Kobo Abe - The Woman in the Dunes
One summer, I boarded a flight to Jeju Island with a fluttering heart. Swollen with hope that the values I'd dreamed of would soon be realized, I'd even forgotten the bitter pain of heartbreak. It was clearly an experiential concept. Yet those five nights and six days, where every hopeful buzzword—'youth spirit,' 'fair travel,' 'collective intelligence'—made a grand appearance, were dreadful. There was no youth spirit of mutual consideration, nor any fair travel for the region. The collective intelligence that was supposed to pool everyone's wisdom reduced a 2.6kg laptop flown in from afar to nothing more than a phone charger. That five-night, six-day experience made me feel the terror of an experience of ideas. It even brought me fear of the future. One winter, I saw Niki Junpei trapped in a sand pit. The only hopeful concept in his monotonous life was sand. I even felt wonder. Those summer days came to mind. Those days I had simply brushed aside with the words, 'Well, I learned a lot anyway.' What if I hadn't escaped from there, from that dreadful five nights and six days? What if the plane returning to land had vanished, just as the rope ladder had disappeared? Could I still have said, "Well, I learned a lot"? That moment when my notion became experience. That moment when hope turned to terror. Perhaps it was precisely because I passed through that moment that I can now look back and say, "Well, that's how it was then." The thought
that sand might have made his life a little better. No, rather than improved, the thought that he was living the life he desired. Wasn't he the one who wanted to appear different from others? So when he left for a two-night, three-day vacation, didn't he tell no one where he was going? Wasn't there some desire hidden within him to appear mysterious? Yet that desire was soon realized as he came to live in the sand pit. To the outside world, he became 'missing,' and for over seven years, not a single trace of him appeared in society. So, hadn't he, to some extent, become that 'someone else' he desired to be to others? But what meaning does that hold? In the end, isn't a meaningful life something that isn't granted to anyone? Isn't the very act of desiring something beyond the capacity given to humans?