Famed Japanese author Kobo Abe’s novel the Woman of the Dunes (Suna No Onna) appeared in 1962, and immediately garnered acclaim in his own country. It was later translated into 20 different languages, and adapted into a Cannes festival award-winning film (it won the 1965 Special Jury Prize, along with two Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Foreign Film) directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara.
The plot of the screenplay was deceptively simple – an amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada) arrives in a little coastal village during his three-day leave from work as a high-school teacher, with hopes of identifying a type of sand beetle among the vast dune plains adjacent to the sea. After falling asleep there, he wakes to find that he has missed the last bus back to Tokyo. Local villagers advise the man to seek refuge overnight in nearby lodge, owned by a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) who lives there alone. After the accepting the offer, the man is lowered down by rope ladder into a large sandpit where he finds a ramshackle hut.
Life under closer scrutiny
Swimming against a tide
He soon discovers that the woman’s sole purpose in life is to spend her entire evenings filling large crates with sand, which constantly pours from the ever-encroaching walls surrounding them, and through the ceiling of her meagre lodgings. The crates are hoisted out of the pit the following morning by the local village union, who then sells illegally to a concrete manufacturer, for cheap. After enjoying basic overnight hospitality, the man discovers upon waking the next morning that the rope ladder is missing, and the relationship between him and woman quickly becomes as fragile as her home itself.
After a failed escape attempt leaves the man defeated, he resigns himself as a failure with several months of servitude ahead, battling the ever-present tides of shifting sand. Focusing on the minutiae of the couple’s everyday existence, the entomologist’s initial determination to escape is gradually replaced with a newfound appreciation of his natural surroundings as a habitant, rather than a visitor. The sophisticated outsider from Tokyo with a desire for his name to be in an encyclopaedia, quickly becomes a curiosity to the woman (he promises to send her a radio on his eventual return to normal life) and a passionate, if somewhat loveless, affair begins.
Visually, the screenplay was a wise choice for Hiroshi Teshigahara’s second film (his second collaboration with author Kobo Abe after 1961′s Pitfall) who along with cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa, decided to use high-contrast monochrome, which helped over-emphasise the use of light and shadow. Many scenes involve large proportion of the frame being plunged into absolute darkness, which helped the feeling of isolation and solitude of the two principal characters, along with unsettling camera angles and close-ups which often amount to clinical abstraction. Natural patterns in the sand are scrutinized in long, static shots – including one which is beautifully segued into a shot of the contours of the naked woman as she tosses and turns in her sleep. The aforementioned sense of the abstract is often replaced with a warm, idyllic feeling of strange contemplation, as images slowly reveal themselves and bleed into one another.
The images are paired with a sparse, minimalistic soundtrack provided by Sound Director and Composer, Toru Takemitsu, who uses pounding drums and a stark, alien-sounding string section over the undulating noise of the wind, shifting sand and the scuttle of insects – all of which effectively heighten our senses and remind us the constant threat from the outside.
Kyôko Kishida as the titular character
Man in peril – is to merely exist enough?
An allegory of the modern 20th Century everyman, detached from a real sense of purpose and incapable of commitment within normalcy, Woman of the Dunes is a powerful piece of work which appeals as a meditative think-piece now just as much as it did forty-six years ago. For all of the entomologist’s ambition and yearning for respect and acknowledgement, we soon realise that like he, we must spend a lifetime of servitude and become prisoners to our own desires and vices.
In an increasingly hurried world, often dictated by lifestyle choice and freedoms, Teshigahara’s film depicts a world without self-imposed ideals, personal ambition, (above others) and the yearning for expression and acceptance in modern society. This serves as a (still-relatable) critique of mid-1960′s Japan during a time of great social and ideological change, and asks us to reflect on our own need for validation and self-purpose in the 21st Century. So what of a quiet working life – is this to be likened to a pinned insect, (as part of the central character’s prized collection) waiting to expire and become trivial? Or perhaps only living by the bare essentials and free of desire and ego can we, like the entomologist, begin to discover potential in the most trivial of things – by merely existing could a person potentially discover ultimate freedom?
