Woman In The Dunes Essay

WOMAN IN THE DUNES (Suna no Onna) 1964 Dir: Hiroshi Teshigahara Screenplay: Kobo Abe (novel by Kobo Abe) “You could find such a sandpit in New York, or San Francisco, or anywhere in the world” Hiroshi Teshigahara An entomologist (Eija Okada) on holiday from Tokyo has come to a remote desert in order to study and collect specimens from the local insect population. As he momentarily rests on the sand dunes, he ponders a fundamental existential question: does a person's recognized achievements validate his existence? Is the value of his life measured by the number of certificates and awards he has received in his lifetime? After lapsing into a daydream, he is awakened with the news that the last bus has left for the day, and the villagers arrange for him to stay with a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) who lives at the bottom of a sand dune. The following morning, his attempt to leave the dunes is thwarted when he realizes that the rope ladder he had used to descend to the woman's house had been retracted, and the sand formations are too amorphous to climb. Eventually, the cyclical, seemingly mindless ritual is laid out before him: the shovelled sand is exchanged for provisions; the sand is hauled away at night and sold in the black market for construction; to stop shovelling would bury the house Given an eternal task similar to the mythical Sisyphus, the entomologist asks the woman: "Are you living to shovel, or shovelling to live?" Resigned to an existence of displacing sand that will invariably be re-deposited by the following morning, can his life have existential meaning beyond deferring the inevitable cascading of the sand? In the barren landscape of the shifting dunes, is there a redemptive purpose in performing the monotonous, uncomplicated task? Kobo Abe’s novel was partially inspired by Albert Camus’s influential text, The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays. Here Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd and the absurd hero; mans search for meaning and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God. For Camus such a man, faced with a futile life would decide against suicide, instead realising that the absurdity of life demands revolt. It’s not how well or how successfully you live, but how much you live.