Kobo abe woman in the sands summary. Analysis of the work of kobo abe "woman in the sands"

Abe Kobo 1924-1993

The Woman in the Sands Roman Parable (1963)

The old man, having found out beforehand that the newcomer is a teacher by profession. and not an inspector from the prefecture, leads him to one of the pits. The man goes down there on a rope ladder. He is greeted by a young woman - the owner of a shabby hovel. She feeds and drinks the guest, but when asked if it is possible to wash, she replies that the water will be brought only the day after tomorrow. The man is sure that he will not be here the day after tomorrow. "Really?" - the woman is surprised.

The shack is buried in sand, sand penetrates everywhere, and the woman holds a paper umbrella over the man's head when he eats so that the sand does not get into the food, but the sand is still felt in the mouth, squeaks on the teeth, soaking with sweat, the sand sticks to the body. The woman says that during last year's typhoon, her husband and daughter were covered with sand, so now she is all alone. At night, she has to shovel off the sand to keep the house from falling asleep. Upstairs z ....

One day in August, a person goes on a three-day vacation to replenish their collection of insects with rare species that are found in the sands. He takes the train to station S, changes to a bus and, getting off at the final stop, continues on foot. He passes the village and follows the sandy road towards the sea. The road becomes steeper and steeper, and all around you can no longer see anything but sand. A person thinks about sand: being interested in the insects that are found in it, he also studied the literature on sand and became convinced that sand is a very interesting phenomenon. Continuing on his way, he suddenly finds himself at the edge of a sand pit, at the bottom of which there is a shack. He sees the old man and asks him where he can spend the night here. The old man, having found out beforehand that the newcomer is a teacher by profession. and not an inspector from the prefecture, leads him to one of the pits. The man goes down there on a rope ladder. He is greeted by a young woman - the owner of a shabby hovel. She feeds and drinks the guest, but when asked if it is possible to wash, she replies that the water will be brought only the day after tomorrow. The man is sure that he will not be here the day after tomorrow. "Really?" - the woman is surprised. The shack is buried in sand, sand penetrates everywhere, and the woman holds a paper umbrella over the man's head when he eats so that the sand does not get into the food, but the sand is still felt in the mouth, squeaks on the teeth, soaking with sweat, the sand sticks to the body. The woman says that during last year's typhoon, her husband and daughter were covered with sand, so now she is all alone. At night, she has to shovel off the sand to keep the house from falling asleep. Upstairs they know that a man has appeared in her house: another shovel and cans are lowered to her on a rope. The man still does not understand anything ... The woman collects the sand in cans, pours it out near the place where the rope ladder hangs, then the baskets are lowered, and the cans go up. It is easier to shovel the sand off at night when it is wet; during the day it is so dry that it immediately collapses. A man helps a woman. The woman explains to the man that the sand does not rest and does not give rest. The man is outraged: it turns out that the villagers live only to rake off the sand. In his opinion, it is absurd to live like this, this way of life, chosen voluntarily, does not even evoke sympathy in him. For a long time he is unable to fall asleep, thinking about the sand and hearing how the woman continues to rake it off. When he wakes up, he finds that the woman is sleeping by the hearth, completely naked, with a towel wrapped around her face to protect herself from the sand. The man wants to leave unnoticed, but sees that the rope ladder has disappeared: those who came at night to lift the sand carried it away. The man feels trapped. It seems to him that some mistake has just happened. The man begins to dig, but the sand immediately crumbles, the man continues to dig - and suddenly an avalanche of sand rushes down, which presses him down. He loses consciousness. The woman is caring for him: he probably fell ill because he worked for a long time in direct sunlight. He has been in the pit for a week, probably, his colleagues have filed an application for his wanted list. He imagines how they are discussing where he could disappear. The man pretends to be seriously ill: he wants both the woman and those who put him in this pit to finally become convinced that he is not an assistant for them, but a burden, and they themselves tried to get rid of him. He just can't understand the meaning of a woman's life. He tells her how pleasant it is to walk, but she does not see any joy in it: “walking around without doing - just get tired in vain ...” The man decides to make another attempt to get out of the pit. At night, when a woman shovels off the sand, he unexpectedly pounces on her and ties her up. When people come with baskets and lower a rope into the pit, the man grabs it and demands to be lifted if they want to help the woman. They begin to lift him, but soon they let go of the rope, and he falls to