The sand is a pump. — Jumpei Niki in The Woman in the Dunes

Penetrable and shifting, sand accepts the shape of objects that in it lie embraced, buried, safe. In this regard, sand is symbolic of the womb. To bury oneself in the sand is a quest for rest, safety, and regeneration. Suna no Onna (1964), Teshigahara Hiroshi’s adaptation of the Abé Kobo novel The Woman in the Dunes maintains the sand-womb analogy as Jumpei Niki undergoes a transformation while trapped in the woman’s sand pit.

An entomologist, Jumpei endeavors to collect new insect specimens during a three-day vacation along the dunes by the sea. However, like an insect captured in a jar, Jumpei becomes part specimen, part companion — he becomes part of the sand. Teshigahara allows the dune landscape with its shifting, wind-blown waves of sand to mimic the flow of water. In Suna no Onna sand and water are inherently connected. When Jumpei contends that “the sand is a pump” he realizes that the sand is an active, captivating force that can both suspend the progress of life, but also endows life with the elements to survive.

During his first evening spent at the woman’s house at the bottom of the sand pit, Jumpei begins to sense the omnipresence of the sand. Parasols dangle from the ceiling to shield his dinner, the teakettle is wrapped in plastic, the woman covers her face with cloth as she shovels moist sand into baskets. However, not until morning when he tries to climb out from the pit does he realize that the sand, entity-like, has providence over both the woman and himself. He sees the woman, asleep, caked in a thin layer of sand as though it were a second skin. The house’s wooden roof tries to keep out the falling avalanche of sand, the parasol protects his dinner, the plastic bag keeps sand out of the tea, and, though the sand appears to be a force of nature to be feared, it also seems to protect the woman in that soft layer coating her body.

In Suna no Onna water is a part of the sand. While the woman struggles to keep the falling sand from encroaching upon and swallowing her home, the sand is also a necessary part of her environment. She cannot separate herself from life in the sand dunes.

Teshigahara places the sounds of city life — horns, subway trains, bells, and intercom chatter — over the credits to Suna no Onna. The credit sequence depicts various papers stamped with official markings. Lying in a barren boat stuck in the dunes, Jumpei remarks about all the certificates, licenses, identification cards necessary in life to prove to others who you are and to allow one to do what one might want. This dreamlike sequence cut with images of his wife sitting next to him or walking along the dunes suggests that Jumpei is disenchanted with modern life.

In Abé’s novel, the desire to be recognized drives Niki to discover a new species of insect — to be immortally known is pleasure:

The true entomologist’s pleasure is much simpler, more direct: that of discovering a new type. When this happens, the discoverer’s name appears in the illustrated encyclopedias of entomology appended to the technical Latin name of the newly found insect; and there, perhaps, it is preserved for something less than eternity. His efforts are crowned with success if his name is perpetuated in the memory of his fellow men by being associated with an insect.

In his rendering of Niki, Teshigahara combines the film-character’s buried seed of unhappiness surrounded by his modern existence with the novel-character’s desire to be perpetually remembered. In the sand pit, Niki will be preserved indefinitely.

Through two sequences, Teshigahara comments on the scope of perception and time. The first is Suna no Onna’s opening sequence, while the other occurs about halfway through the film. These two sequences appear to mirror one another as though time and space have reversed. After the second sequence, Niki appears to have changed. The initial sequence is comprised of five still shots varying in magnification:

Shot	Description
1	Two grains of sand, shot with extreme magnification so that they appear boulder-sized.
2	Light has been focused on the larger of the sand grain so it appears as if only one grain/rock is present. It shines like a large chunk of flint.
3	Lesser magnification. Tens of crystalline sand grains.
4	Another step in demagnification. Now hundreds of grains are seen.
5	What was once perceived as rocks now show to be thousands of sand grains. The camera pulls back to reveal that they are part of the large wavy dune landscape.

The second sequence halfway (approx. 60 minutes) into the film reverses the demagnification trend. It occurs as Niki attempts to call the villagers for water by waving a large pole with a signal fire:

Shot	Description
1	A dual-exposure, darkness, like moisture, seeps into the sand which is overlain on the image of Niki signaling.
2	Niki and the pit disappear. Water bubbles from beneath the sand.
3	A shallow pool of flowing water. Light reverberates on its surface.
4	Slow-motion shot of a single water drop as it begins to form a droplet, but before it falls…
5	Magnification on the water drop, already taking shape, slowly filling as it reaches the point where it has to release.

While the opening sequence convinces the viewer to see the large scope of the image — the dune and not the grain — the second image encourages the viewer to concentrate on the small individual element rather than the large — the drop and not the pool. These two sequences accomplish two objectives: one, they establish a relationship between sand and water; two, they suggest a change in Niki’s perception of the world.

When Niki first arrives at the house, the woman alludes to the connection between sand and water. She claims “the sand attracts moisture.” In describing the deaths of her husband and daughter, she says that “the sand came like a waterfall” and swallowed them as it does cities and countries. Teshigahara depicts the flow of sand, either blown across the dunes or falling down the dune slopes, as though it were running water. By shooting Suna no Onna in black-and-white the texture and motion of the sand and water are accentuated — they are undeniably similar. Abé evokes this relationship in his novel:

As long as the winds blew, the rivers flowed, and the seas stirred, sand would be born again grain by grain from the earth, and like a living being it would creep everywhere. … While he [Niki] mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he began to move with the flow.

Sand is born from water — they both flow and creep as though alive. Abé likewise describes the effect that the sand has on Niki, moving with the flow, he adapts to life in the sand.

