Abe Kōbō’s The Woman in the Dunes opens with an etymologist on a three day vacation walking across the dunes of a small desert and collecting insect specimens in glass vials.  Shortly afterwards, he is sentenced to live out the remainder of his life shoveling sand in a pit even though he has committed no crime.  This surreal situation allows Abe to pose the question to the audience, what is the ultimate meaning of human life?  The man asked the woman he is forced to live with and assist, “Doesn’t this fill you with emptiness?” (The Woman in the Dunes)  His question is the heart of the film.

            I believe that by examining what inspires humans to continue their meaningless activities in the harshest of situations, Abe was attempting to discover the underlying meaning of life.  By stripping away all of the excesses of life, Abe was exploring the fundamental aspects of life.  The man asked the woman, “Doesn’t this fill you with emptiness?  Are you shoveling to survive or surviving to shovel?” (TWD)  The distinction between “shoveling to survive” and “surviving to shovel” is moot.  Survival itself, regardless of cause or effect, is the driving force of human life.  Survival is the reason the man began shoveling.  The villagers were in control of his water supply and withheld this fundamental element of survival until the man agreed to shovel.  The man created an artificial reason for his desire to survive, hope.  He had hoped to escape the sand pit in which the villagers had imprisoned him.  He almost succeeded in his attempt but fell into a patch of quicksand.  In order to escape, he had to rely on the assistance of the villagers who were tracking him.  Again, in order to survive, the man was at the mercy of the villagers and the sand.  The hope the man had created for himself is shown to be false at the end of the film.  The man escaped the pit after the woman was removed to see a doctor but he was not captured or otherwise forced to return to the pit.  He returned under his own volition.  If the hope of escape had been the real cause of his compliance with the villagers, he would have seized this opportunity as the delayed reward for his shoveling the sand and returned to Tokyo.  The man’s hope placed a human rationale for his animal instinct of survival, but his actions were motivated by this instinct.

            The distinction between animals and humans is an important theme in The Woman of the Dunes.  Several times in the film, the man attempted to position himself as different from animals with his words.  The man stated, “Men aren’t dogs.  You can’t put a leash on them.” (TWD)  Later, he said, “A trained monkey could do this job.” (TWD)  In a conversation with the woman, he said to her, but more to reassure himself, “You are a human being.”  To which she replied, “But if it weren’t for the sand no one would bother with me.” (TWD)  Towards the end of the film, the man’s distinction between himself and the animals begins to dissolve.  He said, “They use us and we gladly wag our tails.” (TWD)  In the scene where the villagers promised the man the chance to see the sea once a day if he and the woman would have sex in front of them, we can see his internalization of his role as an animal.  The villagers watch the man wrestle with the woman like the patrons at a zoo watch the monkeys have sex.  At the end of the film, the man’s humanity has vanished and he is more similar to the insects he kept in the glass vials than to what he used to view as human.  Like with the insects of the desert, to the man shoveling and survival no longer had the cause and effect relationship he thought they had in the beginning of the film.  Shoveling and survival had become synonyms.

            In The Woman of the Dunes, the sand is a metaphor for the opposite of survival, death.  The sand rots everything it touches.  The sand had already claimed the lives of the woman’s husband and daughter before the man entered the pit.  The sand threatened to bury them like the soil of the graveyard.  To the man and the woman survival did not mean avoiding the sand.  The sand surrounded them and they could not escape from the threat of the sand.  Escaping death is impossible, like it is impossible for the man and the woman to escape the sand.  Human life is not the avoidance of death; it is a constant daily battle against death.  This battle against death defines the characters’ existence.  To the characters, life is the struggle against death. 

            I believe Abe sets The Woman of the Dunes in an absurd location and situation to remove the confounding variables in his examination of the meaning of human existence.  By having the characters live in a sand pit with very little hope for a better future, Abe eliminates the excess baggage society can add to human existence.  The characters can not realistically hope to gain anything in the future.  There are no long term goals in the sand pit.  Abe, in not setting the story in the city, eliminates the possibilities that the characters are living for happiness, love, material possessions, or knowledge.  All of these things are unimportant in the pit.  However, there can be loss.  The woman is terrified that one day she is going to wake up and the man will be gone.  Human existence is not a struggle for gain; it is a struggle to prevent loss.  Like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, humans are running as fast as they can to stay in the same place.  The ultimate expression of this loss is the loss of life, the failure to survive.  When the woman became pregnant and her life and her baby were in jeopardy, she did not want to leave the pit.  Even though the pit did not bring happiness, when she was confronted with death she was afraid to die and wanted to remain in the pit.  This shows that the eventual failure of individual survival is inevitable.  Even the distant hope of survival through one’s progeny is not guaranteed.

            This may be a dark and cynical interpretation of The Woman in the Dunes.  To return to the question the man asked, “Doesn’t this fill you with emptiness?” I believe the answer given by Abe is yes (TWD).  Human existence does fill humans with emptiness and the reason for this is human existence is empty.  It is the struggle to avoid death which is a purpose that could not exist without having been born.  All of our answers to the meaning of life are illusions.  That is how we cope with our pointless work and daily activities, by creating lies as to why we bother.  We build monuments to ourselves, we gather as many goods as we can, and we attempt to fill our lives with happiness, but the sand will claim all of these ventures as well.  But we still value our lives.  We still fear death and loss.  I believe this is the purity of life.  We live, and value our lives, exclusively for the sake of living.  This gives the meaningless activities we engage in a meaning.  We shovel the sand to live.