the bottom of the pit, and in the meantime they pull the rope out of his hands and leave. A package with three packs of cigarettes and a bottle of vodka are lowered into the pit. The man hopes that this is a guarantee of an early release. However, the woman explains to him that all men are given tobacco and vodka once a week. The man wonders if people like him have wandered into the village, lost on their way. The woman says that several people accidentally ended up in the village, one soon died, the other still lives, no one managed to escape. "I will be the first!" - says the man. Looking into the tank, the man sees that the water has run out. He understands: she was not brought to break his resistance; the torment of a woman does not bother anyone. A man frees a woman from the bondage on the condition that without his permission she will not pick up a shovel. He grabs a shovel and hits the wall: he wants to destroy the house in order to make a staircase from the rubble. Seeing that the wall is rotten (it turned out that the woman was right when she said that the sand rotting wood), he decides to use for this purpose not boards, but transverse beams. The woman hangs on his arm and tries to grab the shovel. The fight for the shovel ends with a love scene. A man understands: enmity with a woman is useless, he can achieve anything only in an amicable way. He asks her to contact those who bring the water, and tell them to immediately deliver it. The woman replies that as soon as they start working, they will find out about it upstairs - from the fire tower there is always someone looking through binoculars - and then they will immediately bring water. The man takes the shovel. When a bucket of water is lowered to them, he tells the old man standing upstairs that his colleagues will declare a wanted list and then those who forcibly keep him here will not be happy. But the old man objects that since they did not find him in ten days, they will not be found in the future. The man promises his help in alleviating the plight of local residents, he has connections, and he can start a campaign in the press, but his words do not make any impression, the old man leaves without hearing the rest. V free time a man furtively makes a rope. Having finished it, he attaches scissors to it instead of a hook and in the evening, when the woman sleeps off before night work, throws the rope onto the bags, which serve as a pulley when lowering buckets of water and lifting baskets of sand. The scissors dig into the bag, and the man manages to get out of the hole. This occurs on the forty-sixth day of his "imprisonment". To avoid being swept from the fire tower, he decides to hide and wait until sunset. As soon as the sun goes down, he needs to quickly walk through the village - before the carriers of the baskets of sand start to work. The man goes astray: thinking that he has passed the village, he suddenly finds it in front of him. He runs in fear through the village. Dogs rush after him. To protect himself from them, the man twirls a rope with scissors at the end over his head and touches children who accidentally turn up. The villagers rush in pursuit of the man. His legs suddenly become heavy and begin to bog down in the sand. Sinking into the sand almost to his thighs, he begs his pursuers to save him. Three men, having attached boards to the soles, approach him and begin to dig out sand around him. After pulling it out, they put it back into the pit. Everything that was before begins to seem to him a distant past. October is coming. The woman lowers the beads and saves money for the first installment for the receiver. The man built a small polyethylene canopy to prevent sand from falling on them during sleep, and came up with a device for boiling fish in hot sand. He stops reading newspapers and soon forgets about their existence. The woman says that the villagers secretly sell sand to the construction site at half price. The man is outraged: after all, when the foundation or the dam falls apart, who will feel better because the sand was cheap or even free. He tries to negotiate with the carriers of the sand about a walk, they in return demand that he make love to a woman in front of them. The woman refuses to do this in front of witnesses, but the man so wants to get out of the hole that he pounces on her and tries to rape her. The woman resists. The man asks her to at least pretend, but she pounds him with unexpected force. The man notices that water is accumulating at the bottom of the barrel, which he wanted to use as bait for crows. He thinks over and over again about the properties of sand. After a long, cruel winter, spring comes, A receiver appears in the house. At the end of March, the woman feels that she is pregnant, but two months later she has a miscarriage. She is taken to the hospital. The rope on which it is lifted from the pit remains hanging. The man goes upstairs, looks after the pickup truck, taking the woman away. He notices that a bar has come off in a hole in a water-collecting device he has made, and he hurries down to fix the breakage. The rope ladder is at his disposal, so there is no need to rush to escape. Seven years after the disappearance of the man, an announcement appears on his wanted list, and since no one responds to it, six months later the court issues a decision to consider him dead.

