Woman in the Dunes

I finally finished Abe's Woman in the Dunes.  I cheated a bit by reading the ending in an English translation, which leads me to my first thought...  this isn't a novel that loses much in translation.  Japanese has a bunch of features that can make it difficult to translate, especially those that show social stratification or dialect, but none of them have much place in this novel.  It's certainly the most direct translation of any major Japanese novel I've read, and more than some of the light novels as well.

Ultimately, I think the novel really dragged.  As I've mentioned before, I don't think the book is a simple dramatization of a philosophical concept; it should be looked at as a novel as well.  Unfortunately, I don't think that it totally works.  Part of the problem is that we know pretty much from the beginning that the man's never going to escape, and so the various attempts he makes don't really drive anything forward.  On the one hand, I understand that you have to have that feeling, because the whole point of the novel is about the struggle in the face of implacable fate, but it feels like it drags on two attempts too many.

The closest analog to the book that I can think of is Kafka's The Trial (I believe that The Castle may be closer, but I haven't read it yet).  But The Trial works better, I think, because Kafka keeps things fresh by throwing in more characters and changing up.  Oddly enough, I was about to write that The Trial is shorter, but I just looked on amazon, and it's at least comparable, if not longer.  But it felt shorter, because of the humor, the way Kafka changes things up, and so on.