Read Online The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe - Free Book Online

part of her body into the aperture with her elbows and wiggling her legs clumsily. The sand began to fall in thin rivulets here and there. He had the feeling that there was some strange insect inside the ceiling. Sand and rotted wood. No, thank you, he had had enough of strange things!
    Then from one corner of the ceiling the sand began to pour out dizzily in numerous tapelike streams. The strange quietness was in eerie contrast to the violence of the flow of sand. The holes and cracks in the ceiling boards were quickly raised in exact relief on the straw matting. The sand burned in his nose and irritated his eyes. He fled out of the house.
    Suddenly he felt as though he were melting away from his feet upward into a landscape of flame. But something like a perpetual shaft of ice remained in the center of his body. He felt ashamed in some way. An animal-like woman… thinking only in terms of today… no yesterday, no tomorrow… with a dot for a heart. A world where people were convinced that men could be erased like chalk marks from a blackboard. In his wildest dreams he could not have imagined that such barbarism still existed anywhere in the world. Well, anyway… if this was a sign that he was beginning to regain his composure and recover from his initial shock, his qualms of conscience were not a bad thing.
    But he must not waste time. If possible, he would like to finish before it got dark. Squinting, he measured the height of the sand wall quivering behind a film of heat waves like molten glass. Every time he looked at it, it seemed to grow higher. It would be hard to go against nature and try to make a gentle slope abrupt—he only wanted to try to make a steep one more gentle. There was no reason to hang back.
    The best way to do it, of course, would be to shave it down gradually from the top. Since this was impossible, he had no choice but to dig from the bottom. First he would scoop out a suitable amount of sand from below and wait for the sand above to cave in, then he would scoop more out and again let the top fall in. If he repeated this again and again, the ground level he stood on would gradually rise and ultimately reach the top. Of course, he might also be carried away by the flowing sand in the midst of the operation. But no matter how much sand flowed, it still wasn’t water, and he had never yet heard about anyone being drowned in sand.
    The shovel was standing with the kerosene cans against the outside wall that went around the earthen floor. The dented edge of the shovel gleamed white like a piece of cracked porcelain.
    For some time he concentrated on digging. The sand was exceedingly tractable, and his work appeared to be progressing. The sound of the shovel as it bit into the sand, and his own breathing, ticked away the time. However, at last his arms began to grow weary. He thought he had worked for a considerable time, but his digging had apparently had no results at all. Only a little bit of sand had fallen from right above where he was digging. Somehow, it was working out very differently from the simple geometric process he had evolved in his head.
    Rather than worry further, he decided to take advantage of a rest period and put his theory to the test by constructing a model of the hole. Fortunately, materials were plentiful. He chose a spot in the shade of the eaves and dug a hollow about a half yard wide. But the incline of the slope did not make the angle he had anticipated; it was only forty-five degrees at the most, about like a wide-mouthed mixing bowl. When he tried scooping sand from the bottom, the sand flowed down the sides, but the incline remained the same. There would appear to be a fixed angle for sand. The weight and resistance of the grains seemed to be in perfect balance. Supposing this were true, did the wall he was trying to overcome have about the same degree of incline?
    No, that could not be. It might be an illusion, but it could not be true. When you looked at any incline