The crazy pace of life has made us hostages to incredible heights and achievements. A short century of a moment of life is negligible, and we in a hurry forget about our "I". We have become hostages to our own parameters and standards: we strive for material well-being, but we forget to just talk to each other. We equip our houses according to Feng Shui, we go to rest in the East, sincerely hoping that all this will help us achieve harmony in life, but we forget about our relatives and friends.

The basics of Eastern philosophy are quite simple: you need to strive to draw maximum pleasure in an insignificant amount, and be content with little, having a surplus. The first adherents of the theory of relativity, the Chinese, with their Yin-Yang philosophy, rightly noted that in any negative action there are positive aspects: such as experience, knowledge, new opportunities, and vice versa, one cannot unrestrainedly rejoice at one's victories and achievements, otherwise there will be retribution. will inevitably follow….

It is difficult for us, Europeans, to accept and understand the postulates of Eastern philosophy, it is difficult for us to read prose and poetry of the East, but touching the reading of such a mysterious and incomprehensible literature, it seems to me, it is easier to understand the essence of being.

"Woman in the Sands" is a cult novel by the Japanese writer Kobo Abe with a straightforward plot. A man named Niki Junpei, 31 years old, an entomologist, in search of a mysterious insect, missed the bus, enters the village. The village is located on the sea coast, in the dunes. The house, where the traveler is lowered on a rope ladder, is located at the bottom of the pit. A man examines the poor life of a woman from high above, cleaning the sand sliding down from above for the whole night. Nicky does not yet know that there will be no stairs in the morning, and the stream of grains of sand streaming everywhere, infinitely varied and indifferent, will become a part of his life. The insect catcher falls into a trap that seems senseless to him. The hero heard about predatory insects that lure their victims into sand pits, but did not think that he would fall into such a pit himself. “This is probably some kind of mistake. Yes, of course this is a mistake. The only thing left was to consider: "... this is a mistake ...", - says Nicky.

Initially, the hero rebelled, but all attempts to resist the absurdity of existence - to constantly scoop up the sand, break up against the woman's monotonous logic, silently waiting for Niki to get used to her compliance and consent. "Yes, sand is not particularly habitable." But is immutability absolutely necessary for existence? The hero's frenzied attempts to find a way out were unsuccessful, and Nicky humbly obeys. It turns out that he is not the first and not the last traveler who is lowered into a hole to dig in order to win the same place from the sand the next night. Suffocation and hopelessness, the loss of freedom turns out, after all, to be only one of a million grains of sand, part of the Brownian movement. All goals and what entomologist Nicky wanted to return to become less important. Having lost the stimulus, which is the starting point, the man also loses the awareness of himself as a person, with a cumulative past. Now Nika has no past, no past goals, nothing but sand.

A grain of sand, sand is a metaphor for a person's daily routine. The novel is dedicated to the struggle with sand - the everyday life of the gray universe, which threatens to swallow a person and turn him into his slave. Sand is fleeting, flows like time. Each grain of sand is a day, an hour, a second. Dullness consumes us, we "kill time". People cease to be people, they become "insects", human existence takes on meaning in useless labor, digging sand. People put up with this kind of life. “Three days a beggar - a beggar forever”, ie the villagers no longer think of another existence.

From the very first pages of the novel, the author plunges us into the element of man's struggle for affirmation in life, into the element of a lifeline. Nicky saw only a woman in the main character, she saw in Nicky her future prisoner. He and she find themselves alone with each other, cut off from the whole world by an insurmountable wall of sand. The novel tells about the loss of his own personality, about the blurring of self-identification.

Kobo Abe achieved the seemingly unattainable ideality of prose in The Woman in the Sands. The main character does not have a name, she is simply a woman, and this her namelessness, humility, fluidity, inherent in the sand, turns out to be a swamp that absorbs the energy of a man. The moment in which the alien chuckles at the belief that the sand can cause the tree to rot is indicative is the moment. The further, the more the absurd logic of a woman triumphs over the logic of the one who was so tightly connected with the benefits of civilization. The woman in the novel is a symbol of positive, kindness, she is the only thing for which Niki can now exist. If in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain the hero voluntarily condemns himself to such an existence, then here we see that the man himself remains in this hole dug in the sand dune.

