe, Kafka, or Beckett; and New York critics were pleased to discover a Japanese writer whose work demanded no extravagant exegesis, no Oriental hermeneu-tics. Niki Jumpei, that hapless thirty-one-year-old high-school teacher who disappears into the sand pit of an unnamed village, is familiar enough to readers acquainted with the biographies of Gregor Samsa or Nagg and Nell to dispense with the need for explanatory, intercultural footnoting. The Woman in the Dunes was fashioned plainly enough in the discourses of our modern crises that reading it could be a pleasant pastime rather than grueling schoolwork.
