Cobo Abe - The Woman in the Dunes

One day in August a man disappeared. He had simply set out for the seashore on a holiday, scarcely half a day away by train, and nothing more was ever heard of him. Investigation by the police and inquiries in the newspapers had both proved fruitless.

Of course, missing persons are not really uncommon. According to the statistics, several hundred disappearances are reported every year. Moreover, the proportion of those found again is unexpectedly small. Murders or accidents always leave some clear piece of evidence, and the motives for kidnapping are normally ascertainable. But if the instance does not come under some such heading, clues — and this is especially true in the case of missing persons-are extremely difficult to come by. Many disappearances, for example, may be described as simple escape.

In the case of this man, also, the clues were negligible.

Though his general destination was known, there had been no report from the area that a body had been discovered. By its very nature, it was inconceivable that his work involved some secret for which he might have been abducted. His quite normal behavior had not given the slightest hint that he intended to vanish.

Naturally, everyone at first imagined that a woman was involved. But his wife, or at least the woman he lived with, announced that the object of his trip had been to collect insect specimens. The police investigators and his colleagues felt vaguely disappointed. The insect bottle and net were hardly a feint for a runaway trip with a girl.

Then, too, a station employee at Shad remembered a man getting off the train who looked like a mountain climber and carried slung across his shoulders a canteen and a wooden box, which he took to be a painting set The man had been alone, quite alone, the employee said, so speculation about a girl was groundless.

The theory had been advanced that the man, tired of life, had committed suicide. One of his colleagues, who was an amateur psychoanalyst, held to this view. He claimed that in a grown man enthusiasm for such a useless pastime as collecting insects was evidence enough of a mental quirk. Even in children, unusual preoccupation with insect collecting frequently indicates an Oedipus complex. In order to compensate for his unsatisfied desires, the child enjoys sticking pins into insects, which he need never fear will escape. And the fact that he does not leave off once he has grown up is quite definitely a sign that the condition has become worse. Thus it is far from accidental that entomologists frequently have an acute desire for acquisitions and that they are extremely reclusive, kleptomaniac, homosexual. From this point to suicide out of weariness with the world is but a step. As a matter of fact, there are even some collectors who are attracted by the potassium cyanide in their bottles rather than by the collecting itself, and no matter how they try they are quite incapable of washing their hands of the business. Indeed, the man had not once confided his interests to anyone, and this would seem to be proof that he realized they were rather dubious.

Yet, since no body had actually been discovered, all of these ingenious speculations were groundless.

Seven years had passed without anyone learning the truth, and so, in compliance with Section 30 of the civil code, the man had been pronounced dead.

One August afternoon a man stood in the railroad station at S-. He wore a gray peaked hat, and the cuffs of his trousers were tucked into his stockings. A canteen and a large wooden box were slung over his shoulders. He seemed about to set out on a mountain-climbing expedition.

Yet there were no mountains worth climbing in the immediate vicinity. Indeed, the guard who took his ticket at the gate looked at him quizzically after he passed through.

The man showed no hesitancy as he entered the bus standing in front of the station and took a seat in the back. The bus route led away from the mountains.

The man stayed on the bus to the end of the run. When he got off, the landscape was a mixture of hillocks and hollows. The lowlands were rice paddies that had been divided into narrow strips, while among them slightly elevated fields planted with persimmon trees were scattered about like islands. The man passed through a village and continued walking in the direction of the seashore; the soil gradually became whitish and dry.

After a time there were no more houses, only straggling clumps of pine. Then the soil changed to a fine sand that clung to his feet. Now and again clumps of dry grass cast shadows in hollows in the sand. As if by mistake, there was occasionally a meager plot of eggplants, the size of a straw mat. But of human shadows there was not a trace. The sea, toward which he was headed, lay beyond.

For the first time the man stopped. He wiped the perspiration from his face with his sleeve and gazed around. With deliberation, he opened the wooden box and from the top drawer took out several pieces of pole that had been bundled together. He assembled them into a handle and attached an insect net to one end. Then he began to walk again, striking the clumps of grass with the bottom of the shaft. The smell of the sea enveloped the sands.

Some time went by, but the sea still could not be seen. Perhaps the hilly terrain obstructed the view. The unchanging landscape stretched endlessly on. Then, suddenly, the perspective broadened and a hamlet came into sight. It was a commonplace, rather poor village, whose roofs, weighted down with stones, lay clustered around a high fire tower. Some of the roofs were shingled with black tile; others were of zinc, painted red. A zinc-roofed building at the hamlet's single crossroad seemed to be the meeting house of a fishermen's cooperative.

Beyond, there were probably more dunes, and the sea. Still, the hamlet was spread out to an unexpected extent. There were some fertile patches, but the soil consisted mostly of dry white sand. There were fields of potatoes and peanuts, and the odor of domestic animals mingled with that of the sea. A pile of broken shells formed a white mound at the side of the clay-and-sand road, which was as hard as cement. As the man passed down the street, children were playing in the empty lot in front of the cooperative, some old men were sitting on the sagging veranda repairing their nets, and thin-haired women were gathered in front of the single general store. All movement ceased for a moment as they looked curiously at him. But the man paid no attention. Sand and insects were all that concerned him.

However, the size of the village was not the only surprising thing. Contrary to what one would expect, the road was gradually rising. Since it led toward the sea, it would be more natural for it to descend. Could he have misread the map? He tried questioning a young village girl who was passing by just then. But she lowered her eyes and, acting as if she had not heard a thing, hurried on. Yet the pile of shells, the fishing nets, and the color of the sand told him that certainly the sea lay nearby. There was really nothing yet that foretold danger.

The road began to rise more and more abruptly; more and more it became just sand.

But, curiously enough, the areas where houses stood were not the slightest bit higher. The road alone rose, while the hamlet itself continued to remain level. No, it was not only the road; the areas between the buildings were rising at the same rate. In a sense, then, the whole village seemed to have become a rising slope with only the buildings left on their original level. This impression became more striking as he went along. At length, all the houses seemed to be sunk into hollows scooped in the sand. The surface of the sand stood higher than the rooftops. The successive rows of houses sank deeper and deeper into the depressions.