Freedom, self-identification, Nika's own aspirations are destroyed by the advancing sands and helplessness before primitiveness, excessive simplicity, - primitive nature (quicksand), primitive instincts (possession, power), primitive understanding of life (peasants). Main character falls out of the usual dimension - and falls into another, and gradually adapts. Nika, however, like any other person, has not one personality, but many - or not a single personality. All people living automatically, and not consciously, are at the bottom of the pit, digging sand every night, "because this is my home."

The ending of the novel is predictable - Nicky voluntarily remains in the pit with a woman, but cannot be read unambiguously. On the one hand, - the hero resigns himself to the fact that he is unable to change - a terrible hopelessness at the same time physical and moral plan. A person, a "trembling creature", can get used to everything. The sand pit is a tough image, but it can easily be extrapolated to anything else. A provincial city from which we dreamed of leaving and did not leave. The job that they dreamed of finding and did not look for. Indeed, without all this it is quite possible to live. “Green intentions, stand up like a flame, eternal memory, dream and hope, did you go out to the porch? Everlasting memory! ”, - Voznesensky once wrote.

On the other hand, the hero's humility is not humility, but a change in the angle of view on the current situation, under which he looked at life. After all, Nicky, in his own way, is happy there, in the sands. The hero fell in love with this woman, he voluntarily stayed with her.

The dualism of the entire work is read in every image, in every deed of this or that hero. The book is filled with psychological and philosophical metaphors, and each plot, even a separate paragraph, does not give an unambiguous assessment of a particular situation, or reflection, revealing not only the plot, event plan, but also a deep one, hidden by a cursory acquaintance. The author raises the age-old question about the meaning of human existence: to accept or resist, complain about the inevitability of events or change the angle of perception of reality. All these questions arise before everyone more than once, but can we always find answers - sometimes, even for ourselves, it remains a mystery ...

Reviews

A wonderful novel and a wonderful review.
"Yes, sand is not particularly habitable." This is true. Although our life itself is the same sand.
Inspiration to you, Polina, and good luck!
Sincerely,
Viorel Lomov.

Viorel, it is very pleasant and flattering to hear such grandiose words from you! Thanks!
And I am a priori in love with a man who is able to appreciate one of my favorite books.
Mutually to you all the most beautiful and desirable, and may what was said and done return a hundredfold!

No, - I did not comprehend the meaning of life,
Who curses her fragility.
One bliss full moment
Does not eternity embrace all?

The dew does not last long
Shining a tear, on a scarlet rose,
But with the whole abyss of heaven
Reflected here in a small drop.

Another flower lives only for a day
But he is the beauty of nature,
And the invariably black stump
Worth countless years.
Benediktov.

Woman in the Sands

Woman in the Sands

The woman collects the sand in cans, pours it out near the place where the rope ladder hangs, then the baskets are lowered, and the cans go up. It is easier to shovel the sand off at night when it is wet; during the day it is so dry that it immediately collapses. A man helps a woman. The woman explains to the man that the sand does not rest and does not give rest. The man is outraged: it turns out that the villagers live only to rake off the sand. In his opinion, it is absurd to live like this, this way of life, chosen voluntarily, does not even evoke sympathy in him. For a long time he is unable to fall asleep, thinking about the sand and hearing how the woman continues to rake it off. When he wakes up, he finds that the woman is sleeping by the hearth, completely naked, with a towel wrapped around her face to protect herself from the sand.

The man wants to leave unnoticed, but sees that the rope ladder has disappeared: those who came at night to lift the sand carried it away. The man feels trapped. It seems to him that some mistake has just happened.

The man begins to dig, but the sand immediately crumbles, the man continues to dig - and suddenly an avalanche of sand rushes down, which presses him down. He loses consciousness. The woman is caring for him: he probably fell ill because he worked for a long time in direct sunlight. He has been in the pit for a week, probably, his colleagues have filed an application for his wanted list. He imagines how they are discussing where he could disappear. The man pretends to be seriously ill: he wants both the woman and those who put him in this pit to finally become convinced that he is not an assistant for them, but a burden, and they themselves tried to get rid of him. He just can't understand the meaning of a woman's life. He tells her how pleasant it is to walk, but she does not see any joy in it: "walking around idle - just get tired in vain ..."

