Sands of Imprisonment, Subjugation, and Empowerment: Reading Foucault in Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes

Abstract

Any reader who familiar with the fiction of the Japanese modernist writer and critic Kobo Abe understands that his depict alienation, emptiness, and loss of identity and that many of his novels and plays deal primarily with characters who find themselves entrapped in nightmarish situations they cannot escape, much as in Kafka, Beckett, and Ionesco. Hisaaki Yamanouchi states that Abe's works provide a picture of life in which man utterly lonely, deprived of communication with his fellow men and determined by physical reality. And yet what Abe intends to prescribe in his not despair but tough reasonableness with which to accept the inescapable reality of life; only by doing so can man justify his own (173). Nancy S. Hardin also brings to light the grim picture of Abe's world, one that, in his novel The Face of Another, charges modern man with the crimes of having lost one's face, the crime of shutting off the roadway to others, the crime of having lost understanding of other's agonies and joys, the crime of having lost the fear and joy of discovering unknown things in others, the crime of having forgotten one's duty to create for others, the crime of having lost a music heard together--these are crimes which express contemporary human relations, and thus the whole world assumes the form of a single penal colony. (149) This image of the world as a penal colony consistent with the history of the postwar Japan, when, contrary to expectations, people were subjected to an institutionalized, multilayered coercive authority that clashed with the stated aims of demilitarized Japan. Abe affirms that compared with the feudalistic society of the Middle Ages, we now have an open society. But in another sense we have made for ourselves a cage, a kind of prison (Hardin 450). Consequently, a number of disillusioned leftist intellectuals born in the 1920s and 1930s turned to existentialism, while others embraced communism, which, in their view, was the ultimate form of social justice. Many, however, could not tolerate its dictatorship and therefore abandoned communism (Motoyama 305-306). Abe among those disaffected writers who criticized the Communist Party and as a result was expelled for alleged disloyalty. Nor did he find solace in existentialism, which he came to regard as extremely self-negating. Abe, emerging from this personal and political crisis, gave form to the image of the world as a penal colony in his 1962 novel Suna No Onna, which, translated in 1964 as The Woman in the Dunes, won him international repute. This novel's literalization of the motif of the world as penal colony powerfully tropes the crimes of modern man. The novel relates the experiences of Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist who held captive with a young woman by a group of people in a seaside village in a house in a sand pit, and who condemned by them to a life of shoveling out the windblown sand that threatens daily to bury the village. After a seven-year absence from mainstream Japanese society, he declared a missing person. Sand, the locus of Niki's captivity and confinement, also, as William Currie explains, a central metaphor standing for the shifting reality in which the hero must come to terms with himself and his surroundings, find roots for his existence and discover who he really is (1-2). But Niki's entrapment in walls of sand also a condition of his discovery of a new self. This study endeavors to analyze some of the thematic corollaries of captivity, such as subjugation, punishment, and discipline, which constitute a constellation of themes that could be viewed as premonitions of power that Michel Foucault discussed some ten years later, in 1975, in his seminal text Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. More specifically, these themes of coercion will be analyzed at the individual and collective levels in the external and internal spaces of the novel: the village, the woman's home, and the self. …