The Woman in the Dunes

The man’s character arc and experiences in the sand pit provide a reflection on what it means to be free and an interrogation of socially constructed notions of respectability. The story begins with a literal example of imprisonment: the man’s entrapment in the sand dune. He is outraged that the villagers would trap him this way, asking, “[Is] it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order?” (51). The man defines the injustice of his imprisonment in terms of social bureaucracy and respectability. He believes he’s entitled to freedom because of his status as a respectable member of a civilized society. He cites his employment and his ability to pay taxes as reasons he is deserving of freedom, or at least not deserving of imprisonment. The idea that a person merits freedom as a basic human right simply by existing doesn’t initially enter into his equation.

In his interactions with the woman, the man sees a different way of relating to existence. At first, he is “angry at the things that [bind] the woman…and at the woman who let[s] herself be bound” because he is projecting his own insecurities of weakness and powerlessness onto her (39-40). He admonishes her to “’stop being treated like a slave,” claiming that “nobody has the right to keep [her] shut up here” (60). Yet the woman evinces no desire to leave—not just the community, but her own sand pit. She says she has no interest in going for a walk because she used to have to walk all the time and it tired her. Since the story is set in post-war Japan, though she doesn’t say it, her walking may allude to migrations during the war. The man recalls “when everything was in ruins some ten years ago, everybody desperately wanted not to have to walk” and wonders now if they are “glutted with this freedom from walking?” (89-90). By the end of the novel, the man fully shifts his perspective and proves willing to give up any perceived respectability to achieve it. When the old man tells him he can come up for a bit if he lets them watch him have sex with the woman, the man immediately assaults her. He thinks about “what he could get as a prize…ground on which he could walk where he wished” (230). He fails to acknowledge that to claim this prize, he must violate the woman’s freedom and basic human right to body autonomy.

Even as the man gradually accepts his imprisonment, he still feels yearnings for freedom. In part, this desire stems from knowing that not all the people in the community have to live in holes—everyone’s plight is not equally grim. When he is trying to run away, he notices that “just to protect this pitiful bit of geography, more than ten households on the sea side [have] had to submit to a life of slavery” (176). The injustice of that inequality chafes him, exacerbated by the villagers’ constant surveillance—the knowledge that someone with binoculars is watching the people in the sand pits. He muses, “More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in” (146). The invasion of privacy reinforces the idea of imprisonment.

The lack of freedom makes the man feel more like an animal than a human, emphasizing the extent to which he defines his own worth via conventions of social respectability, claiming that “even a dog’ll go mad if you keep it shut up in a cage” (89). When he realizes that the villagers will simply withhold water when he threatens to keep the woman in bondage and stop all work, he reiterates the comparison, saying he feels “like an animal who finally sees that the crack in the fence it was trying to escape through is in reality merely the entrance to its cage—like a fish who at last realizes, after bumping its nose numberless times, that the glass of the goldfish bowl is a wall” (123). In his attempt to reassert a sense of his own power (and by extension, his worth), he instinctually assaults the woman, holding her hostage to bargain for his release—something he’s able to justify only by implicitly defining his own worth (as a tax-paying, insurance-holding, male member of civilization) as inherently higher than hers.

Even later, after his will has been broken, there is still a part of the man that yearns for physical freedom. He and the woman discuss getting a plant or small tree. When he imagines it, he sees “clusters of leaves, twisting and fluttering, trying in vain to escape from their branch” (225), and he begins to weep. Freedom of that sort, he accepts, is no longer possible. However, he discovers a new version of freedom when his crow trap turns out to be an effective water trap. Having his own source of water means that he is less dependent on the capricious whims of the villagers. He is “still in the hole, but it seem[s] as if he [is] already outside” (235). The man discovers that having leverage does not require that one use it; that, too, is a type of freedom—the ability to decide for oneself when or if to act. In the end, when presented with the means of escape, the man chooses not to, with the thought that “there [is] no particular need to hurry about escaping” (239). He is exercising the little bit of freedom his new mentality allows, the freedom to do nothing.