The man decides to make another attempt to get out of the hole. At night, when a woman shovels off the sand, he unexpectedly pounces on her and ties her up. When people come with baskets and lower a rope into the pit, the man grabs it and demands to be lifted if they want to help the woman. They begin to lift him, but soon they let go of the rope, and he falls to the bottom of the pit, and in the meantime they pull the rope out of his hands and leave.

A package with three packs of cigarettes and a bottle of vodka are lowered into the pit. The man hopes that this is a guarantee of an early release. However, the woman explains to him that all men are given tobacco and vodka once a week. The man wonders if people like him have wandered into the village, lost on their way. The woman says that several people accidentally ended up in the village, one soon died, the other still lives, no one managed to escape. "I will be the first!" - says the man. Looking into the tank, the man sees that the water has run out. He understands: she was not brought to break his resistance; the torment of a woman does not bother anyone. A man frees a woman from the bondage on the condition that without his permission she will not pick up a shovel.

He grabs a shovel and hits the wall: he wants to destroy the house in order to make a staircase from the rubble. Seeing that the wall is rotten (it turned out that the woman was right when she said that the sand rotting wood), he decides to use for this purpose not boards, but transverse beams. The woman hangs on his arm and tries to grab the shovel. The fight for the shovel ends with a love scene. A man understands: enmity with a woman is useless, he can achieve anything only in an amicable way. He asks her to contact those who bring the water, and tell them to immediately deliver it. The woman replies that as soon as they start working, they will find out about it upstairs - from the fire tower there is always someone looking through binoculars - and then they will immediately bring water. The man takes the shovel. When a bucket of water is lowered to them, he tells the old man standing upstairs that his colleagues will declare a wanted list and then those who forcibly keep him here will not be happy. But the old man objects that since they did not find him in ten days, they will not be found in the future. The man promises his help in alleviating the plight of local residents, he has connections, and he can start a campaign in the press, but his words do not make any impression, the old man leaves without hearing the rest.

In his spare time, a man furtively makes a rope. Having finished it, he attaches scissors to it instead of a hook and in the evening, when the woman sleeps off before night work, throws the rope onto the bags, which serve as a pulley when lowering buckets of water and lifting baskets of sand. The scissors dig into the bag, and the man manages to get out of the hole. This occurs on the forty-sixth day of his "imprisonment". To avoid being swept from the fire tower, he decides to hide and wait until sunset. As soon as the sun goes down, he needs to quickly walk through the village - before the carriers of the baskets of sand start to work. The man goes astray: thinking that he has passed the village, he suddenly finds it in front of him. He runs in fear through the village. Dogs rush after him. To protect himself from them, the man twirls a rope with scissors at the end over his head and touches children who accidentally turn up.

The villagers rush in pursuit of the man. His legs suddenly become heavy and begin to bog down in the sand. Sinking into the sand almost to his thighs, he begs his pursuers to save him. Three men, having attached boards to the soles, approach him and begin to dig out sand around him. After pulling it out, they put it back into the pit. Everything that was before begins to seem to him a distant past.

October is coming. The woman lowers the beads and saves money for the first installment for the receiver. The man built a small polyethylene canopy to prevent sand from falling on them during sleep, and came up with a device for boiling fish in hot sand. He stops reading newspapers and soon forgets about their existence. The woman says that the villagers secretly sell sand to the construction site at half price. The man is outraged: after all, when the foundation or the dam falls apart, who will feel better because the sand was cheap or even free. He tries to negotiate with the carriers of the sand about a walk, they in return demand that he make love to a woman in front of them. The woman refuses to do this in front of witnesses, but the man so wants to get out of the hole that he pounces on her and tries to rape her. The woman resists. The man asks her to at least pretend, but she pounds him with unexpected force.

The man notices that water is accumulating at the bottom of the barrel, which he wanted to use as bait for crows. He thinks over and over again about the properties of sand. After a long, cruel winter, spring comes, A receiver appears in the house. At the end of March, the woman feels that she is pregnant, but two months later she has a miscarriage. She is taken to the hospital. The rope on which it is lifted from the pit remains hanging. The man goes upstairs, looks after the pickup truck, taking the woman away. He notices that a bar has come off in a hole in a water-collecting device he has made, and he hurries down to fix the breakage. The rope ladder is at his disposal, so there is no need to rush to escape.

Seven years after the disappearance of the man, an announcement appears on his wanted list, and since no one responds to it, six months later the court issues a decision to consider him dead.