After the second sequence where Teshigahara isolates the lone falling water droplet, Niki becomes resignedly accustomed to his new life. Several months have passed and he begins to dress traditionally in contrast to the perspiration-laden white tee-shirt he wears throughout the first half of the film. He dines, reads the newspaper, and each night helps the woman shovel the sand into the baskets to be pulled to the surface out of the pit. Yet, he has not lost the desire to escape. Freedom, for Niki, is symbolized by the flying crow.

Chevalier and Gheerbrant discuss the mythology of the crow or raven. They claim that “in Japan it is a symbol of filial gratitude” and “is taken as the expression of family affection”. However, at the same time it is regarded as a messenger of the gods. Raven mythology also has origins in the Bible:

In the Book of Genesis the bird is a symbol of clear-sightedness, since it was sent out to see if the lowlands had emerged from the waters of the Flood. “And it came to pass, at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from the earth” (8:6-7).

At one point in the film Teshigahara cuts to the image of a crow in flight. The freedom with which it possesses to go wherever and whenever it wants strikingly contrasts with the paralyzed imprisonment both Niki and the woman endure. Niki, however, hopes to use the bird’s freedom to affect his own.

Niki builds a crow trap made from a wooden barrel buried in the sand, covered with a light sheet of newsprint, and a small piece of food for bait. He hopes to catch a crow and attach a letter to its feet letting the outside world know of his captivity. That the Japanese regard the crow as a symbol of familial affection and filial gratitude has implications in Niki’s hopes for escape from the sand pit. By returning to the city world he would be returning to his family, to his wife, and be able to complete the obligations with which familial society has entrusted him. His return would likewise be a return to the love of his wife or rather to love his wife, rather than to maintain the relationship with the woman.

The crow’s biblical symbolism is also intriguing, for in Genesis the crow discovers land amidst the Flood. In Suna no Onna Niki hopes that the crow could accomplish the reverse — find the life beyond the flood of sand. Niki associates freedom with the desire to see the ocean and repeatedly asks the villagers to allow him to visit the sea if only for 10 minutes. While Noah hoped to find land while surrounded by water, Niki hopes to find the water that lies beyond the sand. He discovers water, but not where he had hoped — he finds it inside the crow trap.

Along with several other images, the crow trap serves to represent Niki’s situation as a man imprisoned inside an inescapable container. The paradigm for the metaphoric images is Niki held captive at the bottom of a cocoon-like sand pit. When he tries to escape, the sand-walls crumble at his touch. The crow trap is a metaphor for the sand pit. The barrel sides are akin to the pit walls and the trapped crow represents Niki. While the trap fails to capture a crow it does enable Niki to survive. Discovering that the evaporation of water due to the sand’s pumping action condenses inside the barrel, Niki discovers something in this new life on which to devote his energies. He also realizes that by being able to maintain their own water supply he and the woman can distance themselves from the villagers control. In effect, the crow trap does bring Niki freedom — not escape, but independence from the village rations.

Teshigahara depicts several images of insect specimens caught in jars or pinned in boxes. When we first see Niki walking along the dunes, he encounters a slug-like caterpillar. He photographs it and places the insect inside a glass jar. In the next shot we see the close up of the head of a dragonfly. Niki again takes its picture. His camera acts as a form of preservation — the insect’s image is caught on the film. Interestingly, Niki also takes a photograph of the woman as though she has become an object for him to collect. Most dramatically, however, is the shot about forty-one minutes into the film of a moth-like insect fluttering helplessly inside a glass sphere. That one of glass’s main ingredients is sand strengthens the relationship between the jar’s walls and those of the pit. Before discovering water in the crow trap, Niki is like the trapped moth hopelessly trying to free itself.

The insect imagery in Suna no Onna also exists heavily in Abé’s novel. Considering that Niki is an entomologist relates himself to the insect world. Arguably, the sand pit is a womb symbol that promotes transformation. The same womb symbol can also be found in the insect world — the cocoon. In Woman in the Dunes Niki describes insects as cookie molds that “have only edges and no insides” and as he is an entomologist, he therefore considers himself a cookie maker:

Even so, there was no need to be such a dedicated cookie maker as to be unable to resist making unneeded cookies just to use the mold. If the chance occurred for him to renew his relationship with them, he would have to start all over again from the very beginning. The change in the sand corresponded to a change in himself. Perhaps, along with the water in the sand, he had found a new self.

This new self changed through his experience within the sand pit agrees with the manner in which an insect transforms into an adult life-form. An insect begins life as a larva, then pupates — dormant and enclosed in an exoskeletal shell. From this pupa (or cocoon) the insect emerges transformed into a new being: caterpillar, then chrysalis, to butterfly. Like the man enclosed in the sand pit, trapped from the outside world, so, too, is the insect. Before it can exist its destined life, it must transgress a stage in its existence where it is trapped and through this entrapment it finds its cause or destiny. It has also gained its freedom. It is in this fact that a man, or humankind, can be paralleled to an insect. In finding freedom, in escaping, in changing, a man exists in the insect world.

Both Teshigahara and Abé use the symbolism of insects and the sand to shape a world separated from modern life that in its isolation and stagnation still elicits a subconscious change in Niki Jumpei. Buried beneath the surface of the sand, Niki, like a pupating caterpillar, discovers himself transforming. The crow trap endows him with an individual freedom he did not possess in Tokyo: no certificates or identification cards are needed in the sand pit. Niki has become his own individual self, separated, apart from modern life, but acutely satisfied.

References

Abé, Kobo (trans. E. Dale Saunders), “The Woman in the Dunes” (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).

Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant (trans. John Buchanan-Brown) “A Dictionary of Symbols” (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1994).