Water and Sand

Abstract

This study interprets Japanese novelist Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes in terms of the interplay of water and sand, taken now as a dialectic of disorder and order, entropy and negative entropy (negentropy). The protagonist Niki is entrapped not only by nature, symbolized by the encroaching sands, but by society: he is subjected to forced labor and to thirst by a community itself overtaken by moral and social entropy or dissolution. Thus he seems to embody an even greater dissipation of energy, a more encompassing disorder, homogeneity, stillness, disintegration and sense of death. Yet when Niki discovers water in the sands he unexpectedly acquires a vital negentropic energy, a life-energy. Water saves and sustains him and becomes the progenitor of his new self, the symbol of his rebirth. A new life now begins for him in the sand-entrapped community. However, while chaos theory describes the self-organizing of disorder and its deep structures of order, chaotic systems are also prone to unpredictable fluctuations and bifurcations. The same is true of Niki’s new life, and the novel has an uncertain, radically open ending, one that befits all chaotic systems. It also befits water and sand and Abe’s protean self, in all their fluidity.